People Before Profit blog

Movie Review: Brokeback Mountain

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 03:56:00 +0000

12-30-05, 9:37 am

Movie Review: Brokeback Mountain Director: Ang Lee

Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) is a penniless ranch hand looking for summer work to save money for his upcoming wedding to Alma (Michelle Williams). An unscrupulous boss (Randy Quaid) hires him with Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) to herd sheep on Brokeback Mountain. Forced to work long hours and to survive on beans and whiskey, the two young men lose interest in caring for the sheep. As the nights turn cold, a romantic fire is kindled between them.

Initially, Ennis insists that their affair is a one-time thing – after all, he is getting married in a couple of months. But the two men grow attached. Underlying the affair is the subtext of the social rejection of homosexuality: violence, hate, fear, and secrecy quickly become part and parcel of the two men's lives. Suppression of self and self-loathing spark violent episodes, social distance, and constant fear of being found out.

Ennis, who really is the central character of the story, is a committed husband and loving father, but his secret life keeps a part of him separate from those who love him. He is perpetually alienated from those who are closest to him, even from his true self. Throughout, Ennis is incapable of describing his affair with Jack as anything more than 'this thing between us,' let alone imagining the possibility of a gay and lesbian community that might help him understand his feelings and desires and see them as positive and valuable.

After a couple of years of separation, Jack tracks Ennis down and suggests they get together. Soon, Ennis and Jack are meeting every couple of months, ostensibly for fishing trips (and other outdoorsy activities of the masculine variety), in order to carry on a 20-year affair.

Meanwhile, both get married, start families, and live 'ordinary' lives. Jack marries into a well-to-do family in which he quickly becomes adjusted on the outside, even to the point of getting a bit of a paunch.

Ennis' life turns out differently. He sticks with ranching, but doesn't seem to be able to earn enough to buy his own property. Just when he gets good work, he quits to run off into the mountains with Jack on one of their trips. Forced to choose between love and desire and work and promised economic security, Ennis chooses love. Despite his outward gruff and typically masculine appearances, Ennis may be the most romantic character in American film in some time.

Heath Ledger as Ennis Del Mar delivers one of the most memorable performances on film this year. Ennis is a subtly complex character that easily finds his place in the tradition of American film alongside any character Steve McQueen ever played. Ennis is silent. He is more articulate with grunts and snorts, his eye and facial expressions, hunched shoulders, and spitting than with words. But what a powerful communicator is Ledger who skillfully delivers a full range of emotions from anger to tenderness, fear to hate, love to despair to deep sorrow, regret and loss – often within an instant.

Some critics have accused the filmmakers of creating one-dimensional women characters who torment their husbands rather than understanding or caring for them. This is simply an unfortunate misunderstanding. Alma, for instance, is devoted to Ennis until she accidentally discovers that her husband is having an affair with Jack. Betrayed, she keeps his secret in silence, continues to try to win him, and only when she fails does she leave him. Michelle Williams' performance is truly top-notch and deserves consideration from the critics and nabobs of Hollywood awards.

Overall, this is a moving film that you will not be able to stop thinking about. It contains all the elements of our universal struggles to find love, to share a common life with others, to find a place in which we can be truly free of oppressive social judgments and restrictions, to be free of want and loneliness. Though tragic and sad, it is also a bit utopian.

The physical place of Brokeback Mountain is an enormous closet in which gay men hide, ironically a vast and open wilderness. But it is also holds a promise of being the place beyond that closet a place of true liberation. Not a film about escape, or an escapist movie, Brokeback Mountain takes the grit and pain of real life and scratches at it until maybe a peak at beauty, truth, and goodness shines through. It is worth every bit of the price of admission.

--Contact Joel Wendland at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.

Cote D'Iviore(W.Africa): New government announced after weeks of haggling

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 03:38:00 +0000

12-30-05,9:21am

ABIDJAN, 29 Dec 2005 (IRIN) - After weeks of negotiations war-torn Cote d’Ivoire’s new prime minister has formed a transitional government that has 10 months to reunite the country, disarm fighters and hold presidential elections.

Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny late Wednesday announced his trimmed 32-member cabinet, which brings together representatives of the ruling party, the rebels and the political opposition.

“I wanted Ivorians to recognise themselves in this government,” Banny told reporters after the presentation of the cabinet.

“This government has an important and fundamental mission. We have to remove all weapons from our territory, we have to reunify the country, we have to identify the population…We have to learn to solve our own problems.”

Warring parties have failed to deliver on key targets laid out in the three-year-old Marcoussis peace deal, including disarmament of rebel and pro-government militias and resolving the sensitive issue of who is entitled to citizenship. Elections scheduled for 30 October had to be cancelled.

A succession of international mediators have blamed the intransigence of the rival factions, saying they have displayed a lack of political will to end the ‘no war no peace’ stand-off. The country remains divided between a rebel-held north and government-controlled south. Banny has created a new position for rebel leader Guillaume Soro, named minister for reconstruction and reinsertion. It is the second highest position in the cabinet after the prime minister.

Soro’s remit is likely to include disarmament and the redeployment of government administration in rebel-held territories, according to analysts.

Soro had previously demanded the prime minister’s job, but rebel spokesman Sidiki Konate told IRIN the rebels –- known as New Forces –- are content with the compromise.

“The government is a fact and we have no problem with it, so now we have to wait and see how it is going to work,” Konate said.

It has taken Banny over three weeks since being sworn in as prime minister to draw up his team. The delay, according to government insiders, was due largely to President Laurent Gbagbo’s refusal to give up the finance ministry.

Previously, Gbagbo ally Antoine Bohoun Bouabre held the finance portfolio, but in the new line up Banny –- former head of the West African regional bank BCEAO –- will take the job though the day-to-day running of the ministry will fall to Charles Koffi Diby, a former director of the national treasury.

Instead, Bouabre takes the senior cabinet post of state minister of planning and development.

Other key portfolios have been wrestled away from the main Marcoussis signatories going to little-known technocrats and close allies of Banny.

Defence, and so control of the Ivorian army, will go to magistrate Rene Kouassi Aphing. The interior ministry goes to police chief Joseph Ble Dja.

With nine fewer members than Cote d’Ivoire’s previous government of national reconciliation, the new formation meant that all parties had to relinquish one or more posts.

The main opposition Rally of the Republicans (RDR) party and Democratic Party of Cote d’Ivoire (PDCI) now have five ministries each. Seven posts were allocated to the ruling Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) and six to the New Forces rebels.

Independents and civil society signatories to Marcoussis rounded out the government.

While Gbagbo approved the new cabinet by presidential decree, some ruling party supporters were unhappy with the way the seats were divided. Hundreds of youths took to the streets of Abidjan’s Yopougon suburb on Wednesday to express their dismay, some blocking roadways with burning tyres.

Army Chief of Staff Colonel Philippe Mangou and Charles Ble Goude, leader of the pro-FPI militants known as ‘young patriots,’ appeared on state television to appeal for calm.

Armed forces whizzed to the scene to disperse crowds.

Earlier this year when it became clear the October elections would not take place, the UN extended Gbagbo’s mandate for 12 months with a special resolution beefing up the powers of the prime minister, on whose shoulders falls the main task of restoring the one-time beacon of stability to peace.

Banny, with his cabinet, has everything to do if elections are to take place before the new October 2006 deadline, when the mandate for transitional government expires.

Analysts welcomed Banny’s cabinet as potentially workable solution, but warned that the 10-month time frame may prove too tight.

“The new cabinet is a good reflection of the power balance in Cote d’Ivoire,” political analyst Hamed N’Cho said. “The way the seats are shared out should make it possible for everyone involved to begin resolving the crisis.”

“[But] we have only ten months to go. Perhaps one should already think about prolonging the transition.”

Rumsfeld Admits to 'Ghosting' Detainee

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 03:28:00 +0000

12-30-05, 9:09 am

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has admitted that he 'ghosted' a detainee, meaning that he made the decision to hold a prisoner without keeping any records of the fact.

While prisoners of war can be theoretically stripped of their rights by calling them other names (like 'unlawful combatants'), they are probably most effectively stripped of all rights by keeping their imprisonment secret. That is what Rumsfeld says he did.

An account of what we know on this matter can be found on page 110 of a new report by Congressman John Conyers called 'The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Cover-ups in the Iraq War.'

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/5769

Following a catalog of evidence of other crimes sanctioned by top Bush Administration officials, the report reads:

'We also have an admission that George Tenet specifically approved the ghosting in Iraq of a specific individual, and that Mr. Rumsfeld admitted to approving of ghosting of detainees as a special matter. During a press conference in June 2004, Secretary Rumsfeld confirmed not only that he was asked by CIA Director George Tenet to hide a specific detainee, but also that he hid the detainee and that the detainee was lost in the system for more than eight months:

'Q -- Mr. Secretary, I'd like to ask why last November you ordered the U.S. military to keep a suspected Ansar al-Islam prisoner in Iraq [Hiwa Abdul Rahman Rashul] secret from the Red Cross. He's now been secret for more than seven months. And there are other such shadowy prisoners in Iraq who are being kept secret from the Red Cross.

'SEC. RUMSFELD: With respect to the -- I want to separate the two. Iraq, my understanding is that the investigations on that subject are going forward. With respect to the detainee you're talking about, I'm not an expert on this, but I was requested by the Director of Central Intelligence to take custody of an Iraqi national who was believed to be a high-ranking member of Ansar al-Islam. And we did so. We were asked to not immediately register the individual. And we did that. It would -- it was -- he was brought to the attention of the Department, the senior level of the Department I think late last month. And we're in the process of registering him with the ICRC at the present time . . .' This is from June 17, 2004, and can be found here: http://www.denfenselink.mil/transcripts

This is the Secretary of Defense publicly stating that the Director of the CIA told him not to register a prisoner with the Red Cross, and that he obeyed, and that several months later the prisoner was still not registered.

Why do Nuremberg Principles III and IV both come to mind?

Principle III

The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible Government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

Principle IV

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

Why was the CIA calling the shots here? Because they had taken Mr. Rashul out of Iraq for 'questioning' at an undisclosed location. They were transferring him to military custody.

Rumsfeld agreed to keep Rashul off the books, and issued a classified order, that the New York Daily News reported on June 20, 2004, as reading: 'Notification of the presence and or status of the detainee to the International Committee of the Red Cross, or any international or national aid organization, is prohibited pending further guidance.'

General Sanchez issued his own order to implement Secretary Rumsfeld's order. Sanchez' order, as reported in the media, 'accepts custody and detains Hiwa Abdul Rahman Rashul, a high-ranking Ansar al-Islam member;' orders that he 'remain segregated and isolated from the remainder of the detainee population;' '[o]nly military personnel and debriefers will have access to the detainee. . . . Knowledge of the presence of this detainee will be strictly limited on a need-to-know basis.' 'Any reports from interrogations or debriefings will contain only the mininum [sic] amount of source information . . .'

The ghosting of Rashul can neither be blamed on low-ranking personnel nor be described as an isolated incident.

In a statement to investigators, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, said that in September 2003, the CIA requested that the military intelligence officials 'continue to make cells available for their detainees and that they not have to go through the normal in processing procedures.'

Army General Paul Kern testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in September 2004, that the U.S. had held as many as 100 ghost detainees in Iraq.

Rumsfeld himself has confirmed that this was no isolated incident:

'Q -- But then why wasn't the -- why wasn't the Red Cross told, and are there other such prisoners being detained without the knowledge of the Red Cross?

'SEC. RUMSFELD: There are -- there are instances where that occurs. And a request was made to do that, and we did.'

The Republican Tax Cut Scam

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 03:26:00 +0000

12-30-05, 9:07 am

It is common wisdom on the political right that tax cuts stimulate economic growth. President Bush and the Republican-dominated Congress insist that the nearly $900 billion in tax cuts (overwhelmingly aimed at the nation’s richest households) enacted since 2001 have saved the country's economy from deeper recession. In fact, they insist that the almost $1 trillion hit to the federal treasury directly caused by these tax cuts matters little compared to the economic growth they supposedly stimulated.

Such claims, however are shown to be baseless in a new report from the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute (EPI). By comparing past economic cycles with the post-2001 'recovery' and examining employment and income trends, the EPI report concludes that tax cuts for the wealthiest have actually slowed the pace of recovery and created serious long-term problems for working people.

Economist Lee Price in the recent EPI report titled 'The Boom that Wasn't' highlights a comparison of the periods following the 1991-1992 recession and the 2001 recession. This comparison is important because in each case two different tax policies were adopted. A 1993 tax increase aimed at the highest income earners (for which Republicans developed a deep and abiding hatred of President Clinton unmatched by current anti-Bush sentiment) is contrasted by Price with Bush's tax cuts for the rich between 2001 and the present. As the report clearly shows, the 1993 recovery that followed the tax increase for the wealthiest segment of the population was among the strongest in US history, far outshining the Bush-led fiasco we are struggling through now.

Two major indicators of total economic health are the gross domestic product (GDP) and gross domestic income (GDI). In the 4-1/2 years of 'recovery' following the 2001 recession, GDP has grown by 13.5% for an average annual rate of 2.8%. This falls well below the average 3.8% GDP growth rate of the previous five recovery periods of equal length after a recession. As for the GDI, no previous recovery period of equal length has equaled the weakness of the current period. Economic activity as measured by GDI has grown at only a 2.3% rate, compared to the 3.6% GDI rate during past cycles.

Additionally, job figures haven't lived up to expectations. Even when accounting for the disaster after Hurricane Katrina, the US has only 1.6% more jobs than it did in March of 2001, at the beginning of the 2001 recession. By comparison, the previous recovery periods after a recession averaged about 9.3% more jobs at this stage of the recovery. The lowest rate of past job growth during a previous recovery was about 6 times higher than what it has been since 2001.

Despite the fact that the unemployment rate has become a poor way to estimate economic strength, because it fails to count those who have left the job market, the fact is that the unemployment rate remains 1.5% lower than it was in March of 2001.

When you look closely at numbers, it is plain to see that Bush's economy has simply failed to create jobs at a normal pace.

In fact, in 2003 the Bush administration and the Republicans promised that tax cuts would create 5.5 million jobs. Without tax cuts, Bush estimated that only 4.1 million jobs would be created between mid-2003 and now. So far, only about 2.6 million jobs have materialized in that 18-month period. This clearly shows, as the EPI report states, that 'by the Bush Administration's own analysis, the 2003 tax cuts failed to create more jobs than would have been expected without the tax cuts.'

In addition to poor job growth and general economic sluggishness, the EPI notes that in the 4-plus years since the 2001 recession wages and incomes, as well as spending and and investment, simply have not kept pace with past business cycles, and by significant amounts. For the bulk of the population – working families – real incomes have declined.

One exception has been in housing investment. A significant growth in 'residential investment' since 2001, EPI points out, has been unrelated to tax cuts. Changes in the tax code since 2001 have reduced the 'effective value' of deductions a tax filer can claim for mortgage interest rates. This means that while the Bush tax cuts lowered incentives for increasing residential investments, this is the one area where investments have actually grown.

Overall, the stimulus to the economy promised by the Bush administration and supporters of tax cuts and the 'trickle down theory' simply hasn't materialized. In comparison to other periods of economic recovery, under the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress, wage earners and their families have experienced stagnant wage growth, job growth, and general economic sluggishness.

The most noticeable effect the tax cuts have had – also contrary to the promises of tax-cut proponents – has been dramatic increases in the size of the budget deficit and federal debt.

Contrary to the evidence of their own eyes, so-called fiscal conservatives insist that government spending is the real source of the huge deficits and the massive public debt. To give them some credit, they have a minor point. Bloated pork-barrel spending where Republican congressional leaders have handed over hundreds of billions of dollars to corporate supporters for useless projects and unnecessary tax breaks has surely played some role. For example, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay inserted a $1.5 billion dollar no-strings grant in this past summer's Energy Bill to Halliburton, which maintains corporate offices in DeLay's district.

Further, the $229 billion spent so far on the war on Iraq (not including the tens of billions more earmarked for it) might have been saved if the administration had not repeatedly lied about the reasons for war.

So yes, some government spending is indeed partially to blame for the country's financial troubles.

A reasonable fiscal policy would aim tax cuts at working families (middle and lower income), as opposed to high income earners, and target increased federal spending toward education, poverty elimination, provision of health care, housing, public transportation, infrastructure development, small business growth, and education.

Results of a study published by Economy.com has shown that the GDP grows at a much faster rate with targeted tax cuts and social spending aimed at working families than with tax policies aimed at the wealthiest portion of the population.

Tax cuts for millionaires have undeniably failed as economic policy. How many times do we have to suffer from the effects of such tax cuts before we decide that, although Paris Hilton and Tom DeLay's corporate sponsors might benefit from them, they are bad for the rest of us?

--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and may be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.

2006: The Year the Chickenhawks Will Go Home to Roost- Cindy Sheehan

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 03:16:00 +0000

12-30-05,9:00am

Since hot, hot Camp Casey in August, some amazing grass roots actions have taken place all over the country. People are starting to speak up and Congress has begun to take action against the criminal and neo-Fascist regime that tried to take over America.

From Camp Casey to Katrina to use of chemical weaponry and extraordinary rendition to illegally spying on American citizens without due process, Bushco has miserably failed our country and the world. We as Americans said 'enough is enough.' We sacrificed a lot when we showed up in DC and other cities around the country in the hundreds of thousands to protest against and show that we withdraw any consent to be governed by murderous thugs. We started to peacefully, but forcefully resist the notion that this government has any right to govern us when they have betrayed their offices and their sacred trusts as 'defenders' of the Constitution so horribly.

This was also the year that we also began to hold such Republicans in Democratic clothing like: Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, and Diane Feinstein (list is my no means all inclusive) accountable for their support of what George is doing in Iraq. When we as Democrats elect our leaders we expect them to reject and loudly repudiate the murderous and corrupt policies of this administration: not support and defend them.

There are Camp Caseys in front of Hillary's and Chuck Schumer's offices in Long Island every Friday, as well as one in front of Diane Feinstein's Los Angeles office on Fridays, also. There has been a Camp Casey in front of Kay Bailey Hutchinson's office in Dallas since August. Several protestors have been arrested in Dallas exercising their First Amendment rights. We need to let these warmongers, as well as the Republican warmongers, know that we mean business when we say 'bring them home now.' Set up Camp Caseys in front of your Senator's or Congress person's office if they support George in his wars of aggression. Gold Star Families for Peace is planning many activities for the first part of 2006. I would like to give you all a heads up on them, so you can make your plans accordingly to support us and to join us if at all possible.

On January 31st , we will be in Washington, DC for the State of the Union address when George gets in front of Congress and the world and lies through his teeth about how great everything is going in Iraq and here at home. His idiotic policies have ruined Iraq and New Orleans and made the world a more dangerous place…allowing that terrorist attacks have tripled world wide since he decided to 'fight them over there.' He also may be laying the ground work for further acts of needless aggression against Syria and Iraq. GSFP and representatives from other peace organizations and refugees from New Orleans will be gathering in DC to give the 'Real State of the Union.' Check our website for place and time.

For the Love of God, Can't you Make Him Stop? Recently, it was revealed that George only interacts with four people: Laura, Condi, Karen Hughes and his Mom. His Mom, the Ice Queen who didn't want her 'pretty mind' burdened with the images of flag draped coffins coming home, lives in Houston. On President's Day, (Feb. 20) we will be demonstrating in front of her house to implore her to forget about the obscene profits that her family and their friends are making off of this occupation and to beg her to finally do the right thing and make her son stop this insane war OF terror against the world. George and Dick are defiling the highest offices of the world and they need to resign. On President's Day, when we have the day off, we need to demonstrate against the ones who are illegitimately in power, anyway. If you can't make it to Houston, organize your own President's Day protest.

The Camp Casey Peace Foundation will hold its first annual Peace Festival and Concert on April 4, 2006. April 4 th is the day Casey and Martin Luther King, Jr were killed. We want to turn it into a true day for celebrating peace. The Camp Casey Peace Foundation will be awarding the Casey Sheehan Peace Prize, a cash prize, to a young peace activist every year. We want to foster the growth of solving problems non-violently and young people are the ones who get killed in the gray haired old men's wars. We are working on an exciting event and we will announce more details as the event draws closer.

Camp Casey Easter edition: We will be heading back to our leased land in Crawford April 11th to Easter, which is April 16th. Easter is a time of renewal and hopeful promises. Casey was killed on Palm Sunday and his body was returned to us in the cargo section of a United Airlines flight on Holy Saturday and we buried him two days after Easter. Last Easter Season was so painful to us. This Easter we will again be demonstrating in front of the man's home who is responsible for such pain and abject heartache in the world. But, we will be there with a renewed sense of hope that the Chickenhawks will be sent out to pasture this year. Like Michael Moore, I want to be a fly on the wall when Bush and company are hauled out of the White House in handcuffs. Impeachment is not necessary for people who never were elected…eviction is what is needed. If you can't join us in Crawford, set up your own Camp Casey near you.

In 2005, we learned that we have the power. We learned that we can't rely on the propaganda media or the empty promises of most of our elected leadership. We learned that we need to be the change that we desire to see.

We learned that one person can and does make a difference.

We cannot relax in 2006. We cannot slip back into the evil of apathy and complacency that the neocons rejoice in. We need to keep pounding, working, and fighting. We need to support organizations like Gold Star Families for Peace, Veterans for Peace , Code Pink and Iraq Veterans Against the War , or the Peace organization of your choice so we can continue our struggle for peace with justice. We need to support true American patriots like John Conyers who is calling for an investigation and censure for the lies that have cost us so much of our national human treasure.

2006 will be a great year for the people of our country. I know it.

It won't be easy, but we will prevail and the struggle will be worth it.

Cindy Sheehan's book is Not One More Mother's Child

January 2006 – Happy New Year

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 05:30:00 +0000

Portrait (part 2)

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 05:08:00 +0000

12-29-05, 12:00 pm

Continued from Portrait, part 1

“You were too slow. I just didn’t need to be in there anymore,” he replied curtly.

The woman stopped wiping her camera’s lens and eyed the man with a mild look of concern on her face. “Are you alright, man? You look a bit pale.”

“Yes, well. It can’t be helped. I’m bloody English, Lydia.” Underlying his obvious sarcasm, there was an acute sense of discomfort. The man cleared his throat and added in a softer voice, “Did you get the shot then, Lydia?”

“Yeah,” said Lydia, resuming the wiping. “But I had to elbow a few people out of the way. Ours won’t be the only feature tomorrow, you know. People eat this shit up.”

“That shit, as you so eloquently put it, is revolting.”

“Aw come on, Nige, it’s done exactly to provoke this kind of violent reaction. You know you’re going to write about it.”

“Yes, Lydia. I will, but only because I have to. People should know that this is not...not right.” “What the hell are you talking about? It’s a free country, man. People can do what they they want.”

“Yes, but using death to beget fortune is simply reprehensible. It’s unforgivable. The shame of it all is that she really has a true talent. Something intangible. Something unseen but sensed. Those paintings are…”

“Beautiful?” the photographer completed his sentence for him.

“No. Well….yes. I don’t know,” replied Nigel with an exasperated tone. Pausing to fish a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbing his forehead with it. “They’re disturbing and magnificent at the same time. It’s as though they speak, but it’s what they may speak of that scares me.

“But isn’t that the effect that the painter probably was going for?”

“There’s only one person who can really answer that. We must interview her, this…what’s the girl’s name again?

The photographer named Lydia pulled a crumpled program from her pocket and poured over the pages with her eyes. She raised her eyebrows when she found what she was looking for.

“Her name’s Joan Payne.”

Lydia’s voice echoed in Joan’s ears. Who were these people? What were they talking about? How could a complete stranger find such offensive meaning in the abstract shapes and colors? The buzz around her seemed miles away. She didn’t hear the rest of the reporter’s conversation with his photographer. She didn’t see George. She couldn’t feel the heat of the bright lights. It was as though she were numb and deaf, trapped in a bubble of semiconsciousness that separated her from the rest of the world.

Instinctually, she made her way to the Dark Room. There was a line forming to get through the black velvet curtain. A whisper emanated through the crowd as fellow students recognized Joan approaching and parted like the Red Sea allowing her to pass. Some of them stared with curiosity, others with jealousy. Without a glance, Joan slipped through the curtain into the darkness.

Once her eyes adjusted, she could see that the room was packed. Everyone was staring in the same direction. In the anonymity of obscurity, Joan made her way to the front. The journalists were all straining to hear Professor Dutton who stood alone under a dim light. Ignoring her professor, Joan’s eyes were glued to the display behind him. She could not explain what she saw. Four paintings hung in a solemn row behind Dutton. Each one was slightly different from the next but similar enough to be part of a recognizable series. The same elements were apparent; a dark human form at the center of a swirling maelstrom of fiery color, arms and legs twisted at strange, unnatural angles. Although she did not recall putting them to canvas, Joan somehow knew that these were images wrenched from the deepest recesses of her mind, from her darkest dreams. She had seen them before. She had felt them before. She had been here before. Her skin grew clammy and a cold feeling of uneasiness spread through her bones. Her left temple began to pulse and suddenly her heartbeat felt like a bass drum in her chest.

“…and I think the person best-suited to answer your questions is finally here. Miss Payne?” At the sound of her name, the surreal bubble around her burst. Joan suddenly found herself standing in the middle of a dark room full of strangers. And they were all staring at her expectantly, whispering in speculation. All that she could discern in the shadows were the whites of their eyes.

“Miss Payne, why don’t you come up here and answer a few questions.”

Dutton had seen her in the crowd and was now leading her to the same spot he had just occupied under the murky spotlight. His forehead was beaded with sweat and his lofty tone was descending temporarily into agitation. Under his breath he spat, “You took your time getting here, didn’t you? I told you you’d have some questions to answer. Now go on.”

With a little shove from Dutton, she was standing all by herself in the pool of light. Although she could no longer see the people, she could feel their eyes boring right through her. She felt as though she were in a strange childhood nightmare standing on stage in front of a packed auditorium, completely naked and vulnerable. Dutton was pointing to someone in the darkness, apparently taking questions.

“What was your inspiration for these paintings?” a voice asked from the rear of the Dark Room. Before the first voice had even finished posing the question, another voice chimed in from the opposite side.

“Does your painting have any relation to the recent serial murders?”

The second voice had a vaguely accusatory tone to it. Dutton had disappeared. Joan was alone and the questions were now coming from all directions.

“Are you doing this to garner publicity or do you really see this as art?”

The room was crumpling around her and each question resonated through her head like voices down a deep, dark well. And she was at the bottom of it, drowning and sinking slowly. Now both her temples were pulsating, and she could feel the bass drum of her heart forcing cold, crystallized blood through her veins. Each crystal scraped along the inside of her vessels, shredding her from the inside out. The pain was sharpening.

She was catching the bus home in front of school. Just behind her, a fair girl with a cello was running towards the bus stop as fast as she could. “Hold the bus!” she cried. “I ain’t no chauffeur, gotta schedule to keep!” yelled the dour bus driver as he purposely started driving even before Joan was fully on the bus. The girl with the cello had no chance. He was sweaty and angry but strangely exhilarated as he floored the gas. His unsmiling mouth twitched slightly. He liked the surge of power he felt as the bus pulled away. The girl was alone at the bus stop, except for her cello. Like Joan and her easel.

Suddenly the girl with the cello and the surly bus driver disappeared and Joan was blinded by the bright lights of a supermarket. She could hear George somewhere in the background and she could smell something sweet. She had her hands on some….

“Nice melons, how are they today?” An elderly lady with glasses was beside her. Her hands were as wrinkled and gray as an elephant’s skin. “I’m trying to switch my grandkids from candy to fruit....” Joan wondered if all grandmothers cared about what their grandkids ate. She wondered if they all smelled of camphor and melons. But she didn’t know. She’d never had a grandmother. She’d never had a family. Joan blinked.

When she opened her eyes, she was no longer in a market but seated at a candlelit table. There was music playing, a romantic melody. But there was no one across from her and only one setting on the table. A long tanned arm was pouring her a glass of red wine. The waiter had a youthful, handsome face. He made small talk and even toasted with her so she wouldn’t feel alone in this room full of dining couples and clinking glassware. All the while he had a sad look in his eyes. Pity. He felt sorry for her. Her cheeks burned. Something inside her burned.

Joan was dizzy, confused, and sweating. Her migraine was peaking and the pain was unbearable. The images flooding through her mind were now seared into the back of her eyes. Trapped in the pool of light with no escape, she realized that these forgotten memories were shattering the very core of her reality.

“Ms. Payne, please explain your inspiration for your work.”

“Ms. Payne?”

“Joan!”

“Ms. Payne, say something!” Professor Dutton emerged from the shadows to spit venomously in her ear.

“Joanie!”

Suddenly a familiar voice cut through the crowd. “Joanie, what’s going on? Are you alright?” George emerged from the darkness and stepped into the pool of light with her. The questions were still being hurtled at her like daggers and she was still standing naked on that stage with no shield. The pain in her temples was getting worse. She had to get out of here.

Out of nowhere she heard a blood-curdling scream that silenced the crowd instantly. Gathering what strength she had left, Joan took advantage of the moment and bolted for the curtain. To her amazement, no one tried to stop her. Not even George. She hit the white light of the main gallery like a brick wall but kept on running. Running, running, away from the memories, away from the pain.

Once again the world was black. Tendrils of brilliant blue appeared in the void and wrapped themselves around her. There were no crimson storms. Just blue strands of color winding themselves around her feet and continuing upwards towards her face. She felt no chill, no fear, no apprehension, no pain. She felt nothing. She welcomed whatever was happening. Up they came, up and up. Now they were around her shoulders, caressing her like soothing hands. They wrapped around her neck and once again she was struck by the peaceful feeling. She felt no pain and no fear.

The scream had silenced the room, but only for a few seconds. As soon as Joan bolted, the crowd erupted in confusion. The fear in her voice still rang in George’s ears. He had never heard her raise her voice before, much less release the wail of a forsaken banshee. The hair on the back of his neck was still standing and he found his fists clenched so tightly that his nails were digging into his palms.

The crowd was pouring out of the gallery in search of their quarry. It was only as he stepped out of the light that George saw the paintings on the wall. The plaque under the first one said “Untitled 1 by Joan Payne.” They were all hers. Without studying the paintings in great detail, George suddenly understood the journalists’ line of questioning. The paintings bore a startling resemblance to the recent murders, even down to the order in which they were placed on the wall. The figures in the first two paintings were almost feminine, with recognizable curves despite the distortion of their limbs. The figures in the second two were more dense and masculine. Instinctually, George knew he had to find Joan before anyone else did. The only place she would have gone was home to her apartment and to her easel. As he ran out of the gallery and into the night, a light rain started falling. A man was stopped at the corner waiting to cross the street, pulling a newspaper out of his bag to shelter himself from the rain. Without thinking, George grabbed the newspaper as he dodged out in front of traffic. The man yelped in anger but George didn’t hear a thing as he jumped into the nearest cab and headed towards Joan’s apartment. In the cab, he poured over the newspaper.

The killings began four weeks ago with the murder of Jean Geld.

“Four weeks ago?!!” George desperately tried to remember what had happened four weeks ago. That was just about the time Joan started having her weird headaches. She had left class and gone home early on a Tuesday and he hadn’t seen her till the weekend.

A week later, Maria Martinez was found in her apartment in the Amesback neighborhood.

Pinching his forehead with his shaking hands, George tried to stimulate his memory. Joan had made him dinner last week. They had gone grocery shopping together at the corner market for dessert. He bought his favorite Cool Whip and Snickers. Joan had opted for melon. But she had gone home with another headache even before they finished the pasta. That damned melon was still rotting in his fridge.

The following week Martin Elias, a 54-year-old Honduran immigrant and bus driver from Hill Park was found in his residence.

George could not remember seeing Joan at all that week, which was rare. He had called her several times, but she had only answered once. She had been edgy and unusually terse with him, declining his offer to bring over their favorite Chinese takeout. She told him she just wanted to be alone. That’s when he’d had the inspiration to start the Tree of Life. Then just two days ago:

The body of a young man was found in an apartment in Ashton Village.

Joanie had declined to go to the Dali documentary with him and the next day she almost missed the submission deadline. And she’d had another migraine.

It was warm and humid inside the cab but George felt a chill run down his spine.

“This is all just a crazy coincidence,” he told himself. “Maybe she’s somehow psychic? Or maybe a tumor or a blood clot in her brain. I’ve seen character-altering headaches on Young and the Restless before. It could happen.”

And the paintings? He had learned early on in their friendship that Joan was unusually passionate about her craft. To her it was less a craft than a necessity. She captured her life on canvas in order to understand the good and to exorcise the bad. That’s how she dealt with the world around her. That’s how she explained all the other paintings; Abandon, Betrayal, Lost in Red.

George always remembered the day he helped her clean her apartment. While Joan had swept and moved furniture, he had smoked cigarettes and enviously gone through her immense collection of sketches and paintings. Although he knew little about her past, George knew the disquieting titles rang with truth and meaning. They had an unspoken agreement that he would never ask and she would never tell.

His reasoning was not helping him figure anything out. Before the cab even came to a full stop, he was bounding up the steps to Joanie’s apartment. The driver yelled at him to pay his fare, but George paid no heed. Taking the stairs two at a time, he was out of breath by the time he reached Joanie’s door.

“Joanie?” he called. “You there?”

The door was ajar. He pushed the door open slowly, expecting to see her crumpled on the couch. But there was no one. And not a sound to be heard. The room was dark except for the anemic glow of a streetlight outside. Suddenly anxious for the honesty of 60 watt light, George felt along the wall for the main switch. Strangely, when the light flooded the room he heard himself breathe a sigh of relief as though some part of him were happy to be alone in the room.

He could tell that Joanie had been here recently. The room had been thrashed as though she had come home looking for something. The couch was pulled away from the wall of bookshelves and canvases were strewn all over the room. Everything was in a state of disarray except for one thing. Untouched by the disorder around it, the easel stood in the middle of the room as it always did. A single canvas rested on it. Holding his breath and clenching his fists, George inched towards it.

It was obviously the fifth in her series of paintings with the same composition of fiery colors. But instead of being bent in acute angles, the central figure was suspended in the middle of the colorful void by one single wisp of blue. The figure was hanging by its neck in a state of morbid repose. As he stared at the canvas, George noticed another difference. The figure in the middle was not abstract or faceless. He recognized the delicate shape of its shoulders and the deep raven shade of its hair. In the upper right corner, almost obscured in the swirling colors, he could discern a rectangle of light with a shadowy figure lurking beyond it.

“Oh God!” George turned around to make sure no one was in the doorway behind him. Relieved to see no one, the chill did not leave his body. He could not explain it, but he could almost feel the sinister painting reaching out to him. He had to see Joan, but was afraid of what he would find. Running to the only other room in the apartment, he kicked in the bathroom door. It was dark and empty. The shower curtain around was drawn back from the tub and the window was open, letting in the distant city noise. Everything appeared to be normal. George was about to sigh in relief when he looked down at his feet. His breath left him and his heart dropped into his stomach. The light from the outer room flooded the bathroom cutting a white rectangle of light through the obscurity. The shape of George’s body was silhouetted against it. He suddenly understood what he was seeing. Without turning on the bathroom light, he scanned the small room looking for it.

He knew where it would be, tied around one of the clawfoot tub’s legs leading up and out of the window. It was pulled taut and rolled slightly as though whatever was tied to the other end of it had only recently stopped moving. He could hear the blue nylon rope creaking in the slight breeze. He took a few steps into the room but could not bring himself to touch the rope. He didn’t have to. Looking out the window, he caught a glimpse of himself in the window of the apartment across the street; a shadowy figure lurking in the doorway. From this angle, he could not see what hung at the end of the rope, but he knew what he would see if he took just a few more steps forward. The painting had forever seared the image of Joan dangling like a macabre puppet into his mind. In the distance, he heard an ambulance approaching.

“Too late,” he whispered.

Portrait (part 1)

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 05:06:00 +0000

12-29-05, 12:00 pm

In a few minutes, she knew the pain would feel like a saber piercing through her right eye and out through the back of her head. Joan cursed the inventor of childproof bottle caps as she fumbled with a family-size canister of ibuprofen. When she suffered these strange migraines, even the simplest of tasks was impossible. It was only a matter of time before she blacked out.

“Hey, I’ve got an extra ticket to the Dali flick tonight. Why don’t you come with me?” George asked as left her apartment earlier that evening. “It promises to be a torrid dramatization of his sexploits with Lorca. More action than you’ve seen in a while!” He winked up at her playfully. “Besides, the deadline is tomorrow. You should be done.”

“But I’m not. So no thanks, George,” replied Joan.

George’s shoulders sagged with disappointment. A devoted epicurean and sexual opportunist, George had no illusion about his artistic future. Work placed a distant second to reveling in the freedom that art school allowed. In the midst of budding artists discovering and developing their talents, George’s intense admiration for young, nude bodies was conveniently accepted as appreciation for the human form, and his fondness for discussing homoeroticism over wine and cigarettes made him nothing more than eccentric. If George spent half as much time in the studio searching for himself in his work as he did frequenting coffee shops, cinemas and lectures searching for his next conquest, Joan was convinced he would be a sensational artist.

“Oh come on, Joanie. Granted, there is some creepy shit afoot right now, but are you going to let it keep you from having fun?” Noting Joan’s eyebrows raised in question, he added, “you should really read the paper more often.”

Joan laughed at George’s admonishment. Until a few weeks ago when he was inspired to sculpt a paper mache homage to male genitalia, he had never even picked up a newspaper. Apparently the hours he had spent crafting the“Tree of Life,” as he affectionately called it, had made George into the Times’ newest subscriber.

“Look, I’ll just see you tomorrow.”

“Suit yourself, you old nun!” was George’s parting remark as he bounced down the stairs.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. The warm light emanating from the other room was in stark contrast to the ice blue rays that sliced the darkness from the streetlight outside. Even with one eye shut tightly, Joan saw a difference in her face immediately. She possessed a natural beauty, not overt or contrived. She had silky dark straight hair that fell just below her chin framing her clear blue eyes. Right now however, she looked like a cadaver. Her lips were drawn tightly in a painful grimace and her normally milky skin looked thin and dry, like a waking mummy stripped of its bandages. As she stared at her gaunt reflection, she half expected a sinister gust to scatter her face like dust into the wind leaving just her naked skull staring back at her from empty sockets. She needed to lie down…..

After George left, Joan resisted the urge to work further on her canvases and instead laid them out on the floor. She wanted to take her time selecting the pieces that she would submit for the exhibition. As opposed to George, for whom art was a convenient way to explore human bodies, a career in art was as essential as water for Joan. Not because she desired fame and fortune. Not because she enjoyed socializing at gallery openings and nibbling expensive hors d’oeuvres with pretentious artistocrats, that not-so-rare class of self-professed experts on art, artists, and the artistic world. On the contrary, Joan felt extremely uncomfortable in those situations. She had little interest in self-promotion or public relations. She wanted to be a painter for no other reason than to survive. She knew there was nothing else she could do.

Ever since she could remember, Joan had been the proud owner of a rickety wooden easel. She couldn’t remember where it came from or who had given it to her, but since their introduction long ago it had become her closest confident, apart from maybe George. It was the only constant throughout her spasmodic childhood, accompanying her from foster home to foster home.

At first she simply learned to paint the world around her. Then as she grew older, she realized that the world she lived in was often sad and empty. Through her painting, she had the power to create a different world; one full of color and warmth and love and comfort. Instead of weeping tears in times of sadness, she shed brilliant watercolors. When she experienced moments of happiness, she captured them in vibrant oil paintings so that she could return to those colorful memories when everything around her seemed gray. Painting became as essential as breathing for Joan. Without paintbrushes through which to express her emotions, Joan was unable to experience either great pain or joy. Her emotions would build up, asphyxiating her unless she could touch brush to canvas and let them flow out of her into a two-dimensional form.

At the end of the semester, the graduate art school held a student exhibition that brought together critics, artistocrats, and professional artists, all eager to be the first to discover the newest talent. Students competed for gallery space to showcase their work. A good showing usually garnered a place in a professional artist’s atelier. At the very least, it meant a paying job with an artistocrat. But in some instances, the exhibition could spark a firestorm of press, good or bad, catapulting young artists into the limelight.

Joan was bound and determined to earn some prime gallery space. She couldn’t work in someone else’s atelier, relegated to a future of duplicating someone else’s emotions and feelings. Worse yet, she didn’t want to create anything devoid of feeling. She needed her own studio, not to serve as a pulpit for self-worship but rather a sanctuary for her in a world that often left her feeling very much alone.

Sitting on the floor surrounded by canvases, Joan painstakingly selected five oil paintings for the exhibition. Each one represented a memory that she had put to canvas long before graduate school. They were colorful abstract representations of her disjointed childhood selected precisely because Joan thought it would be all the more poignant if these images tinged in the sadness of her past ultimately earned her a bright future and a place in this world.

Most of the objects in her small one-room apartment were pushed up against one particular wall to allow Joan space when she felt like painting. That half of the room was a jumble of art supplies on rickety bookshelves secured against the wall by a tattered old cream, now grey, sleeper sofa. From her vantage point on the floor, Joan could see something through the dust bunnies under the couch.

It was another carrying case that, by the thickness of it, was full of sketches and canvases. She was fairly sure the case was filled with captured moments she had long ago completed and forgotten. Joan painted so prolifically that she often forgot her work only to be surprised by her own artistry after the blurring effect of time.

Intrigued by the prospect of rediscovering forgotten memories, Joan decided to take a look at its contents. As she stood and took a few steps towards it, a sudden but all too familiar wave of nausea overcame her. The room seemed to crumple around her as though she were in an aluminum can being crushed by an unknown force. Gravity was increasing by the second, crushing her into the ground.

Until recently Joan had never experienced a true migraine. She was young and healthy and thus far only suffered from the occasional hangover, usually the result of a debaucherous evening with George. These recent and sudden migraines left her incapacitated for hours, sometimes days. She assumed it was due to increased stress. In preparation for the exhibition, Joan had not slept more than a couple of hours a night for several weeks.

It started with strange, disorienting nausea that quickly escalated to a piercing pain behind her right eye. The nerves in the hollow of her socket were transformed into a cold, wire grip that applied such pressure that salty tears would inevitably form and escape down her cheek. When Joan was lost in the depths of a migraine, a pin dropping reverberated in her head like a Chinese gong and she could feel the blood course through her brain with each beat of her heart. Sometimes she took painkillers. Other times, she just shut her eyes and willed it to stop. Eventually she would pass out from the pain. When she awoke, there would be no lingering signs of her cerebral nightmare.

But the pain was not only physical. Each migraine was accompanied by strange, dark dreams. Though Joan could rarely recall the exact events of those un-natural reveries, she could always remember the atmosphere of that dark place; confusion, uncertainty, and fear.

The nausea was fading and the dull ache was sharpening steadily. Joan knew she only had a few minutes to lie down and brace for the full brunt of the migraine.

In the silent endless darkness, she saw a distant swirling globe of color; crimson, orange, and ochre raging with a centrifugal tide. It grew larger and closer until it was a blinding, deafening maelstrom of hot tangible colors eddying around her, lashing her, strangling her, hurting her. Before she could understand what was happening, crimson plumes darkened into coal black threads that coiled and tangled and coalesced into a shape. It was a human form twisted into an un-natural position, limbs stretched at obtuse angles. Scared and disoriented, she was unable to turn away from the creature. She needed to get closer. She needed to see it. As she approached, she discerned a shadowy face. Suddenly its eyes opened wide and stared out with clear horror and anguish. Its eyes were black voids that shed silent blood-red tears, each crimson rivulet marking a painful path upon its tortured face.

The shrill ring of the telephone mercilessly tore Joan from a deep, unnatural sleep. Disoriented and heavy-headed, Joan let the answering machine pick up.

“Joanie, where the hell are you?!” George yelled so loudly that the machine vibrated on her bedside table. “You’re driving me crazy, woman. This is the third time I’v…”

Concerned by his agitated state and glad to be awake and back in this world, Joan leaned over and picked up the phone.

“George, I’m here,” she mumbled through the receiver. “I’m here. What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong is that I never signed up to be the responsible one in this relationship. I can’t handle it.”

“What are you talking about?” Joan asked. It was a struggle just to sit up. Her vision was blurry and her tongue felt like sandpaper against the roof of her dry mouth. All that remained of the migraine was a faint pulsing in her temples. There was blue paint all over her hands.

“Look toots, you’d better get your ass down here pronto.”

“Shiiiiit!” exclaimed Joan as it dawned on her what George was talking about. The exhibition deadline was 10 a.m. and the alarm clock said 9:37 a.m. She had about 15 minutes to get across town. “I’ll be there, George. I’ll be right there.”

Without thinking, Joan leapt out of bed. Her portfolio lay waiting for her on the coffee table, packed and zipped with blue handprints all over it. She didn’t recall finishing the job or retouching any of her work the night before, but she must have done it quickly and unconsciously before passing out.

Relieved at her own foresight, she almost forgave herself for oversleeping on such an important day. In one fluid motion and three quick steps, she wriggled into a thick sweater that had been draped conveniently over the back of the sofa, slipped into an old pair of sneakers that were tucked under the coffee table and grabbed her keys and portfolio in a mad dash for the door. In her haste, she tripped over the newspaper lying on her doormat and almost fell down the stairs head first, sending her portfolio flying down on to the landing. Angry and flustered, she kicked the paper aside without reading the headline: “Fourth Victim Discovered: Police on the Hunt for a Serial Killer.”

Despite the morning drama, when Joan emerged from her professor’s office she felt both anxious and expectant. Joan had managed to see her professor in the nick of time. Without removing the canvases from her portfolio, just lifting each one and allowing his eyes to pour over them by the metallic light of a suspended frosted glass globe, Professor Dutton had seemed surprised.

Although he was obligated to be verbally noncommittal until the official announcements were made the following week, Joan could tell by the way his eyebrows rose and fell, and by the way he ran his fingers along the side of each canvas as though he were aching to touch them, that something about the pictures that she had chosen had struck a chord with him.

“This is …a departure from your past work, Joan,” said Dutton quietly, almost whispering as he gently closed the portfolio. “An unexpected and…very unique departure.”

Then, regaining his normal lofty composure he added, “I can’t give you any answers now. We’ll call you after the committee meets next week. Good luck to you.”

“You look pleased with yourself!” said George from his perch on a low flowerbed wall where he had been waiting patiently for Joan. A menthol cigarette dangled dangerously from his mouth. Both hands were unconsciously but rather provocatively wrapped around two phallic branches of the “Tree of Life” in an effort to balance it on his knee. Much to his dismay, multiple penile sculptures had already been submitted for the show. Never one to admit defeat, George was content to plant the tree in a student coffee shop Ashton Village where it was sure to make a great conversation starter with the women’s studies graduate students.

“Don’t hold it like that, George. You’re giving away your techniques,” Joan joked. She felt energized for the first time in weeks. “Grab your penises and let’s go drink.”

“Why Joanie, you scoundrel!” George winked.

Miraculously, the next day Joan awoke without a hang over. Bloody Mary had been kind to her and only left a peppery aftertaste in her mouth. The sun poured through the window and cast golden beams on the paint-spattered floor. As she watched dust particles floating and glimmering in the shafts of light, Joan realized that this was the first time in months that she didn’t feel the need to jump out of bed to do anything or go anywhere. Her mood was as bright as her sun-drenched apartment.

A low growl escaped from deep down under the comforter. Apparently the vitamin-filled tomato concoctions from the night before had not sated her grumbling stomach. Sighing happily, she remembered that a perfectly aged leftover pizza awaited in the fridge.

“Mmm…a hot breakfast. Just what I need.”

She rose slowly, stretching languorously like a cat. Her muscles relaxed and a few bones popped but Joan didn’t feel stiff or tense as she usually did when she awoke. Confidence had a healthy physical effect on her.

The three-cheese pizza had grown a fourth topping on the outside edge of the crust, but with the medical precision of a surgeon Joan removed the offensive growth with a butter knife and popped it into the oven. The heat was quickly restoring the pizza to its former delicious splendor. What remained of the crust was transformed from dull cardboard to a shimmering golden shade of brown. As the cheese bubbled innocently, Joan found herself thinking how alien it appeared. It rippled with the promise of something unseen and unknown below its oily surface. Even though she knew that all that lay below was a layer of tomato paste, she felt a chill run down her spine.

“Except with people it’s not just tomato sauce,” she thought.

One could never really tell what lay beneath.

Suddenly aware that she was in need of some serious mental diversion, Joan remembered the newspaper. Today’s edition now joined yesterday’s on her doormat. She retrieved them both and returned to her kitchenette to eat the pizza. Even before she unbound the Times, the front page story caught her attention.

Fourth Victim Discovered: Police on the Hunt for a Serial Killer

The body of a young man was found early this morning in an apartment in Ashton Village. He appears to be the fourth victim in a recent string of gruesome murders. Identified as Alan Stewart, a 21-year-old waiter and aspiring actor, the victim appears to have been strangled, his naked body smeared with paint and posed like a morbid mannequin in his own living room. The condition of the body so closely resembles that of the victims found at the scene of three recent murders that police now suspect these bizarre and heinous crimes to be the work of a serial killer.

Beside the article, there was a photo of Alan Stewart. He was blond, smiling, and by all appearances, innocuous. He still had baby fat around his face and looked no older than fifteen. George’s words echoed in Joan’s mind. There was definitely some creepy shit afoot.

“Considering the time frame and the striking similarities between the four crime scenes, the department suspects that the same person or persons are responsible for these crimes,” stated lead investigator Detective Arlon Waites during a press conference held earlier today.

The killings began four weeks ago with the murder of Jean Geld, a 24-year-old music student. A week later, the body of 80-year-old grandmother and retired teacher Maria Martinez was found in her apartment in the Amesback neighborhood. The following week Martin Elias, a 54-year-old Honduran immigrant and bus driver from Hill Park was found in his residence. In each case, the cause of death was apparently strangulation. A source close to the case confirms that all four victims were found smeared with paint and deliberately positioned. Apart from the way their bodies were found, there do not appear to be any other commonalities. The victims are men and women of various ages and backgrounds.

When asked about any possible links between the victims, Detective Waites declined to comment. The department urges the public to call if they have any information that could lead to the arrest of the perpertrator(s) of these heinous crimes.

“The department is confident that the person or persons responsible for these monstrous acts will be caught. In the meantime, please exercise a normal amount of caution while carrying out your daily activities. There is no cause for fear or panic, however,” said Waites.

On page four, a row of snapshots showed the faces of the three other victims. Like Alan Stewart, Maria Martinez seemed perfectly harmless. Her face was wizened and worn, but she looked like she had once been a good teacher with a kind eyes and a patient face. By the way she looked past the camera, Joan could almost imagine that someone that Maria had cared deeply about had taken the picture. She looked so happy in that moment.

In contrast, Martin Elias had a cold, hard, black stare. His thin-lipped mouth looked incapable of smiling and his skin was beginning to sag with premature age. That scowl could have been caused by terrible hardship or loss, but it was so deeply carved into his face that Joan suspected that he had been born with it. From what she saw in that picture, Martin Elias appeared to be a man incapable of feeling joy or happiness. That mouth had never laughed.

Jean Geld didn’t seem to smile much more than the bus driver. Youth’s magical spell had worn off early and the girl looked years older than her age. Although her face was gaunt and her expression solemn, she possessed her own kind of forlorn beauty. Her eyes were like deep pools, tranquil and unfathomable.

Although Joan did not recognize any of the victims, the longer she stared at the photos, the more she felt as though she knew them somehow. The graduate school was adjacent to the music academy where Jean Geld had played the cello. Maria Martinez had lived in the same neighborhood as George. Young Alan Stewart could have starred in one of those low budget productions that George always dragged her to see. And Joan could have seen the unsmiling lips of Martin Elias any one of the millions of times that she rode the bus around the city.

Although she was a firm believer in the theory that there are only six degrees of separation between all people, she knew she was probably just imagining the connection. Everyone saw something of themselves in the victims of the front page news. There were those few people who could read the daily news about the terrible things that had befallen other people with cold detachment and indifference, as though some people deserved their fate while others were completely immune to it. Joan was not one of them. Having experienced such a variance of depths and highs in her life, Joan found it hard not to empathize. Anything could happen to anyone in this strange world.

The phone interrupted her thoughts. The cold feeling remained as she picked up but when she heard the voice on the other end, she began to thaw.

“Hello, Miss Payne? This is John Dutton calling from the exhibition evaluation committee. How are you this morning?” His voice was even and calm, as always.

“Fine, thanks.” Joan tried not to read anything into his apparent lack of excitement. “The committee has evaluated your work.”

The bastard couldn’t resist the urge to pause for added drama. Joan could feel a primal scream slowly rising in her throat. Her palms were beginning to sweat.

“I’m sure this won’t come as a surprise to you, but we have unanimously agreed that your work possesses a certain quality that we have never seen before; a uniqueness that definitely deserves a showcase in the graduate exhibition. Congratulations.”

Gone was the primal scream. Gone was the chill. In its place she felt a pervasive warmth well up within, from the center of her body outwards down to her toes and up to her cheeks. She wouldn’t be able to tell for sure until she put the feeling down on canvas, but she was quite sure the sensation was pure joy.

“Oh thank you, Mr. Dutton,” she said quickly. “Thank you so much.”

“No need to thank me. We will make all the necessary arrangements. Just be there at the opening. Oh, and Miss Payne?”

“Yes, Mr. Dutton?”

“Be prepared to answer a lot of questions. Your work will not fail to be noticed.”

Mr. Dutton’s voice had a portentous tone. He almost seemed to be warning her.

“I’m just paranoid,” Joan convinced herself. Realizing that she still held the receiver in her hand, Joan pressed the reset button and quickly dialed George’s number to share the good news. On the night of the exhibition, George appeared on her doorstep on time and dressed to kill. His spiky do was replaced with a slick coiffure and instead of shredded jeans and Doc Martens, he wore a thin pinstripe suit and polished shoes. She herself had spent a few dimes on a new outfit for the event and wore a simple but elegant black dress with a glossy red satin sash around her small waist. The plunging neckline accentuated her delicate form. When they arrived at the exhibition, her confidence was at an all time high after all the admiring stares she had received on the subway ride over.

The gallery was an immense rectangular hardwood space with matte white walls, a vaulted ceiling, and innumerable skylights. The main central space was reserved for large sculptures and three-dimensional art. Angular white benches dotted the space allowing for awestruck art appreciators to rest their legs and discuss their favorite pieces. Nine smaller rooms housing thematically grouped paintings and silk screens lined the central gallery; eight small galleries, four on each side, and one slightly larger exhibition space at the very end. This was the Dark Room.

While most of the gallery was bathed in stark white light, the Dark Room enveloped in darkness. A thick charcoal velvet curtain separated it from the central space, preventing both light and noise from the central gallery from penetrating it. Inside, the walls and floor were black, creating the impression that one was entering a void. This space was generally reserved for erotic or otherwise controversial artwork. Last year it had been host to a photography collection called “Puppettes” that had garnered such publicity that the young photographer became a household name. He had been both vilified as a twisted pervert and revered for his cutting-edge sense of the artistic. Whether you loved or hated his work, you certainly knew who he was. George was irrationally jealous that he had not thought of it first. Suspending a beautiful woman from the ceiling with rope in provocative and mind-bending positions and pouring colorful hot wax on her shaved head was pure genius; bondage as art. George was the first to admit that the Tree of Life had originally been intended for the Dark Room but papier-maché was too tame for that space.

Although she could appreciate erotic and controversial art, Joan was generally more attracted by color and shapes. She decided to go in search of her paintings before venturing into the Dark Room. George chose to circulate through the main space, armed with a glass of champagne and his sharp wit.

Standing at the gallery’s entrance, Joan felt swept away as though she stood on the threshold of a fairy tale ball. The immense space was swarming with a colorful crowd. Art students, buyers, appreciators, and critics were all hungrily exploring the galleries, whispering excitedly to each other, scribbling notes, and in some instance taking photographs. The disparate conversations reverberated off the white walls creating a constant excited buzz. The energy in the space was almost tangible to Joan.

This year, the committee had been very astute in their choice of students. As Joan caught bits and pieces of the conversations around her, she could tell that most of the reviews in tomorrow’s paper would be favorable. Drifting from room to room in search of her familiar canvases, Joan took the time to appreciate her colleagues’ work. She was admiring a pair of silk screens when the first negative comment of the evening took her by surprise. A studious looking gentleman in thick spectacles and a tweed jacket sat on a nearby bench. As he sat busily scribbling in a notebook, a young woman approached. She was wiping the lens of a large camera that hung around her neck.

“Don’t disappear like that, Nigel. I wasn’t done shooting yet.”

Go to Portrait, part 2

Secret Invasion: US Troops Steal into Paraguay

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 04:59:00 +0000

12-29-05, 12:00 pm

The Bush administration has sent troops into Paraguay. They are there ostensibly for humanitarian and counterterrorism purposes. The action coincides with growing left unity in South America, military buildup in the region and burgeoning independent trade relationships.

In a speech on July 26 in Havana, Fidel Castro took note of the incursion and called upon North American activists to oppose it. In that vein, an inquiry is in order as to why the US government has inserted Paraguay into its strategic plan for South America. In addition, we should look at factors that favor Bush administration schemes for the region and others that work against US plans.

In December 2004, the Bush administration canceled $330 million in economic and military aid to 10 South American countries. They were being penalized for turning down a US request for granting its soldiers immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit within the countries’ borders.

On May 5, however, the government of Paraguay took the bait. It signed an agreement authorizing an 18-month stay, automatically extended, for US soldiers and civilian employees. The previous limit had been set at six months. On May 26, in a secret session, Paraguay’s Congress passed legislation protecting US soldiers from prosecution for criminal activity, both within Paraguay and by the International Criminal Court.

Reportedly, 400 or 500 US troops – estimates vary – arrived in Paraguay on July 1, with planes, weapons, equipment and ammunition. They are billeted at a base near Mariscal Estigarribia, a small city located 200 kilometers from the Bolivian border in the arid, sparsely populated Chaco area of Paraguay. That facility, built by US contractors in the waning years of the Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989), offers a runway long enough to accommodate large military transport planes and bombers. It provides barrack space for 16,000 troops.

Journalist and human rights activist Alfredo Boccia Paz, stated in Asuncion that immunity from prosecution for US soldiers, extension of their stay, and joint military exercises all provide the groundwork for the eventual installation of a US base in Paraguay. He quoted Argentine Nobel Peace laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel: “Once the United States arrives, it takes it a long time to leave. And that really frightens me.”

The US embassy in Paraguay declared that the United States has “absolutely no intention of establishing a military base anywhere in Paraguay” and “has no intention to station soldiers for a lengthy period in Paraguay.” The government of Paraguay seconded that notion. Brazil, however, responded. In late July, its army undertook military maneuvers along that country’s border with Paraguay. Paratroopers staged a mock occupation of the Furnas electrical substation, located on the Brazilian border with Paraguay.

Paraguay’s vice president, Luis Castiglioni, met with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and former Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs Roger Noriega last July in Washington. Observers suggested that this welcoming committee was unusually high-powered for a visiting vice president of a small South American nation. According to Rumsfeld, experts would soon be going to Paraguay to develop a “planning seminar on systems for national security.” The secretary visited Paraguay in August. The FBI announced that it would be opening an office in Paraguay in 2006.

The official US version of the Paraguay initiative is that for the next 18 months, in addition to joint military exercises, 13 US military teams would be working on humanitarian aide projects, provide counterterrorism and police training and ameliorate the effects of poverty. It turns out that US military personnel have been providing medical care for poor peasants in a northern province since 2002. Boccia Paz commented: “These missions are always disguised as humanitarian aid.… What Paraguay does not and cannot control is the total number of agents that enter the country.”

There is of course no shortage of US bases in Latin America. They are located in Guantánamo, Cuba; Fort Buchanan and Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico; Soto Cano, Honduras; and Comalapa, El Salvador. New US air bases are situated in Reina Beatriz, Aruba; Hato Rey, Curacao; and Manta in Ecuador. The latter was officially described as a weather station on a dusty road, until it came out that a full-fledged air base had materialized on the site at a cost of $80 million. Washington also operates a network of 17 land-based radar stations (three in Peru, four in Colombia, plus 10 mobile radar stations in secret locations.) All of these installations come are under the control of the US Southern Command, based in Miami.

The US rationale for converting Paraguay into a military satellite is worth exploring. For one thing, Washington is responding in catch-up fashion to mounting popular resistance in the region to US bullying. In neighboring Bolivia, for example, two US-friendly presidents have been chased from office in the past two years. And mass opposition to the US-backed candidate in last December’s national election was no exception to the trend.

There’s more. Paraguay’s neighbor, Uruguay, put a social democrat into the presidency in 2004, and last February President Kirchner of Argentina violated world financial orthodoxy when his government negotiated a 60 percent cut in Argentina’s $82 billion debt obligations. Both Argentina and Brazil have quietly rejected the FTAA. Paraguay has joined them in the South American Common Market (Mercosur), which shelters its members from US and International Monetary Fund dictates. For Paraguay to defect would serve US ends.

Washington took major exception to declarations emanating from a gathering March 29, 2005 of Brazilian, Colombian, Venezuelan and Spanish heads of state at Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela. They had discussed the use of raw materials and regional trade patterns to combat poverty and secure peace in South America. A few weeks later Washington was miffed when its candidate for the secretary generalship of the Organization of American States was rejected. And right under the US nose, Latin American nations are coming together to form Telesur and Petrosur, continent-wide television and energy corporations, and developing banking services that serve people’s needs.

Natural resources may also figure into the US motivations for expanding its military presence in South America. One branch of the main opening for a huge Bolivian natural gas field apparently crosses the international border and is accessible in Paraguay at the Independencia I site, not far from Mariscal Estigarribia. If US troops occupied the base there, they would be in striking distance of the Bolivian provinces of Santa Cruz and Tarija, where US natural gas corporations are active. Bolivia will soon be voting on autonomy for the provinces. A “yes” vote is expected to result in privatization. In the event of civil unrest following that outcome, the corporations could call for military protection.

The military base overlies the Guarani aquifer, one of the world’s largest underground fresh water reserves. Already water wars have riled Bolivian politics. Oligarchic interests in both the United States and South America have great longings to advance the process of turning water into a commodity.

The Bush administration has an additional interest in Paraguay through its war on terrorism. The so-called triple border, where Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay meet along both sides of the Parana River, is the storied locus for smuggling, money laundering, commerce in child prostitutes, counterfeit operations, and fixing of illegal border crossings. Some 20,000 Middle Eastern, Muslim expatriates, most of them Lebanese in origin, live in Ciudad del Este on the Paraguayan side of the river and Foz do Iguacu in Brazil. The cities supposedly are centers for Islamic extremism and sources of funding for terrorist groups. Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah operatives reportedly have passed through the area, and training camps, sleeper cells, and passport factories are said to be located there. After September 11, 40 FBI agents joined Paraguayan colleagues to investigate some of these networks. Dozens of suspects were arrested. US military authorities advertise their operatives moving into Paraguay as experts in counterterrorism.

US meddling in South America has great potential to add to existing tensions in the region as it adds its might to ongoing South American military expansion. According to Uruguayan Raúl Zibechi, an expert on the continent’s military landscape, South America is experiencing unprecedented military growth. Nations there have reacted to the excesses of US Plan Colombia and to new military modalities, particularly the privatization of military forces on display in Columbia. They are also attempting to emulate Brazil’s new posture of strategic military autonomy. And, as is their habit, ruling circles in many countries, following Washington’s lead, respond to social unrest through military expansion.

In December 2004, Venezuela agreed to buy 110,000 Kalashnikov rifles, 33 helicopters and 50 fighter-bombers from Russia. Spain supplied Venezuela with naval aeronautical material, 10 transport planes, and four coast-guard cutters. Venezuela will be buying 50 training and combat jets from Brazil. Venezuela earlier this year activated a two million-member reserve component of its national military force.

Yet according to the journal Military Power Review Venezuela comes in at sixth place among South American nations in terms of military strength. Brazil is far in the lead; Peru places second; Argentina, third; followed by Chile and Colombia.

Increased military power, operating in tandem with nationalist stirrings, may inhibit US military meddling. Brazil, for example, with its own strategic defense plan and brisk economic growth, is an unlikely US acolyte. The nation is the 10th largest industrial power in the world and has become the world’s fifth largest arms exporter. Brazilian industry builds warships, several types of fighter jets, and is constructing a nuclear submarine. And to facilitate its expanded trade with China, Brazil is paying 70 percent of the $1 billion cost of a 1,500 mile long highway that extends from Peruvian ports to Santos on Brazil’s Atlantic coast.

Brazil recently sent military planners to Vietnam to learn about guerrilla war. The head of Brazil’s Amazon military command, General Claudio Barbosa, has predicted that Brazil may in the future face wars similar to the war that convulsed Vietnam and the one transpiring in Iraq now. The priority would be guerrilla warfare, “an option the army will not hesitate to adopt facing a confrontation with another country or group of countries with greater economic and military power.” What nation could the general be thinking of?

Brazil opposes Plan Colombia. The nationalist orientation of its industrial leaders persuaded them to put off joining FTAA. Brazil has no US bases on its soil, nor does Brazil engage in joint military exercises with the United States. Military cooperation between Brazil and Argentina apparently is flourishing, and in February, Brazil signed strategic accords with Venezuela. The Brazilian example of independent pursuit of national interests has emboldened other South American nations.

The single-minded pursuit of national interests, however, may work against popular struggle and Latin American unity. Analysts agree that Brazil and Argentina’s preoccupation with internal interests has created a power vacuum that encouraged Washington to court Paraguay successfully. Relations between the two nations have long been plagued by trade clashes.

Ideally, Brazil might have utilized its economic power to further Latin American unity and ward off predatory US behavior. Instead it operates according to free market rules and, unlike Venezuela, looks for salvation through from the US-led world market economy, distancing itself from Latin America’s agenda. Worse, jostling for market advantage creates divisions that lay the region open to tactics of divide and rule.

The Herculean labors of unified democratic struggle elsewhere in Latin America point to strategies through which Bush scheming and US military probing in the region might be resisted. The example of the FARC-EP, in its survival and apparent growth, has meaning for revolutionaries far beyond Colombia’s borders. The organization now maintains a presence in nearly 100 percent of the municipalities in Colombia, and, according to Monthly Review, “with the exception of Cuba, [the FARC-EP] has become the largest and most powerful revolutionary force – politically and militarily – within the Western Hemisphere.”

Chávez forces in Venezuela, under the aegis of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), have fused the twin causes of Latin American unity and social justice. Mass protests in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, even Chile keep empire minders in Washington on edge. The point here is that growing solidarity on the part of US activists with struggles throughout Latin America may act as a brake on US meddling in Paraguay.

Opposition likely will materialize within Paraguay itself. In recent years peasants there have mounted protests against privatization, economic restrictions imposed by the International Monetary Fund, unfair land holding patterns, and antiterrorism legislation.

There is no lack of awareness. Orlando Castillo of the human rights group Servicio Páz y Justicia recalls that, “US soldiers taught torture and other forms of human rights violations in courses at the School of the Americas.” He warns that “the United States has strong aspirations to convert Paraguay into a second Panama for its troops and is not far removed from reaching its objective of controlling the Southern Cone.”

While attending the 2nd Jubilee South World Assembly in Havana, Sixto Pereira of the Paraguayan Initiative for People’s Integration told Cuban-based Prensa Latina: We demand the abolition of regulations that harbor and give impunity to Pentagon troops. It is a demand in favor of Paraguay and Latin American integration.

Pereira indicated that mobilization against the presence of US troops is gaining momentum in Paraguay.

Terminating Arnold: A Cat’s Eye View of California Politics

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 04:57:00 +0000

12-29-05, 12:00 pm

I channel my cats. I really do. I know what they’re thinking and I simply translate these impressions into humanese. My three-year-old tabby, Atticus Bach, likes to watch television with me, suffers through my morbid CNN addiction, and forms his own opinions. Does he get his cues from me? Well, maybe. When Bush appears on screen, he “exclaims,” “That’s a chimpanzee!” Cheney? “That’s Satan!” I praise and reward him. As a former college professor, I know that the notion of left-wing indoctrination is a myth, despite what right-wing handwringers would have us believe. Hence I regard Atticus Bach as quite astute in his own right. Karl Rove is “Rumpelstiltskin,” Condi, the “Wicked Witch,” and Tom DeLay, “Porky Pig.” Good kitty! Smart kitty.

And then there’s Schwarzenegger.

I was so disheartened that this serial sexual batterer, this creatine-addled cretin, was elected governor of my home state that power failed my high fantasy – I mean, Atticus Bach’s – and I dubbed him simply, “Excrement.” It’s a rather too sophisticated epithet for the cat, so he calls him “Poo.” All “public scatology” (to use Bush’s inexplicable phrase in his correspondence with Harriet Miers) aside, I remain baffled by blue-state California’s initial embrace of Schwarzenegger, even now, when his approval ratings are even lower than those of the chimp-in-chief. What were my fellow Californians thinking? As a feminist and a pessimist, I suppose I am not surprised that the Los Angeles Times’ revelations of repeated sexual harassment and aggression did not strike the electorate at large as sufficiently damning. Boys will be boys, and ours is an era of retro “desperate housewives” where working women pine to be stay-at-home moms and abortion is a non-option for even reluctant mothers; where human Barbie dolls named Jessica and Paris and Britney move gazillions of tabloids; where bachelors and bachelorettes giddily vie for the holy grail of marriage on network TV. What’s a little sexual harassment or unwanted groping among friends? I was far more alarmed when such an august leftist as Tom Hayden suggested in The Nation that Schwarzenegger’s election had progressive potential given his Kennedy ties and supposed social liberalism.

“That’s Poo!” Atticus Bach opines, and I echo, “No shit.” Despite the hilarious if underreported pre-election gaffe of declaring that “gay marriage should be between a man and a woman,” Schwarzenegger represented himself as willing to let the political culture decide that particular issue. Some progressive friends of mine actually believed him. Similarly, his Kennedy ties convinced some on the left that he would be kind to the environment. And, of course, he was pro-choice, wasn’t he?

The rejoinder, as obvious then as now, is, why would anyone with even marginally progressive views be a Republican? Didn’t the idea of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism die with Nelson Rockefeller? The substantiated – and never refuted – charges of sexual harassment and battery (a term I prefer to the milder “groping”) should have revealed to the California electorate the bullying arrogance and indifference to fundamental social equity that have marked Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial as well as personal style.

Therefore it is no shock that the campaign gestures toward populism and social moderation have proven as fictitious as a Terminator script. Schwarzenegger’s hapless predecessor, Gray Davis, was recalled largely due to a combination of ineffectuality and widely perceived coziness with corporate donors, but in these regards, the current governor has far surpassed him. Unsurprising, too, the revelation of Schwarzenegger’s business relationship with a fitness magazine put out by American Media, publisher of the National Enquirer and other tabloids, an arrangement predicated on the purchased silence of women peddling accounts of gross sexual encounters with Arnie. Then there’s the matter of Schwarzenegger’s figurative bedfellowship with an industry that promotes the performance-enhancing supplements for which some state legislators are seeking government regulation. Political pressure and abysmal ratings may have forced the governor to weasel his way out of his financial interest in these matters, but the last feeble vestige of his ostensible “social liberalism” fell away when Schwarzenegger vetoed California’s gay marriage bill. That a few liberal friends of mine were even surprised surprises me. Aside from the school-bullyish, homophobic digs at “girlie men,” Arnold Schwarzenegger, public servant, has consistently aped the dishonest “compassionate conservative” persona devised by Karl Rove – er, Rumplestiltskin – in 2000 for the empty-suit candidate George W. Bush. As for reproductive rights, the “pro-choice” Schwarzenegger brought in a Bush strategist to help secure a place on the November special election ballot for a proposition calling for parental notification in cases of minors seeking abortions. Like the antigay rights measures on state ballots in 2004, this explicitly Rovean strategy was designed to lure evangelicals to the voting booths, where they would presumably punch cards or Diebold machines in favor of Schwarzenegger’s union-busting and gerrymandering propositions. (As of this writing, the law of unintended consequences seems to be in play: the parental notification measure leads in polls although each of the governor’s propositions trails.)

So much for the “pro-choice Republican,” the social liberal. Those of us on the hard left know that no such paradoxical creature can survive in this millennium, can withstand the righteous protests of the Jesus bloc. It’s the same reason why Desperate Housewife Gaby does not so much as ponder abortion after her duplicitous husband tampers with her birth control pills in order to impregnate her. In Jesusland, abortion does not exist, not because network executives or dissembling right-wing politicians are really convinced that pregnancy termination – pardon the pun – is tantamount to murder, but because they dare not risk the righteous wrath of the tireless worker bees and boycott leaders on the religious right. Schwarzenegger and his advisors simply know on which side their bread is buttered. Given his dismal approval ratings, the Republican base is pretty much all that remains of the governor’s support and they must be pandered to at all costs. Mr. Hayden, I told you so.

But this is California, and I suppose hope springs eternal. Every so often, between our Nixons and Reagans and Pete Wilsons, we manage to elect a Jerry Brown. I wish Brown would run for governor next year instead of for attorney general; better still, I wish Ron Dellums would seek the state House instead of the mayorship of Oakland. Conventional wisdom seems to hold that Schwarzenegger will be a one-term governor, a failed experiment in novelty politics a la Jesse Ventura, although at least Jesse was maverick enough to have called religion a crutch and to have appeared as a man in black on The X-Files, a show I increasingly regard as less sci-fi than cinéma vérité.

I look at Atticus Bach and ask him, “What next?” Another stealth right-winger, milquetoast Democrat? What about a real grassroots progressive, a Peter Camejo or Donna Frye? No, check that. Our political system is so corrupted by big money that a grassroots candidate stands a chance only if citizens volunteer to forego television for the duration of the campaign season. Maybe the best we can hope for is a Gavin Newsom, the current mayor of San Francisco, who will at least sign legislation allowing gay women and men the same civil rights as straight people, and who certainly won’t push for laws restricting abortions. Yet, alas, didn’t some moderates use the same justifications in 2003 for voting for Schwarzenegger?

And so once again it is the politics of “at least,” and that leads back to a central conundrum for those of us on the radical left. Do we opt out of voting until it’s truly democratic and representative, or resign ourselves to the lesser evil, the evil that will not demand or instigate structural change but that will – we hope – protect abortion and gay/lesbian civil rights? The appeal – and danger – of liberalism is not just its pragmatic emphasis on incremental change but its amenability to cooptation by the machinery of the right, its easy transformation into window dressing for supposed nonideologues such as Schwarzenegger and, once upon a time, George W. Bush. Perhaps for now, my best option is to join Atticus Bach in viewing American political culture as a species of Grimm’s fairy tale peopled by witches and ogres and malevolent chimpanzees, and await a time when the electorate at last decides it has outgrown fairy tales and embraces the high realism of authentic social democracy.

Terrorism: Who Benefits and Why

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 04:53:00 +0000

12-29-05, 12:00 pm

(Preliminary note: I wrote much of this in reaction to the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. Finding myself in the middle of Hyde Park, London, on July 7, 2005, with sirens all around and the city in which I live under attack, it has a new and obviously rather more personal relevance for me.)

Before the events of Genoa, because of the fall of the Soviet Union, many of the peoples of the Western world had been led to believe the possibility of a global capitalism free from any hampering opposition. Yet, obviously, for those represented by the demonstrations at Genoa this was just a Hobson’s choice between exploitation either by one giant global capitalist corporation or another. This was underlined by the fact that recent democratic elections in much of the West seemed increasingly to be irrelevant, little more than a sport, and a pretty dull one at that.

Fewer and fewer people in the “advanced democracies” engaged in the process of voting, voter turnout in the general election in Britain had been, according to the BBC, the lowest for 80 years. This so worried politicians that they quickly began considering schemes that would allow for greater postal and Internet voting, newly unconcerned about the increased possibilities of electoral fraud; and of course there was the Bush election fiasco.

During this peculiar hiatus, no more could the Western powers use the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union to blame for its own failings, as the excuse for authoritarian measures, or to justify the still massive expenditure on arms and security, and there was now little reason for people not to look forward to what capitalism had always promised in its peacetime: a world of freedom from poverty and need, of cultural enjoyment and benign competition that (apparently) acted, in the end, for the good of all; a truly “postmodern world” in which grand designs had come to an end and we could relax in mutually respected “difference and diversity.”

But the large protests of Genoa sat strangely with this image; here was a massive demonstration against the world (G7) trade negotiations, up against high-tech portable military walls that seemed peculiarly to resemble the only recently departed Berlin wall, but in a postmodern version perhaps. Already in this period there were new concerns being raised by the media to take the place of the vacancy left by the old cold war and atomic bomb threats: the possibility of asteroid impact, global warming, HIV/Aids, genetic meddling, the upsetting of biological diversity, pollution, anything, in fact, that could draw the attention away from the usual economic crises. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the vacuum of a transparent peace seemed to be psychologically and affectively intolerable to the media.

Nevertheless, these threats were not in themselves enough to quell a certain kind of euphoria in the people, many of whom now simply desired, and could see no major obstacles to, the better future that had always been promised them. Genoa, however, was a good number of Western people showing their concern with the economics of capitalism, no matter how hard was the attempt by much of the media to paint them all in terms of the minority of crazed anarchists (the “black bloc” some witnesses saw coming from police vans). They could not easily be painted as “the enemy.”

Whoever meticulously and callously planned the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, not long after Genoa, would clearly have known what the likely consequences of their actions would be, set against this political backdrop. The same is now true of the July 7, 2005 bombings in London. It was clear from the outset that, by “terrorists,” we were not talking about the poor and ordinary people of the world, such as the destitute Afghan and Iraqi civilians who were going to pay with their blood for 9/11, but about affluent and well-connected people. We were talking about a sophisticated, well-financed, cosmopolitan global “sect,” one that dealt in stocks and shares, and espionage, and who had access to the expertise capable of financing and directing a global terrorist network (no matter how loose or disorganized).

However, whilst it would be relatively easy to recount here all the economic reasons for the recent wars: economic competition and crisis, oil, drugs, arms, security and the struggle for new markets, along with the history of members of the US administration’s involvement in prior conflicts, of BCCI, of money laundering, of insider dealing and pilfering people’s pension funds, of family and political links to Saudi dictators and the terrorists held responsible for 9/11, and of competition between different secret agencies. Whilst this information is available and can be gathered together to make a resounding indictment, it all inevitably begins to sound, when doing so, like a grand conspiracy, and can be too readily dismissed as cranky.

But indeed, there are conspiracies here. It is well known that today’s powerful worldwide interests do not operate without their clandestine sides, governmental and corporate, and these two factions blend at their perimeters in a murky, unregulated gray area that overlaps with outright organized crime, drug warlords in Afghanistan being only the most obvious example. And what government does not conspire to achieve its aims? What capitalist does not conspire to gain more profits? Nevertheless, such a conspiracy, that would see such terrorism as 9/11 and 7/7 to be the result of a Western plot to generate a never-ending state of war to replace the cold war, would seem extreme and bizarre. Is it likely that the Western ruling class, or a strong faction of it, could allow, support, even cause, terrorist acts in order to conjure up a new state of war, a never-ending flexible (and thus very convenient) war that could justify state authoritarianism and interventions anywhere, in order to deaden the global class struggle? Surely not?!

It is possible, but we don’t have to suppose a grand conspirator, arch evil forces (Bush in his secret bunker, Bin Laden in his secret cave), above all the little conspiracies that happen day to day. All we need to understand is some commonly held feelings that are at work amongst the people that occupy the most crucial positions of power. Feelings that give to each connected, unconnected, and seemingly trivial event enacted by each human subject in the course of this history an unconscious, subliminal, group inflected motivation that adds to the whole underlying economic movement, and the rationalized interests which knowingly and unknowingly follow this. Consider this: much has already been said about “blowback”: the fact that the terrorists held responsible were once financed by the US secret services and that this has now returned to haunt “us” (rebounded) after they have served their purpose against the Soviet Union. We must remember, however, that blowback is not an unquantifiable mystical phenomenon over which there is no control, like a force of nature. It is a consequence of direct human political intervention. Indeed, it is because of the constant evasion (a sign of repression) of the question of culpability for blowback evinced by the authorities involved that we are led to assume a link between the interventions and the class feelings that semiconsciously desire just such blowback. As we see, the result of the recent interventions is that we find ourselves in wars when the majority of people in the developed democracies, the countries of the main perpetrators of these wars, have no wish to be, and we find that almost anything is used to justify these wars in the aftermath, indeed, the justifications change from one day to the next. Why? Because it is difficult for the ruling classes of the various nations involved to validate them precisely since they acted on their feelings for class survival, and to begin to rationalize such feelings would be to encounter the “unthinkable.” The latter is one of the fond expressions of apoplectic politicians when faced with something uncomfortable, an expression, which in this case is apt, because of the repression that must function to quell the horror of the realization of exactly their own class desires. For example, this is why, in April 2003, Donald Rumsfeld of the US administration, in the long aftermath of the prematurely “ended” war between coalition forces and “something or someone in Iraq,” in which the US’s chief weapon was the terror of aerial bombardment, included Lenin in a list of evil dictators who inflicted terror on populations. Notably, he omitted Hitler and Mussolini from this list. This was not simply a form of senile forgetfulness, or a deliberately staged historical falsification, although of course it was deliberately staged. It was a statement made by an individual embedded in his assignment, in its history, impelling him to do and say what was necessary for his personal allegiance to the shamefaced desires of the class he represented. And, peculiarly, in doing this, as if by cataleptic reflex action he refers to his most dangerous opponent, the one who could reveal the untruth of what he says, acknowledging that they (his class) were still arguing with him, Lenin, and that this was what it was really all about. It shows a certain obsession with Lenin, who, after all, has been dead some time now.

So what would Lenin say about our current world of terror? Lenin wrote against terrorism in the context of his argument with the politics of “economism,” a tendency in the Russian Social Democratic movement during the 1890’s. What he says here is still relevant. His thesis against the economists was that they defended the lagging of the conscious leaders behind the spontaneous awakening of the masses. In the economist’s eyes, the masses reacted only in relation to the economy, and so they must follow the masses only when the economic conditions entailed a working-class revolt. They therefore defended the lack of theory and opposed the necessity for a revolutionary vanguard, such as the leadership of Lenin and the party. According to Lenin they vulgarized Marxism and strove to restrict political agitation and struggle to petty activities, while failing to convincingly express themselves against terror when it was necessary to do so. In Lenin’s text “What is there in Common between Economism and Terrorism” he does what the title says, he informs us of the commonality between these positions. So, for Lenin, there was a necessary and inherent connection between economism and terrorism, even though at first sight it may appear paradoxical, so great being the difference between those that stress “drab everyday struggle” and those who call for the most self-sacrificing struggle of individuals (such as suicide attacks). According to Lenin, both camps bowed to the different poles of spontaneity. The economists bowed to the spontaneity of the “pure” working-class movement, while the terrorists bowed to the spontaneity of the passionate indignation of the intellectuals, who lacked the ability to link with the revolutionary struggle of the working-class movement to form an integral whole. Both camps, as he said, worshiped spontaneity. Here, “bowing” and “worship” are key phrases: Lenin was clearly referring to the theological aspect of these tendencies. What we find here is the operation of an essentially neurotic theology, a false dialectic of dejection versus euphoria, the sadness of a lack (of progress) and the rage (terror) against that same sadness. What this psychology sought (and still seeks) at its head was the shaman, the transcendent leader who would be able to reflect back to his subjects all their desires in a purified form, and who shores-up all their weaknesses and seemingly turns them into heroic traits. Ironically and tragically, even Lenin was subjected to this essentially humanist theology after his death, and made into a cult figure.

Those who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks and the recent bombings in London, fall into Lenin’s category of economist-terrorists, but on today’s technologically advanced, global scale. Theology, whether in the guise of Islam or in the name of Western liberalism or Christian or Zionist fundamentalism, is linked to such goals and divorced from the struggles of the people, even while these each rely upon an image of themselves as representing the “true interests” of the people and willfully act “in their name,” or for their “essence.” The use of terror in this context is expected to excite people (in this case Middle Eastern Muslims and Western liberal and Christian citizens) into the psychological state of war. They are expected to succumb to an indignant craving for revenge, to blame the global crisis on an abstract “evil,” and to a disposition where the further loss of civil liberties is taken for granted and even welcomed. Lenin’s thesis, however, allows us to see something that was previously shrouded by this psychology and its attendant media hype: the role of the class struggle and of contradiction in the economic and political policies of both the Western and Middle Eastern ruling classes. There is the primary and fundamental contradiction (which is repeated in a similar form throughout the world) between, to give only one example, the dictatorship of the Saudi capitalist state for instance, and the WTO (IMF, World Bank, etc.) and the process of globalization; in other words, the expansion of secular Western economic imperialism. The development of the latter’s laws governing trade, the attempted opening up of all markets to competition from giant, most often US, corporations such as Unocal and Enron, automatically carries with it a liberal Westernizing cultural ethos that goes against the almost feudal, theological power of, for example, the House of Saud. While this power is on one level buttressed by US political interests, on another level its own favored laws of trade and deregulation work to undermine this very position. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are on this account the concrete manifestation of this contradiction between two basic political processes. Firstly, the Western political attempt to maintain dictatorial regimes in the Middle East to protect oil and drug pipelines from falling into the hands of the working-class, left-secular people of the region. The peculiar result of Saddam Hussein being allowed to remain in power, even after committing war crime atrocities, while the Iraqi people suffer the consequences of Western sanctions, reveals this policy at work. Secondly, the worldwide economic process that destabilizes this very situation through the enforcement of deregulation and the opening up of all markets in pursuit of profits.

The apparent catalyst for the recent wars was, of course, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center: a terrorist crime that was interpreted as an act of war. If, indeed, it had been taken as a crime, one of those famous New York detectives might simply have been allowed to say: “Follow the money” (the earlier bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed seven people, was treated as a crime). We would have been, therefore, on a different path, one that would probably have been stealthier and thus more productive in the fight against terrorism. But instead we are transported to the realms of the spiritual, and a battle between the forces of “good and evil,” and to a never-ending, will-o-the-wisp war, which the perpetrators themselves are not very interested in pursuing above its peripheral but profitable side effects (security, oil, drugs, etc.).

The US World Trade Center stood as a symbol of the policies and principles of Western globalization. The Western ruling classes may now be depicted as trying to protect these principles from evil, rather than imposing them. The attack on the twin towers, on the face of it, was the ideal media cataclysm to work as the justification for a general state of terror: a visible sign, a piece of destruction that appeared greater in importance than the Rwanda genocide, for example (in which about 800,000 died) or some of the recent awful natural disasters, because it was spectacular and happened in such a “civilized” context and against the world’s most powerful nation. It was gruesomely right for the job it had to do, and the job it had to do it did. It was an atrocity, a despicable act, impossible to understand from within the mainstream ideology.

But it is apparent that a significantly powerful faction of those involved in the vicious competition for global markets at this time (from around 9/11 to now) needed and sought a war. What makes this evident is the fact that while 15 of the suicide attackers of September 11 were Saudi citizens, and ostensibly the war was between Saudi and other local factions, such as in Pakistan, and US interests, it was nevertheless to be played-out inside Afghanistan (drugs and oil), and later in Iraq (oil). Afghanistan and Iraq became the battleground because these were the most convenient and lucrative places, economically, geographically, politically and strategically, for the ruling classes both Western and Eastern. This was the case both before, and after, the 9/11 attacks, but the attacks enabled and helped legitimate the wars. As global multinational corporations expand their markets and prepare the ground for further terrorism in exactly this way, the energy, arms, drugs, and security industries are those that increase their profits, we only have to note that Afghanistan is increasing its export of drugs to the West to record levels after its “liberation.” Of course we must not forget that it is also in this way that on a personal level President George W. Bush seeks to live up to the war fame of his father, and many in the current US administration can achieve personal ambitions. Petty, short-term aims and small-mindedness can have quite drastic consequences when these traits are carried by those with considerable power, but these people also inherit their conditions of existence and do not make them themselves.

If the Iraq war was the so-called unfinished business of the first Gulf War, what Bush and Blair continues is in fact the act of unfinishing the already unfinished business by extending its state of unfinishedness to a higher level, so that, all the contradictions that led to terror remain in place, but now at an increased state of exacerbation, and with a higher degree of tension. A tension that enables the justification for the new state of terror in the West at a time when a globalized ruling class feels the need to increase this terror against the people, because they fear the peace and they fear the class struggle continuing past what has been declared to be its final “end.” To find the secret of the current world tension it is sufficient, therefore, to invert the terms of the repeated maxim: the “war on terror” is in fact the terror imposed on the class war, the “terror on war.”

Whatever the terrorists believed were their aims in perpetrating the acts in New York, Madrid, and London, the material effects of their carnage has been to oppose working-class struggles and to give the G7/G8 leaders reasons to clamp down on civil liberties and evade their responsibilities to the people.

Wal-Mart: Always Low Wages

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 04:47:00 +0000

12-29-05, 12:00 pm

Staying union free is a full-time commitment… no one in management is immune from carrying his or her “own weight” in the union prevention effort. --– Labor Relations and You at the Wal-Mart Distribution Center #6022, prepared by Orson Mason, September 1991

During the five years that she worked at a Wal-Mart store in Pennsylvania, Brenda Houle was a model employee. She consistently received stellar evaluations and won awards for her performance. She even had aspirations of becoming a store manager and sought entry into the assistant manager training program.

Unfortunately this wasn’t enough for the manager of the Hazleton Store, #2255. According to this manager all Houle needed was “willingness.” He was looking for a sexual favor (there had been a history of sexual problems with this manager). Houle wanted to move up in the company based on her experience and merit. When she began working at Wal-Mart she made $5.75 per hour. Five years later, after having worked as a customer service manager, a department manager, and the head of seasonal, she made $8.32. Men, who held the same job as Houle, were paid more although they had less experience.

Unfortunately, Houle’s story is not a unique one amongst employees of Wal-Mart. At a National Worker’s Rights Board hearing at the Jobs with Justice annual meeting in St. Louis, in September 2005, Houle and other former Wal-Mart employees delivered the sad, but true tales of their experiences working for the nation’s number one retailer, Wal-Mart.

Boasting over 1.3 million employees with over 5,000 stores and wholesale clubs across 10 countries Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the US. Despite this success, during its 46-year existence Wal-Mart has been plagued with inherent problems that trouble many Americans. For the last two decades the United Food and Commercial Workers Union has attempted to unionize Wal-Mart employees. The average Wal-Mart associate earns just $9.68 an hour while Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott took home $17.5 million in 2004, which equals $8,434 an hour. In 2000 after 10 butchers at a Wal-Mart store in Jacksonville, Texas successfully voted to unionize, Wal-Mart announced that it would be eliminating butchers at 180 stores in the region and eventually at all Wal-Mart super-centers nationwide. And after a Wal-Mart store in Quebec voted to unionize in 2004, Wal-Mart decided to close the store leaving hundreds of workers unemployed, claiming that the store was unprofitable.

Wal-Mart also has a long record of exploiting workers in sweatshops. In 1992 Dateline broke a story about 11-year-old workers from Bangladesh who were making T-shirts for the company. Also, in 2000, the National Labor Committee reported that workers at a handbag factory in China were forced to work 14-hour shifts, seven days a week for little or no money. Though Wal-Mart has promised to reform its international work conditions it has failed to do so as of yet.

Wal-Mart also shortchanges its employees when it comes to providing health care insurance. According to Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, “There are government assistance programs out there that are so lucrative it’s hard to be competitive, and it’s expensive to be competitive,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, 04/06/05.
Nationally, only 47 percent of Wal-Mart employees are covered by the company health plan, while 68 percent of employees at other large national firms receive employer-provided health care. In addition, Wal-Mart Watch reports that in 16 states Wal-Mart employees top Medicaid and CHIP rolls and many rely on public assistance for their health coverage. In addition, Wal-Mart has been targeted for its violation of environmental laws, being forced to pay over $4.5 million in penalties during the last two years alone.

History of Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart traces its beginning to 1962 when Wal-Mart founder Samuel Walton and his wife Helen put up 95 percent of the money for the first Wal-Mart store in Rogers, Arkansas. During the 1960’s Sam Walton opened 15 Wal-Mart stores, mostly in Kansas and Arkansas. In 1970, Wal-Mart stock was offered for the first time in the New York Stock Exchange. Profits from the sale of stock enabled Wal-Mart to open 276 stores in 11 states by the end of the decade. However, it was the 1980’s that propelled Wal-Mart to its current status as a corporate powerhouse. In 1983 Wal-Mart branched out into wholesale outlets, opening the first Sam’s club and in 1988 Wal-Mart opened the first SuperCenter which featured a complete grocery department along with 36 departments with general merchandise. By 1989 Wal-Mart’s profits topped $26 billion.

In 2004 the retail giant generated over $256 billion in global revenue, and added more than $26 billion in sales. It also earned nearly $9.1 billion in net income and grew earnings per share by over 15 percent.

This financial capital has allowed Wal-Mart executives to promote their own political ideologies and objectives, both within Wal-Mart stores and in local communities. In many Wal-Mart stores, the pharmaceutical departments do not sell birth-control or emergency contraception, a problem which has angered many women’s groups. In 1995 Wal-Mart also pulled a T-shirt from its shelves which read “Someday a Woman Will Be President,” citing the shirt could offend some people. In 1996, the retailer refused to sell Sheryl Crow’s self-titled album, because of lyrics which questioned the sale of guns. Recently Wal-Mart has banned Maxim, FHM, and Stuff magazines from store shelves.

Survival of the Fittest

In the game of capitalism, where Charles Darwin’s infamous notion of “survival of the fittest” determines the winners and losers, it is apparent that Wal-Mart is definitely a winner – and it has done so at a cost to the public. On the local and national levels, Wal-Mart is a recipient of large subsidies and other perks which have enabled it to expand at such a quick rate. This expansion has often hurt local businesses, which simply can’t compete with the expansive resources of Wal-Mart.

According to Bill Fletcher, a National Worker’s Rights Board member and president of TransAfrica Forum, Wal-Mart is for our generation what the Ford Motor Company was for an earlier generation. Ford intimidated workers with surveillance, firings and worse. At the same time it sought to buy off opponents through community contributions and donations as well as cultivating a cadre of ministers who were willing to praise Ford and condemn unions. It was through a partnership between the NAACP, the National Negro Congress, and the United Auto Workers that Ford was finally organized and held accountable to the people of the United States; an important lesson in how we should take Wal-Mart to task.

Frustrated by all of the injustices of Wal-Mart community groups, labor unions and others are beginning to take a stand. A broad coalition of organizations including, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Jobs with Justice, Acorn, the Sierra Club, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), and Wal-Mart Watch, have begun to organize one of the largest corporate campaigns in history against Wal-Mart. In November these organizations, led by Wal-Mart Watch hosted “Higher Expectations Week” a week of action against Wal-Mart where they will demand that Wal-Mart changes its practices. Also in November, Brave New Films released a made-for-DVD documentary produced by Robert Greenwald, entitled, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. UFCW, Jobs with Justice and Acorn will continue to organize actions and events into the holiday season.

Though all of these organizations may have different demands of Wal-Mart (and different tactics for getting these demands met) each of them are clear on one thing: the goal is not to shut Wal-Mart down, but rather to get it to change its practices.

Guinea: Ruling party wins landslide in pivotal local elections

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 03:42:00 +0000

12-29-05,9:25am

CONAKRY, 28 Dec 2005 (IRIN) - More than a week after nationwide municipal elections, regarded by many as a test of Guinea’s democracy, the results are finally in and the ruling party looks as strong as ever.

Results were delivered in a marathon three-hour broadcast by the minister in charge of organising the elections, Kiridi Bangouraon, on Tuesday night. The ruling Party of Unity and Progress (PUP) retained the vast majority of the more than 300 ridings, according to his final tally.

The poll was closely watched by the international community, which has been highly critical of Guinea in the past over a perception of corruption and lack of democracy.

The West African nation – one of the world’s poorest despite its wealth of water and mineral resources – has a history of polls marred by violence and boycotted by the opposition.

But this time, international donors backed the poll and the opposition participated in an electoral process billed as a trial run for the prime minister’s ongoing reform programme.

The announcement that the PUP had won 31 out of 38 urban seats and 241 out of 303 rural posts came as little surprise in a country where President Lansana Conte and his party have won every election since he came to power in a 1984 coup.

If the general population appeared relatively unfazed by the news, opposition politicians were quick to denounce the official results of the 18 December vote.

“I cannot imagine how in 2005 a party could score 100 percent in any election whatsoever,” former prime minister and current opposition leader, Sidya Toure, told IRIN, referring to a pair of rural communities where the PUP was attributed 98 and 99 percent of the vote. “The results, as far as these elections are concerned, are farcical and totally unacceptable.” Toure’s complaints mirrored those of other opposition leaders who held a joint press conference last week to denounce what they perceived as massive fraud.

But the PUP responded with a charge of sour grapes, pointing to the presence of 400 neutral observers on the ground to bolster its claims of a free and transparent vote.

“That’s the way with African politics. When we lose, we cry foul,” the PUP’s secretary general Sekou Konate told IRIN on Wednesday.

In a preliminary report issued last week, the observers from 26 civil society NGOs described the conduct of the polls as essentially peaceful and orderly despite isolated incidents.

But observers did list a string of procedural problems, including supplies shortages, the use of false identification papers and the improper supervision of voting by election officials.

According to the opposition, large scale street protests took place in the country’s interior after which some of their supporters remain imprisoned without charge.

For Mike McGovern, West Africa project director at think-tank International Crisis Group, the real picture probably lies somewhere between the government and opposition versions.

“It seems pretty clear to me that technically there were problems,” he said in the Senegalese capital, Dakar. “That doesn’t mean fraud. Certainly, it leaves the door open for that, but even in the absence of fraud, opposition candidates may not have seen the results they wanted.”

He said that the ruling party has developed a powerful political machine over its two decades in power, allowing it to raise more money, mobilise more supporters and field more candidates than its opponents.

At the same time, the opposition needs to focus less on criticising the current regime and more on providing its own partisans with election know-how and actually getting them out to vote, said McGovern.

One of the frequent themes of campaign coverage was voter apathy and anecdotal reports suggested many voters stayed at home on polling day. The official turnout given on Tuesday was 58 percent, though it was a mere 37 in urban ridings.

Nevertheless, McGovern was “provisionally just a little bit optimistic” about the prospects of Guinea’s evolution from a country that holds show elections just to appease donors into a state with entrenched democratic institutions.

“One has to be very honest and say this is a long-term process,” he cautioned. “It’s not going to take weeks or months,” he said.

As for the question of foreign aid and investment, a western diplomat in Conakry was equally guarded about drawing conclusions this early in the game. He said the international community will adopt a common position after meeting with the observers.

“Fraud is committed during most elections all over the world. We still have to see on what scale and in what manner it happened here.”

Over the Edge: The Year in Sports 2005

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 03:18:00 +0000

12-29-05, 9:00 am

Last December I wrote the following: '2004 should be remembered as a year when the hermetically sealed divide between sports and society frayed for the first time in a generation... I cannot wait to see what 2005 has in store. Also in 2005, the Chicago White Sox will win the World Series – and it's splitsville for Nick and Jessica.' [The last sentence was slightly updated for editorial reasons.]

This past year that 'hermetically sealed divide' has gone well beyond the fraying stage. The delicate division between sports and politics was ripped apart like it was trying to block Dwight Freeney. Discussing the 'politics of sports' became in 2005 as popular as sports itself - for better and worse.

The tone was set by that most apolitical of bodies, the US Congress. In March, when our baseball thoughts are accustomed to turning toward spring training, the House of Representatives engineered what Rep. Tom Lantos called 'a theater of the absurd'. Past and present MLB All Stars Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmiero, and Jose Canseco among others were called – under threat of prison – to testify about performance enhancing drugs in the sport. The proceedings were shameful. All that was missing was William Rehnquist in his yellow striped robe to round out the farce. Not one trainer was subpoenaed. Nor were any owners - especially a certain former Texas Rangers owner named George W. Bush who ran the steroid crack-house where Canseco held court in the early 90s. As one former player said to me, 'When it comes to steroids, distribution is a team issue but punishment is for individuals, which is why nothing changes.'

But lost in the brouhaha of congressional preening, Mark McGwire melting, and Rafael Palmiero's fall from grace, was any serious discussion of steroids themselves. Do they actually help you hit a baseball? Does a potential all-star team exist at every Gold's Gym? Should the same owners who celebrated the Dionysian home run orgies of the 1990s be trusted with cleaning up the game? Should we trust Mike and the Mad Dog for medical information on the effects of long-term abuse?

The steroid-mania led to an atmosphere of hysteria, which resulted in the Players Union reopening their collective bargaining agreement with the owners to enshrine stiffer penalties. They adopted a three-strikes-and-you're-out policy, where one positive test would lead to a 50 game suspension and a third offense would trigger a lifetime banishment – presumably to a secret prison in Eastern Europe. Far less discussed in the mainstream press was the fact that significant pressure for a revamped steroid policy was exerted by players themselves, tired of competing on what they perceive to be an unlevel playing field. Regardless, the deal legitimized the congressional carnival so expect to see more of your heroes under the hot lights this year, all with the implication so advanced by this administration: privacy is not a right: it's a privilege.

But if Congress's 'theater of the absurd' was sports and politics at its most insipid, then the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina saw athletes at their off-the-field best. After seeing the Louisiana Superdome become a homeless shelter from hell for 25,000 New Orleans residents, many pro players felt it was time to act. Millions were donated. Houses were built. And some even spoke out against this most unnatural of disasters.

It's not surprising so many athletes would feel the devastation in their gut. More than 100 pro ballers come from the little scrape of land known as the gulf region. Amazing, but not surprising when you consider the combo of year round sunshine, poverty, and racism. That is the fertilizer, which has produced athletes from Kevin Garnett to Warrick Dunn. It was a calamity that broke through their gated communities and touched their lives. Brett Farve didn't know for hours whether his mother was safe. Steve McNair lost his hometown. Even the blue blood Mannings got their hands dirty unloading supplies. But other athletes felt compelled to actually speak out. Joe Horn, the Saints wide receiver said, 'It's devastating to us. I've cried three or four times. Seeing kids without any food, elderly people dying and the government saying that help is on the way – that's the most shocking part.'

A much healthier shock to system went down in October when Venezuelan born manager Ozzie Guillen led the Chicago White Sox to their first World Series since 1917. In the wake of his victory, Guillen for the first time publicly showed his pride in Venezuela's popular President and perennial U.S. coup target Hugo Chavez. Chavez holds a tremendous popularity among Venezuela's workers and the poor by using the country's oil profits to fund job training and literacy programs. He has also attracted a global following by exhorting people to resist Bush’s economic and military agenda. Chavez is also a sports fanatic, and one of his heroes happens to be a former skinny shortstop named Ozzie Guillen. Guillen, previously careful about distancing himself from Chavez, appeared on his television show, and after the World Series, when the streets of Caracas were as excited as Chicago's South Side, said he was going to take the trophy to Venezuela – and might not bring it back.

If Guillen came out of the closet politically, then Sheryl Swoopes did the real thing. The most prominent basketball player of her generation announced to the world that she's a lesbian – out and proud. In doing so, she became the first African American in the WNBA to come out of the closet. Saying she was 'tired of living a lie' Swoopes could be setting a tone for other WNBA players – as well as all athletes female and male – that being a pro athlete doesn't mean having to hide who you are.

But there was no closet for rookie Indy racer Danica Patrick to hide her gender. Patrick made seismic waves coming in fourth in the Indy 500 and even more of a buzz navigating the hostile ball-scratching waters of big time auto racing. Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone, during a 'congratulatory' phone call to Patrick, said, 'Women should be all dressed in white like all other domestic appliances.' He then repeated it during an interview. Patrick, who no one will confuse with Billie Jean King, balked at issuing strong response, but she became a lightning rod to discuss the issue of sexism in auto racing. It was a welcome discussion in a sport where women get to wear bikini tops and tell the racers to 'start your engines' but are allowed access to little else.

But if Patrick was an unwilling lightning rod, Etan Thomas soaked himself in water, stood on his roof and dared the heavens to strike. In 2005, the Washington Wizards power forward released his pulsating book of poetry and CD of spoken word title 'More Than an Athlete.' Thomas didn't just leave it on the page. He brought down the house, speaking at the September 24th anti-war demonstrations, he spoke out in defense of 'looters' in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and he was the only active athlete to speak out in defense of Stan Tookie Williams, legally lynched by the state of California. When questions arose about Thomas's 'unusual' political activities, he responded by writing an editorial for the Washington Post defending his right to have a brain.

In the end, this was a sports year that defined itself on the edge of sports and politics. It was driven by an endless war, and a hurricane that exposed the existence of 21st century Jim Crow. As long as crisis and revolt remain features of the new millennium, sports will never again be a citadel apart.

Let the last word belong to Tony Dungy, the proud, brilliant, soft-spoken coach of the Indianapolis Colts who tragically lost his 18-year-old son James in an apparent suicide. Dungy delivered the eulogy at James' funeral and said to the NFL players in attendance, 'I want to urge you to continue being who you are because our young boys in this country, they need to hear from you. If anything, be bolder...'

--Dave Zirin's new book 'What's My Name Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States' is published by Haymarket Books. Check out his revamped website edgeofsports.com. You can receive his column Edge of Sports, every week by e-mailing edgeofsports-subscribe@zirin.com. Contact him at whatsmynamefool2005@yahoo.com.

Book Review: A Man Without a Country

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 03:16:00 +0000

12-29-05, 8:57 am

Kurt Vonnegut, at age 82, has published over two dozen books. His latest is called 'A Man Without a Country.' It's a book that is brutally honest in its hopelessness, in fact – I think – overly hopeless, and yet humorous. It may even be hopeless in order to better be humorous. Vonnegut discusses in the book the use of tragedy to heighten laughter. But certainly the humor works to lighten the load of dismay and despair that this book ever-so-lightly dumps on us.

'I know of very few people,' Vonnegut writes, 'who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.' Later he writes this epitaph for the Earth: 'The good Earth – we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.'

Vonnegut cannot be comforted with the fantasy that our destruction of the Earth is all part of some benevolent plan beyond our ken, because he doesn't believe such rubbish. 'My parents and grandparents were humanists,' he writes, 'what used to be called Free Thinkers. So as a humanist I am honoring my ancestors, which the Bible says is a good thing to do. We humanists try to behave as decently, as fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. My brother and sister didn't think there was one, my parents and grandparents didn't think there was one. It was enough that they were alive. We humanists serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any familiarity, which is our community.'

Vonnegut does not have consolations or comforts, but he does have humor. He continues:

'I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, 'Isaac is up in heaven now.' It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favorite joke.

'How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, 'If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?'

'But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being.

'I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake.'

So, Kurt has no religion. But why does he say he has no country?

Well, there's this: '…I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable.'

Kurt blames many of our problems on a drug: 'Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn't the TV news is it? Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on.' And this, of course, leads Vonnegut to despair but not to lose his sense of humor: '…I know there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.'

Chile communists to back Bachelet

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 03:13:00 +0000

12-29-05, 8:54 am

Chile’s Communist party pledged yesterday to back presidential candidate Michelle Bachelet in a tight run-off in January against a rightist alliance.

Communist supporters account for close to 5 percent of the vote in Chile and their support could ensure a win by socialist Bachelet and her center-left coalition.

The Communist Party’s central committee said yesterday it had “resolved to call for a vote for Bachelet,” although it also recognised the vote of each member as a personal choice.

Bachelet narrowly missed becoming Chile’s first woman president in December elections when she failed to win more than 50 per cent of the vote over three other candidates.

In a run-off race on Jan. 15 she will go up against a rightist alliance led by conservative Sebastian Pinera, who had 37.5 per cent support in a recent poll. The same poll showed Bachelet with 42.8 per cent of support. The poll also showed nearly 20 per cent of voters still undecided. The poll’s margin of error was 3.5 percentage points.

Bachelet’s presidency was still seen as a sure thing in the second round until rightists united behind Pinera and leftists, disappointed by what they saw as Bachelet’s lack of clear policies, threatened to spoil their votes.

Candidates are seen fighting hard to win over undecided voters, although Communist support could tilt the odds in favor of Bachelet, also fighting to become Chile’s fourth leader in a row from the left-of-center alliance that has run the country since the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship ended in 1990.

From MercoPress

Cubans Celebrate 47th Anniversary of Socialist Revolution

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 03:12:00 +0000

12-29-05,8:54am

Havana, December 26 (AIN).- With a huge cultural program underway through January 2, Cubans are celebrating the 47 Anniversary of their Revolution.

The program kicked off on Sunday December 25, at the Jose Marti Revolution Square in Havana with live music concerts and a wide range of out-door activities for children and adults including a conga-drum dance parade, book and food fair, a circus, topped off by the popular Paulo FG and Van Van bands.

All theatres and outdoor scenarios throughout the island will be hosting different cultural activities to welcome the date when Cuba freed itself from the Batista dictatorship.

In the capital, many cultural centers will be offering free programming for adults and children with popular music bands and theatre performances throughout the week, including two concerts by Pablo Milanes.

The festivities will reach their peak on January 1 and 2 and include sports and cultural activities in all major Cuban cities, said Fernando Rojas, in charge of the National Council of Culture Centers.

The island closes 2005 on an upbeat with a spectacular 11.8 percent GDP growth. Higher salaries and pensions, new education, public health, social security and power generation programs, and the pride of Cubans to be able to offer growing assistance to nations on several continents are part of the general optimism.

Cuba and China Sign Biotech Accord Havana, December 26 (AIN) Cuba and China signed a bilateral collaboration agreement in the field of biotechnology in Beijing on Monday.

The accord will extend over the next 3-5 years and was signed by Cuban Government Minister Ricardo Cabrisas and China's Vice Chairman of the State Development and Reform Commission Zhang Xiaoqiang.

The sides described the pact as one that sets up the basis for the continuation of biotech projects and promoting new ones, while paving the way for further exploring mutual assistance in health care.

According to Juventud Rebelde newspaper, the agreement came during the first China-Cuba joint-working meeting on biotechnology, held in Beijing this month. There,

representatives reviewed all the work done to define common interests and projects to be jointly developed.

This responds to the common willingness to strengthen institutional cooperation, foster biotech collaboration and study the establishment of joint companies and research and development plans, among other actions.

During his visit to China, Cabrisas visited several industrial complexes and met with local authorities, including the Education Minister Zhou Ji, and top executives of companies having economic and commercial relations with Cuba.

Last Friday, the Cuban official and China's Trade Minister Bo Xilai chaired the 18th session of the Cuba-China Inter-governmental Commission for Economic and Commercial Relations

Announcements by Condoleezza Rice Against Cuba

By Nestor Nunez AIN Special Service Chilly winds continue to blow in from the north. Most recently the frigid gales originated from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who announced that in 2006 -in a few days as it were- Washington will come up with new measures against Cuba.

The US official made it clear that Bush's so-called 'transition to democracy' plan against the island will be tightened in an effort by that government to 'free' Cuba.

The issue is nothing new, much less are the masked intentions behind the White House's anti-Cuban rhetoric.

The Washington's political game is aimed at supporting and promoting a handful of internal elements in an attempt to stop the Revolution once the country's current leadership is gone.

Still, this does not exclude the possibility of direct armed intervention if the conditions favor it.

The announcements made by Condoleezza Rice are not unexpected. However, Washington is taking these new steps against Cuba and making bilateral issues more difficult despite the opposition of many Americans, including a number of US lawmakers and governors.

One of Washing's new steps was the naming of Michael Parmly to be head of the US Interests Section in Havana. He has been called an 'expert in crisis management and conflict resolution.'

One of the first acts of the new 'diplomat' in Havana was to convene a meeting with anti-Cuba elements on the island. These individuals are working at the service of Washington in an attempt to satisfy the interests of anti-Cuba bands in Miami.

However, the timing could not be worse for the anti-Cuba elements. The Caribbean island has begun rapid economic growth and is experiencing increased international prestige thanks to the solidarity Cuba offers to just causes around the world.

If this were not enough, Cuba has the broad support of the international community in its fight against Washington's blockade. At the same time the island continues to gain respect from governments that are offering their friendship and growing support.

White House Leaked Classified Intelligence to Make its Case for War

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 03:41:00 +0000

12-28-05, 9:23 am

A new report looks into instances in which the Bush Administration leaked classified information to support its case that Iraq was a threat to the United States.

While that case was, of course, ridiculous and the information falsified, the leaking of it was illegal. And the leaks appear to have been part of a coordinated effort. Immediately following important leaks, top administration officials appeared on talk shows to discuss information that they could not have legally discussed had it not appeared in a newspaper that morning.

Congressman John Conyers has just released an extensive report titled 'The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Cover-ups in the Iraq War.' Pages 73 – 81 address the Bush Administration's claims regarding aluminum tubes allegedly acquired by Iraq for the purpose of developing nuclear weapons.

On page 78, the report notes: 'Our investigation has also found that classified intelligence information supporting the Bush Administration's position regarding the aluminum tubes was leaked to the press. For example, on Sunday, September 8, 2002, the lead story in The New York Times, written by Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon, quotes 'anonymous' Administration officials as stating that 'Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb.''

The headline of that article was 'U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts.'

Conyers' report continues: 'The article goes on to source 'administration officials' for the proposition that '[i]n the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium' and that '[t]he diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq's nuclear program.'' So, someone in the Administration was leaking classified information. Of course, it was false information, but that made it all the more damaging. But who was the leaker(s)?

According to Conyers' report, 'Subsequent media accounts have traced the story, at least in part, to Paul Wolfowitz:

''In the summer of 2002, [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz convened a secret meeting [concerning the tubes] in his office with Francis Brooke, the I.N.C. adviser, and Khidir Hamza, a former chief of Saddam's nuclear program, who had defected to America in 1994 . . . Wolfowitz circulated his conclusions to his administration allies. A few days later, the story of the 'nuclear' tubes was leaked to The New York Times, where it landed on the front page.'

'On the CNN Documentary, Dead Wrong, an anonymous source characterized the dissemination of this biased and slanted information to Miller and Gordon as 'official leaking': 'I would call it official leaking because I think these were authorized conversations between the press and members of the intelligence community that further misreported the nature of the intelligence community's disagreement on this issue.'

Of course, a front page story in the New York Times gets everyone's attention, and – if the lies are glaring enough – can lead to a reporter resigning in disgrace. But the Bush Administration has often promoted stories into the 'mainstream' media by first establishing them in the super-right-wing outlets.

'The Constitution in Crisis' continues: 'Our investigation has also learned that administration officials appear to have leaked classified information to the press well before the New York Times article. A July 29, 2002, article in the Washington Times, titled 'Iraq Seeks Steel for Nukes' reported:

''Procurement agents from Iraq's covert nuclear-arms program were detected as they tried to purchase stainless-steel tubing, uniquely used in gas centrifuges and a key component in making the material for nuclear bombs, from an unknown supplier, said administration officials familiar with intelligence reports . . . U.S. intelligence agencies believe the tubing is an essential component of Iraq's plans to enrich radioactive uranium to the point where it could be used to fashion a nuclear bomb.''

With impeccable timing, on the eve of the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks, top Bush officials appeared on the Sunday talk shows to discuss the aluminum tube story that someone among them had just planted in the New York Times.

Knight Ridder explained how this worked: '[the leaks] appearance in the nation's most influential paper also gave Cheney and Rice an opportunity to discuss the matter the same day on the Sunday television talk shows. They could discuss the article, but otherwise they wouldn't have been able to talk about classified intelligence in public.' ('CIA leak illustrates selective use of intelligence on Iraq [The Aluminum Tubes],' by Jonathan S. Landay, Knight Ridder Newspapers.)

And who can forget the horrifying comments that the Bush Administration made?

Condoleezza Rice: '[Iraq has obtained] high quality aluminum tubes that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs' and 'We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.'

-- CNN Late Edition (CNN television broadcast, Sept. 8, 2002).

Vice President Dick Cheney: 'I do know with absolutely certainty that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon'

-- Meet the Press (NBC television broadcast, Sept. 8, 2002).

Donald Rumsfeld: 'Imagine a September 11 with weapons of mass destruction.'

-- Face the Nation (CBS television broadcast, Sept. 8, 2002).

Movie Review: The Producers

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 03:36:00 +0000

12-28-05, 9:17 am

The Producers Directed by Susan Stroman

Nothing succeeds like success. Mel Brooks deservedly won an Oscar for his seminal screenplay for The Producers in 1968.

The comedy marked his auspicious directorial debut and has, rightly, achieved classic status, showcases one of cinema's finest and funniest musical numbers - Springtime for Hitler.

There are some people - po-faced poseurs with fractured funny bones, perhaps? - who believe that Brooks's heady vision of tap-dancing storm troopers and a singing fuhrer is simply in bad taste. They're wrong.

Brooks is a brilliant, inventive satirist who uses comedy to make potent points about unspeakable events in the finest tradition of Ernst Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be.

Brooks's story for The Producers is ingenious and audacious. Venal Broadway producer Max Bialystock and naive accountant Leo Bloom set out to make their fortune by fleecing their investors by staging a surefire Broadway flop.

They find the perfect play in Springtime for Hitler, a gay romp with Adolf and Eva in Berchtesgarten, and recruit a dud director and matching cast.

It seems as if nothing can go wrong - except that the first-night audience turns the would-be appalling show into a surprise success. In 2001, Brooks turned The Producers into a mega-hit musical that was nominated for 14 Tony awards and won 12, more than any other show in Broadway history.

But theatre is a niche medium, marked by privilege and too often appallingly overpriced.

So we should cheer Brooks and director Susan Stroman for turning their stage show into an exhilarating movie musical accessible to everyone.

Brooks and co-writer Thomas Meehan have happily retained the basic plot and the original Broadway stars Nathan Lane (Max), Matthew Broderick (Leo), Gary Beach as flamboyantly gay director Roger de Bris and Roger Bart as his 'common-law' assistant Carmen Ghia.

All of them are magnificent, vividly and unmissably recreating their superbly honed stage performances for the film.

Uma Thurman, a victim of Quentin Tarantino's egregious ego-trip Kill Bill, unexpectedly delivers an unforgettable, eye-popping comic performance.

She's truly hilarious as Max and Leo's long-legged hormone-stirring Swedish secretary. She sings and dances to memorable award-worthy effect.

Will Ferrell, playing Springtime's deranged nazi playwright, puts in a trademark over-the-top performance, but, this time, it's deliberate. It works to hugely enjoyable effect.

Yes, the performances are larger than life, but they are all the more enjoyable for it.

Cinepseuds and those reviewers who are more concerned with subtext, montage and, if at all possible, subtitles than entertainment, may object to what is essentially a reworking of the stage show for the cinema.

But popular appeal is also 'art,' however much that might grate with art film devotees.

In fact, the essential simplicity of Stroman's approach - to showcase the stars, her own witty choreography and the story to maximum impact - pays off handsomely.

While the film won't win critical plaudits for auteuristic boastfulness, it will score where it matters most - with paying moviegoers seeking two hours of pure pleasure.

The plot is clever, the show fizzes with great jokes that come fast and furiously and the songs and dancers are a delight. So is the film.

Three cheers for Brooks and company for reviving the classic Hollywood musical film so cleverly, amusingly and, above all, so enjoyably.

From Morning Star

How can the war that has killed 30,000 Iraqis be justified?

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 03:29:00 +0000

12-28-05, 9:10 am

U.S. President George W. Bush in his speech on December 14 said, 'my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision,' while admitting that 'much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong' about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. On December 12, he acknowledged for the first time that the death toll among Iraqis has reached 30,000. More than 2,100 U.S. soldiers have died. How can he say that the war that claimed so many lives is 'right,' after the reason for going to war has turned out to be wrong? His speech represents a rogue's rhetoric that any government that it dislikes must be attacked.

Starting war by cutting short U.N. inspections

Just before starting the Iraq War, President Bush on March 19, 2003 justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq by denouncing the Hussein regime of Iraq as 'an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.'

However, even at that time this arbitrary U.S. argument was not accepted by the international community. The war was started while the U.N. inspectors were still in Iraq to verify whether Iraq maintained WMDs or not. The inspectors were to announce a conclusion in a few months, but the Bush administration forced the inspections to be cut short in order to start the war without waiting for the inspectors to announce their results.

Launching preemptive war on another country by denouncing it as a 'threat' is clearly an act of aggression that the U.N. Charter strictly prohibits. Article 39 of the U.N. Charter provides that only the U.N. Security Council is authorized to take measures against 'any threat to the peace.'

The U.S. Bush administration won Britain and Spain over its side to get a U.N. Security Council resolution approved in the attempt to justify a U.S. military attack against Iraq, but the resolution did not win unanimous support. No U.N. resolution exists that authorizes U.S. military attack against Iraq.

Trying to justify the Iraq War, Bush stresses that 'the fight against terrorists' is most essential. However, he failed to show any evidence of the Hussein regime's involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Bush must be held responsible for the war of aggression he started by using false pretexts.

Hillary Rodham Clinton in the U.S. Senate stated, 'Based on the information that we have today, Congress never would have been asked to give the president authority to use force against Iraq.' In the light of facts it was wrong that the Congress authorized the president to prosecute the war.

Koizumi is accomplice

Asked by reporters to comment, Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro said, 'Japan's judgment was in line with the U.N. Security Council resolutions and if Iraq had proved it had no weapons of mass destruction, the war wouldn't have occurred.'

No UN resolution, however, can justify the war of aggression against Iraq. Koizumi must remember that when Bush started the war, Koizumi was emphasizing, 'The question is how we should face threats from Iraq's WMD.' On what grounds did he conclude that Iraq had WMDs? He just swallowed Bush's allegations. Now that Bush acknowledged that he was wrong, Koizumi's argument in support of the war has proved groundless.

The Japanese prime minister must be held responsible for supporting the lawless war that destroyed the international peace.

From Akahata