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Tuesday, May 25, 2004

For Iraq, there are difficult days ahead that may appear chaotic, but do not fear

OK, go read Bush’s latest speech on Iraq.  Then read this (thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden for the link).

The first Mohammed Munim al-Izmerly’s family knew of his death was when his battered corpse turned up at Baghdad’s morgue. Attached to the zipped-up black US body bag was a laconic note.

The US military claimed in the note that Dr Izmerly, a distinguished chemistry professor arrested after US tanks encircled his villa, had died of “brainstem compression”.

Dr Izmerly’s sudden death after 10 months in American custody left his family stunned, not least because three weeks earlier they had visited him in the US prison at Baghdad airport. His 23-year-old daughter, Rana, recalled that he had seemed in “good health”.

The family commissioned an independent Iraqi autopsy. Its conclusion was unambiguous: Dr Izmerly had died because of a “sudden hit to the back of his head”, Faik Amin Baker, the director of Baghdad hospital’s forensic department, certified. . . .

The apparent murder of a “high-value” detainee, held as part of the search for weapons of mass destruction, is another blow for the Bush administration, still reeling from the Abu Ghraib jail abuse scandal.

Dr Izmerly was on the coalition’s original “200 list” of suspects from Saddam Hussein’s regime, and his death happened just two weeks after the US military began its own secret inquiry into the prison west of Baghdad. Last Friday the Pentagon admitted it was now investigating eight more suspected murders.

Several prisoners have been found to have died before or during interrogation. They include Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush, a former commander of Iraq’s air defences, who died last November during interrogation at Qaim.

The original US autopsy said he had died of a heart attack. It now appears he was suffocated during interrogation when a CIA officer put him in a sleeping bag and sat on him.

Last night the family of Dr Izmerly were in little doubt he had been murdered in US custody. The reasons for his death were covered up, they believe.

“This was not natural,” Rana told the Guardian yesterday, in the first interview given by the family since his death. “The evidence is clear. It suggests the Americans killed him and then tried to hide what they had done. I will hate Americans and British people for the rest of my life. You are democrats. You said you were coming to bring democracy, and yet you kill my father. By accepting your governments, you accept what they do here in Iraq.

“You offer no proof that he did something wrong, you refuse him a lawyer and then you kill him. Why?”

Why?  Because we like you!  As the President says, “Iraqis can be certain, a free Iraq will always have a friend in the United States of America.”

(Revised post, 8 pm)

Posted by Michael on 05/25 at 10:58 AM
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Wingnuts furious at Chalabi news

Chalabi Revelations Spark Outrage

American conservatives reacted angrily yesterday to recent reports that Iraqi exile and former Bush administration confidant Ahmad Chalabi has been plotting with Islamist mullahs in Iran, both to leak sensitive information about the U.S. occupation over the past year and, indeed, to induce the U.S. to embark on the occupation in the first place in the hope that it would oust Saddam and strengthen anti-American forces in Iran.

“This is an outrage,” cried Fox News analyst Morton Kondracke.  “The media need to stop spreading bad news about the war in Iraq, and go back to believing whatever our President tells us.  If he says that Chalabi is a friend of the United States who has valuable information on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, that’s good enough for me.  If he says that Chalabi is a dangerous man who is not to be trusted to tell you the correct time, that’s also good enough for me.  And if he says both things in the same week, I will believe them both.  I await further instructions from my leader.”

“Yep,” said a bleary, strung-out talk radio personality who spoke on condition that he remain anonymous.  “Thassa way it oughta be.  Jussa frat prank.  Britney Spears.”

The blogger known as Instagator promptly agreed.  “I’m just talking through an alternate orifice here, you know, not really thinking about what I’m saying or anything, but how long do you think that the freedom of the pressñ which never really existed prior to the 1960s anywayñ will be tolerated in the United States if the media keep trying to criticize the President and his foreign policy?  You know, just what if.”

Every other conservative blogger promptly agreed with Instagator’s prompt agreement.

Chalabi Revelations Spark Outrage

American conservatives reacted angrily yesterday to recent reports that Iraqi exile and former Bush administration confidant Ahmad Chalabi has been plotting with Bill and Hillary Clinton to defeat George Bush in November.

“This is an outrage,” cried Fox News analyst Morton Kondracke.  “As any sane person can see, Ahmad Chalabi has been working against American interests all along, and we need a full and complete Congressional investigation into how U.S. intelligence could ever have relied so thoroughly and so disastrously on a known scoundrel and double-dealer.”

“I don’t want to sound like one of the nattering nabobs of negativism,” said New York Times columnist William Safire.  “But is it too far-fetched to suppose that Chalabi was working with John Kerry to install Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket in 2004, and that he was also working with Hillary to have Kerry ‘disappeared’ not long after the election?  Perhaps, but then again, perhaps not.  All I can say for sure is that Hillary Clinton will be indicted, sooner rather than later.”

“Yep,” said a bleary, strung-out talk radio personality who spoke on condition that he remain anonymous.  “Thassa way it oughta be.  Fort Marcy Park.  Fort Marcy Park.”

Conservative bloggers promptly called for Hillary Clinton’s impeachment.

Posted by Michael on 05/25 at 03:39 AM
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Monday, May 24, 2004

Rip in space-time continuum

So this was my second consecutive weekend without Internet access-- in fact, my second consecutive weekend at an extended-family residence, and thus my second consecutive weekend without access to the outside world in any form.  Last week, it was the B�rub�-o-rama in the Tidewater area.  This time, it was Janet’s parents’ place near New Haven, where I wound up driving Janet and Jamie on Saturday morning after Janet woke up in our NY hotel with one of those blinding migraines.  This also means that I’ve spent two consecutive weekends trying to “help” family members with the unfathomable intricacies of their domestic affairs.  Like persuading my mother to plug in the shredder and begin thinking about the initial procedures for commencing to inaugurate the opening stages of how to plan to get rid of newsweeklies from the mid-1990s, and fixing my father-in-law’s lawn-sprinkler system so that it will not only run for 30 minutes every other day except during leap years in every other sunspot cycle, but it will also co-ordinate its CPU with that of his burglar alarm and call-blocking system, so that if an intruder breaks into their house and attempts to receive a call from a telemarketer, he will be promptly and embarrassingly drenched to the skin.

So I’ve been trying to catch up with the news this torpid Monday morning, and I see that George Bush has fallen off a bicycle, the U.S. has bombed a wedding party full of innocent civilians, leaving stone-faced Pentagon staffers to lie about the details.  I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.  Didn’t these things already happen last year and the year before?  (And check out that headline on the Hertzberg piece!)

This is really eerie.  Next thing you know there’ll be a disputed election or something.

Posted by Michael on 05/24 at 04:16 AM
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Friday, May 21, 2004

MLA Executive Council hockey blogging

Actually, I’m in my hotel in NYC, not in the MLA Executive Council meeting itself (which runs 9-5 today and 9-2 tomorrow), and I have but a moment or two for some crucial pre-finals hockey blogging.  The Flyers did a wonderful job of extending the series last night, and be sure to tune in tomorrow evening for what will be a terrific game 7 (which the Lightning will win 4-2 with an empty-net goal after a furious third period-- if you want a more specific prediction, let me know).  But can we pause for a moment to remark on the passing of an era?  Since my Rangers won the Cup in 1994 (I did not cry when the Berlin Wall came down or when Armstrong walked on the moon, but I cried when the Rangers hung on to beat Vancouver 3-2 in game 7), there have been no Canadian teams in the finals.  1994 was also the last year before the advent of the dreaded Trap (introduced by Jacques Lemaire when he was the head coach of the Devils), certainly the last year in which you would find two teams scoring a surreal eight goals in one period, as the Rangers and Canucks did in game 5 (the Canucks extended a 1-0 lead to 3-0, but then the Rangers scored three goals to tie it before giving up three more in the space of about two minutes).  Since then, the Cup has been won by four teams-- the Devils (three times), and the Three Western Powers (Detroit, Colorado, Dallas).  Well, that long decade is done.  Those four teams are calling for tee times, and for the Lightning and Flames, it’s all about speed, passing, and playmaking.  Settle in for a fast and furious final round, and don’t forget to tape the whole thing, because there won’t be any National Hockey League next year.

Posted by Michael on 05/21 at 11:44 AM
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Thursday, May 20, 2004

Please don’t kill me

On a more serious note, I hear that the great state of Texas is carrying on the Bush legacy, this time by executing a mentally ill man.  Now, I know this is no Abu Ghraib-- after all, unlike the unfortunates we rounded up in greater Baghdad, Kelsey Patterson seems to have been in jail for a very good reason.  But still, as CNN demurely puts it,

His lethal injection renewed the legal quandary of whether it is proper to execute someone who is mentally ill when the Supreme Court says it is unconstitutional to execute someone who is mentally retarded.

And before we take comfort in that Supreme Court decision, let’s not forget the spite and vitriol with which, two years ago, Justice “Benito” Scalia denounced the Court majority on that one.  As Benito put it:

the Prize for the Court’s Most Feeble Effort to fabricate “national consensus” must go to its appeal (deservedly relegated to a footnote) to the views of assorted professional and religious organizations, members of the so-called “world community,” and respondents to opinion polls.  I agree with the Chief Justice that the views of professional and religious organizations and the results of opinion polls are irrelevant.  Equally irrelevant are the practices of the “world community,” whose notions of justice are (thankfully) not always those of our people.

Got that?  Let’s go over it again.  There is no consensus against executing people with mental retardation, and evidence of national and international opposition to the execution of people with mental retardation is irrelevant to the case before the Court.

Anyway, I’m not sure that Texas governor Rick Perry realizes that his job is not done yet.  In Texas, remember, if you’re the governor, after you kill someone you’re supposed to make up stories about the person you’ve executed, and then mock them.

Brought to you by Compassionate Conservatives USA.

Posted by Michael on 05/20 at 09:25 AM
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Musical interlude

For my trip down to Norfolk / Virginia Beach last weekend, I borrowed / stole one of my son Nick’s CD cases—partly because I didn’t have time to go through my own CDs and pick music for the trip, and partly because I thought it would be a good time to catch up on what the kids are listening to these days, with their long hair and their electrical instruments.  (Nick turned 18 last month.) I know the rudiments—I’m familiar with the Vines and the White Stripes and Interpol, and I’m aware that the second anti-Strokes backlash is so over—but I just don’t have the time to keep up with lesser lights like And You Will Know Us from the Trail of Dead or British Sea Power, unless I have a few hours to myself in a car (or kind of to myself, while Jamie occupies the back seat with his own CD player full of the Beatles, the Pretenders, and Robert Palmer—I take all the credit for introducing him to the melodic and inventive Palmer of “Clues” and “The Ballad of Johnny and Mary").

Actually, it turns out that both these bands—Trail of Dead and British Sea Power—are quite good, despite their fondness for these humorously ponderous names.  I listened to the Trail of Dead through much of central Pennsylvania, then after jumping around through the happy pop of the New Pornographers and deciding that the Doves were ultimately too boring to follow, I switched to a couple of things Nick files under something like “ancient alternative” (I’m kidding—Nick doesn’t file anything under anything), namely, The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead and The Replacements’ Tim, neither of which I’d heard in its entirety in over a decade.  (I’m fascinated, by the way, at the continuity, or what’s passing for continuity, between good alt.rock bands 20-25 years ago and good rock bands now.  Thanks to this intergenerational alliance, it is possible for me to say to Nick, “if you like this you should also buy X’s Wild Gift,” or “you might want to pick up the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa” or “some people I trust really liked Sonic Youth, but I never cared one way or another” and for him to say to me, “British Sea Power sounds like one of your old bands,” by which he surely means “one of your old bands that did not suck.")

So, then, Tim.  Tim reminded me of a long-term, long-distance Replacements conversation I had through the 1980s and early 1990s with my friend and former bandmate Larry Gallagher, whom I’ve plugged here once or twice.  I’m more than familiar with “Hold My Life,” “Kiss Me on the Bus,” “Bastards of Young,” and so forth, so listening to them was like going to 80s Nostalgia Nite.  But I’ve always thought that Tim was an every-other-song record:  incendiary, brilliant stuff followed by self-parodic dreck followed by a gorgeous riff followed by stupid adolescent sneering, and so on.  I hadn’t listened to “I’ll Buy” or “Lay it Down Clown” or “Dose of Thunder” for twelve years or so, as a result.

That’s not to say that I listened to those songs on this weekend’s trip and realized for the first time their hidden charms.  Quite the contrary.  I was right the first time: they have no hidden charms.  Westerberg, in my humble opinion, always needed a sympathetic editor, someone to tell him that you can only open a song with a flourish and an ear-splitting scream once per record, and that it worked on “Bastards of Young” but not on the tuneless “Thunder.” Or to tell him that the premise of “Waitress in the Sky” makes him sound like an asshole (or at least like a drunken rock star complaining that the flight attendant won’t serve him champagne, and who doesn’t know that flight attendants, unlike waitresses, are actually trained in CPR) and that the melody is a note-for-note ripoff of the verses of the Harold Dorman song “Mountain of Love” (sent to # 9 on the charts by Johnny Rivers in 1964).  Westerberg’s occasional ripoffs were a problem for me at the time, fussy listener that I am, because I never knew what to make of a guy who titles a record Let it Be on which the catchy pop highlight, “I Will Dare,” is an uptempo version of the chorus of the Beatles’ “I’m Only Sleeping.” I mean, when I first heard this, I thought either he’s an ignoramus or a charming rogue, or some irritating mixture of the two. 

I was introduced to Let it Be shortly after its release by one Andy Bienen, whom I met in graduate school at the University of Virginia and recognized immediately as (a) a fellow resident of northeastern Queens, (b) a dark and brilliant wit, and (c) a charming rogue.  (Andy has since gone on to co-write the screenplay for Boys Don’t Cry, and thus to be thanked by Hilary Swank at the Oscars, which is something I can’t say about anyone else with whom I went to graduate school.) For most of the 1980s, the Replacements were one of the few bands that people cared about in both the circles I ran in—the post-punk scene in Charlottesville and DC, and the grad-school hothouse at the University of Virginia.  You could say that they had crossover appeal—between these two minuscule 20something constituencies, that is.  And for Larry Gallagher, Tim was It, as he told me in a couple of letters as he made his way from freelance writing / music in New York to freelance writing / music in San Francisco.  The Replacements’ followup, Pleased to Meet Me, he said, was terrific—but listening to it and trying to love it completely was like pretending you’re crazy when you know you’re not, whereas Tim was the real thing.

This kind of exchange, as many of you know very well, turned out to be part of the standard critical line on the Replacements: their Classic Period consisted of the years between Let it Be and Pleased to Meet Me, and all the fans who called them Mats (you know who you are) discussed among themselves which of the three was truly their best effort.  But we all agreed at the time, as Larry put it, that the Replacements were the present of rock and roll.

Some years later, in 1992 or 1993, I wrote to Larry to say that I’d been listening to the Replacements’ 1989 record, Don’t Tell a Soul (technically not their last—that would be All Shook Down—but effectively their last), and that I was surprised to find how much I liked it, especially given its word-of-mouth rep as a slickly produced, sellout version of Replacements pop.  There wasn’t anything incendiary and brilliant on it, true enough, and three songs stuck out as retreads:  “Anywhere’s Better than Here” (flourish, scream, yadda yadda yadda), “I Won’t” (plodding) and “Rock and Roll Ghost” (also known, by me, as “Here Comes a Regular—Again").  But the other songs were fresh (the entire first side—remember “sides?”—as well as “Asking Me Lies” and “I’ll Be You"); Westerberg had a better melodic sense than ever; and the lyrics were as catchy-clever as always ("take me to your followers”; “a rebel without a clue”—which later became a device by which you could distinguish genuinely clever lyricists like Westerberg, who toss off these things at the end of lines, from smug hacks like Tom Petty, who blow them up into concept albums) without going the Declan McManus route (that is, moving from early-Elvis Costello gems like “I know you’ve got me and I’m in a grip-like vise” or “I’ll do anything to confuse the enemy” to Serious Songwriter material like “Indoor Fireworks").  All in all, it sounded to me like more mature and less drunken Replacements, and for reasonably sober people over the age of 25, I thought this might be a good thing.

Larry wrote back and said this:

In the formulaic quality of the later Replacements stuff I hear the sound of someone “achin’ to be,” to borrow a phrase.  It’s a Groucho kind of irony, and one that reminds me of one of my favorite Mad magazine cartoons that I saw in a Don Martin anthology a million years ago.  It’s called “The Rejection Slip” or something like that.  It’s about this guy who has the world’s largest collection of rejection slips and is writing to Mad magazine requesting theirs so that he can complete his set and put it on the shelf.  He accompanies the request with some little drawing of himself and his set of rejection slips.  The editors of Mad reply that they loved his letter and would like to publish his drawings.  He writes back to them that he’s not really interested in contributing, and would merely like to have a slip.  Again he accompanies the letter with some funny picture of himself with his head sticking through a mailbox, awaiting a reply.  This exchange continues back and forth a few more times, with greater and greater accolades from the editors, until the guy finally decides to burn his collection and submits ten drawings for publication, which of course gain him the official, impersonal rejection slip that he had been looking for all along.  It’s kind of like that with Westerberg.  He’s saying, “I’m a bum, see?” and we’re saying, “You’re an artist.” Until he gives up and says, “Okay, I’m an artist” at which point we tell him he’s a bum.  Can’t blame the guy for feeling had.

I remember this (obviously, I kept the letter) for a reason, namely, it seems to me exactly right.  In fact, I can no longer think of Westerberg without thinking of Don Martin.  (And earlier in the letter Larry had even agreed me with about Tim, saying that “‘Dose of Thunder’ and ‘Lay it Down Clown’ are so utterly turgid that I forget they are on the album.") But there’s another reason, as well.  I don’t think the difference between Classic Period Replacements and Late Replacements is the difference between alt.rockers being true to themselves and alt.rockers falling all over themselves to try and cross over.  You can’t tell me that the guy who wrote “I Will Dare,” “Swingin’ Party,” and “Alex Chilton” doesn’t have pop instincts in his bones.  It’s just a shame that 1980s radio was such a vast wasteland, dominated by crap like “We Built This City” and “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” that’s all (which, by the bye, is a fine example of what Janet and I call Paradox Songs, like Orleans’ undanceable 1970s hit “Dance with Me,” insofar as there is no possible way for a person to have fun while listening to “Everybody Have Fun Tonight").  A decade later, post-Nirvana, it’s much likelier that the Replacements would’ve had the couple of smash hits they deserved, but that could only happen in the parallel universe in which Nirvana helps pave the way for the Replacements.  (And let’s not even get into the question of whether hardcore Replacements fans—let alone Westerberg himself—could bear the thought of the Replacements being rich and famous.)

Instead, I think the difference between Tim and Don’t Tell a Soul is the difference between a spotty, erratic, annoying but occasionally amazing pop-music bum / artist and a saner, more competent, more assured but less inspired or inspiring pop-music bum / artist.  And I think this is a significant—and psychologically revealing—kind of difference.  As if you’d rather date Tim but would feel better, all around, marrying Don’t Tell a Soul.  So, dear readers, which do you prefer?  And (for you over-40 types, like me) has your preference changed over the decades, one way or the other?

Posted by Michael on 05/20 at 08:54 AM
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