Marian's Blog

What George asked the Queen (in 1991)...

Mara sent me a piece in NYTimes this week, The Queen Visits the White House, in which the  author reflects upon Bush the younger's curious behaviour sixteen years ago in the very same White House. On that occasion George found himself in the presence of both QE and his mom Barbara - "... when the first President and Mrs. Bush played host to their own state dinner for the queen. By several different accounts, including Mr. Bush's own, Barbara Bush told the queen that she had seated her son far away from Her Majesty, for fear he might make a wisecrack. Then, to his mother's horror, he did, telling the queen that he was his family's black sheep and asking, "Who's yours?"  The queen, apparently not amused, replied tartly, "None of your business." Ahhh... a refreshingly direct answer to a startlingly stupid question!

"Embedded" in Iraq

Recently GOP "maverick"(?) Colin Powell labelled the reality in Iraq a civil war. Knowledgeable journalists and others say what we see in the press does not begin to convey how bad it is. It's almost two years since my Jan 19, 2005 entry when I wrote about what to some of us already looked like a tragic, inexorable descent into hell. I contrasted it with George Bush's grand, lavish and self-congratulatory 2005 re-entry into the White House on the same day. Two years on I'm still trying to comprehend the U.S. media's "approach" to reporting Iraq and the kind of place it has become since Bush & Co.'s 2003 unilateral invasion.

This led me to search for the meaning of the term 'embedded' via Merriam Webster's dictionary online. As in "to have embedded virtually all journalistic coverage of Iraq inside the military". Here's what I found: "... to enclose closely in or as if in a matrix"; "to make something an integral part of"; "to prepare [a specimen] for sectioning by infiltrating with and enclosing in a supporting substance"; "to surround closely"; and the use of the intransitive verb: "to become embedded". How will journalists and historians chronicle this still-unfolding story of the way so many are covering Iraq?

The American assassinations, part 2 - 1964, 68: Malcolm, Martin and John's brother Bobby

On the Web I found a photo taken in Washington, at Richard Nixon's January 1969 inauguration. A notation says ten thousand people came out in the cold for this event. Two thousand were protesters. In the foreground, above the crowd, a young woman holds her handpainted sign. "PEACE IS NOT SUBVERSIVE". I read those words and forty years later they make me ask myself what exactly is different today? Is America a sleepwalking society? Quite often that's how it feels. I started blogging this thread, "the American assassinations", before reading that this week BBC News has alleged U.S. CIA involvement in the 1968 murder of Robert Kennedy. The report by Shane O'Sullivan appeared November 21, 2006 on BBC Newsnight. It is possible some in the US still really do not want to think of such things. The evening he was murdered Bobby Kennedy had just won California's Democratic Party primary and was on the verge of becoming the party nominee for president of the United States. How many of us ever stop to consider the implication of these multiple assassinations in the US? All the victims were male political figures and not one of them right wing. All this violence and death. The violent reversal of the politically possible. All in less than five years, from 1963 to '68. The Boomer generation. My generation. Multiple political murders shaped my generation of American youth. In the face of serial murders and assassinations, wouldn't coming-of-age somehow change? One devastating death followed by another and another. All in barely half a decade. All with deep social and political effects that remain today. Who talks about how these killings in the U.S. marked the baby boomer generation? Many of us weren't even 18 by the time we'd lived through all this. How many people, Americans and everyone, ever think about that? Had Robert Kennedy not been shot in the recesses of an L.A. hotel it is possible, even likely, he'd have become the 37th U.S. president. Is this the real reason he died? Indeed this 'alternate reality': had Bobby Kennedy been allowed to live, at the very least would have spared us who we got instead: Richard "I am not a crook" Nixon. Some of us remember -only too well- his other "name", "Tricky Dick". Tricky Dick Nixon. Before Robert it was his brother, our president, on a routine political visit to Dallas where he, too, was assassinated in November 1963. Fewer than nineteen months later it was Black American leader Malcolm X (Malcolm Little), shot so many times, by multiple gunmen, in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. It was Sunday, 21 February 1965. In Pennsylvania my family heard the news on our car radio. This moment in my parents' car stays frozen in my mind. A sunny, early Sunday afternoon, right after church. I am in the back seat as we ride. The news comes on the radio as we're stopped at the light at East Market Street, heading north on South Queen. So much violence. And then barely three years later Martin Luther King is shot and killed, Thursday, April 4th, in Memphis, Tennessee. Then Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles on June 8th. Two more American assassinations less than eight weeks apart.

Hope somewhere in our humanity: Hermann Hesse to Teilhard de Chardin

We're off to an outdoor concert of jazz - "Black classical music" (my term since my 1975 Penn State radio show). In the midst of what I witness and write about in this blog, each day I'm on my own search for 'what helps us' - me especially - to become more fully human. Among the people, thinkers, writers, etc. I admire, whose actions, utterances and writings have influenced me, is the late French writer - Teilhard de Chardin. I came across an archived article at WIRED (Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg, June 1995) on de Chardin and development of a "Net-based" global consciousness and how even 51 years after his death in 1955 de Chardin's thoughts connect to and continue to develop with this consciousness that's making itself real, as we Black Americans might say.

Misogyny, "the English disease"; and Julie Bindel in The Guardian

I noticed Julie Bindel's commentary in today's Guardian and just sort of exhaled, thinking "finally". Finally a British woman writing openly about something which has disgusted me for years, and in spite of my appreciation for much of what makes the UK the UK. What has disgusted me is the glaring contempt toward women that exists and is even rewarded among some British men; even to the point of murder (femicide) and serial murder. Over the years watching British news I kept seeing how it seemed like almost every few weeks some woman's or girl's remains were being sought or found. There are also the stories of UK male doctors and nurses with a penchant for killing mostly women patients. The first and last straw was my own experience working with certain - not all - male Brits. Finally when I fairly screamed about all this, a male close to me - and an Anglophile mind you - told me of "the English disease". I'd never heard it before he said it though I'd definitely felt "the English disease". My friend did not invent this string of words which refers to a profound antipathy among some men toward women. I would love to know who coined it; how this phrase came to be. Bindel writes forcefully in The Guardian: It is high time we start treating murders committed because of men's hatred of us, and, where no conviction is achieved due to the internalised misogyny of police, as being as serious as the Stephen Lawrence case. Stephen Lawrence was a Black teen murdered in London in 1993 by a group of young white men. In 2000 in London I met Stephen's mother. His killing was so poorly handled by authorities that all of it required another, far-reaching investigation. My own hope is someday soon one of us with a 'special' human sensitivity, and one that is not 'selective', will be able to explain to Britain and the whole world the type of antipathy which obviously links both.

"Great Society" Speech, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, Univ Michigan May 22, 1964

Friday, 22 May 1964 "... the "Great Society" is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor. ..." - Lyndon Johnson, 36th president of the United States of America

Back to Burning Women at the stake? South Dakota's move to end abortion & women's most basic freedom of choice

I am a 'pro-choice mom'. I am a mother (and Grandma) - I am a mother by choice and I am highly concerned over South Dakota's state government positioning itself for its assault on Roe v. Wade - the US law that gives women the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy. My guess is that with its large population of Native Americans and including Indian "reservations" (Native 'reserves' in Canada) such as Rosebud and Pine Ridge, hard-pressed American Indian women will be disproportionately affected. Monica Davey writes in her NYTimes article, "If enacted, the bill, the most sweeping ban approved in any state in more than a decade, requires the signature of Gov. Mike Rounds, a Republican, who opposes abortion." Well of course; just what we need. In South Dakota's long and racially exclusionary "racially hostile" political tradition, one more white guy awarded the reins of power who pretty obviously never had an abortion and never will need to even consider one for his own body, yet politically poised to run roughshod over thousands of women's (and other men's) lives. Read my lips. In the long run any effort that might ban legal access to safe and affordable abortion will backfire. It is not going to work. You can try to destroy Roe v. Wade, but women's lives, minds and our political organisation will not turn back to pre-1973. ...Come to think of it, not even pre-2003. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mike.

Liverpool, Slavery and The Beatles: Modern Black Atlantic History

"As we write the 20th century what is the role of the Beatles - four white guys from Liverpool UK - in modern Black Atlantic history?" I feel a sense of betrayal when I recall that in the 1960s and later American kids made quite wealthy a group of young men from a city called Liverpool. And in recent years scholars of American popular music and culture have discovered the high cost of the "Liverpool music" phenomenon to the careers and livelihoods of U.S. musicians - especially Black American R&B groups of the 1960s. More than that, I freely admit I was one of these 'ahistorical' youth, though in most respects I wasn't really ahistorical. We simply hadn't a clue about Liverpool's earlier role in deporting, shipping, trading and enslaving our ancestors and those of millions more African descendants in the Americas. I loved the Beatles' music. I bought their records. I saw A Hard Day's Night. My friend Angeline and I even took Paul and John (Angeline and myself, respectively) as alter egos. Don't ask why exactly, but we really were into it and in a way our respective choices were on target. I think very few people in America "put two and two together" back then. I would be intensely curious to know whether any historian or social critic in any country ever attempted to put into the broader Black Atlantic context various interpretations of the meaning of the arrival in the Americas of a group of young Liverpudlian men. In America, apparently, we young Black, Native American, White, Latino and Asian American youth had no idea we were part of a longstanding socio-historical process between the US and UK - a system which without doubt was postcolonial contrary to opinions of some current observers [see my note below on Deepika Bahri's exclusion of postcolonial experience in the US]. Point of history: Among other settlements, in 1607 English settlers founded the Jamestown colony (Virginia). Over in the UK did the Beatles or anyone else reflect upon all this? It seems that even in the late 20th century and on both sides of the pond we still were part of the uninterrupted Atlantic relationship that conspired to silence and 'not remembering'. In the US there had to be those who knew this history and yet they said nothing, let alone jog public memory and foster discourse. More than a few Black American youth - including myself - were buying Beatles' records, singing their songs, we watched them on Ed Sullivan and stood in long lines to pay them to get into their concerts. We never asked - nor did we have means to do so - what Ringo, Paul, George or John thought of Black people - Black Americans, Africans, African Caribbeans, African Canadians or Black British - and of our post-slave-trade societies. We never asked what The Beatles thought of our history or of their own or of their intersections. Nor did we ask what they knew or thought of Liverpool's wildly lucrative links to Africa and the slave trade. Fast forward to 2006. Like the October 2005 STAMP project on the docks of Lancaster near the Millenium Bridge, does Liverpool have a public memorial to the way this city constructed and equipped itself from wealth acquired through catching, shipping and selling captive Blacks? Do Paul McCartney, George Harrison or Ringo Starr, or Sean Lennon or Yoko Ono Lennon or the John Lennon estate for that matter even care that these roots formed the cornerstone of Liverpool history? It's been almost a half century since four young musicians from Liverpool arrived on the shores of America and received an unbiased and unprecedented welcome. In turn that welcome afforded them the means, if not the responsibility, to contribute and to help make our common future different and better than our common past.

What if FDR met Bush?

A curious thought crossed my mind recently. What might Franklin Delano Roosevelt have thought had he ever met George W. Bush and engaged him in, um, conversation? Possibly even one about public social policy. Can one imagine the elite but also seriously social justice activist (especially in her appreciation of Black Americans and especially right there locally in Washington, DC) Eleanor Roosevelt in the same setting with Laura Bush? Equally fascinating considering that FDR and G.W. Bush share the same East Coast American social class (and no matter how much others constantly spin Bush's 'nouveau working class-cattle ranch' socio-economic and geographic pretentions), President Roosevelt must've known - or at least at some distance - the reportedly rather notorious Bush grandfather, Prescott, who allegedly organised and provided material financial and industrial support to Nazis in Germany - until some branch of the U.S. government "intervened". Are those accounts true? So many questions, so few answers, so little public discussion.

2005: Thank you from me to you

Habari gani? Nia. Purpose. Today is the fifth of the seven days of Kwanzaa 2005. In this sense, Ron Karenga's official Kwanzaa website explains that purpose means "to make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community..." The older many of us get (and perhaps among people across the world), the more we marvel at some mysterious "space" somewhere 'out there'; the place to which months and years and decades and even centuries fly away. Miraculously, 2005 has now done the same thing. And twelve months from now we will already have lived the first five years or 5% - of this still-new 21st century (by "western" time). For me 2005 has been a most amazing year. We began 2005 celebrating Capo d'Anno (while in shock over the tsunami) near Alberobello, in Puglia, in Italia (Italy). Two years ago we ate, danced and celebrated with my Mother, at Muthaiga Club in Nairobi. I sense that for me this New Year's will be one that is more contemplative, and I would like to take this moment to thank God and family, friends, readers and other colleagues for helping to make 2005 as amazing as it's been. We look forward to wonderful and beautiful experiences to come in 2006, and even to some of those not so easy things along with the friendship, love and support we share with each other to get through them. Thank you, also, for reading this blog, Marian's Blog!

About those Diebold machines... A FL county elections head thinks votes were manipulated

Blogger and investigative reporter Brad Friedman writes that the elections director of the Florida county that includes the state capital, Tallahassee (that would be Leon County), says he believes there was "electronic manipulation" of votes in the state's year 2000 US presidential election results. More specifically, he alleges manipulation of some "certain" votes cast in Volusia County, Florida. How many more knowledgeable folk need to come forward on all this?? Friedman's own Brad Blog documents his detailed account of the ongoing struggle over votes, politics and democracy in the United States of America.

Frantz Fanon and France's Wretched of the Earth

I'm remembering the brother of a friend of mine from the Maghreb - northern Africa. Yes - Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Algeria and several other countries beyond are in and are part of Africa. My friend's older brother was killed some years ago - murdered it seems - in a small town in France; a town I visited. To my knowledge up to now no one has ever been arrested, let alone tried for this young man's tragic and unnatural death. I don't even have any idea whether French local authorities investigated the circumstances of his death. Last year in 2004, in spite of our collective efforts and dialogue at the 2003 European Social Forum (ESF/FSE) right there in France, in St. Denis and in Paris, there was precious little global recognition of France's history and responsibilities in Haiti during the 2004 bicentennaire - bicentennial - of the entire world's first modern Black republic. In spite of all this I maintain my love of France, though certainly not uncritically. I have lived and worked, struggled, learned and shared in France. Now national authorities have activated a state of emergency - un etat d'urgence - for the first time since Algeria's war of independence against France as European colonial occupier. There's a huge gap of both time and politics from 1955 to now. Yet not nearly enough has changed it seems. Coincidentally, the Bandung Conference in Indonesia also took place in 1955. Two of my blog categories are "Bandung+50" and "Wretched of the Earth?" I was very much influenced in choosing these themes by a person, a Black Frenchman and an historical cousin - another person of African descent from the Americas - named Frantz Fanon. Fanon authored two seminal works of "anti-colonial revolutionary thought, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), works which have made Fanon a prominent contributor to postcolonial studies." Fanon died of cancer in Washington, DC on 6 Dec. 1961. In 1964, after his death, his third book appeared in English as Toward the African Revolution. Black Skin, White Masks originally was titled, "An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks." The above quote is from Prof. Deepika Bahri's informative Fanon website. Bahri, from India, is associate prof of English and director of Asian Studies at Emory University in the US. Her site also notes British director Isaac Julien's 1996 film on Fanon - Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, available from California Newsreel. Read more of this post below...

FRANTZ FANON, MD (1925-1961):

Native of MARTINIQUE, Caribbean Americas

Hesse's "The European": France, Europe and Populations who do not know "their place"

In the midst of France's continuing social upheavals even Sweden's press is sitting up and taking notice, bringing some stark truths to the conscious level. Part of the problem is we don't know how long Europeans will let themselves publicly examine those truths. Victor Simpson's Associated Press article from Rome says political leaders and others in Europe are wringing their hands over the riots and fires in France. Yet Simpson also quotes an editorial translated from the Swedish newspaper Expressen. The last part of the quote is as clear as the first part is ambiguous. "We have difficulties accepting that people come to us from far away" [my emphasis added] ... "It is like the humble staff at a luxury hotel would suddenly take up quarters with their richest habitues. They should know their places, a dark undercurrent in the collective European consciousness says." Only major social unrest and, sadly, at least one death have now brought international attention to the permanently marginalised and invisible condition of many people of colour and immigrants in France. At the same time, this problem and this attitude in "the collective European consciousness" is not just in France and not only in Europe. Were he alive today what would German pacifist and author Hermann Hesse think of all this? His early 20th century essay, "The European", seems a logical and likely place to start. Hesse's essay is online here. [I've substituted my own link for the other that changed. - 24 may 2006]

Einstein's Black Friends: "Einstein on Race and Racism" by Fred Jerome & Rodger Taylor

Einstein on Race and Racism is written by Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor. This is their Preface to the book. "More than one hundred biographies and monographs of Einstein have been published, yet not one of them mentions the name Paul Robeson, let alone Einstein’s friendship with him, or the name W. E. B. Du Bois, let alone Einstein’s support for him. Nor does one find in any of these works any reference to the Civil Rights Congress whose campaigns Einstein actively supported. Finally, nowhere in all the ocean of published Einsteinia – anthologies, bibliographies, biographies, summaries, articles, videotapes, calendars, posters and postcards – will one find even an islet of information about Einstein’s visits and ties to the people in Princeton’s African American community around the street called Witherspoon. [emphasis added.]

"One explanation for this historical amnesia is that Einstein’s biographers and others who shape our official memories, felt that some of his “controversial” friends, such as Robeson, and activities, such as co-chairing the antilynching campaign, might somehow tarnish Einstein as an American icon. That icon, sanctified by Time magazine when it dubbed Einstein the “Person of the Century,” is a myth, albeit a marvelous myth. In fact, as myths go, Einstein’s is hard to beat. The world’s most brilliant scientist is also a kindly, lovably bumbling, grandfather figure: Professor Genius combined with Dr. Feelgood! Opinion-molders, looking down from their ivory towers, may have concluded that such an appealing icon will help the great unwashed public feel good about science, about history, about America. Why spoil such a beautiful image with stories about racism, or for that matter with any of Einstein’s political activism? Politics, they argue, is ugly, making teeth grind and fists clench, so why splash politics over Einstein’s icon? Why drag a somber rain-cloud across a bright blue sky? Einstein might reply, with a wink, that without rain-clouds life would be very, very short. Or he might simply say that a bright blue sky is a fairy tale in today’s war-weary world.

"Yet, despite Einstein’s clear intention to make his politics public – especially his anti-lynching and other antiracist activities – the history-molders have seemed embarrassed to do so. Or nervous. “I had to think about my Board,” a museum curator (who doesn’t want his name used even today) said, explaining why he had omitted some of the scientist’s political statements from the major exhibition celebrating Einstein’s one hundredth birthday in 1979.

Hurricane WILMA Roaring toward Yucatan and South Florida

The US national hurricane center - based in Miami - is one of the best places I know to get latest info on hurricanes present and past. Only two days ago I warned weather scientists were tracking a new tropical depression in the Caribbean. I think it was #24 of the season. Now it's been named Wilma. Hurricane Wilma. Between then and today Wilma went from a depression to a tropical storm, and then overnight since yesterday from a Cat. 1 hurricane to the biggest, baddest Category 5 storm in tracking history. Haiti and Jamaica have already been hit. Central America seems about to be. This storm is currently on track to come aground somewhere along Mexico's Yucatan peninsula near Cozumel and over the coming weekend it may consume South Florida. That information and the course of this storm could change, which is why we need to pay attention and share information. If you have details to share about this storm and what's happening currently, please add them here as a comment. Between natural disasters and everything else going on all over this planet, around the world populations most likely to be affected need as many of their own people as possible - children, adults, women as well as men - to have the most appropriate and well-conducted disaster training and preparation that can be made available. I don't know all the parties out there responsible for things like this. But I do believe someone reading this does.

Shirkat Gah women's NGO earthquake relief

Pakistani women's resource centre Shirkat Gah is another NGO involved in earthquake relief and will appreciate your help. They are also associated with the JAC joint committee group mentioned in my last blog entry, and this info is from the same item on the website of Women Living Under Muslim Laws. Shirkat Gah is based in Lahore (Pakistan) and the centre coordinator is Ms Farida Shaheed. Ms Shaheed advises that "Gulnar" at Shirkat Gah is the contact person or "focal point" for quake relief and she can answer questions. My advice before contacting them: keep in mind how swamped these folks must be. Gulnar's contact is: gulnar at sgah.org (dot) pk. Shirkat Gah has some good strategic advice on how to collect and send humanitarian assistance funds. This would apply to sending almost any donation. "If you are sending [relief assistance] money to Shirkat Gah, please email Gulnar to inform her of the amount, date and reference number of the remittance, so that we can email you to acknowledge receipt. We will send you updates whenever possible... bank transfer is best, rather than sending bank drafts and international cheques which take too long to clear. It would also be better for one person or group to collect money from friends or family to send in one go, rather send small individual transfers since the bank deducts too much money per transaction. Some Pakistani banks with overseas branch[e]s may agree to transfer the money without bank charges. At least some are doing so in the United Arab Emirates. Shirkat Gah's office in Peshawar is working with others in that area to deliver direct assistance to one particular village. If you want to support that effort, then please inform us." Send contributions to:

Account name: Shirkat Gah Women's Resource Centre
Account No. 3582-050996-001
SWIFT code: SCBLUS33, ABA CHIPS UID 057048
Standard Chartered Bank
1 Evertrust Plaza, Suite 1101 (11th floor)

Jersey City, New Jersey 07302 USA

With instructions for onward telex / swift remittance to:
Standard Chartered Bank
Karachi, Pakistan
Account No. 3582-050996-001 SWIFT CODE: SCBLPKKX
For further credit to:
Shirkat Gah
US$ Account No. 05-5307597-79
Standard Chartered Bank
New Garden Town
Lahore, Pakistan

NGO Sungi - Sending Help to South Asia Quake Survivors

Uh, note to Typepad admin: I have no idea where my earlier draft went but this is the second and final time I'm writing this entry... Obviously 2005 has been a helluva year for natural & "other" disasters. My "other" category includes certain disasters that arguably are largely 'masculine-made' yet which could not be executed without varying levels of indifference, tolerance &/or support from some women. In the Americas right this moment meteorologists are monitoring "tropical depression #24" of the 2005 hurricane season; #24 is potentially another future tropical storm &/or hurricane currently dumping tons of rain on Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. I'm checking the Women Living Under Muslim Laws website for a variety of other issues, including their take on sending aid to South Asia quake survivors. (Whether Darfur, Malawi, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guatemala, the Gulf Coast or Kashmir, I prefer to think of people as survivors and not just victims, and those who sadly have not survived are now sheltered in the hand of God.) WLUML's website advises: "... Pakistani human rights organisations in the Joint Action Committee for Citizens Rights (JAC) have banded together for the relief work, with the NGO [nongovernmental (non-profit/non-lucrative) organisation] Sungi in the lead. Sungi has previous experience with relief work since they started with a flood relief programme some decades ago. The organizations in the JAC have long worked with local communities in the region of the earthquake and are thus able to access remote villages through social networks that are not available to the military and large donor organizations. ..." Makes sense to me; so, alongside other options you have, you may want to consider contributing to the JAC combined relief effort directly by sending funds to the Sungi NGO:

Sungi Development Foundation

www.sungi.org
US Dollar account no. 412-2
Branch Code: 0585
MCB Start Branch Abbotabad
Swift Code: MUCBPKKAA

Katrinagate: "Has Katrina Saved US media?" Matt Wells for the BBC

BBC Viewpoint: Has Katrina saved US media? by Matt Wells, from Los Angeles. "As President Bush scurries back to the Gulf Coast, it is clear that this is the greatest challenge to politics-as-usual in America since the fall of Richard Nixon in the 1970s. But unlike Watergate, "Katrinagate" was public service journalism ruthlessly exposing the truth on a live and continuous basis. Instead of secretive "Deep Throat" meetings in car-parks, cameras captured the immediate reality of what was happening at the New Orleans Convention Center, making a mockery of the stalling and excuses being put forward by those in power. ..."

Katrina, the writing on the wall for the "laissez-faire nation"

"No coordinated effort" - John Zarrella, CNN. "An engineering nightmare" - Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco. -- For more than 30 years, Americans of conscience have been forced to watch as a well-heeled and amazingly connected clique has dismantled virtually all of our national responses to national problems. Everything (except funding) has been "left up to" - read: dumped on - our cities and states. The Gulf Coast disaster of Hurricane Katrina is no exception. This must be "states' rights" at their finest - the right to fend for yourself. Most US governors and mayors (who aren't also part of the "laissez faire nation" mentality) must be taking all this as a very, very sober warning. 

Superstorm catches Bush the bookless jock "by surprise" - Millions Now Pay Price

Americans have been lied to so much in the last six years. We are told George Bush can't be bothered - day after day after day- to speak with the mother of a dead 24 year old, even as "mainstream" US media tout the occasional scenes of Bush riding bicycles, grinning, swaggering, and chopping wood. The nation's attention is diverted by a much-hyped space flight - yet none in the mainstream media has the guts to ask - let alone utter - how many people lost their lives in Iraq this week, or how many more billions have just been spent on "Iraqi freedom" - even though supposedly the war ended over two years ago. Bush does not allow thoughts of either an impending hurricane season or something called global warming to ruin his day. And he doesn't read books anyway. Was Hurricane Katrina intensified by global warming?? And please - spare us the self-serving photo-ops of George Bush off the ranch - the so-called "Western White House" - just long enough to go stand among the ruins. The ruins in Mississippi will be perfect for this. You do realise Bush's pal, former Republican chair Haley Barbour "just happens" to be governor of Mississippi. My mouth just about dropped open when I saw his face yesterday on TV. Millions in Mississippi and Louisiana have been abandoned to fend for themselves, faced with illness, birth, death, thirst, flood, hunger, frightened animals including venomous snakes, darkness, insecurity and crime. And long-term homelessness. The list goes on. A doctor at LSU in Baton Rouge says as people cling to their roofs for dear life they are exposed to the Gulf air thick with mosquitoes, and West Nile fever outbreaks probably will come next. I am ashamed. The American people and the world are watching as the US federal government again abandons its responsibilities, both to its citizens and to humanity. And hurricane season is not over.

Srebrenica versus "political will": the tenth anniversary

I have this nagging question: whether the old robna kuca (department store) in the center of Srebrenica has been rebuilt yet, or if it's still there as a sad and enduring punishment. Live shots today on BBC, at Potocari, the site just before Srebrenica, the place where the killings occurred. We first arrived in Sreb in March 97, from Zvornik, for the meeting at the local municipal building, to prepare to do voter registration for the first elections after the war. The mosque was still there then - its minaret collapsed, lying across the remains of the building. All of that was cleared away quite sometime ago. At Potocari we inspected the old abandoned factory building Dutch UN troops had used as their base. A musty smell inside. Dutch names scribbled by hand across the walls give an air of desperation: peacekeepers' names and their divisions, as if organising themselves could ward off senseless chaos committed nearby. 8,000 in Srebrenica and almost million in Rwanda just 12 months earlier. Kofi Annan - and others - occupied well-paid posts at the UN during both events. The BBC journalist at Potocari ("poe toe CHARRY") today notes all concerned - the "international community" - now readily admit there was no political will. That seems very "white" of them. But even that 'admission' is a cop-out, and rather cynical in my book. What calculation did they make in their minds and careers and to their superiors and peers? How do they justify these failures? Did they calculate - correctly - that the world's public would tolerate slaughter?

For Claudia - Mexico, Memin, Blond eyes, blue Hair and Hermann Hesse, Part 2

A thank you to reader Claudia who wrote to offer an honest insight into part of what Mexican culture is like. In response to a fellow Mexican who can't seriously be described as 'eloquent', she wrote, "As if calling americans stupid engages you in any intelligent dialogue." And that's exactly what we'd like to shoot for in this blog: intelligent dialogue. As Claudia also noted, I did not and would not ever say that "all" Mexicans are racist or anti-Black and/or against Indian (native) people. The fact about we people of the Americas -- meaning those of us whose primary ancestry is some combination of African and/or indigenous Native Indian and/or European intertwined over the past 200-500 years - is the vast majority of us (who are not newcomers), regardless of region or country, are of mixed-race heritage. I won't go into all of mine again right here. And DNA tests are now easily available for all of us to take. But I do remember a Mexican American friend of mine, originally from Texas. She was 'typically' 'mestiza'-looking (indigena+ (Southern, dark) European), but she told me that her brother - also Mexican American, with the same parents - clearly looks more Black (African). As Claudia writes: "... do you not remember the saying in mexico when you marry a white mexican or a white US American or when your kid comes out "guerito" [meaning 'light' in skin colour] - "estas mejorando la raza" - "YOU ARE IMPROVING THE RACE." How totally idiotic... These days this phrase may be heard less often, but the thinking still is just about the same. 

Terrorism, Armed conflict, & "Women Living Under Muslim Laws" - WLUML

As far as I'm concerned - and from my own work in post-conflict situations - terrorism is a part of 'armed conflict.' Sadly, people who carry out violent attacks today make "innocent civilians" the target. The same in London as Darfur. Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) is an international organisation addressing some of the underlying issues of some types of instigated intolerance that breeds violence. Their International Coordination Office is based in London. Here's a link to WLUML's explicit Plan of Action against violence and col