I cannot in fact seem to get my brain to work at all. Today you should read Machetera; there is a fun article about translation. Read also BoRev, they have a funny visual pun about Interpol's investigation of the laptop that doesn't actually link Chavez to the FARC and Interpol, that band that I still like. & while you're at it, the last 3 entries on Global Guerrillas are important.
Here are other fun things I discovered today.
Fisk's article in the Independent from Saturday, about, of course, Lebanon:
The roads were open again; the hooded gunmen had disappeared; the government had abandoned its confrontation with Hizbollah – the suspension of the Shia Muslim security chief at the airport (who bought me a bottle of champagne a year ago, I seem to remember – some Hizbollah "agent" he!) and the abandonment of the government's demand to dismantle Hizbollah's secret telecommunication system was a final seal of its failure – and I opened my newspaper and what did I read?
That George Bush declared in Jerusalem that "al-Qa'ida, Hizbollah and Hamas will be defeated, as Muslims across the region recognise the emptiness of the terrorists' vision and the injustice of their cause".
Where does the madness end? Where do words lose their meaning? Al-Qa'ida is not being defeated. Hizbollah has just won a domestic war in Lebanon, as total as Hamas's war in Gaza. Afghanistan and Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza are hell disasters – I need no apology to quote Churchill's description of 1948 Palestine yet again – and this foolish, stupid, vicious man is lying to the world yet again.
Amy Goodman's hilarious interview with Gore Vidal, including these fun tidbits:
And Chalmers Johnson's review of the new book Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon Wolin:AMY GOODMAN: Do you believe in the death penalty?
GORE VIDAL: No. But in their [Bush and Cheney's] case, yes.
...AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, Gore Vidal, when you say you think what happened after 9/11 was a coup?
GORE VIDAL: Well, it was. The first move they made at the time when Timothy McVeigh decided to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City—he started to write me letters, and I wrote him back, and he’s a brilliant kid, very interested in law, would have made a good constitutional lawyer, and a patriot. He’s a professional soldier. But he has to be depicted as a monster, because who else would blow up little children?
But he didn’t know he was blowing up any little children. He was acting out of a fit of rage at what had happened at Waco, when that whole religious community was set fire to by the Army. And as a soldier, he thought to himself, you see, the one thing that divides our country from being another military or militarized republic, it is not only due process of law, but it is also the Posse Comitatus Act of 1875, which the Army may not be used in any action against the citizens of the United States. And they just wandered—bang! bang!—they set fire to the place, burned down more children and mothers and so on than ever Mr. McVeigh did.
...AMY GOODMAN: How do you want to be remembered?
GORE VIDAL: I don’t give a goddamn.
Wolin writes, "Our thesis is this: it is possible for a form of totalitarianism, different from the classical one, to evolve from a putatively 'strong democracy' instead of a 'failed' one." His understanding of democracy is classical but also populist, anti-elitist and only slightly represented in the Constitution of the United States. "Democracy," he writes, "is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs." It depends on the existence of a demos -- "a politically engaged and empowered citizenry, one that voted, deliberated, and occupied all branches of public office." Wolin argues that to the extent the United States on occasion came close to genuine democracy, it was because its citizens struggled against and momentarily defeated the elitism that was written into the Constitution.
Happy Monday!
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