IT'S BEEN AWHILE

Well, what a day! Today I've been reading my friend's poetry in his latest book, Crazy Stairs. And dipping further into Foreign Affairs magazine for July/August while alternately journaling in my paper journal bits of poetry influenced by Geoff Peterson's work and odds and ends of political and cultural thought entering and exiting my 70 year old leaking brain as fast as they can. There's also more to enter from the Gould book I'm reading, The Mismeasure of Man. I finished Brautigan's book, The Revenge of the Lawn (my bathroom reading these past weeks) and am really disappointed by it. Poor dead suicide. My new bathroom reading will be Art For Beginners by Dani Cavallaro. Well... take a breath... I won't get that all in today, and who'd read it if I did?

BARACK OBAMASERVATION

Barack Obama is a man of the 21st Century. John McCain is a man of the past, a left over jingoist, cold warrior from a dead era. More than anything we need an Obama. If we fail to elect a man of the 21st Century in this next election, America may find itself irrevocably behind and out of the touch with the developing and modern world. I mean, we need more than change, we need someone who in his psyche and very synaptical being is modern. This is it for America. Get with it or get lost. Will the religionists hold America back and multiply its inevitable decline?

Today, Sunday, I passed yet another rich suburban church, it's lot crammed full of SUVs and other gas hogs, i.e. terror supporters. I imagined I was seeing the ancient linkage of the rich and powerful and the church, just as one found them linked in Franco's Spain, pre-revolutionary Russia, and Dicken's England, and currently, Arabia's Imam's and political rulers. The fat ladies are singing all over America. One out of four Americans is now obese. Is the game nearly over? And has America lost it? Or, at minimum, lost the way?

CHINA'S OLYMPIC SPRINT IS NEARING ITS END

As you newspaper readers know, China's international image is supposed to be enhanced by its Olympian effort, but internal and external politics, repression and secrecy have made them to show themselves as exactly what they are, a despotic government, but, strange to say, China's history with the West has made its average citizens extremely mistrustful of our motives. (The imperialist past coming home to roost?) So there's a twist on the old story about empires, dictatorships and democracies that we don't often meet. Read below and weep:

[SNIPPER]
If the Games do not go well, there will be infighting and blame shifting within the party's central leadership, and it will likely adopt a bunker mentality. Vice President Xi Jinping, the government's point man on the Olympics and President Hu Jintao's heir apparent, would likely face challenges to his presumed leadership.

A poor outcome for the Games could engender another round of nationalist outbursts and Chinese citizens decrying what they see as racism, anti-Chinese bias, and a misguided sense of Western superiority. This inflamed form of Chinese nationalism could be the most enduring and dangerous outcome of the protests surrounding the Olympics. If the international community does not welcome China's rise, the Chinese people may ask themselves why China should be bound by its rules. As a result, Beijing may find the room it has for foreign policy maneuvering more restricted by public opinion. [All we have to do is imagine how Americans feel when their national honor is challenged. Stupid, yes, but explained by evolutionary biology? Yes also.]

This is from the magazine I hold in my hand (to your right) from July/August 2008 by Elizabeth Economy and Adam Segal. Damn, I can't get it to turn itself right side around. Well, you'll just have to read backwards or print it out and hold it up to a mirror. No wait, I flipped it upside down, snapped the picture, then turned the result upside down. At least I think I did.
[PASTER]

CONDOLENCES TO THE CONDOLEEZZA, BUSH’S BLUNDERBUSS

I just this morning read Condoleezza Rice’s report in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs. Interesting how she reported on our current foreign affair objectives without once showing us how Bush has screwed them all up. For example, on Page 7, she believes that the rise of an alliance of certain unnamed democracies in Asia along with Japan and Australia will counterbalance the increasing influence of China in that region. She forgets to mention that a recent poll in Australia shows that Australians trust China more than they trust America. So much for that alliance.

About Iraq, she writes that “the cost of this war in lives and treasure, for Americans and Iraqis, has been greater than we ever imagined.” (Page 21) I wonder if she or Bush or Cheney ever read any popular magazines, like Newsweek, for example, before they illegally invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq. I recall very clearly reading in many places and hearing on many TV shows just how costly our invasion and occupation of Iraq would be. Were some of our news media more astute and informed than the government which carried on the invasion? Humnnnn? Also under this heading, she failed to mention why we did not, therefore, invade other dictatorships whose practices were worse than Hussein’s.

She also continued to assert the now defunct reason for our invasion of Iraq, that is the presence of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein. She did this by going to the fallback position of the Bush administration, that Saddam was willing and ready to reconstitute his invisible weapons of mass destruction. Her assertion was an act of mind reading that surpasses the abilities of all previous American Secretaries of State, beginning with Thomas Jefferson and including James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams. (Page 21) I wonder if she’ll take up tea reading after her stint in American government?

Anyhow, I didn’t mean to make this an endlessly long recapitulation of Rice’s essay in Foreign Affairs. But you might enjoy reading it yourselves. Nowhere does she take Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld to task for their blunders and failures. I think this failure of nerve on her part makes the entire presentation suspect and weak.

Note how her paragraph, following, would be more honest if she just mentioned how our American values have been most compromised, not by liberals, but by you know who and his lackey and by Republicans in general since the start of the Reagan era:

“Ultimately, however, what will most determine whether the United States can succeed in the twenty-first century is our imagination. It is this feature of the American character that most accounts for our unique role in the world, and it stems from the way that we think about our power and our values. The old dichotomy between realism and idealism has never really applied to the United States, because we do not really accept that our national interest and our universal ideals are at odds. For our nation, it has always been a matter of perspective. Even when our interests and ideals [i.e. under the Bush administration or when Republicans invaded Chile and overthrew a democratically elected government] come into tension in the short run, we believe that in the long run they are indivisible.”