Death or Glory

I’m no friend of Saddam Hussein, but the whole lynch mob (which included Shiite Iraqi officials) was kind of barbaric, wasn’t it? I mean, c'mon, the guy had been convicted of some of the crimes against humanity that he committed—and then he was sentenced to death. So he’s down and out in a major way (even though he was tried and convicted for just a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis that he's ordered killed)…yet he’s heckled at his own hanging!

Couldn’t the mob at least have the courtesy to wait until after he was dead to dance around his body, gloat, and hurl insults? Then again, life is pretty cheap in Iraq these days.

I understand that the Bushies wanted to distance themselves completely from Hussein's rushed execution (though not because our great leader has any problem with capital punishment: Dubya presided over the state-sanctioned killings of 151 men and one woman during his six years as governor of Texas--and remember how Bush mocked born-again murderess Karla Faye Tucker, "Please, please don't kill me!" and refused to commute her sentence to life in prison?)--most people in the Arab world believe that the U.S. is orchestrating everything behind the scenes anyway. But you’d think that Cheney, Rove et al would have realized that the Iraqi government, which barely functions as it is, should not have been trusted to control the recorded images of Hussein’s hanging. All it takes is some idiot with a camera cell phone--and presto, the world's most famous snuff film all over YouTube--and you have another international crisis on your hands and increased sectarian violence throughout Iraq, instead of a moment of "victory" for U.S.-style democracy in the Middle East.

Can't wait to see what Bush & Co. have in mind for winning the war in Iraq in 2007...

Know Your Product

Weird juxtapositioning of the week, spotted on a large billboard just to the right of the door of a youth hostel used by German and French twenty-somethings on Manhattan's Upper West Side: the image is supposed to be a post-card depicting a rather curvy, teeny-bikinied woman reclining on a beach, with the caption "Greetings from Brazil" printed in script. Marring this soft-porn fantasy are the spray-painted words "Turistas Go Home" (the title of this nasty organ-stealing horror movie).

I guess the movie marketers are writing off the international market on this one...

* * * *

"Know Your Product" is a great song from the Aussie punk band The Saints. Here's a sample:

I'm just sitting in my chair when a voice comes on the air
Says "Why don't you try it? You'll feel allright!"
"Got some great new brand of smokes
"Cool your head and clear your throat
"Keeps you young and so in touch."

Cheap advertising, you're lying
Never gonna get me what I want
I said, smooth talking, brain washing
Ain't never gonna get me what I need

Johnny, Are You Queer?

Following up on my Mary Cheney post from yesterday, here is an excerpt from a thoughtful column on the subject from Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post:

My only regret about Mary Cheney's pregnancy is that it didn't happen earlier -- say, during the 2004 presidential race, when Cheney was working for her father's campaign and his running mate was busy trying to write discrimination against people like her into the Constitution.

Imagine a hugely pregnant Mary Cheney sitting in the vice president's box at the convention. Imagine Cheney and her partner, Heather Poe, cuddling their newborn onstage at the victory celebration.

How perfectly that would have illustrated the clanging disconnect between the Republican Party's outmoded intolerance and the benign reality of gay families today.

Better late than never. Cheney's no crusader; she has little interest in becoming the poster mom for gay parenthood. But whether she intends it or not, her pregnancy will, I think, turn out to be a watershed in public understanding and acceptance of the phenomenon. This is the Ellen DeGeneres moment of national politics.

Acceptance won't come immediately, of course, and certainly not from all quarters. The folks who have fits about "Heather Has Two Mommies" are beside themselves over "Heather Is One of Two Mommies." Especially because the other mommy is -- as Mary Cheney is inevitably described -- The Vice President's Openly Gay Daughter.

"Unconscionable," said Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America. "Her action repudiates traditional values and sets an appalling example for young people at a time when father absence is the most pressing social problem facing the nation," Crouse wrote on the TownHall.com blog. "Her child will have all the material advantages it will need, but it will still encounter the emotional devastation common to children without fathers."

"I think it's tragic that a child has been conceived with the express purpose of denying it a father," pronounced Robert Knight of the Media Research Center. The couple, he said is seeking to "create a culture that is based on sexual anarchy instead of marriage and family values."

I can understand that people -- especially those who have no personal experience with gay families -- are uncomfortable with the notion of children without a parent of each gender. What I can't understand is using words such as "unconscionable" or "tragic" to describe the choice of two people who love each other and want to create a family together.

To be a badly wanted child (one thing that's indisputable about the children of same-sex couples: the parents had to work to make it happen) in a home with two loving parents is no tragedy. If they're worried about "emotional devastation," the Crouses and Knights of the world would do better to reserve their lamentations for children in poverty, those who are abused or neglected, or for children in families splintered by divorce.

Seems like a no brainer to me.

* * * *

"Johnny, Are You Queer" is off of Josie Cotton's "Convertable Music," as well as the soundtrack to "Valley Girl."

I'm a Sonic Generator

I've got no beef with Gwen Stefani--she's talented and a star with No Doubt or on her own. But I was kinda queasy when I read in Entertainment Weekly that her new look--"coke whore"-- is based on Michelle Pfeiffer's character in Brian DePalma's "Scarface." From the EW article it's clear that Stefani is just having fun putting on the bad girl image, but she does has a huge following amongst the tween and teen girl set...she's kind of a role model whether she likes it or not (and she's a new-ish mom to boot) and with that has to come some responsibility, right? Then again, the folks that rail against (black) rappers for glorifying misogyny and the thug life are curiously silent in the presence of this 37 year-old blond white woman from Orange County who likes to dress up like a Hollywood-ized crackhead.

+ + + +

From Salon.com:

George W. Bush, speaking today on the Iraq Study Group report: "The truth is a lot of reports in Washington aren't read by anybody. To show you how important this report is, I read it."

Asked whether he's still in "denial" about Iraq, Bush shot back: "It's bad in Iraq. That help?"

Warms the heart, don't it?

+ + + +

According to the New York Times, VP Dick Cheney's daughter Mary--you know, the (whisper, whisper) lesbian one--is pregnant (with her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, a former park ranger). Personally, I wish them the best. But, how does the anti-gay marriage, anti-premarital sex, anti-children-out-of-wedlock Bush administration spin this? The Times was unable to unearth exactly how Mary Cheney was impregnated. (Thank god for Dick's obsession with secrecy.)

+ + + +

Speaking of the hypocrisy among our nation's leaders when dealing with their own, check out Michael Kinsley's column from the Washington Post on the Bush Twin's nightclubbing while American troops are blown up in Baghdad every day:

From what little has leaked out, it seems that Jenna and Barbara are party girls who like to drink and dance until the wee hours with aristocrats and frat boys. Jenna is interning for UNICEF in Latin America (not actually teaching kids, as originally reported, but involved somehow in education). The twins recently took a trip to Argentina. Their first night there, partying in Buenos Aires, Barbara lost her purse to a thief.

So it would appear that George W. Bush's daughters are not Amy Carter or Chelsea Clinton or Karenna Gore. So what? Are you surprised?

Nevertheless, there is a war on. It's a war that has killed 3,000 Americans, most of them around Jenna and Barbara's age or younger. It has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis of all ages. And even more Americans and Iraqis have been injured, lost limbs, suffered terrible pain. President Bush can be quite eloquent in talking about the sacrifices of American soldiers and -- he always adds -- their families. In the Reagan style that has become almost mandatory, he uses anecdotes. He talks of Marine 2nd Lt. Frederick Pokorney Jr. "His wife, Carolyn, received a folded flag. His two-year-old daughter, Taylor, knelt beside her mother at the casket to say a final goodbye."

Bush says truly, about the American dead, "They did not yearn to be heroes. They yearned to see mom and dad again and to hold their sweethearts and to watch their sons and daughters grow. They wanted the daily miracle of freedom in America, yet they gave all that up and gave life itself for the sake of others."

Living your life according to your own values is a challenge for everyone, and it must be a special challenge if you happen to be the president. No one thinks that the president should have to give up a child to prove that his family is as serious about freedom as these other families he praises. But it would be reassuring to see a little struggle here -- some sign that the Bush family truly believes that American soldiers are dying for our freedom, and that it's worth it.

Who knows? Maybe they have had huge arguments about this. Maybe George and Laura wanted the girls to join the Red Cross, or the Peace Corps, or do something that would at least take them off the party circuit for a couple of years. And perhaps the girls said no. But I doubt this scenario, don't you?

. . . .

At first it seemed a brilliant strategy -- repellent, but brilliant -- to isolate most Americans from the cost of the war in Iraq. It's starting to seem a lot less so. As the deaths and injuries mount, more and more people are touched by the war -- and become understandably resentful of those who are not. Bush, in his speeches, is eloquent about what no one doubts -- the sacrifice -- but banal about what most people have come to doubt: the purpose.

But no amount of eloquence can overcome the bald contrast between that rhetoric and how his own family lives. His daughters are over 21, and he can't control them, but that doesn't let them off the hook. They are now independent moral actors, and their situation requires that they either publicly oppose their father's war or do something to support it. Is it unfair to expect Jenna and Barbara to shape their lives around their father's folly? Of course it's unfair. If this is war, then unfairness comes with the territory.

+ + + +

Also, check out these interesting articles about Mick Jones from the Clash (most recently in the music press for producing the Libertines' two albums) and Jarvis Cocker from Pulp (who has a new solo album--"Jarvis"--that's only available in the US as an import). Oh, and Billy Idol has just released an album of Christmas standards. No word on if it bites the big one or not, but his track record since "Rebel Yell" has been spotty, to say the least.

* * * *

This post's title comes from Elastica's song "Generator" from "The Menace."

Babylon's Burning

Each morning, when I hear of the latest bloodshed in Iraq on NPR and after all these years of car bombs, suicide bombs, death-squad-sectarian killings, I wonder how can there be anyone left standing in Baghdad to kill? Seriously. During the months of September and October, the UN has recorded over 5,000 civilian deaths in Baghdad alone (7,000 througout all of Iraq). As occupiers, that's a lot of blood on our hands.

While the White House is splitting hairs over whether or not the situation on the ground is a civil war or not (how about spending some time figuring out how to fix things, instead of managing the public's perception of the war?), here's a pretty grim assessment from CNN:

KITTY PILGRIM, CNN ANCHOR: Michael Ware reports from the Iraqi capital tonight.

And Michael, the Iraqi government and the U.S. military in Baghdad keep saying this is not a civil war. What are you seeing?

MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, firstly, let me say, perhaps it's easier to deny that this is a civil war, when essentially you live in the most heavily fortified place in the country within the Green Zone, which is true of both the prime minister, the national security adviser for Iraq and, of course, the top U.S. military commanders. However, for the people living on the streets, for Iraqis in their homes, if this is not civil war, or a form of it, then they do not want to see what one really looks like.

This is what we're talking about. We're talking about Sunni neighborhoods shelling Shia neighborhoods, and Shia neighborhoods shelling back.

We're having Sunni communities dig fighting positions to protect their streets. We're seeing Sunni extremists plunging car bombs into heavily-populated Shia marketplaces. We're seeing institutionalized Shia death squads in legitimate police and national police commando uniforms going in, systematically, to Sunni homes in the middle of the night and dragging them out, never to be seen again.

I mean, if this is not civil war, where there is, on average, 40 to 50 tortured, mutilated, executed bodies showing up on the capital streets each morning, where we have thousands of unaccounted for dead bodies mounting up every month, and where the list of those who have simply disappeared for the sake of the fact that they have the wrong name, a name that is either Sunni or Shia, so much so that we have people getting dual identity cards, where parents cannot send their children to school, because they have to cross a sectarian line, then, goodness, me, I don't want to see what a civil war looks like either if this isn't one.

Being the good Americans that we are, we don't really care about something like the carnage in Iraq unless it directly affects us (from Bob Herbert's NYT column relating to Black Friday):

Iraq burns. We shop. The Americans dying in Iraq are barely mentioned in the press anymore. They warrant maybe one sentence in a long roundup article out of Baghdad, or a passing reference — no longer than a few seconds — in a television news account of the latest political ditherings.

Since the vast majority of Americans do not want anything to do with the military or the war, the burden of fighting has fallen on a small cadre of volunteers who are being sent into the war zone again and again. Nearly 3,000 have been killed, and many thousands more have been maimed.

The war has now lasted as long as the American involvement in World War II. But there is no sense of collective sacrifice in this war, no shared burden of responsibility. The soldiers in Iraq are fighting, suffering and dying in a war in which there are no clear objectives and no end in sight, and which a majority of Americans do not support.

They are dying anonymously and pointlessly, while the rest of us are free to buckle ourselves into the family vehicle and head off to the malls and shop.

* * * *

The title of this post is from The Ruts' song of the same name.

Stop Making Sense

Even though the return of the Dems to power in Congress is a victory for reasonable and sane people everywhere, Bush still has ways to mess with people's lives.

For instance, Dubya just hired Dr. Eric Keroack--who has dedicated his life to discouraging women from using birth control--as the new deputy assistant secretary of population affairs within the Department of Health and Human Services. His primary responsiblity in this position is to oversee the Federal Title X family-planning program, which has a federal mandate to provide information and access to birth control, as well as pregnancy tests, and abortion counseling/referrals (the Feds don't pay for abortions).

File this bit of perniciousness under: War is Peace, and Work will Make You Free (Arbeit Macht Frei). Here are the shameful details.

* * * *

The lyric above is from the Talking Heads' song "Girlfriend is Better," found on "Speaking in Tongues."

Dance Like a Monkey

Woke up the other morning last weekend in a haze and was making breakfast for my daughter when I thought I saw something dart out from behind the garbage can. Considering that my eyes were barely open, I wrote it off as some sort of optical illusion, a trick of my mind. But, just in case, I looked around the corner of the stove--the direction that whatever it was went--and saw a tail hanging out from behind the back of the oven...

I've lived with roaches and mice before, though not in our current apartment and not with kids. So, I'm a little freaked out, but figure that the mouse must have come in under the service door in our kitchen and was headed out that way (the apartment below us is being renovated and there is other construction throughout the building, and that always stirs up the critters). As I'm pouring my cereal, I see the mouse dash out past the garbage can (my reaction is to jump about a foot in the air, sending raisin bran everywhere) and head for the living room. I assume that it ran under the radiator (where there must be a hole in the floor), but when I grab a flashlight and sweep the light under there I see nothing. I don't mention this to my wife.

While she's out, I take the radiator cover off, find a hole large enough for a mouse next to the radiator pipe that goes into the floor, and plug up the gap with some spackle. My daughter asks me what's going on and I tell her, and she's not phased by this in the least. She knows that mice poop everywhere and belong in cages if they're inside, so she thinks this is a good idea.

I also decide to check the under the radiator cover in the kids room--and find a gi-normous hole in the wood floor, as well as a few mouse poops. Damn! I drag the kids out to the grocery store for steel wool and mouse traps, and then stuff the Brillo into the hole, seal it up, and set out the traps (the nasty glue kind--I know, they're horrible and less humane than the snappy ones, but I hate setting them).

In the our first post-college apartment that we shared with two other friends--a crappy railroad on the top floor of a nasty tenement--we were away for the weekend and came back to learn that our roomies had caught something like 13 mice (!) while we were gone. The landlord had begun fixing up the apartment beneath us and those suckers came pouring out of the walls. Once the renovations were done, things weren't too bad (we also patched up every hole we could find), but we all bailed out of that apartment when the lease was up. After that, anytime we moved somewhere new, I plugged up any holes under sinks, etc., and pretty much never had any problems with bugs or mice (apart from the odd waterbug that would wander in under the front door during summer heat waves). Yes, the bugs and vermin are still in the walls and always will be with us, but this way they have their space and we have ours.

Knock on wood, I haven't seen any evidence that the mice have visited us again (and nothing has turned up in the traps). And I told my wife about the sighting and finding the holes after I fixed the problem. It minimized the freakout (if you gotta deliver bad news, at least tell someone about it after you've taken action to make things better). My wife, though, is the real pest control master...she actually stepped on and killed a mouse (by accident) at our friend's house earlier in the week!

* * * *

"Dance Like a Monkey" is from the latest New York Dolls record, "One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This."

Don't You Forget About Me

Kids,

Sorry that I haven't posted much here in November. I started a new job (yay!) and have been busy with this and that. I do have lots of things to write about and promise to have new content up soon, very soon!

Thanks for your understanding and love.

Familyman