IS APRIL, AFTER ALL, THE CRUELLEST MONTH?

Lilacs, irises, dogwoods, redbuds, wisteria, azaleas, even tulips still hanging on in many gardens -  it's all happening at once!  Spring with a vengeance.  i went the next town north of us to get a hair cut  (does anything make a girl feel better than a good haircut?  especially when she's also lost 20 pounds?)  after my morning class, and since the highway was under construction and hyper-congested, i took country backroads home.  i got delightfully lost, drove through farmland beginning to green up, past farmhouses with yards bursting with lilacs (we have one measly bush) and iris, fields of grazing cows, even a flock of sheep.   as Delaware is a very small and narrow state, i never worry when i'm lost here.  i know eventually i'll hit a major road that i am familiar with.  it was high noon with the sun directly overhead, so i couldn't use that to steer by.  i worked the 2000 census here in DE, so i'm fairly familiar with the backroads and almost never get lost.  this morning i just wanted to go wherever the road took me, and had a wonderful time.

furthermore, you should go visit this journal, From Every Angle, which belongs to Sunflowerkat in another guise, and is on the editor's list of top five picks this morning.  i know, i know, we're not sure we like those editors and their attitude any more - but this is a photo journal that will knock your socks off.  Kat captures nature at its loveliest.  as well as many other less likely subjects.

LISTEN TO THE WOMEN!!

First of all, an enormous "thank you" to the thousands of women, men and children who rallied, marched and partied in Washington, D.C. this past weekend for the many and various issues that constitute "women's health" and therefore women's lives.  People came from all over the planet to take part in this demonstration.  It was a truly impressive show of solidarity of gender, race, nationality and interests, organized by a coalition representing many facets of our struggle for justice and power.  Amazing grace.

           *********************************************

I'm currently snowed under by end-of-semester stuff, so i won't be doing too much here, but i was so affronted by what i read in today's Bush Greenwatch that i had to give it a little space.  unbeknownst to me, and maybe everyone else, our National Parks have become sites for the cell phone towers that allow our national obsession with cell phone communication to proliferate.  yes, Virginia, there's a cell tower actually overlooking Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park!  furthermore  "Towers in the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Everglades National Parks, Big Cypress and Mojave National Preserves, as well as Yellowstone, have gone up with no public notification or review."

read all about it here, and be sure to click the link to PEER's (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) website where they have a petition you can sign.  according to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress was supposed to oversee the placement of these towers on public lands, and it was supposed to be subject to all kinds of review processes.  under this administration, color me surprised, this has not happened.

While you're at PEER, check this out:  Faith-based Parks?

 

MEMENTO MORI

 
(picture from thememoryhole.org)

I'm sure everyone in the blogoverse is all over this story, which is so ubiquitous it was even on the AOL welcome screen early this morning (6:30ish).  it has since been pushed off by the NFL football player-turned-soldier's  (life imitating art?  see the post re Doonesbury cartoon here) death in Afghanistan, but is a headline on the news crawl from CNN. the story, of course, is of the photo of flag covered coffins returning home to Dover AFB from Kuwait.  the photo was taken by a contract worker in Kuwait, Tami Silicio, whose job was helping load the planes.  the photo was first published in a Seattle paper, and i first saw it on the internet on EasyBakeCoven's blog a couple of weeks ago.  she's onto the story there again today.

Tami has since been fired from her job, along with her husband.  imagine that.  however, the amazing internet site thememoryhole has obtained several hundred photos from the Dover AFB mortuary under the Freedom of Information Act.  imagine THAT.   i didn't actually know that Act was still in operation. boy, are they sorry now! no more Freedom of Information Act for us! 

i don't watch much network TV news, so i don't know what's being made of this story there, or if the American public will finally actually witness in their living rooms the evidence that our troops are dying in this war.  the front page of my only local major newspaper, The Wilmington News-Journal, has a picture of flag covered coffins on the front page, and i'm willing to bet so do most major newspapers.   

I'm old enough to remember the constant coverage of war casualties arriving at Dover in the VietNam War, day after day - coverage that helped to turn the tide of public sentiment against that war, instigate large demonstrations of popular opinion clamoring for an end to the carnage.  this new policy of not covering the arrival of the coffins, or even of the wounded, back on American soil was an invention of the first Bush administration during the first Gulf operation.  also the first war where reporters were not allowed to accompany troops to the battle front and send home firsthand information about events taking place there.  the Pentagon's story on this policy is that it is to protect those soldiers loved ones' privacy and feelings - to prevent a "spectacle." 

unfortunately, since i long ago stopped believing a word the Pentagon tells me, i choose to go with Rep. Jim McDermott, who served in the Navy in VietNam, when he says of the return of the dead to Dover from VN:  "As people began to see the reality of it and see the 55,000 people who were killed coming back in body bags, they became more and more upset by the war..."  and about the current policy:   "This is not about privacy. This is about trying to keep the country from facing the reality of war."

8:30 p.m. Addendum:  this story is back on the AOL opening screen.  At least on the one I use.

 

EARTH DAY, 2004

For the Future

Planting trees early in spring,
we make a place for birds to sing
in time to come.  How do we know?
They are singing here now.
There is no other guarantee
that singing will ever be.
                                          Wendell Berry

         ********************************************

I'm going to give some links here having to do with Earth Day, because, really, it's a major holiday for me.  It's even a gorgeous day here, and after my visit to my doctor this afternoon i'm going to put on gardening clothes and get Really Earthy.  Dirty, in fact.

I've got plenty of Bad News links, but here's an uplifting one for a change.  this essay, Earth Day's Daughter, is by Tia Nelson, daughter of Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day in 1970.  Senator Nelson is 87 now, and still working for The Wilderness Society.  Tia works for The Nature Conservancy, so i guess it runs in the blood.

Now for the Bad News.  From the bushgreenwatch site, a hardhitting article called On Earth Day, Experts Blast Bush.  it's today's story, so you may have to go to Back Issues if you're reading this after today.  Bob Whitson at howlings gives us this press release from Environment Maine on our Environmental President's Photo Op trip today to Maine to talk about how much he loves the environment.  The article will tell you how the local residents and environmentalists feel about this campaign stop.

I'm not sure anyone read my long entry with the newsletter from the League of Conservation Voters, but even if you don't read the whole thing check out the link to this, the Environmental Victory Project.  It's some more good news for anyone who wants to get involved.

And, wait, I have another Earth Day entry over here.  Shorter, but quite nice, I think.

LANDFILL

Even though it's Earth Day, remember this:

I'm sure everyone is aware that Earth Day is tomorrow.  my mailbox has been filling up with mail on the subject from all the environmental organizations to which i belong. this entry is a copy of one i received today from the League of Conservation Voters.  this seemed easier than copying over the info and links.  a real celebration of Earth Day will involve more than picking up litter and planting a couple of trees.  the real celebration will come when this administration leaves office and some of the damage can start to be healed.  in the meantime, we work like hell. Thus, the Environmental Victory Project presented in this newsletter.

April 21, 2004       Pre-Earth Day Special Edition Launching Victory

LCV is commemorating Earth Day with the help of a couple of friends. Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund and Friends of the Earth Action have joined with LCV in launching the environmental movement's unprecedented grassroots campaign to elect a pro-environment president. LCV President Deb Callahan, Defenders President Rodger Schlickeisen, and FOE President Brent Blackwelder addressed a packed banquet hall at Washington, DC's Mayflower Hotel to announce that the environmental movement was getting back to its grassroots for the 2004 election. The effort aims to mobilize 25,000 volunteers to knock on doors of 1.5 million households, concentrating on the main battleground states of Florida, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wisconsin. "It is up to us to work like never before," Callahan said. "Our Environmental Victory Project will work for victory for John Kerry, victory for America, and victory for our nation's environment!" In addition to the DC event, LCV staff and volunteers launched EVP at the University of New Mexico and will hold an Earth Day event at Rollins College in Orlando.

Read LCV's Press Release
Visit the EVP Web site

Taking it to Texas

Tomorrow, LCV President Deb Callahan travels to an Earth Day rally in President Bush's home turf, delivering a speech to motivate volunteers on the ground. She will talk about the importance of this year's election to the environmentally conscious -- and plug the Environmental Victory Project -- at an event sponsored by the Texas League of Conservation Voters and the Texas Environmental Democrats at the University of Houston. The event will also be the culmination of a week-long campaign push on environmental issues by LCV endorsee John Kerry. He is expected to be on hand to deliver a major policy speech that will contrast his environmental vision for America with the pro-polluter policies of the Bush Administration. Stay tuned to our Web site for more details on the Texas Earth Day event.

Take an Earth Day Action

Too busy to attend a rally? Tied to your desk on Earth Day? You can still be a part of the celebration. With a few clicks of your mouse, you can tell your elected officials in Washington that you care about the environment -- and you're watching their votes.
Participate in a virtual celebration of Earth Day.

Take action now!

Airing His Disagreements

Former top EPA official Bruce Buckheit fought to enforce the nation's clean air laws, and was winning -- until the Bush Administration pushed to roll back the laws he had enforced for the last two decades. Buckheit successfully used the Clean Air Act's "New Source Review" (NSR) rules to press industry to clean up their acts. The rules require that older, more polluting plants be equipped with modern pollution controls if they undergo major upgrades, eventually cleaning up or phasing out these older plants in favor of newer, cleaner, more efficient facilities. In particular, Buckheit said that NSR rules were crucial in forging a landmark agreement with a Tampa, Florida energy producer. The agreement improved the air quality in the area by getting the energy producer to switch to cleaner burning technologies -- while increasing productivity and efficiency. But the Bush Administration announced an overhaul of the rules that favor industry's bottom line and fly in the face of protecting the air we breathe. In addition, pending investigations that could have lead to other agreements with industry to clean up their facilities were put on hold.

Last December, after seeing that the Bush Administration was in effect dismantling the very tool for reigning in polluters and enforcing the Clean Air Act, Buckheit made the difficult decision to retire. When asked in an interview on NBC's Dateline what the biggest challenge is when it comes to air pollution, Buckheit gave a very pointed response: "The Bush Administration." He continued, "I'm saying this administration has decided to put the economic interests of the coal fired power plants ahead of the public interests in reducing air pollution… I was the head of the air enforcement division up until a couple weeks ago and I watched it happen."

Read an excerpt of the interview in our Newsroom

      

  

The Weekly Insider is brought to you by:
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1920 L Street, NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036
www.lcv.org
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Paid for by the League of Conservation Voters

 

 

@#$$%**&@#?????

First off, just want to say i seem to be doing hunky-dorily, classes going well, students happy to see me back, sun shining, breathing in, breathing out.  i'm taking a minute here in between preparing for my evening class to make note of a little something.

on the AOL welcome screen there was a little article headline from the AP as follows:  "This Doonesbury isn't funny."  so of course i had to go read it.  you might want to do the same.  i haven't been following Doonesbury with any regularity, mostly when fdtate sends me a particular strip, so i haven't kept up with the storyline.  evidently B.D. (former football player, tough kinda guy) has reupped and been fighting in (oops, i started to type "Nam" - i actually got the N on the page) Iraq.  He's been injured and is about to lose the injured leg in surgery.  the headline is correct.  this isn't funny.  Garry Trudeau's humor is not always something we can laugh at.  sometimes it's not humor.  it's a good deal more complex than that. 

in any case, the paragraph that caught my sense of irony was this one:           " 'About ten newspapers have called Universal Press with concerns about the strip, primarily with language the character uses after learning his leg is gone,' company spokeswoman Kathie Kerr said." (emphasis is mine)  yes folks, that's the way we see things here in the good ol' USA.  the horror is not that a man, an athlete, loses a limb and is forever disabled in a war that makes no sense at all -  it's the language he uses when he finds his leg missing.  let's not really present reality, if we can help it. 

BACK TO REAL LIFE, I THINK

so, my time-out has come to an end.  at least that's what i think right now.  i'll know more by this time tomorrow.  monday is my most difficult teaching day, so i'll be plunging back in full bore.  i'm not at all sure i'm ready, but spring break is over and i'm not crying ALL the time, so i guess i'll give it a try.  i've been doing everything my well-meaning friends have suggested:  eating better, getting a lot of exercise, taking the anti-depressants regularly, sleeping a lot, trying to pay far less attention to the news.  there's only three weeks left in the semester, i'm going to make a run for it.

the weather has done its usual Delaware spring thing, gone from cold, bleak and rainy to just almost too hot.  we've spent a lot of time this weekend in the yard, trying to beat back the rampant growth that all the rain produced, transplanting some stuff, planting other stuff.  but mostly, weeding.  i should have done more mowing than i got around to, but why, after all it's just going to keep right on growing.  we pay a guy to do our front forty with a rider mower, but i try to keep the back forty under control.  right now i'm losing the battle bigtime.  one problem is that i actually love a lot of the spring lawn weeds:  the violets, the things that make clusters of little blue flowers, even the dandelions.  they're happy, i'm happy, i'll mow when i can. 

i've also been reading during this week, especially during the rain.  i've written about what i'm reading in The Biblio Philes  (this entry and one before it)  and i'd love to know if anyone else out there has read His Dark Materials.  it's a British fantasy series for young people that doesn't seem to have made much of an inroad in this country, although it's been somewhat of a cause celebre in England.  it's spellbinding, to say the least.  and New Line Cinema is planning to make two films from the series, so eventually everyone will have heard of it. 

CHICKENMAN

tired of politics?  in despair over the leadership of the Free World?  sick of news, news commentary, news blogging?  here's something Completely Different, as my old friends on Monty Python's Flying Circus used to say.

via bernmilo's journal, yesterday i discovered Chickenman, or, as he likes to be called, Subservient Chicken.  now, maybe everyone else has known about this for a long time and has just been keeping it from me, because that's how you are.  but, then again, maybe not.  so, first of all, go here and stay for a while, have some fun.  then come back and read this article, and maybe even this (the command list), if you really have some time on your hands.

and then contemplate with me the true weirdness of the world in which we're living.

DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS

From my home town of San Antonio, where my young nephew lives and plays soccer and almost certainly does a fair amount of breathing, an article about the air we all must breathe.  as ibspiccoli asks in an excellent post - how can anyone say they're not interested in politics?  do they not realize it involves the very water they drink, air they breathe, future of our planet?  in this journal i so often feel i'm preaching to the choir - we need to get out and sing to those who have not yet heard the choir, who don't even know it exists.  how do we do that?  how are you doing it?

Clear Skies No More for Millions as Pollution Rule Expands
    By Jennifer 8. Lee
    New York Times

    Tuesday 13 April 2004

    SAN ANTONIO, April 8 - More than half the nation's population lives in or around areas that violate clean air standards, according to a list to be released on April 15 by the federal government.

    The list is a long-delayed result of federal standards revised in 1997 and will sweep beyond traditional smog-filled metropolises like Houston, Los Angeles and New York to encompass smaller cities like Little Rock, Ark., and Birmingham, Ala., where the air appears relatively clear. In San Antonio, which has begun taking steps to combat air pollution, the local government broadcasts warnings telling children not to play outside even on some days when the skies are azure blue.

    Rural communities will be affected along with at least seven national parks, including the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee, Acadia in Maine and Yosemite in California.

    On April 15, the Environmental Protection Agency will release a list of about 500 counties that violate or contribute to violations of ground-level ozone, more than double the number listed under older standards. Ground-level ozone, which is odorless and invisible, is a major component of smog on hot summer days. Prolonged exposure causes the equivalent of sunburn to the lungs.

    The revised federal standards have wide economic and environmental implications and the makeup of the list has been the subject of lobbying in Washington. Areas in violation face the loss of federal money for roads. Industrial development can be barred in those areas unless companies prove that they would not make pollution worse.

    "A lot of counties feel if they are in, it will have negative impact on their economic development plans," said Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio. Like many members of Congress, he said he has been deluged by letters and calls from local officials worried that the revised standards "will cause the loss of jobs, restrict economic growth, discourage plant location and encourage manufacturers to move overseas."

    Since passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act, the country's air is significantly cleaner, but scientific research continues to ratchet down the amount of pollution that is considered healthy to breathe. One reason for the dirty-air designations is "to communicate to the residents of the areas that the air they are breathing is not as healthy as our national standards," said Michael O. Leavitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, which makes the determinations.

    The new designations are a result of a process that started in 1997 when the Clinton administration tightened standards for ozone and fine particulate soot, which lodges in the lungs and contributes to lung disease, heart attacks and premature death.

    The old ozone rules measured peak exposures over one-hour periods. But dozens of studies showed that persistent exposure to low levels of ozone damages the respiratory and immune systems. The tighter standards measure ozone over eight hours.

    Industry challenges to the revised standards rose to the Supreme Court, which unanimously rejected the arguments in 2001 and allowed the E.P.A. to begin the multiyear process to determine which areas were in violation. On April 15, the agency will release areas in violation of the ozone standards. In December, it will announce which counties exceed limits for soot.

    A number of states contend that the revised standards are so strict that even if their counties drastically reduced their own air emissions, pollution from other states, notably power plant pollution that blows long distances, would still push them into violation.

    "There are counties that could take all their cars off the roads, close their factories and clean up their power plants and still not be in attainment," Mr. Leavitt said at a Senate hearing last month. To combat that problem, the agency has proposed reducing pollution from coal-fired plants in the eastern United States by allowing plants to buy and sell the right to emit sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, with a lowering of overall pollution limits over time.

    Almost 300 counties are expected to be deemed in violation of the revised ozone rules on Thursday. But about 200 neighboring counties will face restrictions because they are considered contributors to the ozone pollution in the counties that violate the rules. In all, about 160 million people will live in areas affected by the revised standards, up from 110 million affected by the old rules.

    Many states and locales are reviewing strategies that would intimately affect how people live — from cutting speed limits by 5 miles per hour, to discouraging house painting during summer months, to giving tax breaks to businesses that encourage telecommuting.

    "It will underscore vividly that almost all of our activities during the day directly or indirectly contribute to air pollution and smog levels," said William Becker, the executive director of the State and Territorial Air Pollution Program Administrators and the Association of Local Air Pollution Control Officials.

    States will have three years to come up with detailed plans on how they would reduce the two main ingredients of ground-level ozone: nitrogen oxides, which are emitted through combustion, and volatile organic compounds, gases that evaporate from gasoline and paints.

    Actions taken by some 30 metropolitan areas, including San Antonio, offer an early look at the kind of measures that will be adopted by states and cities over the next decade. These areas, which are in violation of the revised standards generally by slim margins, have signed agreements with the E.P.A. to reduce pollution early to avoid some of the regulatory consequences.

    In San Antonio, where tractor-trailers, Ford F-150 pickup trucks and chunky S.U.V.'s ring the city on the shimmering highways, local officials are looking for ways large and small to nibble away at air pollution.

    They are keen on maintaining a healthy-air designation, believing it helped them attract an $800 million Toyota plant last year while Dallas, a competitor, had additional regulatory burdens from clean-air violations.

    San Antonio has asked refineries to reformulate gasoline to lower car pollution. School districts have pushed the start of the academic year after the hottest parts of August, in part to reduce the need for air-conditioning and the pollution from electricity generation that produces it. Schools also are organizing students to walk to and from school in groups with parental chaperons to cut back on cars using the roads and idling in front of schools.

    Some companies are asking employees to bring lunch or eat in company cafeterias to cut down on traffic during the hottest part of the day. Some businesses are discouraging use of drive-through lanes, asking customers to park and come inside.

    "We are looking for small habit changes that people can keep up over a lifetime," said Dorothy Birch, who manages the ozone outreach programs for the Alamo Area Council of Governments. "There is no crumb too small."

  

THE AMERICAN LEGACY IN IRAQ

  
This will certainly test the new character limit, but it's so good i wanted to put the whole piece in the post, not even link to it.  it's today's TomDispatch from Tom Engelhardt.  if you're not reading Tom daily you're missing so much good stuff.  the rest of the post is from Tom.

Quotes of the week leading up to the presidential news conference:

"'I want heads to roll,' US President George W. Bush told top US officials here last week following the murder of four and mutilation of two American contractors in Fallujah." (Matthew Gutman, Analysis: Will rolling heads crush rebellion, or Iraq itself? the Jerusalem Post)

"'The fighting now is different than a year ago. Before, the Iraqis fought for nothing. Now, fighters from all over Iraq are going to sacrifice themselves,' said a Fallujah native who gave his name as Abu Idris and claimed to be in contact with guerrillas who slip in and out of the besieged city three and four times daily.

"He spoke in a mosque parking lot emptied moments earlier of more than a ton of donated foodstuffs destined for Fallujah -- heavy bags of rice, tea and flour loaded into long, yellow semitrailers by a cluster of men who, their work done, joined a spirited discussion about the need to take the fight to the enemy. They included a dentist, a prayer leader, a law student, a lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi police and a man who until 10 days earlier had traveled with U.S. troops as a member of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.

"'Our brothers who went to Fallujah and came back say: "Oh, God, it is heaven. Anyone who wants paradise should go to Fallujah,"' Abu Idris said." (Karl Vick and Anthony Shadid, Fallujah Gains Mythic Air, the Washington Post)

"'The situation in Iraq has improved,' Mr. Bush said, though he conceded that ‘it was a tough week.'" (David Stout, Bush, With Mubarak, Links Progress in Iraq to Mideast Peace, the New York Times)

"Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate. One senior officer said thatAmerica's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of ‘unease and frustration' among the British high command.

"The officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as untermenschen -- the Nazi expression for ‘sub-humans.' Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: ‘My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are.'" (Sean Rayment, British commanders condemn US military tactics, the [British] Telegraph)

"'My intent is to destroy Sadr's militia, absolutely destroy it,' said Col. Dana Pittard, commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division, which is leading the operation dubbed Operation Duke Fortitude. ‘And then to capture or kill Sadr. That is our mission. We're just waiting to be unleashed.'" (Jeffrey Fleishman and Edmund Sanders, U.S. Reclaims Major Roads in Iraq, the Los Angeles Times)

Unleash the dogs of war, they say, and this, it seems, our man in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, has done. It's been something of a magician's trick -- in the space of weeks, turning widespread inchoate feelings of dissatisfaction, disillusionment, and dislike into something akin to a national resistance movement. It's the sort of thing, like a hole in one, winning the lottery, or drawing a straight flush that you couldn't plan to do in a million years. A kind of mad miracle in reverse. And now, in prime time, our President gets up at his first news conference of the year -- it's only April, after all – to tell us again that "we're makin' progress"; that "now is the time and Iraq is the place in which the enemies of the civilized world are testing the will of the civilized world"; that "we're changin' the world" (you bet); that "the consequences of failure" in Iraq are "unthinkable" (and so he's suspended all thought processes); that we're not "an imperial country," nor are we facing a "popular uprising"; that we are opposed by only a "violent few" in a "relatively stable" Iraq which itself is but a "theater" in a global war against "The Enemy" (singular) whom we must never "appease"; and that with Saddam's fall The Enemy "lost an ally in Baghdad."

Is there any question that the "theater" we're in is the movie theater of the Bush administration's dreams and fantasies. I don't know about you, but I wanted to call out to the President who can't remember a mistake he's made or ever felt genuine responsibility for anything (though he's ready to "grieve" with the best of them), "Wake up, George, the movie's over. It's real people dying out there."

This is the man who, as the joke goes, was born on third and thought he hit a triple, and last night, before the nation, he certainly seemed not only removed from reality but eager indeed to remove Americans from the same. In his dreamworld, those Saddamist weapons of mass destruction clearly exist and the Iraqis, all except the odd terrorist, Baathist "remnant," and Islamist fanatic, love us to death.

While he talked of "negotiations" with the rebellious cleric Muqtaqa al-Sadr, he also managed to lay out a negotiating position that, as one commentator said afterwards, left Sadr remarkably little "wiggle room." (It's worth remembering that the "theater" we're in is a global one and, though it was the pre-dawn hours in the Middle East, his news conference was being carried live on Arabic TV networks.) He assured his (global) audience that there was "no safe alternative to resolute action," a phrase that managed to resonate with Operation Vigilant (or Valiant) Resolve, the partially suspended assault on Fallujah. (There are now, by the way, several harrowing, mutually confirming eyewitness accounts from inside the city, including a vivid description by Rahul Mahajan, who writes www.empirenotes.org, an on-the-spot blog from Iraq, and at the openDemocracy.net website by Jo Wilding whose last line is: "It's a crime and it's a disgrace to us all.")

So now we evidently await Operation Duke Fortitude. (In that bizarre name could there be a hidden reference to "Duke" of Doonesbury fame, who recently took control of his own comic-strip town in Iraq?) Who makes up these names up anyway? What "theater" have they been in for the last year?

Sooner or later, against all reason, against every "lesson" that should have been learned in this war (or, dare I say it, Vietnam), it's quite conceivable that Col. Pittard will be "unleashed" and sent into the holy city of Najaf to take out Muqtada al-Sadr and his relatively modest "militia" with, naturally (as Brig. Gen. Kimmitt, our military spokesman in Baghdad just loves to say), "precision." There are "negotiations" going on at the moment, but from the President on down, you can just feel the overpowering urge to bring force to bear on the situation. In this "theater" of war, we really don't negotiate, we smite. So just for the sake of argument, imagine if 2,500 marines, involved in a massact of vengeance without mercy against a city of 300,000 in response to an act of brutality by very small numbers of men, could generate a wave of sympathy and support throughout Iraq and the Arab world, what an operation of carnage inside Najaf could do?

Late in his news conference the President commented that "the legacy that our troops are going to leave behind is a legacy of lasting importance." The legacy to which he referred was "freedom," of course -- as in Operation Iraqi Freedom. But I was thinking about a line from a recent Washington Post piece by Pulitzer-Prize winner Anthony Shadid. He was describing Firdaus Square, where one year ago Saddam's statue was pulled down to such televised acclaim and which, on the anniversary, was off-bounds to Iraqis, deserted and guarded by American troops. He wrote of the guards: "Tanks stood vigilant with names like ‘Beastly Boy' and ‘Bloodlust' scrawled across their barrels." And I started to consider that legacy of which the President spoke.

In a sense, it's already laid out, name by strange name, military operation by military operation. "Resolve" and "fortitude" are mixed in, but also scifi names like "Operation Planet X." There are operations filled with "scorpions," "sidewinders," and "vipers"; operations filled with "iron" (hammer, justice, grip, promise); with mythical beasts like "bulldog mammoth" and cross-bred creatures like "ivy [could that be as in Ivy League?] serpent"; with the names of American Civil War heroes (Chamberlain, Longstreet); even with the name – "Red Dawn" – of a 1984 John Milius movie in which the Communists invade America, get bogged down in a quagmire war, and are finally destroyed by young American guerrillas. Remind me again, what theater is it we're in when we're in Iraq?

So it's true, as the President said last night; we already have a historical legacy on the record -- a legacy of sorts that begins with the name Operation Iraqi Freedom. Had the invasion of Iraq been more realistically named, it would have been called something like Operation Bush Administration Freedom to Act Any Way We Chose in a Foreign and Conquered Land. Symbolically, it's worth remembering that the American liberators/occupiers arrived largely without translators, or in fact Iraqis of any sort, and felt free to inscribe any names of their choosing on Iraqi reality. But, of course, reality has a way of striking back, of -– sooner or later -– breaking through.

Here, then, from an administration whose first and last principle is force, or the threat thereof, is our legacy in shorthand and in their own words. Tom

Operation Planet X (May 15 2003)

Operation Peninsula Strike (June 9 – 12, 2003)

Operation Desert Scorpion (June 15- , 2003)

Operation Scorpion Sting

Operation Spartan Scorpion

Operation Sidewinder (June 29 – July 7, 2003)

Operation Soda Mountain (July 12-17, 2003)

Operation Ivy Serpent (July 12, 2003)

Operation Ivy Needle (August 26, 2003)

Operation Longstreet (September 2003)

Operation Chamberlain (October 15, 2003)

Operation Sweeney (October 15, 2003)

Operation Ivy Cyclone (November 7, 2003)

Operation Ivy Cyclone II (November 17, 2003)

Operation Iron Hammer (November 12, 2003)

Operation Bulldog Mammoth (December 4, 2003)

Operation Red Dawn (December 13, 2003)

Operation Iron Justice (December 18, 2003)

Operation Rifles Fury (December 21, 2003)

Operation Iron Grip (December 24, 2003)

Operation Market Sweep (January 13, 2004)

Operation Saber Turner II (February 2004)

Operation Trailblazer (February 2004)

Operation Suicide Kings (March 17, 2004)

Operation Iron Promise (March 24, 2004)

Operation Vigilant Resolve (April 7, 2004)

(With thanks to Nick Turse for research aid and to the invaluable military information website www.globalsecurity.com where, to find this list of operation names, click here) 
 
 

TEMPORARILY INCOMMUNICADO

because it's raining, and raining and raining and raining - has been for days, will be for days - our phone lines are out.  this somehow always happens in a lengthy rainy spell like this.  so, i can't use the computer at home.  right now i'm at the library for a moment, trying to read some news and commentary online.  i don't know how long this outage will last, so just wanted to let the journal world know i'm in techno purgatory.  not any other kind.  i'm feeling much better as the days go by.  better living through chemistry, as the patron saint of Delaware - the DuPont Co. - used to say.  i'll be posting as soon as the phone lines dry out. 

WE WON'T EAT THE CAT!!!

Okay, here's the girl.  we won't be eating her after all, i made it to the supermarket and stocked up up.  this is Molly Katzen, she's fifteen years old, has the same birthday as Dr. M.L. King and my nephew Robert.  she's the best cat i've ever had, and i've had aplenty.  you knew i was just kidding about eating her, of course you did.  but i just wanted to reassure you in case.  after the article on AOL's opening screen this morning about the seal hunt in Canada i didn't think it was too funny to joke about Molly.  i'm changing my mind now about moving to Canada if the Reps win the election.  maybe Costa Rica, an extremely environmentally conscious country where i could still speak the language and maybe even find employment teaching English. 

SOMEWHAT IMPROVED VERSION

a week of rest, of anti-depressants and sleep sedation, which included a weekend of holding Charlotte, Ben and Alexander's grubby little hands while we trudged around NY: seeing sights, playing in Central Park, eating in China Town, telling stories, singing songs - has at least enabled me to stop crying.  mostly.  so, that's good.  it really is.  we came back home to DE last night, back to unremitting rain, the grass growing uncontrollably as deep puddles cover the entire back yard.  i spent today mostly reading, dozing, my cat cuddled next to me.  soon i'll even be able to face grocery shopping on my own.  i better, or we'll be eating the cat.

i also finally turned on the computer to see what's happening in the real world, and the journal world.  i'm hopelessly out of the loop.  but i want to thank you, my darling imaginary friends (which is what Tank Gurl calls those of us who are virtual friends, having never met in person, but who have grown close through journals, emails, IM, the virtual forms of communication) for all the comments, emails, comix, cards, words of wisdom, understanding and commiseration that i found waiting for me.  it's pretty amazing to have such a community of friends whose support and caring is no less real because i've never seen your faces or heard your voices.  your spirits, your presences, are so very real, and so very appreciated. 

the world goes on, the war, escalating death and suicide rates in Iraq, the lies, the billionaires not paying taxes, the astonishing facts with which we now live.  maybe we all read the same journals, but if you don't regularly read Progressive Musings you're missing a damn good thing.  Duane took the mercury issue and ran with it.  this entry gives you the scary in-depth accounting of how this horror came to pass.  why are impeachment proceedings, for any one or ten of the ten thousand possible reasons, not underway this very moment, as i type?   well, i'll be back on board the journal train soon, i think.  i've got to do a lot of reading all over the place in the coming days.  looks like it's going to rain my whole spring break, so the grass will just have to grow while i read and sleep, do t'ai chi, try to feel more like a whole person every day.

WILD GEESE

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
      love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imaginiation,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
                                       -Mary Oliver (from Dream Work)

GO ASK ALICE

On a more personal note than usual, though i guess i've been kinda building up to it - my situation of the past few posts has been more than a blue mood, or a minor down period.  i've been subject to depression most of my adult life, often been on medication, usually in therapy.  i dropped my meds late last summer, because my insurance won't pay for it, and i felt fine.  over the ensuing months i've been feeling less and less fine, but able to generally keep it together.  for the past couple of months i've only been barely able to keep it together long enough to make it through the teaching week, then spend the weekend collapsed in helpless uncontrollable sobbing.  the past few weeks the sobbing has been trying to break through into class time, and yesterday i lost the battle.  i had to leave the campus, after making a complete fool of myself, and drove straight to my doctor's office.  she called G at work and had her drive me to the mental health facility in Dover, where she wanted to hospitalize me for a while. 

i convinced the assessment team that i wasn't going to put my head in the oven, and that it was too far for a daily drive for "day hospital."  so, i'm at home with a lot of meds, about to go take some, and zone off into zombie land.  they all agree that not sleeping is a large part of the current problem.  as well as the simple fact that my brain chemistry is such that i just need nice little pills to make it through the day/night/life.

there's no tragedy, no sorrow, no factual explanation for this.  it's organic in origin, and organic compounds will, im sha allah, given time to take effect, take care of it.  an improved version of me should be around soon.  in the meantime, i'm not going to do much blogging.  all the news results in, yes, sobbing, and commentary is impossible.  i do believe that paying so much attention to what's happening in the political realm has been a contributor to my collapse.  it's idiotic to be this fragile, but we are what we are. if i'm in any shape to do it, G and i are planning to go to New York for Passover/Easter weekend.  her sisters, nieces, one son and his kids, will all be gathered there for a big family Seder.  which hasn't happened in a long time.  i hope to be able to make it.  so, now, i'm going to go see the white rabbit and take a pill.

peace be with you all.

AL FRANKEN!!!!

if you read my yesterday's entry you know that, 1. i'm in a serious bad funk, and 2. i went to see a filming of Jeopardy in D.C. yesterday afternoon.  the Jeopardy taping is the more interesting topic - because, it was two "Power Play" shows they were doing, featuring celebrities playing to raise money for charitable causes, AND one of the celebs on the first show was...AL FRANKEN!!!  you can't imagine how excited i was to see him on that stage - the stage, BTW, was in the DAR's historic venue:  Constitution Hall. 

he was smart and funny and crazy, playing to raise money for the Congressional Hunger Project, and he made that first show a delight.  of course Alex Trebec mentioned Al's new radio gig, gave it a good plug.  now MoveOn is helping publicize Air America, and according to an email yesterday they and Al have a contest going for us all. from that email:  "One of the big aims of this new radio network is to counter the claims of right-wing politicians and media figures. When a major right-wing figure says something misleading or something so full of holes it can only be described as dumb, Al Franken and other Air America hosts will call them out on it....

We can help them out. We're teaming up with Franken on a contest to find the stupidest or most clearly false (or preferably both) statement by a major right-wing figure or Bush administration official. Over the next week, any stupid or misleading comment you hear on the radio or see on TV is fair game as an entry. If your comment is selected by Al Franken as the winner, you'll receive a personalized and autographed copy of Al Franken's book "Lies and the Lying Liars that Tell Them," and you'll be recognized on-air."

what fun, eh?  we just keep doing what we do naturally, and we can win Big Prizes, well, okay, Al's book. go here for more info on this contest. 

JEOPARDY

it's been one of those weeks when everything makes me want to leave the planet.  the world news, the White House news, environmental fact-finding,  my own classes, the weather, my bank account, the fact that the cat urped a hairball on the kitchen floor and i stepped in it first thing.  you see what i'm saying?  everything.  a week when i have felt 150 years old most days, and ready to be finished with waking up in the morning.  a dirt nap sounding better and better.  serious depression abounding.  so, today i'm doing something Completely Different, hoping to blast out of the hole i've been pounding myself into. into which i have been pounding myself. 

a friend called to say she had tickets to a filming of a session of Jeopardy, in Constitution Hall in DC today, would we like to go with her?   the weather is too crappy to do needed yardwork; i don't think the basketball games are on until tonight - why not?  i love Jeopardy, have often fantasized winning comparatively large sums of money by appearing on it someday.  except of course the categories would all be sports and science, not literature and geography and i'd bomb completely.  anyway, yeah, i've got to go take a shower and pull myself together and go watch other people win comparatively large sums of money on Jeopardy. 

in the meantime, here's something i thought was mildly amusing, it's in three parts, all of which are worth a grin, so keep going.  (i guess if i can still find something mildly amusing, i'm okay, huh? sort of?)

BUSHWOMEN

A few entries back i mentioned the feminist quandry presented by Condoleeza Rice.  seems i'm not the only one thinking about this.  in this article from In These Times (via Alternet), The Powerful Women Problem, Susan Douglas is talking about the same thing, starting with the prosecution and conviction of Martha Stewart ("a combination between showboating by federal prosecuters and good old-fashioned backlash."), going on to discuss a new book by Laura Flanders called Bushwomen.

She notes that "Team Bush has successfully used women, in cabinet positions and elsewhere, to make the administration seem female-friendly and egalitarian."   But, of the five female cabinet members she profiles, "only one has children.  The rest are simply unfamiliar with struggles faced by millions of mothers to juggle the demands of work and family.  All have 'benefited directly from feminism - the movement they now cast as women's enemy.'" 

Since the gender gap will be as important in this election as it was in the last (if not more so), Flanders wants women to look beyond the Cabinet window-dressing and learn what these Bushwomen (she begins with Katherine Harris, then devotes chapters to Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, AnnVeneman, Elaine Chao, Christy Whitman, and Gale Norton.) are really about.  Sounds like a good idea to me.