we are our parent's children...amongst other serious thoughts

my father called me yesterday and amongst other trivialities he slipped in this little bit of information:

wednesday night my brother was arrested for possession of marijuana (the second time). my father left him in jail for two days because on the two visits he made to see him, my brother didn't ask him for any help. meanwhile my mother is ripping her hair out because she has no idea what is happening to her youngest son and my stuborn father refuses to let him off the hook unless he asks for help. meanwhile my father makes arrangements with the police to have my brother released to him (since he is a minor and it has legal implications otherwise if he is released to no one at all.) what do the police do? they release him to no one at all only a few hours before my father is supposed to come get him. This sends my father into a rage at which point he demands that the sheriff's office re-arrest my brother because he needs to be released as a minor. so my brother who just got home to my crying mother, is made to stand outside on the street in front of my parent's house (while my mother watches) so that some sheriff's deputies can come by, put him in handcuffs for the second time in three days, and haul him off to jail--again--at which point my father brings my brother home.

so what does blaise think? blaise is so pissed off at something (he doesn't know what it is) that it confuses and frustrates him to the point that he only gets more rageful and angry at everything. blaise's phone call to his brother last night brings his brother to tears which brings blaise to tears--something like a mixture of the most extreme forms of love, worry, anger, and sadness all mixed up in one long, tiresome conversation over the phone. just the beggining of the conversation:

(blaise's brother): hey...
(blaise): are you okay?
(blaise's brother): i don't know (starts to cry...)...I'm so sorry, Blaise. I'm so....
(blaise): its okay...don't appologize...its okay...
(brother): (sniffles and crying)
(blaise): i don't care about anything dad told you. i don't care about anything that happened...
(brother): i'm really scared....I'm so sorry...(more crying)
(blaise): (tears) I love you...that's all that matters...you can tell me whatever you want to tell me...it doesn't matter what it is...
(brother): okay...(tears)...i know...
(blaise): i'm not judging you...i'm trying not to judge you...i don't care about any of that stuff....(tears)
(brother): okay...(uncontrollable crying)...okay...thanks blaise

so there it is. my brother is broken and scared. maybe its a good thing in the eyes of my father. maybe now he can be re-made and re-learn all these lessons of responsibility and committment to good values. maybe now he'll finally learn this lesson.......maybe I say. but maybe fear mongering is not the way to teach or "influence" people in what they think and do. maybe what my father sees as my brother waking up to his bad habits and problems is actually my brother shaking as he tries to make his love for his family and parents compatible with the fact that he is terribly ashamed of letting them down. maybe my brothers mistakes are really the side effects of his trying to live up to the image of his older brothers, dwelling in their shadows. maybe his older brothers were, after all, only trying to live up to the image of their father, dwelling in his shadow. and maybe they are still having trouble getting out of his shadow. maybe now blaise is realizing how long and big a shadow his father has cast. and maybe his father is still a great man whom he loves deeply. but maybe there are fears and neglects in the folds of that shadow that are not so great--that are being passed over, that we do not need to love or affirm to love his father.

i am worried about my brothers most of all and then my mother--who has sacrificed (and continues to sacrifice) too much to watch her sons be jailed and re-jailed. and then I am worried about my father--who I know is not sure he is doing the right thing and who also loves his sons and his wife to deeply to let a little bit of pot destroy their lives.

re-reading my praxis

some words on landscape ubarnism. Charles Waldheim writes:

"The tendency to use landscape as a represntational lens to describe the contemporary city reminds us that landscape first existed as a genre of painting, a way of seeing, before it became actively engaged in either designing built environments or reordering natural ones. The description of contemporary metropolitan areas in ecological terms is most evident in work which appropriates the terms, conceptual categories, and operating methodologies of field ecology: the study of species as they relate to their natural environments. One of the implicit advantages of landscape urbanism over urban design or civil engineering is that it avoids the ideological opposition of environmental and infrastructural systems. In lieu of modernist engineering "solutions" through the civil engineering of natural environments, or postmodernist urban design desires for a mythical return to origins, landscape urbanism advocates the conflation, integration, and fluid exchange of environmental and infrastructural systems. James Corner describes the poetic and imaginative potential of this disciplinary breakdown as:
'...the lyrical play between nectar and Nutrasweet, between birdsong and Beastie Boys, between springtime flood surge and drip of tap water, between mossy heaths and hot asphaltic surfaces, between controlled spaces and vast, wild reserves...'"

a poem from one of my favorites

Elegy

About a year has passed. I've returned to the place of the battle,
to its birds that have learned their unfolding of wings from a subtle
lift of a surprised eyebrow, or perhaps from a razor blade
- wings, now the shade of early twilight, now of state bad blood.

Now the place is abuzz with trading
in your ankles's remanants, bronzes
of sunburnt breastplates, dying laughter, bruises,
rumors of fresh reserves, memories of high treason,
laundered banners with imprints of the many
who since have risen.

All's overgrown with people. A ruin's a rather stubborn
architectural style. And the hearts's distinction
from a pitch-black cavern
isn't that great; not great enough to fear
that we may collide again like blind eggs somewhere.

At sunrise, when nobody stares at one's face, I often,
set out on foot to a monument cast in molten
lengthy bad dreams. And it says on the plinth "commander
in chief." But it reads "in grief," or "in brief,"
or "in going under."



1985, Joseph Brodsky

please be honest

Anonymous said...

"so i wonder, was kerry so feeble and niave that he was duped by Bush's "lies," or was he part of the conspiracy when he voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq?

and since kerry said (http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=5915798) that, knowing what he knows now, he would vote the same way, does that mean he would also have to be hauled in front of this tribunal?"

these are comments posted recently on the blog in response to one of my posts and to another commentator's decision that Bush should face a war tribunal. let me first say that I do not believe bush should face a war tribunal.

However, I think it is important to ask the the commentator quoted above to be accurate--a task that the article he references does not achieve. Neither Kerry nor any of his fellow congressmen authorized Bush to go to war. They authorized him to use neccessary force if and when it became apparent that diplomacy was no longer a functioning option to deal with Saddam Hussein. They said so in numerous speeches (not just Kerry) delivered before the vote took place. They pleaded with our president to build an alliance, to give diplomacy all possible chance to resolve the Iraq issue. It is nothing short of misleading, so to suggest that despite the current administration's poor, badly executed occupation of Iraq, Kerry has no business criticizing the administration for such failures because he voted to authorize force (not the same as giving the immediate go ahead for war--remember this was not like Pearl Harbor--its more like grenada or the first Iraq war where a powerful alliance was built effectively). In many ways, this supposed "flip flop" is the central criticism directed at Kerry by the administration in their assessment that he is not fit to lead as commander in chief or defend the country through the use of force. It is unfortunate that it is based on a deception. Admittedly, it would be a stronger position for Kerry had he simply avoided the Iraq war, supported a war time president, and merely pointed to the "war on terror" as the real issue of foreign and domestic policy that this administration is failing us on. Iraq is, at best, a distraction from a much more real "war on terror" that must be fought on many different battlegrounds, both virtual and real, both here and abroad with a variety of weapons--the least of which are tanks and guns. The real war on terror is a completely different landscape than the one we are encountering in Iraq--insurgents in fallujah or najaf are the very end of a long and powerful whip that is wielded as much by the media and those who would make war on the idea of american freedom as much as they would on americans themselves. In this sense, we are wasting valuable resouces, american lives, and political currency in Iraq the way we have taken it on. Kerry should not be challenging the legitimacy of the war--he should be laying out a policy to crush all insurgents in Iraq (meaning lots more troops and hopefully an alliance worth discussing), have elections, and ask the american people to make whatever sacrifices we should make (something neither of them is doing) . Then he should move on completely and turn to the "war on terror" as it is now fueled by our bungling in Iraq.

here is an article to support this opinion:
"Of Mice and Men"
From the May 24, 2004 issue: Some war supporters, having previously written eloquently of America's generational commitment, now want to throw in the towel.
by William Kristol
05/24/2004, Volume 009, Issue 35

"ARE YOU A MAN or a mouse? Squeak up." Forty years ago, I thought this playground taunt witty. It isn't, really, but it seems apt right now. We're certainly hearing a lot of squeaking.

Not from the American people. They--including American women--are behaving like men. They supported the president when he decided we had to go to war to remove Saddam. They have been critical of the president's management of the war where appropriate, especially of the postwar war, so they are wavering on his reelection. But they have repudiated candidates who wanted to cut and run from Iraq, they have ignored demagogic attempts to assign blame for 9/11 and to peddle conspiracy theories about the war, and they haven't been panicked by the occasional (or even frequent) bad news from the front.

The elites are something else. It can't be said that the left has suddenly begun squeaking, because that's its normal state. But the mainstream media have outdone themselves, spending the last two weeks treating the abuse of prisoners by Americans as the biggest story of the war. And some war supporters, having previously written eloquently of America's generational commitment, the magnitude of the cause, and the transformational nature of 9/11, have now decided that a few months of bungling by the Bush administration require throwing in the towel on the central front in the war on terror.

And the Bush administration? It's natural that they are somewhat disheartened. It would be good if this led them to rethink some of their decisions. But above all, they should be redoubling their efforts to win the war. They shouldn't be curling into a fetal position, hoping to survive the blows of political opponents, and praying that John Kerry will be so bad a candidate that their guy will stagger through.

It is true that the mistakes of the past year have had a dispiriting cumulative effect. It is true that it is harder to recover now than it would have been a year ago. But we can't win if we don't apply ourselves anew to trying to win. Reasonable people can differ about what steps must be taken, but here are just a few of the many that could be.

(1) The president announces that, with respect to the prison abuse scandal, he has ordered that legal proceedings move ahead as quickly as possible--and that until they have run their course, he and his cabinet will have no more to say. There will be no more apologies. And, the president could add, Sen. Kennedy's comment that Saddam's torture chambers have "reopened under new management, U.S. management" is beneath contempt.

(2) The president orders Secretary Rumsfeld to send 50,000 more troops to Iraq to win the war. He also orders the secretary of defense to submit a plan to increase the overall size of our armed forces so that it is sufficient for the tasks ahead in the global war on terror.

(3) The president orders combatant commanders to move aggressively to see to it that killers of Americans are killed, that those who aid those killers are held responsible, and that the insurgents are crushed. He might add that any site where Americans are attacked will be regarded as a combat zone, and anyone who chooses to go there to celebrate will be subject to attack.

(4) The president announces that we will accelerate the Iraqi elections, advancing them to this fall, to make clear our commitment to aiding the Iraqis in establishing a real democracy.

(5) The president cancels his own political travel for the next few weeks to engage in an intensive review with his top advisers of our strategy and tactics, to ensure that we are on, or can get onto, a path to decisive victory.

If the president spoke this way and his administration acted in concert--if the president led the country as a fully engaged commander in chief--surely the American people would prefer this to the squeaking of his opponents. If not, then he, and we, are headed to defeat in any event. But at least this path would give victory a chance.

--William Kristol

some more political thoughts

yes...and yes...this is my agreement or, rather, acknowledgement of an anonymous commentor's remarks. I must aquiesce and admitt, after scrutiny of my hastily (and poorley) written words, that I was, in fact, a bit harsh on 'ole Buzz.

However, I will clarify the intention of my remarks (I do not believe the premise of my argument to be without a legitimate claim) with regards to those comments. It does me no good to lay claim (historically or otherwise) to the reciprocities of american political history such as "manifest destiny" or a "a city on a hill"--this was the weakest part of my argument to be sure. I do much better, I find, by speaking directly to the composition of the thoughts I find flawed--flawed from my opinion--not some supposed standard of absolute correctness that I would otherwise pretend to reincarnate in my being and words. This I will do--after paying due homage to Ryan Sandrock, forever the avatar of Howard Zinn.

Thus, I ask and answer (for my own clarity of mind as much as anything else):

When do we decide, as a people, that one extremism demands another extremist response? Where is that line? Is it completely fair to point to September 11th, 2001 and gasp in horror, "Pearl Harbor, re-lived"? Is it journalistically accurate, ignore ethical, to pretend that we are, again--symbolically, "standing down Nazi Germany" in our occupation of Iraq? Does taming a frontier have anything to do, symbolically, with the courage of American troops in Iraq or the power of the American people to affirm their presence and their mission there?

I say that we, as the American people, must distinguish between what we believe--what our mission and our values are--and how we achieve the execution and protection of those beliefs. This distinction, if done carefully and with respect to all parties involved, is what separates us as the users of the "language of a city on a hill" from those who use a similarly potent "language of jihad." If we cannot make such a distinction, and we cannot hold our leaders accountable to this distinction than we are besmirching our mission and our history of doing "big things." This is what islamic extremist terrorists have done to their history and the mission of Islam by not distinguishing the horror and implicit evil of their acts with the clearly peaceful aspects of Islam as a religion:

"Religious extremist groups in the Islamic world are deeply divided along ideological and sectarian lines. Stereotyped images of Islam as a monolithic religion predisposed toward violence do not do justice to the fact that most Muslims are peaceful. Such stereotypes also fail to take into account the multi-faceted complexity of those Islamic groups that choose violence as a political strategy.

The rise of religious extremism in South Asia and the Middle East has to do primarily with four factors: the absence in much of the Muslim world of democratic, accountable governments, and, indirectly related to this, disputes over contested territory; the failure of governments in some Islamic countries to address problems arising from rapid social, demographic, and economic changes in the last century; financial, logistical, and moral support provided by external actors; and the breakdown within Islam itself of ijtihad—the established tradition whereby religious clerics independently interpret the Koran in order to apply Koranic law to diverse and changing circumstances."--quoted from the website for the United States Institute of Peace.

Forgetting the rhetoric of the presidential campaign and the media's horrific manipulation of access to that rhetoric, it is not wrong for Americans to distrust this President based on his repeated failed attempts to make such a distinction between the mission and the execution of that mission. It cannot be denied that our mission in the fight against terror in protection of our freedom and the freedom of all threatened by terrorism has been incredibly compromised by the failure of this administration to "execute." Does this mean that Kerry can or would do a better job? Not by a long shot. In fact, I rather doubt it.

Ideologically, our choices for president are very different--but we must judge on not only on belief or ideology but on performance--on their ability to achieve what they believe in a way that does not compromise the belief. It is easy to say--it is much harder to do. In this light, Kerry and Bush come very close to each other--in fact, they are very much the same. Every word uttered is distant from the last and even more distant from their record of achievements.
Our mission in Iraq, though perhaps mired in poor execution, must not fail. But more importantly, we must elect leaders who will judge that mission's tasks according to the "how" not only the "why." This is the origin of my worry for Mr. Manweller's distortion and my commentor's acceptance of that simplification.