Jessie Gugig, 15, said she could not believe the charges, especially against Mrs. Murphy, who was an accomplished gardener.
“They couldn’t have been spies,” she said. “Look what she did with the hydrangeas.”
Tags: oddments
“Fourscore and seven years ago, our “fathers”—with half the population excluded from the start—“brought forth”—with the dubious, always questionable assumption of “progress”—itself a value judgment about the meaning of history, which opens up the inherently dubious notion of “history” itself—“a “new” “nation”—a double double scare quote, with the claim of “new” at once instantly erasing the presence of all indigenous peoples and affirming the utterly questionable notion that anything can be qualitatively or authentically “new,” which again calls the very notion of “history” into question—and the word “nation” presupposing a commonality that may be nothing more than a kind of conspiracy of consent, a conglomeration of power meant to enrich the few and marginalize almost everyone else—“conceived”—privileging the idea that anything so questionable as a “nation” could be made up, as if out of nothing—“in “Liberty”—
Well, that’s just too much. We’re going to have to stop right here. We can’t even begin to get into “dedicated to the proposition”—we’ll let that pass—that “all”—“all”? Really? “men”—again—“are “created”—by whom? By what? For what purpose? To what end?—“equal.” Yes. Stop right here.
After the seminar
Greil Marcus, an editor of the New Literary History of America, in a piece called “Scare Quotes are the Enemy”
What Marcus’s parody captures about bien-pensant readings is their dainty horror at the discovery that people in the past did not think like Us. Which is odd in a generation that rabbits on about the Other. Texts are produced only to be decontaminated. It wasn’t us, cry the critics, we didn’t silence the Other. It was Them.
Tags: language and ethics, literature, politics
Tariq Ali’ s nostrum for Afghanistan: talks to include the “Chinese because they have investments there . . . the Pakistanis, Iranians, and the Russians.” Not, we note, the Japanese, to whom Hamad Karzai has just promised first crack at the minerals – which were discovered by the Americans.
Remind me again: why are Australians dying there?
Tags: Afghanistan, politics, Tariq Ali
The modern president is America’s shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He’s also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth.
This messianic campaign rhetoric merely reflects what the office has evolved into after decades of public clamoring. … Americans, left, right, and other, think of the “commander in chief” as a superhero, responsible for swooping to the rescue when danger strikes.
Gene Healy in the June 2008 issue of Reason.com.
Right now, Obama is expected to walk out on the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, extract the oil – if a vacuum cleaner can do it, so can the President – and hurl the damned stuff into outer space. (Aliens don’t vote.)
But this is only the first of three disquieting features of the current crisis. Americans ar confronted by a technological problem to which there is no immediate technological solution. This must be somebody’s fault, goddammit. Worse, the problem is oil, a substance worshipped wherever two or three SUVs are gathered together. It’s as if holy water turned into sulphuric acid.
We know what America does when foreigners threaten its oil supplies. The question now is what it will do to itself faced with this more intimate threat. Be very glad that Obama is in office. George W. would by now have annexed the Home Counties.
So is the US an “aggressive, war-mongering military machine” obsessed with spending on defence and plumping up its armed forces? Perhaps, the numbers say, not.
But you have to follow the charts quite a way down to see why. Compare this presentation with the one-line statistics in our newspapers – makes you groan.
Other highlights. The North Koreans have 24,728 people per 100,000 in what might be called the aggression business – soldiers, reservists and paramilitary. A 2008 census gave a total population of about 24 million of whom about half are children. It follows that about half the adult population are in the aggression business.
Then there’s Burma, which spends 26% of its GDP on the military.
Tags: politics, Social Issues
Is it just me? The bien-pensant stuff about Afghanistan keeps reminding me of pollyanna talk during the Cold War. The Russians aren’t so bad, after all those satellite countries, they have elections, a little bit of socialism wouldn’t hurt this country by the way and it’s obvious that we couldn’t possibly agree with anything whatsoever said or done by the Americans, so, so, well anyway, let’s have another drink.
Tariq Ali has decided that the only solution to the situation in Afghanistan is for everyone to pull out. All will be arranged at a conference:
. . . the Pakistani military obviously is a key player, and has to be part of the process of withdrawal, as have the Iranians, as have the Russians, the Chinese. These are the four critical players. The Chinese because they have investments there and their money is needed to rebuild the country; the Pakistanis, Iranians, and the Russians because they need to tell their supporters in this country, “We need a national coalition government in Afghanistan for ten years, we’ll disarm you, no violence will be tolerated, we’re going to rebuild the country.” That is the only way forward. I know it seems utopian at the moment.
No Tariq, what it seems is asinine, disingenuous and menacing. ‘No violence will be tolerated’. In Afghanistan? Exactly who will police that, and how? But then, this is the guy who in the same article tells us that the tribes who drove out the British only used their rifles for sport, if the wicked West had only let well alone, women in Afghanistan would have the vote, and the Russians were good for Afghanistan because they say they were and those neo-liberals won’t put a red cent into the country. So long as he can continue to hate Americans and anyone allied with them he doesn’t give a brass fuck about, for example, the Afghanis.
In particular, about Afghani women. But perhaps the assembled Chinese, Iranians, Pakistanis and Russians will take care of them.
Tags: Afghanistan, Tariq Ali, War in Afghanistan, women
