Reading notes

I knew the moment she came into widespread public view that I liked Teresa Heinz Kerry. As I learn more about her, that appreciation deepens. Judith writes a lengthy and fascinating article about Teresa’s life in The New Yorker:

Kati Marton, the author of “Hidden Power,” a study of modern Presidential couples (her husband, Richard Holbrooke, advises Kerry on foreign policy), believes that, whatever her liabilities as a candidate’s wife, “Teresa would be an enormous asset” as the country’s second foreign-born First Lady. … “At a time in American history when we have alienated so much of the world, Teresa, with her languages and her cultivation, could perform a real service as an envoy in a way that Jackie Kennedy or Hillary did,” Marton says. …

Yes, yes, that was one of my first thoughts, too.

Maria Teresa Thierstein Simões-Ferreira Heinz Kerry was born in Lourenço Marques on October 5, 1938. …

[Her father, a Portuguese-born oncologist] emigrated to Mozambique about the time Salazar seized power, and, having married a young woman from Lourenço Marques’s cliquish British colony, set up a practice in Manjacaze, northeast of the capital — an inland village that was a center of cashew-nut cultivation. …

[Irene] Thierstein [Teresa’s mother] was born in Mozambique to a couple who had immigrated from South Africa at the time of the Boer War. Her father was the scion of a Swiss-German family living on Malta, and her mother was the half-French, half-Italian daughter of an Alexandrian shipowner who traded with Russia during the Crimean War.

This multi-ethnic heritage fascinates me. How wonderful!

[Son Andre] calls Kerry his mother’s “kindred spirit,” though he adds that, while “John has a lot going on upstairs — he is thinking all the time, parallel processing — Mom is very intuitive. At the end of the day, she listens to her gut, and that’s why she is such a conundrum.” …

I’m desperate for a leader of whom it can be said “he is thinking all the time, parallel processing,” and if we can get intuitive input from Teresa as well, then we’re hugely better off, for now we have neither.

[via Melanie]

Frank writes concerning George W. Bush: Faith in the White House, an upcoming DVD that is “being specifically marketed in ‘head to head’ partisan opposition to ‘Fahrenheit 9/11.’” How I wish this movie were intended as satire, but I think its makers intend seriousness, whereas what they achieve (if Frank’s assessment is accurate) sounds pretty much like the dictionary definition of blasphemy.

This movie aspires to be “The Passion of the Bush,” and it succeeds.

More than any other campaign artifact, it clarifies the hard-knuckles rationale of the president’s vote-for-me-or-face-Armageddon re-election message. It transforms the president that the Democrats deride as a “fortunate son” of privilege into a prodigal son with the “moral clarity of an old-fashioned biblical prophet.” Its Bush is not merely a sincere man of faith but God’s essential and irreplaceable warrior on Earth. … As for the actual president, he is shown with a flag for a backdrop in a split-screen tableau with Jesus. The message isn’t subtle: they were separated at birth. …

“Will George W. Bush be allowed to finish the battle against the forces of evil that threaten our very existence?” Such is the portentous question posed at the film’s conclusion by its narrator … Anyone who stands in the way of Mr. Bush completing his godly battle, of course, is a heretic. Facts on the ground in Iraq don’t matter. Rational arguments mustered in presidential debates don’t matter. Logic of any kind is a nonstarter. …

The propagandists of “Faith in the White House” argue, as others have, that the president’s invocation of religion in the public sphere … is consistent with the civic spirituality practiced by his antecedents, from the founding fathers to Bill Clinton. It’s not. Past presidents have rarely, if ever, claimed such godlike infallibility. Mr. Bush never admits to making a mistake; even his premature “Mission Accomplished” victory lap wasn’t in error, as he recently told Bill O’Reilly. …

It’s not just Mr. Bush’s self-deification that separates him from the likes of Lincoln, however; it’s his chosen fashion of Christianity. … His view of faith as a Manichaean scheme of blacks and whites to be acted out in a perpetual war against evil is synergistic with the violent poetics of the best-selling “Left Behind” novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and Mel Gibson’s cinematic bloodfest. …

“George W. Bush: Faith in the White House” must be seen because it shows how someone like General Boykin can stay in his job even in failure and why Mr. Bush feels divinely entitled to keep his job even as we stand on the cusp of an abyss in Iraq. In this pious but not humble worldview, faith, or at least a certain brand of it, counts more than competence, and a biblical mission, or at least a simplistic, blunderbuss facsimile of one, counts more than the secular goal of waging an effective, focused battle against an enemy as elusive and cunning as terrorists.

Brilliant wordsmithing. Thanks, Frank.

I see no way to interpret this worldview other than Jesus’ warning is being fulfilled again in our hearing … and some went out anyway:

Be on your guard and be careful that you are not led astray; for many will come in My name appropriating to themselves the name Messiah which belongs to Me, saying, I am He! and, The time is at hand! Do not go out after them.

Steve captures what breaks my heart about all this (I added the link to further info):

Any time that religous people place their faith in secular authority, they are going to face severe disappointment. Because Bush is so religious that he almost never goes to church services. He uses religion as a tool, not as an article of faith.

The disillusionment, grief, and remorse at the damage being done in Jesus’ hijacked name, when it comes, is going to be overwhelming.

[via Steve]

Another view supporting the notion that “Republican” no longer means “conservative” — it means radical — and that voting Republican in the past is no reason to do so now. This from John Eisenhower:

As son of a Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, it is automatically expected by many that I am a Republican. For 50 years, through the election of 2000, I was. With the current administration’s decision to invade Iraq unilaterally, however, I changed my voter registration to independent, and barring some utterly unforeseen development, I intend to vote for the Democratic Presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry. …

The Republican Party I used to know placed heavy emphasis on fiscal responsibility, which included balancing the budget whenever the state of the economy allowed it to do so. The Eisenhower administration accomplished that difficult task three times during its eight years in office. It did not attain that remarkable achievement by cutting taxes for the rich. Republicans disliked taxes, of course, but the party accepted them as a necessary means of keep the nation’s financial structure sound.

The Republicans used to be deeply concerned for the middle class and small business. Today’s Republican leadership, while not solely accountable for the loss of American jobs, encourages it with its tax code and heads us in the direction of a society of very rich and very poor.

Sen. Kerry, in whom I am willing to place my trust, has demonstrated that he is courageous, sober, competent, and concerned with fighting the dangers associated with the widening socio-economic gap in this country. I will vote for him enthusiastically.

Me, too. I like courageous, sober, competent people in positions of authority. Those qualities are imperative now — we can’t keep going without.

Thank you, sir.

[via Atrios]

The newspaper U.S. presidential endorsements begin, this one of particular interest:

The publishers of The Iconoclast [Crawford, Texas] endorsed Bush four years ago, based on the things he promised, not on this smoke-screened agenda.

Today, we are endorsing his opponent, John Kerry, based not only on the things that Bush has delivered, but also on the vision of a return to normality that Kerry says our country needs.

Four items trouble us the most about the Bush administration: his initiatives to disable the Social Security system, the deteriorating state of the American economy, a dangerous shift away from the basic freedoms established by our founding fathers, and his continuous mistakes regarding terrorism and Iraq. …

The re-election of George W. Bush would be a mandate to continue on our present course of chaos. We cannot afford to double the debt that we already have. We need to be moving in the opposite direction. …

That’s why The Iconoclast urges Texans not to rate the candidate by his hometown or even his political party, but instead by where he intends to take the country.

The Iconoclast wholeheartedly endorses John Kerry.

Well done.

And a little sad in that — as I’ve always said I want George Bush to have a long, happy life out of office clearing brush in Crawford — a number of his Crawford neighbors would just as soon see him live somewhere else.

[via Maryscott]

I don’t deeply regret having been a College Republican for nothing:

On June 14, [Prof. Steven] Helmericks began the first session of General Sociology by introducing himself and the course. Helmericks said he believed the war in Iraq was unjust and that American troops were dying unnecessarily.

One student, Heather Schmidt, spoke up and said she did not appreciate his views because her husband was fighting in Iraq. Helmericks said he then told Schmidt that he appreciated her views and that he did not mean to offend her or anyone else. …

[Helmericks told Schmidt,] “‘If you are having trouble with what you’ve heard in today’s lecture, I think you’re going to have trouble with lots of things we’re going to talk about in this class, and there may be other sociology classes that might better suit your needs,’” Helmericks said. …

This reminds me of my seminary experience in which students stormed out of the room during Intro to Old Testament class — and never came back — because they weren’t prepared to have their beliefs challenged. The truth is, beliefs, like lung capacity and leg strength for a bicyclist, are strengthened by challenge and uphill climbs. Unchallenged, unexamined beliefs are about as strong and resilient as a couch potato’s lungs and legs as he suddenly jumps off the couch and onto a bike for a 150-mile tour.

Later in the summer Helmericks received e-mails from Chuck Fogland, president of the CSU College Republicans, condemning Helmericks’ actions in class.

Fogland said he intervened on behalf of Schmidt and other students who were being “harassed” by a “totalitarian” professor.

“It is narrow-minded, abusive and unfair, and it is wrong,” Fogland wrote to Helmericks soon after the incident. “In the interest of all points of view, (CSU College Republicans) will not tolerate stifling of debate.”

There’s a certain pathetic chutzpah in charging someone with stifling debate as you yourself are stifling debate.

Helmericks said the Aug. 13 Denver Post column sparked an unending string of threats. Helmericks said people began sending threatening e-mails and letters to his home, and he received hang-up calls in the middle of the night.

After presenting the information to the CSU Police Department, Helmericks met with Swanson and others in the College of Liberal Arts and determined that it was not safe for him to continue teaching.

This story, if accurate, is Reason #9997 why I will never vote Republican again in my life.

[via PatriotBoy]

I watched Naomi Klein on Thursday’s The Al Franken Show (Sundance). Her account of her experiences in Baghdad intrigued me, especially its imagery, so I read her September 2004 piece in Harper’s Magazine they were discussing.

Recommended: A long read but worth it.

I was also reminded of the most common explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint echoed by everyone from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: Iraq is mired in blood and deprivation because George W. Bush didn’t have “a postwar plan.” The only problem with this theory is that it isn’t true. The Bush Administration did have a plan for what it would do after the war; put simply, it was to lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies. …

The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war’s ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. …

In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. …

Here’s a tidbit not widely known: the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was staffed by U.S. children:

The Green Zone, the city within a city that houses the occupation headquarters in Saddam’s former palace, was filled with Young Republicans straight out of the Heritage Foundation, all of them given responsibility they could never have dreamed of receiving at home. Jay Hallen, a twenty-four-year-old who had applied for a job at the White House, was put in charge of launching Baghdad’s new stock exchange. Scott Erwin, a twenty-one-year-old former intern to Dick Cheney, reported in an email home that “I am assisting Iraqis in the management of finances and budgeting for the domestic security forces.” …

I have nothing against staffers my kids’ age (if I had any), but not in positions of authority that demand hard-won know-how from years of experience in comparable situations. Ideology, the apparent sufficient qualification in this case, is no substitute for experience. (I was a Young Republican at age 21, God forgive me; looking back, I see that I and most of the other YRs I knew would have been, in our know-it-all cluelessness, a disaster waiting to happen.)

With unemployment as high as 67 percent, the imported products and foreign workers flooding across the borders have become a source of tremendous resentment in Iraq and yet another open tap fueling the insurgency. And Iraqis don’t have to look far for reminders of this injustice; it’s on display in the most ubiquitous symbol of the occupation: the blast wall. The ten-foot-high slabs of reinforced concrete are everywhere in Iraq, separating the protected—the people in upscale hotels, luxury homes, military bases, and, of course, the Green Zone—from the unprotected and exposed. If that wasn’t injury enough, all the blast walls are imported, from Kurdistan, Turkey, or even farther afield, this despite the fact that Iraq was once a major manufacturer of cement, and could easily be again. …

Naomi concludes,

The great historical irony of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq is that the shock-therapy reforms that were supposed to create an economic boom that would rebuild the country have instead fueled a resistance that ultimately made reconstruction impossible. Bremer’s reforms unleashed forces that the neocons neither predicted nor could hope to control, from armed insurrections inside factories to tens of thousands of unemployed young men arming themselves. These forces have transformed Year Zero in Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons envisioned: not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded. These dangers are so great that in Iraq global capitalism has retreated, at least for now. For the neocons, this must be a shocking development: their ideological belief in greed turns out to be stronger than greed itself.

This further backstory to what was going on during these many tumultuous months in Iraq is consistent with much other international reporting I’ve read. Reading this, I observe again the radical disconnect between the perceptions of those who get their news solely from TV and the perceptions of those who get it from multiple international sources, primarily written ones. TV-informed U.S. perceptions I’ve encountered run along the lines of “We won in Iraq; why aren’t they grateful?” Well-read perceptions are more like, to craft a metaphor, “We attempted cultural rape on an intended victim who turns out to have the motivating fire and firepower to fight back, for as long as it takes, until the attacker retreats, bloodied and neutered. Would we not fight back with similar deadly determination if attacked?”

If this is a fair metaphor, I observe that courting and wooing works better. And also, if courting and wooing doesn’t work, that No means No.