Hey Paul Krugman

This is for all the Krugman junkies out there.

Yahoo for the Rebirth of Liberalism!

This is great. It's tinged with racism ("third world peasants"), but nonetheless it's wonderful to see liberals regain some backbone and some anger. Note how thick the Fox interviewer is: he cites a $70 per hour figure for worker compensation, then denies asking anything about healthcare pensions. Obviously autoworkers don't make $70 an hour; the kind of cooked numbers Fox presenters use include all future costs for the worker. The guy could at least have the courtesy to understand how his numbers are distorted.

The Limits of Liberalism

Terry Eagleton on the Limits of Liberalism.

Thomas Friedman is a Raging Fucktard

A raging, monumental fucktard. I first became acquainted with Friedman in my capacity as a shelver at a library where I worked. I liked to read reactionary books while on the clock, because I was less likely to lose the track of the argument if interrupted than with serious books. I remember reading one of his books (the World is Flat, maybe?) and coming across the phrase "I thought the Second Intifada was a dumb idea." I closed the book, secure in my knowledge that this man could not possibly have anything useful to say.

Yet here we are, years later, and his pie-hole still flaps. Once more, Friedman has turned his gaze to the Palestinians. As is his wont, he has employed an asinine metaphor to explain the situation to us.

The fighting, death and destruction in Gaza is painful to watch. But it’s all too familiar. It’s the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: “Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?”

650 Palestinians are dead, and Friedman is playing Max Bialystock.

That is, Gaza is a mini-version of three great struggles that have been playing out since 1948: 1) Who is going to be the regional superpower — Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Iran? 2) Should there be a Jewish state in the Middle East and, if so, on what Palestinian terms? And 3) Who is going to dominate Arab society — Islamists who are intolerant of other faiths and want to choke off modernity or modernists who want to embrace the future, with an Arab-Muslim face? Let’s look at each.

The great struggle for hegemony over the middle east hasn't been between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It's been between the United States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. The 1956 Suez War? England, France, and Israel against the United States. 1967? The US vs. the Soviet Union. The struggle for national self-determination in mideastern countries has, in the twentieth centuries, been waged in the context of imperialism. Egypt's rise under Nasser was less about Egyptian hegemony than Arab nationalism and anticolonialism. Erasing the history of colonialism in the Middle East allows Friedman to construct a ridiculous mythology in the rest of the column.

WHO OWNS THIS HOTEL? The struggle for hegemony over the modern Arab world is as old as Nasser’s Egypt. But what is new today is that non-Arab Iran is now making a bid for primacy — challenging Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Iran has deftly used military aid to both Hamas and Hezbollah to create a rocket-armed force on Israel’s northern and western borders. This enables Tehran to stop and start the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at will and to paint itself as the true protector of the Palestinians, as opposed to the weak Arab regimes.

This first sentence is a typical Friedmanism. It is either nonsensical or utterly banal. The struggle for control over "the modern Arab world" was going on long before Nasser arrived on the scene. What was the Balfour Declaration but a means by which the British sought to assert their dominance over the Levant? Dating the struggle to Nasser simply allows Friedman to forget that hegemony requires a hegemon. On the other hand, one could be charitable and say that Nasser signaled the rise of the modern Arab world. In this case, Friedman is simply being banal and saying that the struggle over the modern Arab world started when the modern Arab world did.

“The Gaza that Israel left in 2005 was bordering Egypt. The Gaza that Israel just came back to is now bordering Iran,” said Mamoun Fandy, director of Middle East programs at the International Institute of Strategic Studies. “Iran has become the ultimate confrontation state. I am not sure we can talk just about ‘Arab-Israeli peace’ or the ‘Arab peace initiative’ anymore. We may be looking at an ‘Iranian initiative.’ ” In short, the whole notion of Arab-Israeli peacemaking likely will have to change.

Another typically Friedmanesque attack on rational thought. The man can barely contain his boundless euphoria every time he is allowed to utter something to the effect that "everything has changed!!!!!" In this case, it's a rather bizarre assertion. Iran has pointedly remained quiet on Israel's slaughter in Gaza. In fact, Lebanese politicians are saying that Iran has pledged that Hezbollah will not interfere.

CAN THE JEWS HAVE A ROOM HERE? Hamas rejects any recognition of Israel. By contrast, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, has recognized Israel — and vice versa. If you believe, as I do, that the only stable solution is a two-state one, with the Palestinians getting all of the West Bank, Gaza and Arab sectors of East Jerusalem, then you have to hope for the weakening of Hamas.

"Hamas rejects any recognition of Israel." Or is it the other way around? After all, as Avi Shlaim reminds us, it was Israel that rejected recognition of a Hamas-Fatah unity government in March of 2007. Moreover, what does recognition actually mean? Jonathan Cook argued lucidly in 2006 that recognition is a trap. Israel refuses to determine its borders, so recognition of the Israeli state means recognizing the territorial claims of a nebulous entity bent on seizing control of as much of the West Bank as possible. It means, in effect, abandoning those parts of the West Bank currently under Israeli control. So while avoiding "recognition," Hamas has repeatedly signalled its willingness to agree to peace within the pre-1967 borders.

Why? Because nothing has damaged Palestinians more than the Hamas death-cult strategy of turning Palestinian youths into suicide bombers. Because nothing would set back a peace deal more than if Hamas’s call to replace Israel with an Islamic state became the Palestinian negotiating position. And because Hamas’s attacks on towns in southern Israel is destroying a two-state solution, even more than Israel’s disastrous and reckless West Bank settlements.

Here we have nothing more than a paragraph of mythology. Death cult? As lenin points out in his excellent book, when you construct a subject as totally irrational, it means you don't have to aim very high in your explanations of its actions. And if Israel really wanted to stop the rockets, all they would have to do is agree to another ceasefire.

Israel has proved that it can and will uproot settlements, as it did in Gaza. Hamas’s rocket attacks pose an irreversible threat. They say to Israel: “From Gaza, we can hit southern Israel. If we get the West Bank, we can rocket, and thereby close, Israel’s international airport — anytime, any day, from now to eternity.” How many Israelis will risk relinquishing the West Bank, given this new threat?

Hamas has proven that it can and will stop rocket attacks, even in the context of a ceasefire whose agreements Israel refuses to honor. This talk of the West Bank is also bizarre. Given that, in the context of a ceasefire, virtually no rockets were launched from Gaza (those that were launched came from groups like Islamic Jihad, which Hamas has tried to stop), a similar approach would seem to be apt for the West Bank.

SHOULDN’T WE BLOW UP THE BAR AND REPLACE IT WITH A MOSQUE? Hamas’s overthrow of the more secular Fatah organization in Gaza in 2007 is part of a regionwide civil war between Islamists and modernists. In the week that Israel has been slicing through Gaza, Islamist suicide bombers have killed almost 100 Iraqis — first, a group of tribal sheikhs in Yusufiya, who were working on reconciliation between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, and, second, mostly women and children gathered at a Shiite shrine. These unprovoked mass murders have not stirred a single protest in Europe or the Middle East.

This last sentence is one of the worst Friedman has ever penned. What on God's green earth does he expect a European protest against suicide bombing would accomplish? Who is the target of such an action? Global protests against Israel's slaughter have clear targets; they encourage whatever country they are in to side with Palestinian self-determination in the "international community." Suicide bombers don't exactly look for legitimacy the way Israel does. Basically, Friedman is wagging his finger at Europeans and asking them why they are not as ineffectually self-righteous as he.

Gaza today is basically ground zero for all three of these struggles, said Martin Indyk, the former Clinton administration’s Middle East adviser whose incisive new book, “Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Diplomacy in the Middle East,” was just published. “This tiny little piece of land, Gaza, has the potential to blow all of these issues wide open and present a huge problem for Barack Obama on Day 1.”

Just one thing here. The provenance of Indyk's book title is Mark Twain's 1869 travelogue "Innocents Abroad" (clearly Indyk is a very creative man). "Innocents" was a fairly typical American travelogue of the nineteenth century, when the "holy land" became an object of wild fascination among Americans. However, Twain would soon became a principled anti-imperialist, who wrote scathingly about American and European efforts to dominate the globe. That the work of a sterling anti-imperialist such as Twain can be appropriated by an imperialist like Indyk is just gross.

Obama’s great potential for America, noted Indyk, is also a great threat to Islamist radicals — because his narrative holds tremendous appeal for Arabs. For eight years Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda have been surfing on a wave of anti-U.S. anger generated by George W. Bush. And that wave has greatly expanded their base.

No doubt, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran are hoping that they can use the Gaza conflict to turn Obama into Bush. They know Barack Hussein Obama must be (am)Bushed — to keep America and its Arab allies on the defensive. Obama has to keep his eye on the prize. His goal — America’s goal — has to be a settlement in Gaza that eliminates the threat of Hamas rockets and opens Gaza economically to the world, under credible international supervision. That’s what will serve U.S. interests, moderate the three great struggles and earn him respect.

Dear god, when will it end?! Here, thankfully. Friedman concludes his piece on the typical imperial liberal note that they brought this on themselves. Friedman's tone is different, however, in that he apparently believes that Arab leaders enjoy being bombed by bellicose Westerners, since it allows them to stoke anti-Western feelings among "the masses." It's worth noting, in passing, the perversity of Friedman blaming Bush for hatred of the West, when he was an enthusiastic cheerleader for virtually all of Bush's major initiatives in the region.

Friedman is a clown, a court jester in the imperial thrown room. He deserved this.

Abortion in an Anti-Choice Culture

The New York Times has an interesting article today on the growing use of ulcer medications to induce abortion. The article, which focuses on Dominican women in Washington Heights, is tinged with liberal racism, explaining that Dominican culture is socially conservative and pro-life. Two responses. First, American culture is socially conservative and pro-life (Knocked Up, anyone?). Particularizing this pathology to Dominican culture is absurd in a country that can barely say the word abortion on television. Second, it's worth questioning just how "socially conservative" Dominican culture actually is when women can walk into a pharmacy, say they need to bring down their period, and pharmacists will know they are asking for abortificants. This sounds to me like a widespread understanding and acceptance, on a subterranean level, of the practice of abortion. Maybe Dominican culture is actually complicated and can't simply be described as socially conservative?

This kind of essentialism aside, the article highlights a number of important facts. The first is that even in a culture which officially disproves of abortion and stigmatizes those that seek it, women will continue to terminate their pregnancies. It also shows that the stigmatization and criminalization of abortion hurts women, who, when denied safe medical care, will use other means, even at the risk of substantial self-injury. Finally, the article shows how abortion is a positive experience in many women's lives. The caption of the photo on the first page speaks directly to this - “It’s cheap but dangerous. Certain people are more delicate than others. But afterwards, I felt relief.” While liberals go on about reducing the number of abortions and how it's sad and tragic, they ignore the fact that for millions of women every year, an abortion is a victory in the struggle for control of their bodies.

Imperial Liberals and Gaza: Or, the Myth of "They Brought This on Themselves."

The moans of pity that emanate from the corridors of imperial liberalism are a sound that never ceases. Whether their gaze rests upon Bosnia, Darfur, or even Iraq, these veteran consciences of empire can always find a suffering victim in need of pity. Never is their grief so somber, their hearts so heavy, as when they can find victims Who Brought it on Themselves.

The imperial liberals have judged this to be the case with Israel's latest assault on Gaza. Hillel Schenker at The Nation coolly informs us that

In many respects, Hamas brought this war on itself by declaring on December 19 that it was not renewing the cease-fire (tahadiya) and by renewing rocket fire even as it maneuvered for a "better cease-fire" from its point of view--primarily, the lifting of the international blockade. It should be noted, though, that lifting the blockade was a part of the June cease-fire agreement that was not implemented by Israel and the international community.

The generally readable Robert Dreyfuss even insinuates that Hamas' supposedly implacable rejectionism was a ploy to provoke an Israeli attack and thus reverse its flagging popularity:

Writing in the Washington Post, Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab points out that, before the latest crisis, Hamas was in sharp decline. The headline on his thoughtful piece is: "Has Israel Revived Hamas?" He says: "Israel appears to have given new life to the fledging Islamic movement in Palestine."

Over the past two years, Kuttab notes, Palestinian support for Hamas -- an ultrareligious, terrorist-inclined wing of the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood movement -- has declined sharply, from a 30 percent in 2006 to 22 percent in August, 2007, to just 17 percent in 2008 -- compared to 40 percent for Fatah, the mainstream, secular nationalist wing of the Palestinian body politic. Kuttab points out that Hamas has "turned down every legitimate offer from its nationalist PLO rivals and Egyptian mediators." Now, he says, the attacks are a "bonanza for Hamas" and says that Israel's assault will achieve "results exactly the opposite of its publicly proclaimed purposes."

That Israel's actions will only strengthen icky Islamists like Hamas is a favored leitmotif in the imperial liberal chorus. If only the hegemon had a brain, all this could be avoided...

The myth of Hamas rejectionism is a significant point of agreement between unabashed warmongers like Bret Stephens and liberal imperialists like Schenker. Hamas' refusal to renew the ceasefire, a typical manifestion of their inner drive towards Judeocide for the warmongers, becomes for the liberals a tragic manifestation of the organization's irrationality. For both, December 19th was a key turning point.

Yet the importance of December 19th is far from self-evident. As Uri Avnery points out, Israel had broken the cease fire more than a month earlier in an attempt to provoke Hamas into providing an excuse for the slaughter:

Then there came the small provocations which were designed to get Hamas to react. After several months, in which hardly any Qassam rockets were launched, an army unit was sent into the Strip “in order to destroy a tunnel that came close to the border fence”. From a purely military point of view, it would have made more sense to lay an ambush on our side of the fence. But the aim was to find a pretext for the termination of the cease-fire, in a way that made it plausible to put the blame on the Palestinians. And indeed, after several such small actions, in which Hamas fighters were killed, Hamas retaliated with a massive launch of rockets, and – lo and behold – the cease-fire was at an end. Everybody blamed Hamas.

It was Israel that rejected the cease-fire, not Hamas. This rejection goes all the way back to the agreement's origin in June, when, as Dreyfus points out, Israel agreed to lighten the blockade, which it subsequently refused to do. Hamas, meanwhile, ceased its own rocket attacks and dramatically lessened those launched by other groups. See the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs own graphs on the subject.
Rockets

Mortars


While Hamas very nearly eliminated rocket fire from Gaza, Israel continued its siege and engaged in a series of provocative actions designed to goad Hamas into rejecting the ceasefire. Hamas' leadership, far from being irrational rejectionists, saw clearly that the ceasefire had gained them nothing since Israel routinely violated it, and announced that it would not be renewed.

As the song goes, "we want no condescending saviors." What Palestinians need now is solidarity, not finger wagging. Imperial liberals do little except muddy the waters with their repetition of right wing narratives. That they score these stories in a minor key does nothing to change the essentials.

The one fortunate thing about the imperial liberal construction of Hamas as a subject that cannot comprehend its own interests is its strong tendency towards inaction. Mourning the irrationality of the oppressed doesn't beget any clear strategy for change. While they may be allowed disproportionate representation in liberal publications like The Nation, their total lack of a way forward allows those of us organizing solidarity actions an important advantage on the streets. Let's make sure we use it.

Ten National Security Myths

The Nation's lead article this week is "Ten National Security Myths," an effective debunking of both candidates' talking points on foreign policy. It's quite good, aside from the odd liberal nonsense about American leadership.

'Stuff White People Like' is Reactionary Trash

If you're an even moderately internet savvy American these days, you will doubtless have been told by some friend of the hilarious new site "Stuff White People Like"(SWPL). A collection of short encyclopedia style entries on various things adored by the white man, ranging from sweaters to organic food to religions their parents don't belong to, the site is basically a big send up of urban liberal multiculturalism (a lifestyle which doubtless deserves some critique).

White people love this site. I've been notified of it by at least 6 or 7 different white friends. It seems that being able to take a joke about themselves is something white folks also love. I'll be the first to admit that the satire on the site is quite funny.

However, if one actually spends any time going through the list, what jumps out time and time again are little kernels of reaction. Take, for example, entry number 62: Knowing What's Best for Poor People. It goes through how white people spend a good portion of their day worrying about poor people and how they shop at Wal-Mart instead of Whole Foods. It ends with a classically reactionary bit of filth scraped off of Rush Limbaugh's microphone:

"But it is ESSENTIAL that you reassert that poor people do not make decisions based on free will. That news could crush white people and their hope for the future."

As it is in Limbaugh-land, poor folks are poor for the choices they make, not because food prices are skyrocketing, there are no new jobs, and decent health insurance is little more than a mirage.

Entry number 94: Free Healthcare, strikes a tone similarly reminiscent of a certain obese pill-popping waste of our planet's resources. Boldly going where no Republican has gone before, the author argues that European health care isn't as good as Americans think, and then takes some potshots at Michael Moore. He concludes:

"Though their passion for national health care runs deep, it is important to remember that white people are most in favor of it when they are healthy. They love the idea of everyone have equal access to the resources that will keep them alive, that is until they have to wait in line for an MRI."

Perhaps Mr. Lander would like to talk to these white folks about national health care. They had good old American style health insurance (you know, the kind where you don't have to wait in line) when their daughter was diagnosed with a stomach disorder that would require her to have a feeding tube the rest of her life. A treatment available in Massachusets was shown to remove the need for a tube, but their insurer, United Health Care, would have nothing of it. Fortunately, a campaign by activists around the country forced UHC to reverse their decision. While arsewipes like Lander disparage Moore, without his movie it's unlikely that the Griggs' case would have received the attention it did.

I could go on listing examples of how reactionary this site is, but I think it's more valuable to pursue a discussion of what actually is wrong with liberal multiculturalism as practiced by Lander's targets.

To begin with, let's clarify the terms. By liberal multiculturalism, I refer to that ideology which is officially against racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ageism, etc. Often encapsulated in the phrase "social justice," this ideology has become the official one of the American academy in the last decade. Every major university today has an Office of Multicultural Initiatives of its equivalent. Though the institutionalization of multiculturalism is undoubtedly a fruit of the victories of the sixties and seventies, the degree of its incorporation into the primary capitalist institutions for the production of knowledge and reproduction of the labor force hints at the limits to its emancipatory potential.

These limits are evident in the specific characteristics of liberal multiculturalism which distinguish it from other counter-hegemonic ideologies such as nationalism or Marxism. The most important of these, in my opinion, is the tremendous degree to which liberal multiculturalism is marked by commodity fetishism. Marx argues that under capitalism, the commodities produced by workers "reflect the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things." (Capital Vol 1 165). Trade becomes not a relationship between people exchanging things, but a relationship between commodities. Social relationships between people become relationships between things. This pervasive thingification (a word common to both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Georg Lukacs, primary theorist of commodity fetishism) even covers workers themselves, whose position in capitalist society is determined above all by their sale of the only commodity they possess: their labor power, or ability to work. Even though workers are exploited as a collective class by the capitalist class, their very class position imposes an atomization. As "creative agency becomes a 'thing' to be bought and sold like other things" (Mieville 22), people's relations with each other reflect the relationships of commodities to one another: a relationship of discrete objects existing in formal equality. (To be sure, commodity fetishism is not the only atomizing force in capitalist society. It will, however, be my focus here.)

The fetishism I've just described is evident everywhere in liberal multiculturalism. As in SWPL's satire of white people loving to shop at Whole Foods, commodities become the bearers of social relationships. My place in society is determined not by my relationship to other people, but to the commodities I consume. A working class person is reactionary for shopping at Wal-Mart, while a police chief is progressive for shopping at a Co-op. One becomes multicultural by consuming commodities marked by Otherness (sushi anyone?). Actual positions in social relations don't matter.

Such an ideology is intensely surface level, rejecting any attempt at grasping the social totality in favor of a brief glance at someone's shopping list. Additionally, this consumptionist framework happily takes on many of the bourgeois myths about our society, such as everyone having the social power to "vote with their dollars."

Commodity fetishism also marks liberal multiculturalism's approach to race. Take one influential example, Peggy McIntosh's essay "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (available on a college syllabus near you). McIntosh effectively reduces questions of racial oppression to their most atomized level. She describes how she has had to learn to think of herself "as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture." Leaving aside the tremendous conflation of categories involved in this clause, let's examine for a moment the claim that Prof. McIntosh is indeed an oppressor. While I know little about the woman personally, I find it implausible that she has the social power to determine whether America's Black gulag continues (indeed, if she had such power, she would undoubtedly exercise it). While she does mention structural aspects to oppression (housing, the police, etc), by systematically conflating these with claims that white people must realize their dominance McIntosh effectively reduces such structural factors to the product of individual white folks' actions.

For good measure, McIntosh also throws in commodity consumption as a measure of social power: "I can cho[o]se blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin." To be sure, on one level commodity consumption surely is an indicator of social power; the rich, after all, can consume many more commodities than the poor. And the lack of bandaids for people of color is a reflection of racism in our society. However, white people's ability to buy bandaids that match their skin color is hardly indicative of their social power. Bill Clinton and the kid who delivers my pizza might buy the same bandages, but that hardly means they hold equivalent social positions. Though commodity consumption is a marker of social power, to truly understand its dynamics ("the riddle," as Marx says) one must dig deeper into the social relationships which constitute a commodity producing society.

Though the account here is far from complete, I think it's on surer footing than some other Left critiques of multiculturalism I've seen, specifically Slavoj Zizek's. It's certainly on better footing than the reactionary garbage on SWPL (though not as funny, I'll admit). Agree? Disagree? Holler back in the comments.

References:

Marx, Capital, Vol 1. (Penguin edition).

China Mieville "The Conspiracy of Architecture: Notes on a Modern Anxiety." Historical Materialism Vol. 2 No. 1 1998.

Sometimes Dems Make it Easy

The authors on this blog can easily be, and often are, berated by mainstream liberals for our unflinching criticism of the Democratic Party. With catchphrases like "the graveyard of social movements" (imagine what we call our significant others, with pet names like that!), it's no wonder that in both 2000 and 2004 the three of us constituted three more votes for G.W.

But sometimes, the Democratic Party makes our jobs easy. One of those times was when two of the authors were thrown out of Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)'s office during a rally because our Palestinian flag "made the issue too real for constituents." Another one of those moments was when Howard Dean attempted to remove my friend from a dinner and Q&A session despite the fact that my friend had been instrumental to bringing Dean to Cornell. His crime? Being associated with a group of hair-brained radicals who dropped a banner demanding Dean take a stand on the Iraq war.

And then there's this newest development. University of Florida police officers tasered a student for asking too many questions. Interesting is that while the University of Florida President has apologized for the incident (which makes sense, since UCLA got slammed for similar actions), the Kerry orgainzation has made, to my knowledge, no comment about the incident, or even the shutting-off of the student's microphone when he asked about black voter disenfranchisement, which provoked the incident.

The conclusion here? Like Michael Moore, true activists or lefties asking real questions are personae non gratae from the Democratic Party. While I understand the draw of the Party in the 2008 elections to voters tired of eight years of Republican autocracy, and am happy to organize with these people here and into the future, I think we can do much better.Publish Post

A Solidarity Letter to a Victim of Michael Vick

From Counterpunch:

A Solidarity Letter to a Victim of Michael Vick

By Pius Adesanmi

Dear Comrade Dog,

Greetings from Al-Janna. Before you start wondering where on earth I’m writing you from, Al-Janna is not on earth. It is that place of infinite bliss where Muslims who serve Allah faithfully and adhere strictly to the teachings of Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon Him) during their lifetime go to enjoy eternal life. It is similar to what your American owners call paradise in their evangelical Christian religion. I arrived here last week with all my limbs missing but I am happy all the same that I have finally escaped the Jahannam that your American owners have made of my country, Iraq. I hope you do not pronounce it Airak like your owners. That’s infuriating! It is ee-r-a-k!!!

Lest I forget, Jahannam is the place of eternal damnation in my religion, something like that place they call hell in the Bible of your Christian owners. Your owners may know it as Gehenna if they are Americans of Jewish extraction. Hundreds of my brothers and sisters, my people back in Iraq, arrive here daily bearing tales of women and children in a hurry to get out of the American Jahannam in Iraq and join us here in Al-Janna. How did I get here? Well, we were at my cousin’s wedding, making merry. Next thing I know, a blast and we all vaporized, all hundred guests, including the bride and the groom. Every gathering in today’s Iraq is suspicious in the eyes of an Occupier whose psyche is held hostage by the T word. The only two things the Occupier does not find suspicious are the smell and the sight of oil. Sometimes he even finds himself suspicious, opens fire on himself, and calls it friendly fire. The word on the street is that they suspected our innocent wedding party, called in attack helicopters and a few bunker-busting smart bombs were dropped on us. Anyway, that’s a minor detail of daily life in Iraq. It is really not newsworthy.

But I digress! I apologize. I’ve become quite garrulous and wordy since I got here. This letter is not about me. It is a letter of solidarity and commiseration. News travels fast and I have recently received news from American Muslim arrivals here of your near-death experience in the hands of that barbaric African American football player, Michael Vick, who, I hear, has been declared guilty by the American public before his trial on charges of sponsoring and facilitating dog fighting. The NFL is already making a lot of noise about the distance they have put between themselves and Mr. Vick. Nike has cancelled endorsement deals. Animal-loving, placard-carrying protesters are having a field day. I hear his alleged participation in this primitive, crude, and backward practice has provided a legitimate excuse to call him all kinds of names that would have been considered unacceptable racial and racist slurs had the circumstances been different.I hear that in the society of your owners, it is always welcome for the occasional person of colour to commit a horrible faux pas that could constitute a convenient and legit veneer for the public explosion of secretly-held, long-suppressed prejudices. Now, why would Michael Vick go and do something like this? Something this barbaric, almost lifted out of the practices of his folks in the heart of darkness. I guess your owners are by now murmuring that it is not always easy to take the African jungle out of the African American. Three centuries of trying to inoculate Vick against the primordial barbarity of his African origins and see where we are at!

But I digress again. I am beginning to suspect my own digressions. Remember I’ve only just escaped an enclave of destructive suspicion. It’s too early to expect coherence from me given the incoherent world I’ve just left behind. This letter is not about Michael Vick either. I don’t care about him and I hope he gets his just desserts if proven guilty. This letter is about you. First, I am sorry to hear about all you went through. The details have been graphic and gory. To be raised and trained for the sole purpose of tearing at and destroying your own kind just for the gain, pride, and pleasure of man is an unfathomable fate. Man! What a traitor! What a betrayer! What a way to repay his best friend! You who have served him so faithfully, so absolutely ever since his accursed ancestors domesticated you. If he is a hunter, you helped him in his profession; if he is a shepherd, you’re on duty almost 24/7, rallying the sheep and keeping predators at bay; if he is blind, you’re trained to be his eyes; if he has kids, you play with them; if he is lonely, you keep him company. If he is attacked or approached by strangers, you bark your lungs out, ready to lay down your life for him. I can go on and on. What have you not done for man? You never ask for gold in return. You never ask for silver. You just serve him selflessly. Yet he trains you to turn on on your own?

Given your location in America, I can only ask you to be comforted by the knowledge that the best animal health care delivery service in the world will be mobilized round the clock to take care of your physical scars and injuries. Be comforted by the fact that while they can live with the idea of over 40 million of their fellow citizens being too poor to afford health insurance, Americans will not tolerate, even for a second, an imperfect animal health care system. Be comforted by the knowledge that the world’s best trained dog psychologists, dog therapists, dog masseurs, and dog whisperers will be mobilized to take care of your emotional scars. Take comfort in the fact that American dog dieticians will also intervene with numerous prescriptions of a restorative diet. Academics may even write postmodernist tomes about your experience and the construction of trauma. If you’re a female dog, God help Mr. Vick! The radical feminist establishment may join the fray against him. And if he hasn’t done it yet, it won’t be long before White House Press Secretary, Tony Snow, calls a press conference to condemn Vick and offer you presidential commiseration. Last time a dog died in the White House, Ari Fleischer, one of Mr. Snow’s predecessors, called an international press conference to announce the death of that presidential dog. We laughed then in Iraq and wondered about the strange customs of Americans. We even heard that some Republican friends of President Bush called for a probe to ascertain whether the terrorists were somehow responsible for the death of that presidential pet. You know how rumors tend to fly around in seasons of madness.

In essence, I am happy that you will soon be restored to a life that most poor Americans – especially the folks in the hood, in barrios, in Reservations, etc – cannot even imagine possible. If no one has thought of it, I will even suggest you spend a convalescent year at that famous Manhattan five star pet hotel where Hollywood royalty and America’s rich and famous check in their pets whenever they are in New York. Mr. Vick should, of course, be made to cover your expenses as part of his process of redemption. We can’t possibly expect your owners to pay, knowing that they also suffered terrible emotional pain when you got lost the last time they went strolling with you in the park, only for you to end up in Mr. Vick’s hound harem. Come to think of it, I ought to be careful using the word owners. The relationship between you and your human family in America is not exactly that of ownership. You are a bona fide member of the family, on equal footing with the children of your human Dad and Mom. Sometimes you are more important than their children, your human siblings. At least it looks that way to anyone viewing that culture from the unimplicated location of the outside observer. Where they opt not to have or adopt children, it goes without saying that you are their child. It is not inconceivable for you to be the sole beneficiary of their will, in which case you inherit millions and humans act as trustees on your behalf. It is against this background that the enormity of Mr. Vick’s heinous crimes can be appreciated.

Everything happens for a purpose. I want you to consider your ordeal in the hands of Mr. Vick as the ultimate act of commitment to the cause and salvation of the American public. Your story almost follows the script of the life of Jesus Christ, the only difference being that he actually did die for the salvation of sinful man. If you look closely at things, both of you were persecuted and tortured and both processes were salvational in man’s behalf. You see, before your ordeal, the rest of the world had given up on the American public. If your human Dad and Mom are neoconservatives or fringe, extremist evangelicals, you must be familiar with the rhetoric that the rest of the world needs to have its head examined since America, by nature, can do no wrong. The rest of the world may have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, America is the one perfect exemption. In line with a national fetish, I am sure you have not failed to notice American flags in every room, every square inch of your home. One is attached to the family car. I’m sure they did not forget to put a star-spangled banner in your kennel.

Have I digressed one last time? Sorry. I was talking about the rest of the world giving up on the American public. You see, in the last couple of years, hundreds of thousands of people – yes, we must keep insisting that the Other is people until the American public accepts that fact – have perished in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq through policies and practices either directly authored and supervised by America’s rulers or approved and funded by them. I am not going to talk about Latin America and Africa. This mass murder of civilians is carried out with the tax of the American public in behalf of the American tax payer. Yet, the rest of the world has watched with utter amazement the seemingly infinite inability of the American public to be outraged by the mass murders committed in its name in the places I’ve mentioned. No one is spared. You already know how I got here. Women, children, and other innocent, non-combatant civilians whose only crime is to have been born in parts of the world blessed with resources coveted by American capitalism.

The rest of the world has watched in disbelief and wondered how a people could go about its myriad quotidian preoccupations with so much insouciance, not a teeny-weeny thought is accorded the horrible fact that somewhere, every second, somebody is being bombed to maintain what American rulers like to call “our way of life”. So, the rest of the world concluded that either the American public has lost the capacity for human empathy or it is governed by conceptions of the human that the rest of us just cannot understand. We concluded that this public’s benchmark for the expression of collective, humanizing outrage is beyond our understanding. Or maybe the American public has ways of determining who qualifies to be a mournable human and such parameters that they have established exclude the Palestinian, the Afghan, the Iraqi, and so many Others. The American public’s insouciance has led us to a moral question we could never have imagined possible: in the event of death, especially violent and needless death, who is a non-mournable human? And we are not alone in giving up. Unable to snap them out of their slumber and insouciance, Cindy Sheehan, the American anti-war activist who got a taste of Iraqi life when she lost her son needlessly to the war, also gave up on her own people and retired from an apparently pointless conscientization cause.

Then comes your ordeal in the hands of Mr. Vick and we discover, to our pleasant surprise, that the American public is endowed with the ability to express public outrage and emotion in the face of the Other’s tragedy! Dear friend, your experience has bestowed on you the exceptional privilege of being the vehicle for the renewed faith of the rest of humanity in the ability of the American public to recognize horror and react to it the way the rest of us do. This letter is already looking like a dream. Dreams, I know, are not the exclusive preserve of the Reverend Martin Luther King, that great American who, were he not in the Christian paradise today, would have been horrified by his compatriots’ self-sedation in the face of civilian massacres in Iraq. Now that this somnambulistic public has shown so much outrage on account of Mr. Vick’s inhuman treatment of you, my comrade and friend, I dare to dream:

that one day, an Iraqi civilian life taken in cold blood by American bombs will elicit half, no, a quarter of the noise Americans have shown themselves capable of making on account of their maltreated dogs.that one day, an Afghan baby’s life, wasted as collateral damage by American-controlled NATO forces, will elicit half, no, a quarter of the decibels Americans have supplied thus far in behalf of yourself and your fellow victims of Mr. Vick.

that one day, a Palestinian woman’s life, taken in cold blood by bombs bought with American subventions, will elicit half, no, a quarter of the noise Americans will continue to make whenever their pets experience trauma.

that one day, when the worth of these people’s lives has equaled a quarter of the worth of the lives of America’s dogs in the eyes of the American people, a future generation of Americans will arrive to increase that worth to half; and other successive generations of Americans will add gradual value to our lives until that generation of Americans arrives, hundreds of years from now, that will actually believe and be seen to actually and truly believe that the Other is people too.

A Your human comrade,Pius Adesanmi

Pius Adesanmi is Associate Professor of English and Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL), Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

2 Years After Katrina

Today's Democracy Now! has some great coverage of the tragic state of affairs two years after Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast: Public housing is still closed (even when it was never even touched by flood waters), golf courses to be built in the hood, and trailers full of fermaldahyde fumes. Bush is doing nothing (obviously) nor FEMA, nor Ray Nagen.

The tragedy continues, but residents are fighting back. They've occupied the Public Housing Authority. Check out what's going on on the ground.

PS The Curtis Mohammed interview at the end is interesting. He started organizing for SNCC at 18 and has been a radical activist since. Now, his anger with the collapse of the Left over the past 30 years to the point where all that progressive America, in his words, can offer is reformism and writing/lobbying our representatives has led him to decide to leave the country in disgust. His main argument is that COINTELPRO and government attacks on the cadre of the revolutionary and non-liberal far left have been chiseled away to the point that they are non-existent now.

I think we should discuss this more so and I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts. I'd write more now, but I have to hit the hay. More coming tomorrow.