the enchanter's side notes, leftovers of mind, and the rest.
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
stradgirl's leftovers of mind, thoughts, and maybe... something of you
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Wednesday, September 26, 2001
The lucky star was with me, just not in the way I wanted it to be...
I'm going to end up revealing the truth, it's just a matter of WHEN
2:10 PM | I GOTTA talk to you about
this!
Monday, September 24, 2001
Today I'm calling the customer service office. Will the lucky star be with me? I'm scared.
12:58 PM | I GOTTA talk to you about
this!
Friday, September 21, 2001
I'm falling and falling and falling and falling, and falling...and falling and falling and falling.
Sinking into the deep water..
3:53 PM | I GOTTA talk to you about
this!
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
Limbs of no body -
World's indifference to the Afghan tragedy
By Mohsen Makhmalbaf
June 20, 2001
The Iranian
'If you read my article in full, It will take about an hour of your time. In this hour, 14 more people will have died in Afghanistan of war and hunger and 60 others will have become refugees in other countries. This article is intended to describe the reasons for this mortality and emigration. If this bitter subject is irrelevant to your sweet life, please don't read it...'
And of course, we will read.
http://www.iranian.com/Opinion/2001/June/Afghan/index.html
4:22 PM | I GOTTA talk to you about
this!
"Have we learnt our lesson?
Unless we learn what it is to be that bombed child - whether it be in Vietnam or Iraq - we learn nothing
by Studs Terkel
Guardian
Friday September 14, 2001
That which is called the impregnable Fortress America has been touched, and all the commentators and pundits are saying: "How dare they do it?" Now, in the midst of all the grief, unless we do what teacher says - put our thinking caps on - we won't understand. Einstein said that ever since the atom was split, the world has changed irrevocably except the way we think. Now we must think anew.
Peace is indivisible, the world is one and we are not the invincible guardians of the world we once were. For the first time we have been touched, and other people have been touched in different ways. Unless we learn what it is to be that bombed child, wherever that place is - whether it be Vietnam or Iraq or wherever - we have learned nothing.
Since the end of the second world war we have had 15 military adventures elsewhere. Our adventures were Vietnam, Iraq, Grenada - God help us! But these wars have been elsewhere. For the first time since the second world war, we have been affected, tragically and horribly. What have we learned?
Of course bringing the murderers to book is important, but we must learn that we are part of this world, and not Fortress America. The irony is - and this is Einstein's point - that the 21st century can be a tremendous one: we have all the advantages in medicine, in food production.
FDR, back in 1936 during the great depression, with one-third of a nation ill-fed, ill clothed, in poor health - that munificent big government saved our society. Our new religion is the free market - well, the free market in the 20s slipped on a banana peel and fell on its ass. I did a book on the depression, and I asked a prototype of Alan Greenspan, a top executive in the banking world: "What happened?" He said: "We don't know." We looked for some kind of announcement - the answer came from the government. Those who most condemn the government today - their asses were saved by big government. We are suffering what I call a national Alzheimer's disease. We have no memory of yesterday.
When it comes to this event - and it is all related, by the way - will we learn that we are now not invulnerable? Thus far, of course, there is hysteria in the air, and fury, and anger: no one has yet brought up the subject of the role we have played. There is an article in the current edition of Harper's in which we are compared to the Romans. But they did not pretend to do good, they were just conquerors. We are always doing good, we are always innocent. But we are always the ones looked on badly. Why? The question is: are we now thinking what has to be learned from this? I am on the air in a little while on public radio, and I may get into trouble too, telling them what I am saying. I have not heard one politician yet who said anything in the sense of what I am saying now. Not a one.
The second world war vets - well, you know how they are. Bernard Shaw said something on the lines of war being loved by old men as young men go to fight. But I think there is a feeling among younger people that maybe there is something else here to be learned. People have a hunger for a faith of some kind.
Before, in the cold war, it was communism. The Evil Empire is no more, so now it's terrorism. Now we come to the question: what is terrorism? But isn't dropping bombs on people you don't see and are told to do so for the sake of justice and honour - isn't that terrorism too? So that's the big question. Will we learn from this? I hope we will. But nothing of that sort has come through here.
We are part of this world, and as Martin Luther King said years ago, we live together as brothers or die together as fools. And this is precisely what Einstein was talking about. Have we learned this lesson? I don't know."
• Studs Terkel was talking to Peter Lennon. Terkel's latest book on Death will be published by Granta next month.
10:43 AM | I GOTTA talk to you about
this!
Tuesday, September 18, 2001
"Islam and the West are inadequate banners
The United States may too often have failed to look outside but
it is depressing how little time is spent trying to understand America
Edward Said
Sunday September 16, 2001
The Observer
Spectacular horror of the sort that struck New York (and to a lesser degree Washington) has ushered in a new world of unseen, unknown assailants, terror missions without political message, senseless destruction. For the residents of this wounded city, the consternation, fear, and sustained sense of outrage and shock will certainly continue for a long time, as will the genuine sorrow and affliction that so much carnage has so cruelly imposed on so many.
New Yorkers have been fortunate that Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a normally rebarbative and unpleasantly combative, even retrograde figure, has rapidly attained Churchillian status. Calmly, unsentimentally, and with extraordinary compassion, he has marshalled the city's heroic police, fire and emergency services to admirable effect and, alas, with huge loss of life. Giuliani's was the first voice of caution against panic and jingoistic attacks on the city's large Arab and Muslim communities, the first to express the commonsense of anguish, the first to press everyone to try to resume life after the shattering blows.
Would that that were all. The national television reporting has of course brought the horror of those dreadful winged juggernauts into every household, unremittingly, insistently, not always edifyingly. Most commentary has stressed, indeed magnified, the expected and the predictable in what most Americans feel: terrible loss, anger, outrage, a sense of violated vulnerability, a desire for vengeance and un-restrained retribution. Beyond formulaic expressions of grief and patriotism, every politician and accredited pundit or expert has dutifully repeated how we shall not be defeated, not be deterred, not stop until terrorism is exterminated. This is a war against terrorism, everyone says, but where, on what fronts, for what concrete ends? No answers are provided, except the vague suggestion that the Middle East and Islam are what 'we' are up against, and that terrorism must be destroyed.
What is most depressing, however, is how little time is spent trying to understand America's role in the world, and its direct involvement in the complex reality beyond the two coasts that have for so long kept the rest of the world extremely distant and virtually out of the average American's mind. You'd think that 'America' was a sleeping giant rather than a superpower almost constantly at war, or in some sort of conflict, all over the Islamic domains. Osama bin Laden's name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any his tory he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured at home for the first time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict, without clear borders, or visible actors. Manichaean symbols and apocalyptic scenarios are bandied about with future consequences and rhetorical restraint thrown to the winds.
Rational understanding of the situation is what is needed now, not more drum-beating. George Bush and his team clearly want the latter, not the former. Yet to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds the official US is synonymous with arrogant power, known for its sanctimoniously munificent support not only of Israel but of numerous repressive Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who have real grievances. Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on a hatred of modernity or technology-envy: it is based on a narrative of concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in the cases of the Iraqi people's suffering under US-imposed sanctions and US support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Israel is now cynically exploiting the American catastrophe by intensifying its military occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. Political rhetoric in the US has overridden these things by flinging about words like 'terrorism' and 'freedom' whereas, of course, such large abstractions have mostly hidden sordid material interests, the influence of the oil, defence and Zionist lobbies now consolidating their hold on the entire Middle East, and an age-old religious hostility to (and ignorance of) 'Islam' that takes new forms every day.
Intellectual responsibility, however, requires a still more critical sense of the actuality. There has been terror of course, and nearly every struggling modern movement at some stage has relied on terror. This was as true of Mandela's ANC as it was of all the others, Zionism included. And yet bombing defenceless civilians with F-16s and helicopter gunships has the same structure and effect as more conventional nationalist terror.
What is bad about all terror is when it is attached to religious and political abstractions and reductive myths that keep veering away from history and sense. This is where the secular consciousness has to try to make itself felt, whether in the US or in the Middle East. No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents, most particularly when only a small group of people are in charge of such actions and feel themselves to represent the cause without having a real mandate to do so.
Besides, much as it has been quarrelled over by Muslims, there isn't a single Islam: there are Islams, just as there are Americas. This diversity is true of all traditions, religions or nations even though some of their adherents have futiley tried to draw boundaries around themselves and pin their creeds down neatly. Yet history is far more complex and contradictory than to be represented by demagogues who are much less representative than either their followers or opponents claim. The trouble with religious or moral fundamentalists is that today their primitive ideas of revolution and resistance, including a willingness to kill and be killed, seem all too easily attached to technological sophistication and what appear to be gratifying acts of horrifying retaliation. The New York and Washington suicide bombers seem to have been middle-class, educated men, not poor refugees. Instead of getting a wise leadership that stresses education, mass mobilisation and patient organisation in the service of a cause, the poor and the desperate are often conned into the magical thinking and quick bloody solutions that such appalling models pro vide, wrapped in lying religious claptrap.
On the other hand, immense military and economic power are no guarantee of wisdom or moral vision. Sceptical and humane voices have been largely unheard in the present crisis, as 'America' girds itself for a long war to be fought somewhere out there, along with allies who have been pressed into service on very uncertain grounds and for imprecise ends. We need to step back from the imaginary thresholds that separate people from each other and re-examine the labels, reconsider the limited resources available, decide to share our fates with each other as cultures mostly have done, despite the bellicose cries and creeds.
'Islam' and 'the West' are simply inadequate as banners to follow blindly. Some will run behind them, but for future generations to condemn themselves to prolonged war and suffering without so much as a critical pause, without looking at interdependent histories of injustice and oppression, without trying for common emancipation and mutual enlightenment seems far more wilful than necessary. Demonisation of the Other is not a sufficient basis for any kind of decent politics, certainly not now when the roots of terror in injustice can be addressed, and the terrorists isolated, deterred or put out of business. It takes patience and education, but is more worth the investment than still greater levels of large-scale violence and suffering."
12:53 AM | I GOTTA talk to you about
this!
Sunday, September 16, 2001
"Brother, if you don't mind...[URL]
Take a look..
There's so much to read it's making me dizzy...
12:03 AM | I GOTTA talk to you about
this!
Saturday, September 15, 2001
Okay.......... just, a lot of things... almost all things look so insgnificant, meaningless and trivial right now. It's all changed, and it will be far from normal for a long, long time.
There are too many disturbing things.. I just really must watching T.V. because, it is all too personally disturbing.. I heard a woman crying for her daughter who had three young children at home, and.. they are without.. their mother...?
And there must be hundreds of those kids - orphans overnight. My dad was especially late from work tonight, and I can't describe how worried and almost upset I was every passing minute. To think the children were waiting for their parents who were never to return...
Too many kinds of horrible consequences, - I haven't spoken at all about this publicly because I just could not organize and put my thoughts into words...
It is impossible to stay focused on anything, I can't think or do anything else because, everywhere I turn there is again something about the tragedy... constant reminders everywhere, there's no-where to look, to escape to...
*sighs*
My friend Jonathan, who is in New York, is spending most of his time at an internet cafe.. watching movies online, the "total avoidance" reaction - it's just, too much.
Another thing that disturbs and worries me most is.. young school kids getting out their anger and aggression towards the wrong objects.. with their uneducated and ill-informed minds, I heard that at two high schools in my neighbouring town muslim kids were beat up. And, I'm sure there must be several similar accidents happening all over the country down in the states. It is the exact same spirit that motivated terrorism in the very first place, why are they becoming terrorists themselves?
11:33 PM | I GOTTA talk to you about
this!
Tuesday, September 11, 2001
I was awful efficient today.. hmph.
ARGH..
C***.. you do me GOOD.. :P
12:06 AM | I GOTTA talk to you about
this!
Saturday, September 08, 2001
It's strange how you suddenly become to resent someone you once adored so much..
It's a weird feeling. It is a very weird feeling... He told me to call, so I thought about calling him but decided not to, with the late time and all.. I don't have a phone card either.
I'll just let it flow.. on its own, I guess. Where will it take us?
It's a perversely unyielding, obstinate force that messes up my mind sticky. I can't seem to...
Oh well. It may as well be ... a kind of mindset that I have decided for myself.... I don't know. I'm trying.. I just don't want to see him for some time.. then we can become friends.
Bye bye...
12:15 AM | I GOTTA talk to you about
this!
|
|
| |
|
|
|
