Insubordinate in Albuquerque

Imagining an American spring and a movement to topple 1% rule

2012-02-12T12:24:00.000-07:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —Gross inequality in income,wealth and power in the United States is the defining issue of our time—aperiod in which the American empire is fast declining and the domestic economyis moving into uncharted, troubling waters. Whether these enormous inequitiescan be addressed without chaos may be determined by the strength of popularresistance, most notably the Occupy movement, over the next few months.

There are indications in the social and traditional news media of a resurgence in grassrootsopposition in the spring, certainly by May Day. And because the outrage is sowidely held, the forces of reaction, the combines of capital and theirpolitical and media front men, will be prepared.

Meanwhile, within the Occupy movement,which has framed the conflict as one in which the 99% vs. the 1%, there aredivisions surfacing over ideology, strategy and tactics. Chris Hedges, who hasbeen a prophetic voice of non-violent resistance long before Occupy Wall Streetlast September, recently offered a surprisingly shrill denunciation of blackbloc anarchists, who he called “the cancer” of the movement. The blackbloc’s willingness to engage in militant and sometimes violent direct actionjeopardizes the Occupy movement’s legitimacy in the eyes of the larger publicand invites violent state repression, according to Hedges. He alsocharacterized the anarchists as elitists unwilling to work cooperatively withother elements within the movement.

Hedges’ accusations drew an almostimmediate rebuttal from David Graeber, who has emerged as one of the movement’sleading anarchist theoreticians. Graeber claimed that Hedges wildlymisunderstands anarchism, has mischaracterized their efforts, and employs the“language of violence” in his denunciations. “This is precisely the sort oflanguage and argument that, historically, has been invoked by those encouragingone group of people to physically attack, ethnically cleanse, or exterminateanother—in fact, the sort of language and argument that is almost never invokedin any other circumstance,” wrote Graber. “To see this kind of languageemployed by someone who claims to be speaking in the name of non-violence isgenuinely extraordinary.”

“My first impression was that Hedgesis sensing the death of Occupy, and is looking for a scapegoat,” wrote MichaelMcGehee on his blog. Hethinks Hedges has failed the address the “elephant in the room,” which has beenthe Occupy movement’s inability to create the “structures” that can sustain thelong struggles, the vision, as well as the activist communities over time. The Occupy movement has wiselyrefrained from policy proclamations that can be easily appropriated and watereddown by reformists, but as McGehee argues new structures of cooperation must bebuilt in our neighborhoods and workplaces and the existing models ofcooperative enterprise like food coops, other retail purchasing cooperatives,credit unions, and worker-owned businessneed to be dramatically expanded. Without those structures, themovement will be even more susceptible to its greatest threat: the liberalreformists who are determined to suck the revolutionary lifeblood from themovement and channel it into package of cosmetic policy initiatives at the serviceof an Obama presidential re-election campaign.

“I think these movements reallyterrify the power elite and, in particular, the Democrats. One could argue thatthe greatest enemy of the Occupy movement is Barack Obama,” said Hedges in an interview published two days after his “cancer”essay.

In the short term, the success of the Occupymovement may be largely determined by how it chooses to engage the established order. It is strategic suicide to engage the 1% on the terrains in which they havean overwhelming advantage, any field of competition easily dominated by moneyor violence. Corporate and financial interests seeking a wholly subservientstate will always exponentially outspend the working classes, broadly definedas the 99%, in the mass media battles for hearts and minds in federal electoralcampaigns.

The scales are even more lopsidedif the terrain is one of violence. State security forces are armed to theteeth, loaded with sophisticated surveillance technology, and many of theirhandlers are salivating at the prospect of violent encounters with themovement. If anyonebelieves the state will show restraint in any serious challenge to itsauthority, I suggest they review U.S. labor history, which was as brutallysuppressed as any labor movement in the western world, or the Civil Rightsmovement in which many of the guardians of law and order used truncheons andunleashed attack dogs on women and children, while turning a blind eye onvigilantes who tortured and murdered activists.

This is a struggle that can be wonas long as the movement of the 99% accepts that broad-based support is fickle, shouldnever be assumed, and must be continually earned and organized. Lasting structural change can only be built from the bottomup, a proposition overwhelming demonstrated by Obama’s victory in 2008 and hisadministration’s subsequent failures, by creating new structural alternativesto replace the corrupt ones we will help to topple, and by strategicallyengaging the 1% on battlegrounds in which we can employ our superiorimagination and cunning.

Reconciling the preference for war by a 'peace-loving' nation

2012-02-05T10:21:00.000-07:00

Military veteran and anti-war activist Charles Powell at a
rally Saturday opposed to any U.S. military action against Iran.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Demonstrators in an estimated 80 U.S. cities staged rallies Saturday against the looming possibility of war against Iran, with about 50 gathered here in front of the University of New Mexico bookstore along busy Central Avenue.

War is increasingly the foreign policy of choice for political candidates and hate-mongers masquerading as news analysts, and the casualness with which war is discussed as a policy alternative is especially appalling when it takes place among men seeking to become the U.S. commander-in-chief. Let us assume that the candidates are smart enough to know what war means.

To support or advocate war is to accept that the majority of the people killed and maimed will be civilians. The dreams and desires of many non-combatants, mothers, fathers, children, and siblings, will be reduced to puddles of blood, regardless of how smart or sophisticated the weapons manufacturers claim their products to be.

To support or advocate war is to accept that most of the loved ones of the dead and damaged will hate the perpetrators for the rest of their lifetimes, that many will seek and support acts of vengeance, and that some will pass their thirst for revenge on to their sons and daughters. It is to acknowledge and accept that, even in victory, many of the warriors that followed your directives will be as physically and emotionally mangled as the victims, and that their trauma will also ripple through generations.

But that scenario assumes the candidates understand war beyond its depiction in film and video games, that they aren’t “chickenhawks,” who avoided military services themselves while having no reluctance to send other person’s sons and daughters to the front lines. And if they don’t understand the horrors of war, any war in any place, then they are not fit to run for national office.

The spectacle that passes for debates among the GOP presidential candidates is at times less about politics than about dueling masculinities, with each candidate trying to convince likely voters that he is a bigger, tougher bad-ass than his competition. This is just what American public needs in a president: someone so psychologically stunted that he behaves like a pre-teen boy bragging to his schoolyard buddies. I am waiting for the moment one unzips the fly of his pants to brag about the length of his dick.

Meanwhile, the incumbent president oozes gooey platitudes about peace and freedom while increasingly waging war with drones—killing “sanitized” by virtue of the triggerman’s distance from the target. But the far sadder reality is that the sanctimonious assassin, the schoolyard bullies in training, and the media cheerleaders of death on the sidelines could not exist without the passive acceptance of the American public, liberal and conservative alike, that war, the systematic pursuit of death and destruction, is somehow OK.

Searching for an AfPak peace proposal with legs

2012-01-20T19:18:00.000-07:00

Anatol Lieven, a professor in the War Studies Departmentof King’s College London, outlines what he believes are the essential elements of a settlement in "Afghanistan: The Best Way to Peace," a sober review of new releases in The New York Review of Books that includes:

Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–89 by Rodric Braithwaite
A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan by Artemy M. Kalinovsky
Killing the Cranes: A Reporter’s Journey Through Three Decadesof War in Afghanistan by Edward Girardet
Ghosts of Afghanistan: Hard Truths and Foreign Myths by Jonathan Steele
The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts,and the Failures of Great Powers by Peter Tomsen
Afghanistan and Pakistan: Conflict, Extremism, and Resistanceto Modernity by Riaz Mohammad Khan
Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability inAfghanistan by the US Department of Defense, available at www.defense.gov
Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field edited by Antonio Giustozzi
An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan,1970–2010 by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn. (due September 2012)

Levin’s latest book, Pakistan:A Hard Country, was published in 2011.

If you like desecration and rape, then keep voting for warmongers

2012-01-14T11:13:00.000-07:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M—If you like Marines pissing on the dead bodies of the “enemy,” then keep voting for the warmongers from both political parties who cavalierly advocate war as legitimate foreign policy. If you think raping women and children is a proper way to humiliate the enemy, then keep voting these warmongers into office because the worst human behavior occurs every day during war.

War is the suspension of all human kindness and decency, and while heroism can surface through the mud, the blood and the gore, there is nothing ennobling about war—those are the delusions and lies of the chickenhawks, the architects of death who never served in the military, and the pundits and politicians, who manipulate hate, fear and insecurity to serve their own self-interests. If war is hell, then those who champion it are its most vile demons, and any candidate who advocates war in the pursuit of political office has already proven that he or fit is unfit to serve.

There is no good war, and while a “just war” may be within the realm of human imagination, it will never, ever be good. That is the illusion of the pimply teen-ager spoon fed a cultural diet of murderous video games, films, and TV shows and poisonous rhetoric in a society desperate to rationalize its economic dependency on the industries of death.

If you want to guarantee wars in the future, wage them today, because most of the survivors will never forget what happened to their loved ones and they will seek revenge and pass that bloodlust onto their children. If you want to kill and main women, children and civilians, then wage war because non-combatants make up the greatest number of the casualties on the modern battlefields. And anyone who tells you that there is weaponry “smart” enough to distinguish between combatants and civilians is a liar.

If you think there is anything good about war, go talk to a veteran who has been on the frontlines and seen the horror or smelled its stench. Last night, I ran across an old friend, a Vietnam vet, who said the nightmares, the depression, and the bursts of tears associated with his post-traumatic stress disorder over the last couple of weeks are the worse he has experienced. The last U.S. troops left Vietnam 37 years ago.

If you find a battle-tested veteran who glorifies war, I got 10 dollars that says he or she never really saw combat or was psychologically damaged as a consequence. I remember when I was a pimply teen-ager asking my father, an Army combat veteran of World War II, why he never attended any of “patriotic” rallies in our hometown on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, or Veterans’ Day. He quietly turned to me and said, “Because there is nothing worth remembering about that time. I only wish I could forget all of it.”

Windows and Mirrors art exhibit to offer view of Afghan war

2012-01-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

The decade-long war as drawn by an Afghan student.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan, a traveling national exhibit featuring selected installations from 45 mural panels created by international artists and U.S. students, will be on display at St. Michael and All Angels Church, 601 Montano NW, from March 31 to April 21.

During the exhibit’s run, “there will be art presentations and educational opportunities for school age children, an interfaith prayer vigil on the Saturday before Easter, a political panel addressing War is Not the Answer, short plays and dramatic presentations, poetry readings, and opportunities for children and adults to create their own art if so moved,” according the event’s online site.

For more information, contact Judith Kidd, judkidd@msn.com, 243-6174.

Local march suggests global activism will continue into new year

2011-12-31T10:05:00.000-07:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —The New Years' Revolution March for Poor and Working People here Friday is another indication that the global groundswell of indignation against the privileged and corrupt elites of the world will continue into the new year.

The march through downtown Albuquerque was punctuated by symbolic stops and speeches that highlighted the diverse concerns of key importance to local activists. They included militarism, spiraling economic inequality, corporate greed, police brutality, particularly by the Albuquerque Police Department, homelessness, poverty and unemployment, human rights for immigrants and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered persons, the war on drugs, runaway incarceration rates, institutionalized racism, healthcare reform through a single-payer system, affordable housing and the crisis in home foreclosures, campaign finance reform, and the two-party stranglehold on electoral politics.

“They tell us we’re strange, right, because we want people to have jobs, food and houses. We want people to be healthy and have healthcare and that makes us crazy, right? Bullshit,” said Enrique Cardiel, a public health worker and organizer for La Raza Unida.

The march was organized by the Anti-Capitalist Working Group of Occupy/(un)Occupy Albuquerque and was endorsed by the Industrial Workers of the World, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Food Not Bombs, the Albuquerque Solidarity Network, La Raza Unida, Organizers in the Land of Enchantment, Southwest Organizing Project, Central N.M. Labor Council, Veterans for Peace, the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice, Stop the War Machine, Raging Grannies and the Gray Panthers of Greater Albuquerque.

U.S. blew chance to support popular uprising against Taliban

2011-12-30T19:21:00.001-07:00

Abdul Haq (right), born Humayoun Arasala, 1958-2001

The Afghan Solution: The Inside Story of Abdul Haq, the CIA and How Western Hubris Lost Afghanistan (Pluto Press, 2011), by Lucy Morgan Edwards

This long overdue work shows how poor intelligence by theUnited States and it subservient U.K. allies coupled with an uncriticalwillingness to accept the self-serving advice of the Pakistani military blindedthe Americans to a strategy that might have toppled the Taliban in Afghanistanwithout an invasion in 2001.

Instead, the United States pursued what has become itspreferred foreign policy intervention—war, which has dragged on for a decade, killedthousands, created enemies out of people who might have otherwise been allies,and generated popular support for the Taliban.

The lost opportunity was represented by Abdul Haq, thePashtun military commander during the anti-Soviet resistance and a bona fidenationalist with a record of working in alliance with Afghanistan’s diverseethnic groups, according to Edwards. Before the 9/11 attacks, Haq claimed thatlocal support for the Taliban regime was crumbling and that key sections of theAfghan military, many of which were led by his mujahedeen allies, were preparedto desert the Taliban and support a representative government. After the 9/11attack, Haq pleaded with U.S. and U.K. leaders not to invade Afghanistan,warning that foreign military intervention would backfire by consolidatingsupport for the Taliban. Two weeks after first U.S. strikes, Haq left Pakistanto launch his ambitious plan, but was soon captured and executed by the Talibaninside Afghanistan on October 26, 2001.

Edwards, a former political advisor to the EuropeanUnion, NGO worker, election monitor, researcher and UK press correspondent, convincinglyargues that the U.S.-led plan allowed the new Afghan state to become dominatedby ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks who were part of the so-called Northern Alliance,and largely shut out ethnic Pashtuns, who represent about 45 percent of Afghanpopulation. The one exception was Pres. Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun but one with little popular support,a profile that increased his dependency on western support.

The United States and its allies also welcomed into the government the non-Pashtun warlords, many of whom committed atrocities against other Afghans during the civil war that followed the collapse of the Najibullah government in 1992 and practiced a brand of fundamentalist Islam that rivaled the Taliban’s. Warlord support was rationalized as necessary for security by the United States, which re-armed them. These strategic choices created a corrupt state with little commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and human rights and little legitimacy in the eyes of most Afghans.

Edwards’ work is well-researched and benefits from her seven years in Afghanistan as well as her familiarity with Haq’s family, the Arsalas, the chief clan within the Ahmadzai tribe of the Ghilzai Pashtuns in eastern Afghanistan. Her knowledge makes the deficiencies of the book—many misspellings and grammatical errors and even a statement that Afghanistan has 24 provinces, not the actual 34—all the more inexplicable. Perhaps the errors are limited to the Kindle electronic edition, which occasionally reads like unedited galleys.

Rediscovering Vachel Lindsay

2011-12-27T17:33:00.000-07:00

Vachel Lindsay (1897-1931)

“Early in 1914, having heard a young and unknown poet perform in Chicago, W. B. Yeats approached him and asked, ‘What are we going to do to restore the primitive singing of poetry?’ That young poet was Vachel Lindsay. Yeats’ recognition of something unusual in the style of the performance was the beginning of a strange episode in American literary history,” writes T.R. Hummer for Slate.

“A native of Springfield, Ill., Lindsay began his career as a self-avowed “Poe crank,” an acolyte of William Blake, and a firebrand populist/socialist figure, who—unknown to a wider world, but well known at home, though not as a poet—handed out flyers to his neighbors, chastising them for their materialistic conservatism. An early poem reveals him in this mode:”

Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket

I am unjust, but I can strive for justice.

My life’s unkind, but I can vote for kindness.

I, the unloving, say life should be lovely.

I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.

Man is a curious brute—he pets his fancies—

Fighting mankind, to win sweet luxury.

So he will be, though law be clear as crystal,

Tho’ all men plan to live in harmony.

Come, let us vote against our human nature,

Crying to God in all the polling places

To heal our everlasting sinfulness

And make us sages with transfigured faces.

2011-12-24T11:09:00.000-07:00

Oaxacan girl on accordion singing and playing the song, "On my knees,
I ask." (Thanks, Enrique, for bringing this lovely video to my attention.)

Historians, activists still defining the legacy of Malcolm X

2011-12-23T17:41:00.000-07:00

Malcolm X with Shirley Graham Du Bois, by then
W.E.B.’swidow, in Ghana in 1964 after
Malcolm’s Haj pilgrimage.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,one of The New York Times best books of 2011, ignited debatealmost immediately upon publication.

Author Manning Marable, a ColumbiaUniversity professor who died soon after the book’s publication, said hislong-awaited work was generated, in part, because of inconsistencies and otherproblems he had with TheAutobiography of Malcolm X (1965),which was written with the assistance of Alex Haley. Malcolm’s early-lifecriminal past as “Detroit Red” was exaggerated to establish his streetcredibility and to create a more compelling life story, according toMarable.

On Dec. 29, Third World Press isscheduled to publish ByAny Means Necessary Malcolm X: Real, Not Invented, a collection ofessays designed “to continue, and to expand, the debate arising from ManningMarable’s biography,” according to its co-editors.

An onlineresource patterned on A Lifeof Reinvention is availableat The Malcolm X Project at ColumbiaUniversity.

City's easily forgotten dead remembered at annual homeless vigil

2011-12-23T08:39:00.000-07:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —There is no more damning indictment of American society than the presence of homeless men, women and children amidst such incredible wealth. “We should never accept that this tragedy is inevitable or intractable,” said the Rev. Trey Hammond Thursday at the 2011 Albuquerque homeless persons’ memorial vigil.

But each year since 1990, at the instigation of the National Coalition for the Homeless, activists in cities across the United States have organized memorials “to remember our homeless friends who have paid the ultimate price for our nation's failure to end homelessness.”

In Albuquerque, where vigils have been held for more than a decade, there were “68 documented deaths” of homeless men and women over the past year, said Hammond, “and there are invariably more.” The people forgotten while alive seldom get recognized when they die.

The dead were remembered at the downtown First United Methodist Chris with words and music, sometimes choked, often eloquent and always heartfelt. “The people that we lost, they were beautiful people,” said one speaker. Another concluded his recollection of a fallen friend with a moving a capella cover of the African-American spiritual “Wade in the Water.”

Earlier this month, a survey of 29 U.S. cities reported a 6 percent overall increase in homelessness. Requests for emergency food aid had increased an average of 15.5 percent, and 26 percent of those persons seeking help were employed, according by annual survey conducted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

The delusion that extreme poverty and homelessness is solely the consequence of personal failings, unchangeable human nature, is deeply embedded in popular culture. Yet the vast majority of all homelessness in the United States could be eliminated in a decade through a comprehensive public commitment that included affordable housing, a single-payer heathcare plan, and living wages for all workers. The belief that this is impossible survives by the assenting nods of persons unwilling to examine conventional wisdom, but the belief is also sustained, sometime zealously perpetrated, by the greedy and the indifferent.

On Thursday, the national Jobs with Justice coalition announced that it had chosen its “Scrooge of the Year,” none other than Rob Walton, chairman of Walmart’s board of directors. Walton’s estimated net worth is around $21 billion and his family, heirs to the fortune created by retailer Sam Walton, has a combined net worth is $93 billion. “The Walton family has as much wealth as the bottom 30% of American families combined – more than 35 million families,” according to Jobs with Justice.

“The family’s dividends from their Walmart stock alone are more than $2 billion/year. Just using their dividends, they could ensure that a million Walmart employees make at least $12/hour,” according to the coalition, which is not expecting a charitable turn from the Waltons. “Just last month Walmart, under Rob’s leadership, slashed health care coverage for hundreds of thousands of Walmart employees and their families.”

Homelessness and poverty will not be solved by charity. Charity humanizes the giver and acknowledges the flesh-and-blood and spiritual connections with the recipient. But charity without a commitment to justice, in this case, policies to correct gross inequality and restore the social contract our nation deserves, means this disgrace will endure.

Democrats enlist Hollywood to sustain the illusion of difference

2011-12-19T16:55:00.004-07:00

Image by the Anti-Republican Crusaders.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —You know the Democrats are desperate when they haul out a multi-millionaire celebrity, in this case, George Clooney, to make the case for a second term for Pres. Obama.

George Clooney is fine actor, but he has no qualifications as a political analyst with insight, but that seems unimportant to mainstream liberals and conservatives who look to comedians and professional windbags as news sources in a discourse largely dominated by emotions.

Clooney says we should stick by and stand up for the people we elected. OK, but what about Obama’s obligation to stand up for interests of the people who voted for him? Perhaps Clooney feels his loyalty has been rewarded. After all, he speaks from the vantage point of the most privileged 1%, which continues to benefit from policies developed for decades by both parties that have hurt, with varying degrees of severity, the other 99% of Americans.

Clooney then tries to imagine Obama as a Republican—not much of a stretch there—and how he might craft his re-election campaign pitch to the GOP faithful. I don’t think Clooney has much insight into the GOP because I doubt they would be moved his claim that Obama helped keep jobs in this country. If Obama wanted to court Republican support for a second term, his pitch would more likely sound like this:

You knew where I stood even before I took office. I supported the Wall Street bailouts even before John McCain did. I proved my loyalty to Big Money by appointing a team of financial advisors from the Wall Street “A” list. Wall Street has acknowledged my allegiance by dumping boatloads of money into my campaign coffers.

When push came to shove and the American people thought I might appoint someone who would seriously regulate the consumer lending industries, I pulled the plug on Elizabeth Warren.

I have stood arm-in-arm with you on the War on Terror and will approve National Defense Authorization Act, which now means we also have Congressional approval to kidnap anyone suspected of terrorism anywhere in the world and can hold them indefinitely without being charged with a crime or the cost of a trial. I didn’t close down Guantanamo Bay either, did I?

Postscript: Beinga celebrity member of the 1% doesn’t automatically determine your view ofreality, as actor Matt Damon illustrated in some comments recently reported by The Huffington Post: “I've talked to a lot of people who worked for Obama at thegrassroots level. One of them said to me, ‘Never again. I will never be fooledagain by a politician’ …You know, a one-term president with some balls whoactually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of the country, muchbetter.”

Support building for New Year's Revolution march Dec. 30

2011-12-17T17:22:00.000-07:00

Democratic desire erupted in Russia last week (wirephoto).

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —One way to usher in 2012 and build grassroots momentum for an American Spring is the New Years' Revolution - March for Poor and Working People on Friday, Dec. 30, starting at 1 p.m. at Robinson Park in downtown Albuquerque.

“We march to prove, not that we are capable of dreaming, but that we are waking up,” organizers said in a prepared release.

“This march is not only to show our strength, but to break ground on a lasting structure of solidarity to meet the needs of our community,” according to the Anti-Capitalist Working Group of Occupy/(un)Occupy Albuquerque. “We must start from the beginning—with connections between people who have the power to help themselves and others, who need only to organize themselves to begin the work of building a better world.”

The march has already earned the endorsement of city’s leading advocates for social and economic justice, including the Industrial Workers of the World, The Party for Socialism and Liberation, Food Not Bombs, The Albuquerque Solidarity Network, La Raza Unida, Organizers in the Land of Enchantment, Southwest Organizing Project, Central NM Labor Council, Vets for Peace, Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice, and Stop the War Machine.

The march route is being finalized and will includes several stops in the greater downtown, concluding at the point of departure, Robinson Park, at 4 p.m.

For Facebook users, the march has an event page.

A scrooge’s advice for taming the runaway Christmas season

2011-12-15T15:54:00.008-07:00

Billy Bob Thorton as Bad Santa (2003).

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —Okay, I am a bit of a scrooge with Christmas approaching. No disagreement, but even we scrooges are entitled to some suggestions on how to improve the bloated and drawn-out holiday season, which even its most fanatical adherents agree has lost its bearings.

For that reason, I’m not going to dwell too long on the commercialization of the Christmas, except to say that shopping locally and avoiding the retail giants, while it may produce some economic benefits, doesn’t address the deeper problem: We shop too damn much and spend too much. So, how about less gift-giving, say, limiting each person you care about to a single gift?

How about an agreement that Christmas carols can’t be broadcast on public airwaves before December 21? The winter solstice is also an auspicious day to initiate the ridiculously long holiday stretch from Thanksgiving through all of December to sometime in early January. (It isn’t called a “season” without reason.) The best lead-up to Christmas I ever experienced was in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a largely Muslim country still heavily influenced, at least in the north, by the Russian celebration of the New Year, which incorporates some elements of the Christmas, like Grandfather Frost, a dead ringer for Santa, and decorated conifer trees. Anyway, in 2007, I did not notice a single advertisement or public gesture about the holidays until about Dec. 21 or Dec. 22, which meant I wasn’t oversaturated by the time New Year’s Eve rolled around.

And once the assault of the Christmas carols begins, can a little discretion be exercised? Not every song about Santa, snowfall or sleigh bells is worse listening to. And just between me and you, is there a worse Christmas carol than “Jingle Bell Rock”? Your nominations will be gladly accepted.

Let us accept that Christmas is a holiday for children, as it should be. What that means is that adults who wear those silly-looking reindeer- and snowflake-patterned sweaters should give them to the children in their lives, and all those pins and pendants representing holly, mistletoe, or Santa’s elves should be removed and put back on the tree where they belong.

We could also remind the on-air media personalities that they don’t get a cut on the local mall profits so there is no need to harass us about holiday shopping or to convince us that we have some patriotic obligation to sustain the economy by guaranteeing the retailers’ profit margins.

Why not take a tip from the natural world, for which winter is a period of dormant restoration, and spend some time in quiet reflection? The early Christians weren’t trying to hoodwink anyone by celebrating the birth of Christ in late December. For them, Jesus was the Light of the World, so it only made good sense to celebrate his arrival at the time of year when the light of the world starts to lengthen after the shortest days of the year.

You see, I’m not totally opposed to Christmas. After all, it is the one time of year in which many of the most annoying pains in the ass try to be pleasant. Many, but not all.

Albuquerque homeless persons' memorial vigil, march 22 Dec.

2011-12-14T18:16:00.001-07:00

Rio Grande Valley State Park, south of Montano Bridge.

Join communities across the nation that gather on or around the first day of winter to remember those who passed away in 2011 while homeless.

Noon-1pm, Thursday, 22 Dec.: Gather at the memorial wall at Albuquerque Health Care for the Homeless, NW corner of Mountain and First NW

1 pm: Begin march through downtown to First United Methodist Church, SE corner of Fourth and Lead SW

2 pm-3:30 pm: Memorial vigil at First United Methodist Church

For information or to help plan the vigil, contact Lisa-H@nmceh.org or 505-217-9570

Flickering hope thumbs its nose at the specter of the end of time

2011-12-13T20:14:00.001-07:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —Human society is drowning, choking on its own wastes, having fouled the skies, all the waters, and the air, while the world’s leading polluters flee from the climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, after having done nothing.

The stench of end times is in the air.

O fears about the end of time have loomed before: the war to end all wars, a nuclear winter, a runaway Ebola-type virus, the shift into new millenniums, and its Judeo-Christian manifestations, the Rapture and the Second Coming.

Animals and plant species are dying, many into extinction, as forests and jungle are cleared, fields of ice thousands of years old suddenly melt, oceans rise, and the climate wretches and reels, as if in conscious revolt. Some projections about the extent of climate change that seemed dire at the time have already been exceeded. The planet will survive, though it may not be recognizable, or capable of sustaining human life as we know it.

The global economy is collapsing, at least for the people who produce the good and services of the world, while the owners and investors wallow in wealth beyond the wildest imaginations of the kings of queens of yesterday.

Murderous wars have become normative foreign policy. Enemies are increasingly manufactured to serve as cover for mega corporations and nation-states scouring the planet in pursuit of energy and other natural resources that they can privatize and sell. The U.S. military requires oceans of oil—a single gallon of fuel can cost between $200 and $400 by the time it reaches the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq—to fight wars that are justified as necessary to ensure access to natural resources like oil.

Here in the belly of the empire, the politicians, war junkies, and oligarchs thumb their noses at democracy and science, stoke hatred against the poor and the unfamiliar, and rattle sabers in support of new theaters of wars, starting in Iran and maybe Pakistan. If only our leaders were just corrupt, but they are so mean and stupid too.

Anxiety at the specter of the end of time has erupted into popular culture: the terminal storm that only Curtis LaForche, the young father, sees coming in the film Take Shelter, or the planet rushing toward collision with Earth and the well-to-do family psychologically disintegrating at their secluded estate in Melancholia.

Angst, despair has been simmering for years, across the globe. It has morphed into rage against the bullies and the indifferent who profit from the misery of others, who fleece the commons, and against the political mercenaries who rewrite the rules to favor the pillagers and are handsomely rewarded in return. The rage exploded earlier this year in Tunisia, then Egypt, throughout North Africa and the Middle East, in southern Europe, with the indignado, the movement of the indignant in Spain, and in Greece, in the insurrections of students in the U.K. and Chile, in the Occupy movement roiling in America, and it is rising now in Russia.

Buried within the rage, oddly enough, is hope—a palpable, flickering hope that the tide might yet be turned. It is a mature hope, not the childish variety that gets invested in a man, a person, a leader who will fix things for us, but a deeply felt hope that says only we, working together in ways that we maybe can’t even imagine now, can end this nightmare and create a world that is better, much better.

'Anarchist theory—use it or lose it,' advises Anarcho

2011-12-07T17:57:00.002-07:00

A helpful comparison for persons who already understand Marxist theory. By Anarcho, posted on the Anarchist Writers blog.

“Bakunin argued that a ‘popular revolution’ would ‘create its own organisation from the bottom upwards and from the circumference inwards... not from the top downwards and from the centre outwards, as in the way of authority.’ For Kropotkin, ‘new social forms can only be the collective work of the masses.’ ”

Against liberal reforms of the state:
“Nowhere has the system of ‘non-intervention of the State’ ever existed… The State has always interfered in the economic life in favour of the capitalist exploiter… And it could not be otherwise. To do so was one of the functions — the chief mission — of the State.”

“We want the mines, canals, railways handed over to democratically organised workers’ associations … We want these associations to be models for agriculture, industry and trade, the pioneering core of that vast federation of companies and societies woven into the common cloth of the democratic social Republic.”

Occupy movement well poised to withstand escalating repression

2011-11-29T20:18:00.002-07:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—The Occupy movement, as broadly defined as you want, has already demonstrated the ability to reshape consciousness through acts (and spectacles) of public resistance. That is very real political capital in the struggle to control the public imagination and cannot be underestimated.

However, the state/corporate alliance and its police take this movement very seriously and have arsenals of weapons at their disposal, starting with surveillance technology that can analyze virtually everything we say or do or write online. The internet has become “the most significant surveillance machine that we have ever seen,” said Wikileaks founder Julian Assange after receiving his native Australia’s highest honor for journalism. Every Face book, email or blog posting should be written with the understanding that it could be used against you in a court of law or during a police interrogation. And that’s not being paranoid.

Local police departments were infused with a surge of new weaponry and surveillance technology after 9/11 through Homeland Security initiatives, ostensibly to fight terrorism. There were all-out displays of fully armored tactical teams with automatic weapons and military vehicles at anti-Bush, anti-war protests in Albuquerque during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is standard operating practice for police and federal intelligence agencies to have informants pose as movement activists. Agent provocateurs can be directed to incite acts of violence for the sole purpose of providing a cover for a police crackdown.

Digital technology advances enable enhanced coordination among local police departments and national intelligence agencies. Naomi Wolf writes that the Department of Homeland Security participated in a conference call involving 18 U.S. cities in early November and advised on “how to suppress” to Occupy demonstrations, after which police violence against protestors and journalists in New York, Oakland and elsewhere ratcheted up a notch. According to Wolf, “when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence.”

State funding for repressing the Occupy movement is virtually limitless because, as history shows, private corporations will pay the police bills when necessary and hire their own paramilitary forces. Private security forces were deployed against protesters by the owners of Succoth Park, the privately-owned public space where the Occupy Wall Street resistance began.

If the movement can sustain or step up the resistance, repression will become more widespread and probably more violent. The good news is that the Occupy movement’s radical decentralization and its horizontal organizations make it collectively capable of withstanding heavy handed opposition. Clusters of resistance operating largely independently of one another are harder to penetrate and make predictions more for difficult for intelligence agents. The movement lacks a hierarchy that can be toppled and powerful leaders who can be neutralized or bought off. There are, it seems, plenty of reasons for optimism.

Threatening sky over wind-blown cedars in near North Valley

2011-11-27T20:35:00.003-07:00

On the north side of Alameda Drain east of Los Poblanos Open Space.

Fading sun over bosque canopy late afternoon in November

2011-11-27T20:28:00.002-07:00

Rio Grande Valley State Park on the west side of the river, north of Montano Bridge.

History advises caution for U.S. radicals in alliance with reformers

2011-11-20T06:33:00.004-07:00

Demonstrator at Occupy rally Oct. 15, Albuquerque.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Any movement that claims to represent the 99% of the U.S. population must be willing to work within a broad and diverse coalition, but any movement that ignores the ways in which liberals have historically turned on radical allies in an attempt to salvage their own mainstream respectability is courting disaster.

Let me be clear from the outset. I hold the Democratic Party as guilty as the GOP for institutionalizing inequality, wrecking the national economy and trashing the Constitution. U.S. electoral politics on the federal level, because it is so dominated by Big Money and two political parties with few ideological differences, not only fails to represent popular will but has become an enormous impediment to democracy. I have grown impervious to the lesser-of- two-evils defense of voting, an argument that expects me to believe that anything can good can come about by consciously choosing evil.

That said, I support the American Dream Movement’s 10-point contract, the policy reform agenda championed by MoveOn and its partners that calls for public funding for jobs and education, a national healthcare plan, campaign finance reform, an end to the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich, Wall Street regulation, and an end to foreign wars.

My concern is that the historical records show that when the shit comes down, when major repression is unleashed, liberal reformers will abandon and vilify their radical allies in an effort to gain the favor of the state, Big Business, and the right. For evidence, look no further than the two Red Scares the United States went through in 1919-1920 and 1947-1957.

In the first, on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the U.S. Justice Department in the administration of Pres. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, raided the homes of radical labor activists, socialist and anarchists, many of whom were recent immigrants. Thousands were arrested, detained and deported. On the sidelines, the lions of the respectable press, like The Washington Post and The New York Times, cheered their approval. In cities across the nation, laws were passed that curtailed free speech.

Three decades later, a few years World War II, U.S. political leaders, represented most visibly by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Wisconsin Republican, stoked Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union and orchestrated public fear into a “communist witch hunt” against anyone suspected of being “un-American.” Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, the Patriot Act of its age, which restricted civil liberties in the name of security, over the veto of Pres. Truman who called it a “mockery of the Bill of Rights.”

Then, in the middle of the black Civil Rights movement, the Democratic Party abandoned the Mississippi civil rights workers, including Fannie Lou Hamer, when they sought seats at the 1964 National Convention after courageously registering black voters over the violent opposition of racists and the openly segregationist Democratic Party.

The forces of the status quo (the investing class, the financial combines, the politicians they fund, and the mass media they own) are planning their attacks of this nascent movement as we speak. If the Occupy movement can sustain its momentum, police repression is likely to become increasingly brutal and sophisticated. Municipal and state police, particularly after the post 9/11 war on terror, have become highly militarized in terms of weaponry and surveillance capability. The rhetorical assault over the airwaves will be relentless. Recall the ways in which the Bush goon squad savaged anyone who questioned the intelligence it crafted in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. State rule typically requires enemies against which public support can be mobilized. Immigrants, communists, radicals, the criminal poor, and lately terrorists have filled that role in America and there is no reason to believe that will change anytime soon. Similarly, political radicals who seek systematic and not cosmetic changes have every reason to be cautious of liberal reformers who now claim to be their allies.

Understanding contemporary Afghanistan: two places to start

2011-11-18T16:58:00.001-07:00

Two policeman in Jalalabad, 1970.

The Afghanistan Analyst

The independent online resource developed by Christian Bleuer includes bibliography, news, blogs, reports, experts, government agencies, politicians, NGOs, embassies, and photography. The Afghanistan Analyst Bibliography, he explains, "is intended to be an up-to-date resource for studying and researching contemporary Afghanistan. The vast majority of sources included are from after the late 1970s, except for in the bibliography section on ethnic groups and, to a lesser extent, on Islam. I did not compile sources on linguistics, art, literature, pre-/mid-20th Century history or on the natural sciences (unless applied to resource management), and the sources on the Soviet-Afghan war are limited (a specific section on the Soviet-Afghan War may be added in the future).”

The Afghanistan Analysts Network

AAN describes itself as “a non-profit, independent policy research organisation. It aims to bring together the knowle dge, experience and drive of a large number of experts to better inform policy and to increase the understanding of Afghan realities. It is driven by engagement and curiosity and is committed to producing independent, high quality and research-based analysis on developments in Afghanistan.”

Rally for jobs reveals emerging attempt to direct Occupy movement

2011-11-18T10:01:00.003-07:00

Even from behind the message was clear: America Wants to Work.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—“Invest in Infrastructure” was the theme of the rally Thursday afternoon organized largely by MoveOn.org, the N.M. Federation of Labor, and the AFL-CIO, though some of the hundred or demonstrators who turned out at the intersection of Paseo del Norte and I-25 may have had additional motivations, like the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and the eviction of OWS protesters earlier this week by New York City police.

The police presence was heavy but quiet. At least two dozen marked vehicles assembled in the nearby Target parking lot. Officers in paramilitary gear stood away from the crowd, while a few uniformed police walked among the protesters.

While demonstrators in Albuquerque and elsewhere across the nation were calling for jobs creation and Wall Street reform, there are indications that there may soon be an internal struggle within the grassroots movement to determine who can best harness its energy and lay claim to representing the interests of the “99%.” Nationwide efforts to “Rebuild the Dream” are being coordinated by a new alliance of liberal and progressive organizations led by MoveOn, which is perhaps best known for raising boatloads of money to support Democrats in electoral campaigns, fueling the perception among many Occupy activists that the organization is too allied to the established order to represent their call for wholesale, systemic change. The new alliance, dubbed the American DreamMovement, claims a long and diverse list of partners, including labor unions, Code Pink, the Economic Policy Institute, the Hip-hop Caucus, Move to Amend, Planned Parenthood, Brave New Films, and groups trying to influence the Democratic Party.

The American Dream Movement has developed a “contract” to rebuild the dream that consists of “10 critical steps to get our economy back on track.” Those specific policy goals, which some members of the public have been clamoring for, include more public funding for jobs and education, campaign finance reform, an end to the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich, Wall Street regulation, and an end to foreign wars.

Interestingly, Working America, which is affiliated with the AFL-CIO, today issued its own set of eight “demands,” which are very similar to those of American Dream Movement but exclude the call to U.S.-led wars abroad.

The battle for leadership of the young movement appears to be shaping up.

Take Shelter evokes the anxiety that helped trigger Occupy movement

2011-11-16T11:21:00.003-07:00

Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) alone sees the approaching storm in Take Shelter.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Take Shelter, driven by Michael Shannon’s powerhouse portrayal of a brooding but devoted father, gives voice to the dread and the nightmares that have replaced dreamy optimism for many American families. The anxiety that is palpable from the opening frame of this painfully beautiful film is, in many ways, the same emotion that ignited the Occupy movement two months ago.

A vast, sometimes angry sky hovers over the everyday lives of Curtis and Samantha LaForche and their six-year-old daughter Hannah, who is deaf and awaiting implants. Curtis, a crew chief for a sand-mining company, sees and hears in the roiling skies terrifying signs that the predictable life his family knows in small-town Ohio is about to collapse. He has apocalyptic nightmares that he fears are visions of the future. He is afraid he is losing his sanity much like his mother did about the same age, before she fled her family.

“The audience watches LaForche's life and world fall apart in a film that is soaked with both supernatural imagery and the everyday American problems of losing a job and being unable to afford healthcare for your family,” writes Paul Harris. “The film vibrates with uncertainty and foreboding for the end of the American way of life.”

Director Jeff Nichols also wrote the script, starting in 2008, when financial industry failures wrecked the national economy. “Although both my career and personal life were on a positive track, I had a nagging feeling that the world at large was heading for harder times. This free-floating anxiety … mainly came from the fact that I finally had things in my life that I didn't want to lose,” he said. “I hope there is an answer to this feeling by the end of the film.”

The film was completed before Wall Street was first occupied on Sept. 17, triggering a national outpouring of similar protests against decades of corporate greed, burgeoning economic inequality, and indifferent government. For a long time before Sept. 17, I saw little evidence that would those trends would change. I was convinced that the American empire was in free fall and that the plutocrats, the 1%, would continue to loot the commons until it was spent. I was equally certain that there was insufficient public will in this nation to tackle the climate crisis that has already altered the conditions of human life on this planet—an ecological endtimes so effectively evoked in Take Shelter. The worldwide rage against injustice, which includes the Occupy movement, has restored for me some measure of hope that these fates might be avoided. For me, and, I suspect many others, this movement embodies much more than political protest.

But can the outcomes I feared for so long really be averted? I asked myself leaving the theater. Or have my sober expectations been deranged by a sudden infusion of unfamiliar optimism?

Upon hearing Kurt Elling

2011-11-13T15:11:00.007-07:00

His voice is not that of a singer fronting a band but voice as the lead instrument in a tight ensemble. That approach is essential to scat singing, which uses wordless syllables to communicate and utterances have sonic but not literal meaning. Elling scats very well, but he is a master of vocalese: lyrics written and performed, often improvised, as melodies, or to supplant instrumental solos.

His choice of material stamps him as an apostle of romantic love, the salvific kind that heals and makes whole. Elling is a true believer in the mold of Al Green, testifying to one of the most attractive (and wounding) ideas of modernity.

Jamming' the Blues, 1944 short, remains vital, beautiful

2011-11-13T10:48:00.001-07:00

This award-winning short film (about 10 minutes) knocked me out when I saw it for the first time during a talk on the legacy of saxophonist Lester Young (above) last month at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. The music and dance are outstanding and shot after shot is worthy of framing.

News media wonders why it can’t recognize the faces it has ignored

2011-11-12T20:50:00.001-07:00

Bank Transfer Day rally rally Nov. 4 in uptown Albuquerque.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Two months out, The New York Times is openly discussing its inability to understand and report on the national movement sparked by Occupy Wall Street. Public editor Arthur Brisbane shares some of the advice he sought and received from J-school professors, bloggers, colleagues and readers in his article, “Who Is OccupyWall Street?” Much of what he gives us is pedestrian, but there is one nugget:

Catherine Jones of Berkeley, Calif., suggested that The Times delve deeply into the historical backdrops of Occupy protest sites in locations — like the Bay Area and Boston — that previously have served as “historic incubators of movements for civil liberties, workers rights, racial justice, etc… In-depth reporting on the demographics, history and politics of particular cities/metropolitan areas might shed light on the sources and meaning of the Occupy movement.”

The Times admits to a deficiency in news reporting and analysis that is more pervasive in the dominant broadcast outlets that favor short “news” bursts of images and sound with little opportunity for history or context. This formula requires, for example, demands or policy statements that can be whittled down to sound bites or leaders who can be transformed into celebrities or brands. They are not readily available in the Occupy movement. Those absences are huge, bone-jarring potholes for an approach to news reporting that only wants to glide over the surface, searching for jingles and gestures, instead of unearthing the record of events and choices that created this moment in time.

As Jones suggests, the story of how the world’s wealthiest nation was plundered by the favored as well as the government and news media the few hired or bamboozled can be told in any American city. There are three decades of thick, rich details in any place, state or region; in each there is a cast of characters, some with familiar faces. Rampaging inequality, record bankruptcies and home foreclosures, frightening levels of unemployment are poverty are not acts of God or akin to weather phenomena, but the consequences of economic, political and social policies made by human beings with faces and names.

That’s not all the story. Amidst these tectonic socioeconomic shifts were many other people with names and faces who resisted their exploitation every step of the way over the same three decades. They weren’t always the same faces, some dropped in when others left while a few never ceased the struggle, but they organized and rallied and voted, committed quiet acts of sabotage and rebellions, and dared to question the rhetoric of inevitability. And their resistance was largely ignored, dismissed and derided by the mainstream media, so it is with little wonder that even the august NYT doesn’t recognize the rabble outside its windows today.

Enough! V (with touches of blue) at Bank Transfer Day

2011-11-05T17:41:00.000-06:00

An incarnation of V, one of two this morning, at an (un)Occupy Albuquerque demonstration that started at the Bank of America in the uptown area and marched along Louisiana Boulevard to the New Mexico Educators’ Federal Credit Union in solidarity with Bank Transfer Day, a national populist appeal developed by a 27-year-old Los Angeles art-gallery owner.

"V" and Guy Fawkes tied to Bank Transfer Day on Nov. 5

2011-11-02T12:06:00.002-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—The mask worn by shadowy insurrectionist "V" in the film V for Vendetta (2006) as well as countless demonstrators since then was based on Guy Fawkes, who was part of the failed “Gunpowder Plot” in London, England, in 1605.

The conspirators sought to blow up the British House of Lords, assassinate King James I, a Protestant, and replace him with a Catholic monarch, but were thwarted on Nov. 5, when Fawkes was caught with the stash of gunpowder. Nov. 5 was originally celebrated by the monarchy to commemorate the failure of the plot and soon became associated with anti-Catholicism, but Fawkes has since become a folk hero for many and Nov. 5 is now recognized with bonfires and fireworks as Guy Fawkes Day.

With a nod to Fawkes, Nov. 5, 2011, has been dubbed Bank Transfer Day in the United States and persons with accounts in any of the “too big to fail” banks are encouraged to transfer their funds to a credit union or a locally owned bank.

In defense of the preservation of Occupy's open space

2011-11-01T08:36:00.000-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—The discursive “open space” created by the Occupy movement is driving pundits and bosses of just about every political persuasion absolutely nuts. It’s almost worth the price of admission.

Critics are desperate for anything to discredit the Occupy movement. As soon as a policy statement is developed, the hegemons of public discourse will unleash their rhetorical weaponry to reduce the proposal, no more how sophisticated or reasoned it might be, into an emotionally saturated thought fragment that can force fit into one or more of the available binary oppositional paradigms like capitalism/command economy, pragmatic/ hopeless idealistic, patriotism/treason, unregulated/strangled, liberty/Big Brother, and eventually good/evil. Some critics are trying to discredit the moment with tired, unimaginative claims that it is Marxist/Leninism in disguise or by invoking comparisons with the stinky hippy hedonist stereotype they last had some success with 40 years ago. Dull and insipid yes, but also mean-spirited, which is often useful when dominance not reason is the aim of the game.

Many Americans, it seems, do not need a pamphlet or a written explanation to understand or palpably feel the gross economic inequality fueling this movement. A recent New York Times poll revealed that 46% of those surveyed have a favorable view of the Occupy movement. One of the things I have been struck by as a participant in the Saturday rallies and marches organized by (Un)Occupy Albuquerque is the huge numbers of passers-by who enthusiastically gesture or shout their support. Few people are neutral in their response and even fewer are opposed.

One of the latest tactics of the Occupy critics is the charge that many protestors are breaking laws by violating municipal permit requirements, exercising constitutional rights outside of designated “free-speech zones,” or in the case of Albuquerque for violating the on-again, off-again directives of the president of the University of New Mexico against overnight demonstrations on campus. Where was their pious concern that the law should be applied equally to everyone when it came to investigating the financial elite who pillaged the economy for personal gain in actions that destroyed jobs, emptied out pension plans, and fueled poverty for millions of Americans? Where was their righteous concern for the rule of law and calls for investigations as the evidence mounted that Pres. Bush and now Pres. Obama have ransacked the Constitution in pursuit of the war on terror?

The duplicitous charge of lawlessness is simply a means to an end, justification for the use of state violence against protestors, a shameless strategy that backfired last week in Oakland, California, when police action there resulted in serious head injuries sustained by a 24-year-old Marine veteran, Scott Olsen. Demonstrations around the world last weekend suggested that heavy handed police retaliations against non-violent protesters can also generate new enthusiasm for the movement.

At some point, the movement will be required to articulate a program. The value of the current open space is that it is showing that the most vociferous critics are dull, mean-spirited and eager to deploy coercive violence. Their responses are creating new support. Meanwhile, organizers can use this space to imagine the previously unimaginable, like an economy that values the common good over the obscene accumulation of riches by the privileged few.

Local actions against inequality have global, national ties

2011-10-29T19:20:00.004-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—The march organized by (Un)Occupy Albuquerque today in defense of civil liberties incorporated elements of Halloween and Dia de los Muertos while stating its solidarity with Scott Olsen, the 24-year-old Marine veteran who sustained a serious head injury Tuesday in the Occupy Oakland protests.

The procession from Yale Park on the University of New Mexico campus to Civic Plaza downtown drew more than a hundred persons and was punctuated by moments of silence for Olsen and mock memorial services for the constitutional rights of assembly and free speech, which have been under assault in many U.S. cities, according to local organizers, since the Occupy Wall St protests against economic equality started more than a month ago in New York City. Tuesday evening 22 protesters were arrested in Albuquerque after UNM President David Schmidly denied them any further overnight use of the campus.

Protesters' claims of inequality were supported by a Congressional Budget Office report released earlier this week that showed that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans enjoyed 275% growth in their after-tax incomes from 1979-2007, while the bottom fifth saw 18% real growth and middle-income Americans saw increases of just under 40%.

Meanwhile, half a connected world away, a Taliban suicide car bomb attack today on an armored bus carrying NATO troops in Kabul, Afghanistan, killed 17 persons, including 12 American soldiers and contractors. Three of the civilian fatalities may have been children, according to one report. While public services are being slashed at home, the United States is spending $10 billion per month waging wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the Eisenhower Study Group report published in June.

Mixing, maybe mangling signals under mostly blue sky

2011-10-27T20:29:00.002-06:00

An ad for the movie J. Edgar looms in the skyline above east 23rd Street in New York, while Occupy Wall St roils in jam-packed Zuccotti Park in view of the rising World Trade Center, but much of Manhattan's public face last week seemed affluent, flabby, and oblivious to hard times.

Lester's ghost in Harlem, then a horn in Central Park

2011-10-27T20:03:00.000-06:00

Ralph Wilson in Central Park

NEW YORK, N.Y.—Lester Young, “Prez,” the man, the legend and the artist who rose to prominence on the tenor saxophone in the 1930s with the Count Basie Orchestra was celebrated at a panel discussion featuring Ira Gitler, Dan Morgenstern , Chris Albertson, Dr. Lewis Porter, and Ethan Iverson hosted by Loren Schoenberg at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem Oct. 22.

Much of the talk and audience comments, a few first-hand experiences, focused on his influence and listening, often in rapture, to recorded clips. Young, typically relaxed and understated even when the band was ripping, embodied cool before Miles. Morgenstern, the white-haired director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers, bopped in rhythm with contagious bliss plastered across his face.

After a break, Sam Newsome on alto performed smartly but briefly but the my highlight was watching “Jammin’ the Blues," a dazzling 10-minute film short from 1944 featuring Young, lovely dancing, music and photography.

Like like many of his contemporaries, he died young, 49, and miserably, a malnourished alcoholic. Geoff Dyer, imagining Young late in life, wrote, “He waited for the phone to ring, expecting to hear someone break the news to him that he had died in his sleep,” in But Beautiful (1991).

Day later, under a fall blue sky, I heard another lyrical horn, Ralph Wilson, playing for change in Central Park. He softly explained how tough it was to get a steady gig in New York and how jazz was much more visible in Tokyo, where he hopes to visit his wife and new daughter with the beautiful eyes, maybe in January.

'We are the 99%' chant sounds increasingly convincing

2011-10-15T18:42:00.005-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—John Steinbeck and the Joad family might have appreciated the noisy spectacle on the ghost of Route 66 here Saturday.

Central Avenue, once part of the iconic highway, roiled with several hundred loud, raucous protesters of all descriptions near Nob Hill, revealing the depth of the disgust in Albuquerque over the greed and indifference of the U.S. financial and political elite. This was the the most diverse of three demonstrations and marches inspired by Occupy Wall Street that have taken place on successive Saturdays in Albuquerque. Similar demonstrations of populist outrage across the country and globe are being reported today.

The last time the economy was this bad was the Depression, which Steinbeck personalized in The Grapes of Wrath (1940) with the Joads, Oklahoma farmers who packed their life belongings into a beat-up truck and fled the Dust Bowl along U.S. 66, the major east-west highway, through Albuquerque, Grants and Gallup, N.M., in search of jobs in California.

While chant of the emerging Occupation movement, “We are the 99%,” is sounding more and more convincing, stunned critics are sharpening their attacks. OWS organizers were derided as “Lenin's ‘useful idiots’ in Manhattan” by one Ellis Washington:

For the past month, the liberal fascist mobs have been protesting American exceptionalism, capitalism and its symbolic embodiment, Wall Street in Manhattan. These legions of largely white hippie-types, are unwashed, unshaved, unemployed, unemployable masses; prone to violence, conspicuous drug use, rantings, cursing, public defecation on police cars and promiscuous sex —yet are clueless as to what, why or who they are even protesting.

Mr. Washington would be wise to step away from his computer and TV for a moment to venture into the streets.

Occupation watch: Beware the reformist usurpers

2011-10-14T09:37:00.000-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Beneath the criticism that the Occupation movement lacks a clear agenda is the curious assumption that this spontaneous movement is deficient for not acting like an organized movement, which is lot like castigating a horse for not behaving like a cow.

Would the same critics assess an organized movement on how well it conformed to the behavior of a spontaneous movement? Well, they might, especially if their primary goal is simply some line of argument to rationalize their opposition.

This nascent movement is developing its goals and objectives, very democratically from all reports, and I hope they will articulate a resolute commitment to dismantling plutocratic rule and developing an economy that first serves the common good. Goals of that order will require a strategic focus outside two-party electoral politics. The right to vote is one of the west’s greatest contributions to democratic political participation, but electoral politics in the United States, especially at the federal level, is at this moment in time hopelessly subservient to the interests of the plundering classes. It doesn’t have to be that way, it shouldn’t be that way, but it is, and few would disagree, so it seems counterproductive, maybe even stupid, and perhaps even suicidal to suddenly believe it will function any differently now.

In the meantime, the forces of capital, the politicians they support, and the pundits they favor will ramp up their attacks, which are likely to become bloodier and more pervasive, almost certainly involving citizen surveillance authorized by the Patriot Act and other legislation that were sold to the American public as a protection against terrorism. Their opposition is guaranteed, we are, after all, each other’s sworn enemy

However, a bigger, more insidious threat is posed by the mainstream liberal usurpers, who are salivating at the prospect of harnessing the movement’s anger and energy into support for Democratic candidates and toothless legislative reforms. MoveOn, the liberal policy advocacy and electoral action group, is already attempting to do this by helping to organize bank protests on Saturday, including one starting at noon the Wells Fargo bank at Richmond and Central in Albuquerque.

The movement should be willing to build a popular front with any organization that shares its outrage, ideals and emerging political agenda. However, there should be no illusion about the intentions of the mainstream reformers, who will seek to redirect this grassroots explosion of democratic desire toward another delusional attempt to reform a corrupt political infrastructure. If the Occupation movement is to make a lasting contribution to greater social equality, then it must develop bold, creative approaches that go beyond cosmetic reforms and build new, genuinely democratic structures.

Anti-greed, anti-war passions merging in Burque protests

2011-10-09T14:01:00.000-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—A guy walked up to me, informed me he was astrologer, and then told me the world was about to enter the Aquarian age of peace and cooperation. Hell, I thought we were supposed to have entered the Age of Aquarius 30 years ago and that it was the new Mayan epoch that was right around the corner, so I just nodded.

I had come to the demonstration in front of the UNM bookstore to call for an end to the war in Afghanistan, just like many others were doing Friday and Saturday to mark the 10th anniversary of the war. Even though it is costing U.S. taxpayers about $10 billion per month, the war has not appeared to concern too many Americans, who seemed focused instead on the deteriorating domestic economy. Then came the Occupation movement, which started more than three weeks ago as Occupy Wall Street in New York City and has since spread across the nation. The connections now seem increasingly clear: the costs of endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere and the Wall Street bailouts have been borne by average Americans, who have been rewarded with staggering rates of unemployment and poverty and a crumbling national infrastructure. Without the Occupation movement, I would have expected 30 to 40 people at the anti-war demonstration, but Saturday there were at least four times that number.

Unlike the more spontaneous Occupy Burque (Albuquerque) action that started a week ago, the anti-war demonstration was organized by a local coalition. At the risk of generalizing, the mostly white-haired organizers represented the local chapter of Veterans for Peace and the Albuquerque-based Stop the War Machine, while the younger organizers came from the local chapter of the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition. Organizers for the Party for Socialism and Liberation, or PSL, an active member of the ANSWER steering committee, have been active in both the local occupation and in anti-war organizing.

Cooperation among different generations did not extend to different political ideologies as evidenced by a tongue-lashing an elderly woman gave to a young man holding a sign supporting the presidential candidacy of Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican.

The anti-war demo in front of the bookstore featured a “die-in,” a bit of street theater in which the recorded sounds of weapons firing were followed by participants collapsing and feigning death. Once resurrected, we assembled for a march east on Central Avenue to the rhythms of chants like “We are the 99%” and “Funding for schools. Not for war, what the hell is Congress for?”

At the Wells Fargo branch office on the corner of Richmond Drive, a smaller group of marchers entered the bank, walked through the lobby chanting to the dumfounded looks of the bank tellers and then quickly exited. A little further along, marchers were greeted by a pair of waiters who stepped outside their restaurant holding small fliers that read, “We are the 99%.” Similar gestures of support were also shown later by workers at fast-food restaurant.

The next bank on the route was Bank of America, which received $45 billion in taxpayer bailouts in 2008-09 and then brazenly announced earlier this month that it will charge debit-card users $5 per month, which prompted many customers to close out their accounts in protest. The good news for the BoA in Albuquerque Saturday was that the lobby of its branch office near Washington Street was closed, so irate protesters vented their outrage in a largely empty parking lot. By the time marchers reached the next open bank lobby, the Bank of Albuquerque near Jackson Street, the chant had changed to “Jail the bankers.”

The march then advanced to the Bank of the West branch office at the busy intersection of Central and San Mateo Boulevard, at which point I left, and then proceeded south to a Wal-mart store before doubling back to the university.

Mainstream criticisms of Occupation movement are empty

2011-10-03T20:20:00.000-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—There has been a lot of chatter in the mainstream news media that the Occupation movement that began Sept. 17 on Wall Street and has since spread to scores of other U.S. cities, including Albuquerque, lacks specific goals and objectives. What do NPR and Fox News expect, an electoral campaign platform that will be adopted and co-opted by the Democratic Party and then ignored?

What is unclear about the largely spontaneous explosion of demand for economic justice? What is confusing about what the signs and demonstrators say? The wealthiest 1% of Americans dictate the fortunes of the other 99%, or some variation of that sentiment. How many young people have explained to reporters that they have a mountain of school debt, no health insurance and no prospect for employment? How much unemployment, poverty and inaccessible healthcare does it take to be recognized as a national crisis? What is morally ambiguous about these inequalities existing alongside staggering increases in wealth, income and capital accumulation for the privileged few? How much more evidence does it take to show that the electoral process and conventional two-party politics are blatantly subservient to corporate and other elite interests? Didn’t the site of the mother action—Wall Street, the symbolic epicenter of global capitalism—provide a clue to what these demonstrations seek?

Feigning confusion about goals and objectives is a weak attempt to discredit the movement. It is also a stark admission about the shameful lack of insight exhibited by most mainstream news reporting and analysis. And the charge that these largely spontaneous demonstrations are not well organized and lack clear leadership (i.e., hierarchically organized) is groundless because it only acknowledges the self-evident.

An emerging national movement unaffiliated with the powerbrokers of the status quo will soon face pressure from its critics to designate leaders in the name of clarity and efficiency—a temptation that should be vigorously resisted. Hierarchical decision structures can be more easily corrupted and decapitated than structures that are more horizontal and decentralized. Liberal political careerists can also be expected to try to steal the insurrectionary spirit of this movement and tame it into a program of modest and ultimately meaningless reforms. Also to be resisted at all costs. In fact, the loudest criticisms seem to me to be the greatest strengths of this groundswell of democratic desire.

Clarity of vision, what we want and defining what is better than what we have, strikes me as far more important at this stage of the process than any piece of legislation or any choice of spokesperson. So I cringed this afternoon when I listened to an interview with a student on NPR who said the movement should not been seen as a wholesale indictment of capitalism. Please, someone show his ass to the door. This inspiring effort will be on death’s door the minute it believes it can make peace with the same rapacious capitalism that is destroying our nation.

'Banks got bailed out, we got sold out' on Central Avenue

2011-10-01T16:58:00.004-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—The Occupy Burque (Albuquerque) action that started at the US Bank office along Central Avenue today drew 200-300 activists, mostly young and culturally diverse, about 2 p.m. The assembly walked along Central to the UNM main campus; chants included “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.” The group sometimes occupied a bus line, more often the entire lane without incident or police interference, then reversed field and moved east toward Washington Street. Today's demonstration was scheduled until 5 p.m.

A day later (Oct. 2), three additional observations I find encouraging. The action appeared to be organized exclusively through Facebook and to a lesser degree Twitter, allowing organizers to bypass the conventional news media, which is often unresponsive, especially to advance coverage. Second, while most of the people taking part during the 90 minutes or so that I was there appeared to be under the age of 30, persons of all ages participated, including many veteran organizers, who seemed content with having younger activists at the helm. Finally, there were several gestures of support and little opposition or hostility expressed by pedestrians and passers-by.

Democracy denied creates other means of expression

2011-09-28T22:19:00.002-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.— During the parliamentary election last year in Afghanistan, there were plenty of reports of the heroic lengths to which some Afghans went to vote. For example, the dye that stained a voter’s index finger was designed to prevent them from voting a second time, but it also became a means by which the Taliban, which opposed the elections, could easily identify voters for harassment or death. But people went to polling stations anyway, often in groups for mutual support and defense.

Similar levels of courage were exhibited earlier in Iraq and elsewhere in the developing world whenever people decided to take part, perhaps for the first time, in what they hoped would be genuinely free and fair elections. Sometimes, they were deeply disappointed like Afghans were after the 2010 vote proved to be rife with fraud and corruption. Yet it was hard not to be impressed by their determination to be part of the political processes. U.S. history is filled with similar stories of people who were harassed, brutalized, beaten and sometimes killed while expanding the franchise from white, property-owning, Christian men to an increasingly broader swath of all adults.

So it is with sad irony that the voting in the United States has become so meaningless, especially in federal elections. Corporate campaign contributions and news media coverage have the influence to effectively prevent the election of any federal candidate who would serious challenge their interests. This trend in burgeoning corporate influence, especially over the last 30 years, had unfolded regardless of which party controls the presidency or the Congress. The two dominant parties and their corporate backers have rewritten federal and state laws so that it is hard to even imagine how an independent and viable third party could emerge.

The desire to have influence on the decisions and policies that shape our lives is the pumping heart of democracy. Voting is a means to achieve democratic participation; it is not the sine qua non of democracy, which the beneficiaries, profiteers and apologists of electoral politics would have voters believe. The politicians, the interests they represent (overwhelmingly corporate), and the state itself are the obvious beneficiaries. The profiteers include the mainstream news media, which depends on campaign advertising income, as well as the PR firms, consultants, polling firms, and other spinmeisters for hire. The primary apologists are the pundits and the think tanks that churn them out and both are typically supported by the same corporate interests that fund the candidates and sometimes even own the news media reporting on the campaigns.

This trend, which perversely distorts democratic desire, can generate apathy, frustration, and rage but sometimes it feeds inspiring, alternative means of expression, like the mass protests of the Arab spring and the Occupy Wall Street actions under way in New York. “From South Asia to the heartland of Europe and now even to Wall Street, these protesters share something else: wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over,” reports Nicholas Kulish.

Beneath that contempt is a sober and perhaps historic recognition that overdependence on a singular means of democratic participation, voting, has been hijacked and manipulated to more effectively serve the interests of the privileged few, and nowhere moreso than in the United States. But as recent events in Cairo and New York have shown, when the promise of democracy is denied, the desire will bravely create other means to express itself.

Postitive spin difficult for U.S. after latest Kabul attacks

2011-09-16T17:32:00.000-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —Attempts in the United States to put a favorable spin on the coordinated series of Taliban attacks that killed at least 15 Afghans in Kabul city earlier this week were probably under way before the last insurgent’s spent shell casing had cooled.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, on Wednesday said the multi-pronged attack, which was most likely carried out by the Haqqani network, a Taliban affiliated militia, was “not really a very big deal.” The U.S. embassy was attacked, but he pointed out that its security perimeter was not breached and no personnel were killed. “If that's the best they can do, you know, I think it's actually a statement of their weakness.”

Crocker’s comments were intended for the ears, hearts and minds of the American public, not ordinary Afghans who endured almost 20 hours of gunfights and rockets attacks throughout the capital, including the heavily fortified “ring of steel,” where many embassies and Afghan ministries are located.

The same day a Brookings Institute fellow took the U.S. news media to task for failing to point out the valor of the Afghan security forces, which have demonstrated greater capability in recent months, or the sheer difficulty of preventing small weapons from being transported into the city. “The U.S. media does have tendencies to reach a certain level of malaise about the wars — and a certain distrust of government. This can make some collectively tend toward a more negative bent than the facts warrant,” wrote Michael O’Hanlon. Again his comments were meant for the American public, which is understandably reluctant to accept the news that insurgency is gaining ground a decade after U.S. intervention and with current expenditures running about $10 billion per month.

Of course, the hearts and minds that most concern the Taliban do not belong to the American public. The Taliban strategy, in part, is to convince ordinary Afghans that its war of resistance cannot be defeated by the combined efforts of the world’s military colossus and the puppet regime of Pres. Hamid Karzai. They have provided evidence all summer long, attacking the plush Intercontinental Hotel, assassinating key government leaders, including the president’s half-brother; taking down a NATO helicopter loaded with troops, and launching on assault on the British Council.

Since the start of the year, "the attacks in Kabul have become more intense, lasted longer, demonstrated better intelligence and tactics on the part of the insurgency, and struck ever more supposedly secure targets," explained Fabrizio Foschini, an Afghanistan Analysts Network researcher.

Afghans saw the Taliban swiftly toppled in late 2001 by U.S.-led western military forces and so diminished that by 2005 many believed the insurgency was effectively dead. However, that storyline reversed field in 2006 when the Taliban, after regrouping with al-Qaeda and other allies in frontier Pakistan, returned to Afghanistan where they have since made steady gains, even in the face of the heavily ballyhooed U.S. “surge” engineered by Gen. David Petraeus, now head of the CIA. And today I suspect there are few Afghans who would agree with Crocker that this week’s attacks are any indication of the Taliban’s “weakness.”

Suddenly wistful for the unstable environment I left behind

2011-09-13T17:52:00.000-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —I confess to a twinge of longing for Kabul, Afghanistan, even while reading about the multi-pronged insurgent attacks earlier today that targeted the U.S. Embassy, NATO headquarters and other sites across the capital, possibly including the American university where I used to teach.

Reliable information remains sketchy, but Afghan police fired on Toyota Corolla approaching the main gate of the American University of Afghanistan, fearing the vehicle was loaded with explosives or gunmen, according to an email from a former colleague. In response, university security corralled students and workers into a single building and distributed weapons to its transportation escorts, who are typically unarmed.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for coordinated assaults that involved rocket-propelled grenades, shoulder-held rockets, assault rifles, and suicide attackers, some possibly disguised as women wearing burqas, and lasted for more than 10 hours, according to published reports. At least six Afghans were killed and many more wounded, say local authorities, though the actual toll is likely to increase as more information is collected.

I left the university at the end of May in large part because of Kabul’s deteriorating security conditions, which meant increasingly severe restrictions on the freedom of movement for international employees, including lockdowns that increasingly kept us either on campus or in our guesthouse residences. Yet I realize today that I miss the excitement of Kabul and, more importantly, the knowledge that I was contributing to the development of new university in a country with its educational infrastructure in shambles.

Here I find myself dealing with prospective employers who are typically unresponsive and often rude, conduct they can only get away with because of “staggeringly high” rates of long-term unemployment and poverty that is experienced by more than 46 million Americans while a tiny percentage wallows in its wealth. Our political leaders make headlines, not for imagining solutions to complex problems like these, but because stupid things they say or do, like denying modern scientific consensus or piling up a shameful record of public executions, much to the delight of their mean-spirited supporters. Meanwhile, after decades of declining expectations, much of the American public appears numb or beaten.

Another way to conceptualize my reaction, which may seem a little perverse on the surface, is to frame it this way. Death is inarguable, we all have to exit sometime, but there are better and worse ways to depart. Death by a suicide-bomb attack is not my first choice, but if that occurs while I am doing something that I enjoy and believe to be meaningful, then that strikes me as far preferable to a death that simply snuffs out soul-killing tedium. So I read today’s horrid news concerned for former colleagues and students, grateful that I don’t live under those conditions, yet wistful for the ties that once bound us together.

Final thought after the orgy of 9/11 anniversary coverage

2011-09-12T11:55:00.000-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —I watched the wax drip down the thin candle to where it collected in a warm lump just above my hand. I had no words to speak, no thoughts to share, and that seemed all right after an orgy of words and images meant to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

About 60 or so people attended the vigil last night organized by the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice at Bataan Memorial Park to remember the people who lost their lives in the attacks and the retaliatory killings that followed in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. A Muslim man began the brief service by releasing about a dozen white doves, which rose to the trees towering above us before re-grouping for their return flight home.

He was followed by religious speakers: a Franciscan priest, who in a few brief comments graciously undermined his reputation for long-windedness; a Buddhist who proselytized; a retired Christian minister, and a Jewish rabbi. The talks were followed by several minutes of quiet reflection punctuated by soft candlelight.

The Buddhist was clearly miffed that her faith tradition had been unrepresented in these inter-faith peace affairs and seemed to determine to make the case why that was a mistake, while I wondered why there was no representation by a voice of secular morality. Many of the people responsible for the 9/11 killings and those that followed justified their actions in the name of God or, equally odious, in the defense of nation, but I don’t recall reason or rationality every being used an excuse for killing.

Like many others, I was prepared to be inundated with reminiscences of the 9/11 attacks, shallow ideological justifications for what followed, along with a smattering of critical reflections. I even penned my own thoughts in a posting a few days before the anniversary. Richard Rohr, one of the vigil speakers, said he spent much of the day watching the coverage, presumably on TV, in search of some indication of an emerging “caring beyond boundaries.” That conviction has always existed, however small and is indistinguishable, but most of what I saw and read, especially in mainstream media of this nation, echoed the nationalist jingoism of a decade ago.

A friend who I admire but have known for only a short while recently reflected on Facebook that she left the United States in 2006 to work overseas “in part because I wanted to understand some whys; because I had been for the war on terror; because I wanted to serve those that so many told me were my enemies.” She returned to the States this year “perhaps more bigoted and with less understanding…I have less faith. Less hope. The one thing I do have—that I know I have—is even more love than ever for my home. My country.”

I also left the United States for overseas work in 2006 and returned this year. But unlike her, I departed deeply disillusioned with America domestic and foreign policy and resolutely opposed to U.S. terrorism waged under the guise of nobly motivated war. I left with the hope I could find some reasons to challenge those beliefs, and while did find a precious few for which I am grateful, I returned with that disenchantment fortified by even more evidence. If by country, we mean the U.S. nation, then I have no love for it, none at all, only deep disappointment.

I woke this morning grateful that the anniversary coverage would soon be over, but a column by Chris Hedges caught my attention while searching for news online. Hedges, whose criticism of U.S. foreign policy manages to alienate many liberals, responded to the Twin Towers attack as a reporter. His column attempted to make sense of how that moment of profound vulnerability was hijacked by the forces of fear and crude nationalism, and concluded:

"It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too.”

Nakedly harvesting the legendary weed of the Chui Valley

2011-09-11T12:47:00.002-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —There is a memorable scene in one of Chinhgiz Aitmatov’s novels in which one of the central characters runs naked through the legendary marijuana fields of the Chui River valley on the border of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, covering his sweaty body with the plants’ resin, creating a super-powered gooey concentrate that is carefully scraped from his body and molded into pliable bars that are dried before being smoked.

As a recognized gesture of courtesy, the man saves the lion’s share of the dark brown “plasticine,” or plastilin, for the Russian drug dealer who recruited him for this relatively lucrative, albeit illegal job.

An online news story published Sept. 10 indicates that this harvesting practice for “dichka,” as the wild marijuana is called in post-Soviet Central Asia, is also done by bodies on horseback, typically in August. “It begins with a freshly showered person riding naked for hours on a clean, washed horse inside a two-meter-high ‘forest’ of marijuana,” reports Merkhat Sharipzhanov. What is essentially a rewrite of this story appears on a separate online site accompanied by Youtube video in which a group of Kazahk rappers extol the virtues of the Chui Valley weed.

I encountered the works of Aitmatov, the best known writer in Kyrgyzstan, while teaching a few years ago at an American university in the nation’s capitol, Bishkek, which is located in the Chui River valley. Aitmatov, who died shortly after I left in 2008, wrote in Russian and Kyrgyz and his most widely recognized works are probably The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980) and Jamilya (1958). The harvesting sequence I described appears in The Place of the Skull, which was published in 1989 by Grove Press. Place of the Skull, or Golgotha in the New Testament, is the site outside ancient Jerusalem where it is said Christ was executed. The original Russian work, Плаха (1986), is also known in translation as The Scaffold.

Language and loss: thoughts on the darkness visible

2011-09-07T17:02:00.003-06:00

Mental health authorities say there is the normal, garden-variety depression that most of us suffer from at some time, a short-lived response to any one of a host of unpleasant life-events. It can also be a symptom of other diseases or psychological problems. There is major or clinical depression, the long-lasting disorder that is a consequence of major life trauma and/or aberrant brain chemistry, typically involving neurotransmitters, like serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine. In bi-polar disorder, depression is accompanied by swings into mania.

Little wonder the term is confusing. I once understood it as the “real” condition beneath my anger. I masked my depression, which was difficult to admit to and talk about, with displays of anger, an emotion that was culturally acceptable for men to express.

I once understood it as the condition I “treated” with alcohol abuse. Alcohol made me laugh, made life momentarily fun I would otherwise be miserable, so I sought it as an escape, a way out, which worked for a while. (Says one sonnet to addiction: “Alcohol gave me wings to fly/Then it took away the sky.”

I understood it as a pattern of behavior acquired during a dysfunctional childhood that I will not describe or discuss here. I understood is an unavoidable consequence of my peculiar aggregation of genetic pre-dispositions, inheritances, learned behavior, past events and personal choices that cannot be undone. The hand I was dealt.

I understood it as just another disease that some people get and others don’t. And long before that, I saw it as a curse.

There’s probably some truth to each, but lately it seems it can be imagined as a consequence of loss—the loss of youth, of love, family, vitality, essential energy in a life that is ebbing, as it must.

Bala Hissar fortress during the second Anglo-Afghan War

2011-09-06T17:49:00.001-06:00

The Bala Hissar fortress in Kabul, Afghanistan, during the second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880). The ancient seat of power overlooking the city was built in the fifth century CE and today, largely in ruins, is often used as a site for flying kites. (John Burke, 1879, British Library Collection)

Greater equality is impossible without organized labor

2011-09-06T08:56:00.000-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—There was only a scattering of children and a few of them tried to join the chorus of overwhelmingly aging white heads struggling to remember the lyrics of a handful of labor standards, including the poignant and still relevant “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” sung at a Labor Day potluck I attended on Sunday.

Turning to a friend, I said “I will never understand why so much of the American public remains so hostile or at best indifferent to the idea of working people organizing on the basis of their collects self-interests. I didn’t understand it 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and I sure as hell don’t comprehend it today in the nation’s poorest economy since the Depression.”

Few Americans question the right of small business to organize in local chambers of commerce, larger industries have trade associations, and many transnational corporations employ small armies of lobbyists to augment their flood of contribution to electoral campaigns, yet many Americans harbor a special wrath for people working for wages who organize to advance their interests.

Even the Labor Day we observe on the first Monday of September was an attempt to separate the labor movement from its more radical roots. The federal holiday declared in 1894 was the creation of government officials and moderate trade unions, which sought to cut the legs out from International Workers’ Day, which was celebrated on May 1 and grew out of the movement that included communists, socialists and anarchists for an eight-hour work day. What is now widely known as May Day is a holiday in an estimated 80 countries.

Listening to the likes of “Union Maid” and “Joe Hill,” I asked myself whether I was nostalgically retreating from this age of ugly inequality into a mythologized past. My answer came quickly. Unions have always faced heavy opposition in this country and even at their peak in 1945 represented only about 36 percent of U.S. workers. Today organized labor represents a little more than 12 percent of the workforce. Yet those American who would dismiss the role of organized labor don’t understand history, democracy or how equality grows. Improvements in the common good don’t drop out of the sky; they are very seldom the ideas of the people or parties in power. Instead, they rise from the bottom up, from the margins, from the people who have less and insist upon more of what of the privileged enjoy. That truth has not changed.

Killed at 41, Shahzad revealed the Taliban's resurgence

2011-09-03T20:56:00.005-06:00

Sayed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistan Bureau Chief of Asia Times Online, was killed in May, the same month his rare and informed view of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, beyond Bin Laden and 9/11 was published. His body was found in a canal on May 31, two days after he was kidnapped in Islamabad and killed, as many journalists believe, by members of the Pakistani intelligence service.

The book was clearly rushed into print as evidenced by many typographical errors and a few failures of attribution, but his insider’s account of the Taliban resurgence that started in 2006 is essential. Shahzad names the people recruited and employed to rebuild the Taliban in the Pakistani frontier and advance al-Qaeda’s long-range vision to defeat the United States in an end-times showdown in the Middle East.

Stubborn denial, not surprise, recalled on 9/11 anniversary

2011-09-03T12:52:00.004-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —I was reading on online news page when an alert announced that an airplane had struck the World Trade Center in New York City. I had my suspicions as I moved to the TV in the living room.

Speculation that terrorists were behind the attack became certainty when the second plane hit, yet the horror unfolding before me was not surprising. For several years the counter-terrorist talking heads on the op-ed pages and Sunday morning news shows had been telling the American public that it was “only a matter of time” before al-Qaeda or some other violent Islamic fundamentalist group took their program of terror to U.S. soil. For the matter, al-Qaeda had already attacked the WTC in February 1993 and followed up with numerous other strikes around the world, including U.S. embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in the August 1998 and against a Navy destroyer, the USS Cole, in the Yemeni port of Aden in October 2000. What struck me was how easily the news coverage and a large share of public reaction shifted from disbelief into a narrative of lost innocence.

The American public’s lack of interest and knowledge about anything beyond its borders is legendary, but the public response to the 9/11 attacks required a staggering level of willful ignorance. Osama bin Laden and his compatriots told anyone willing to listen why they perceived the United States to be the leading source of evil for the world’s Muslims. They claimed America bankrolled corrupt governments in predominately Muslim lands, including the brutal dictatorships now under siege in the Middle East. They said the U.S. backed Israel with few reservations, thereby preventing any chance for peace or land settlements for dispossessed Palestinian, mostly Muslims. They pointed to American military bases in Saudi Arabia, the site of Islam’s two holiest cities, from which U.S. fought a limited war and waged siege against Iraq, an overwhelmingly Muslim nation.

Without discussing the truth of charges, they never registered in the American popular imagination. Public memory cherry picks the historical record and in the United States it downplays the nation’s birth in slavery, the decimation of indigenous peoples and the occupation of western lands. It ignores an infancy of intervention in the affairs of the others playing in America’s god-given sandbox of two continental landmasses that almost stretch from pole to pole. It overlooks the “splendid little war” in 1898 against the doddering Spanish empire in which the booty included stepping stones to Asia, the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii. U.S. public memory extols the victories of World War II and the Cold War in Eurasia, but takes a pass on the bloody proxy wars waged in Africa, central America and southeast Asia, followed by more than a decade as the globe’s unrivaled superpower.

In 2001, if you put aside our colonial and national history and accepted without reservation that the United States was the global beacon of freedom and democracy, then it wasn’t much of a stretch to believe that America had been blindsided by evil incarnate. The perpetrators had to be irredeemably immoral to attack the generous paterfamilias, the reasoning went.

Yes, the Bush administration and its ideological compatriots manipulated post-9/11 fears to support their political ends, but the American public failed too. We allowed the powerful to mold our comprehension of the past, present and future into a child’s fairytale in which stubborn, stupid denial masqueraded itself as innocence.

Afterword: Three days after posting this, I ran across a NY Daily News online series on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the headline of the first story was "When our innocence was lost forever."

Imperialism forms backdrop for recent film, book favorites

2011-08-28T11:27:00.002-06:00

One of the advantages of being back in the States is the opportunity to enjoy movies and books that were difficult to find in the developing nations of Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan and several which I enjoyed recently share a thematic concern for imperialism.

The City of Life and Death (2009), the first film by a Chinese director that addresses the Rape of Nanking in 1937 by the Japanese military, is a gritty epic shot in spectacular black and white that is at times almost too difficult to watch.

Amigo (2011), the latest by director John Sayles, explores the U.S. occupation of the Philippines initiated during the Spanish-American War, ostensibly to liberate the locals from the colonial rule of Spain and serves as a timely historical primer for the U.S. imperial wars being waged in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya. While not one of Sayles’ best (Lone Star, Eight Men Out, Matewan, and Men With Guns), his films are routinely head and shoulders above the quality of most American screenwriters and directors, in part because his characters are fully developed, have jobs and responsibilities, which makes them unlike the indolent rich engaged in anguished navel-gazing who are the subjects of too many American and British films.

The French film Of Gods and Men (2010) provides a compelling view of a contemporary Christian monastic life in its story of a community of Cistercian (Trappist) monks in Algeria who face the decision whether to stay or flee in the face of a violent Islamic fundamentalist insurgency that will eventually target them. Apparently based on true story, this is a Christian theology that could not be more different from the self-righteous distortions of Christianity peddled on the airwaves by some of America’s most visible politicians and pundits.

The Arabs: A History (2009) by Eugene Rogan improved my understanding of political history of the Arab world, now embroiled in an uneven quest for greater democracy, starting with the Ottoman conquest in 1516-17.

Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (2009) as told by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano reflects on the creation myths of popular history that justify domination by ignoring or whitewashing the lives of ordinary people and the contributions of earlier civilizations.

The prose of Nadeem Aslam is at times florid, but his novel The Wasted Vigil (2009) is a captivating portrayal of war-ravaged Afghan society in which every character, the good the bad and the ugly alike, comes to know suffering and crushing loss.

In a thematic departure that might appeal to anyone who has even thought about running, I would recommend Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (2009) in which journalist Christopher McDougall examines the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico’s Copper Canyons, arguably the world’s greatest “natural runners,” while also making a case that the evolution of the human species was propelled by its superior ability to run long distances and that running barefoot is the only way to go.

Spirit of Life casts art deco shadow in downtown Syracuse

2011-08-27T17:10:00.001-06:00

The headquarters of the Niagara Mohawk electrical power company in Syracuse, New York, embodied art deco design when built in 1932. Six floors above the entrance is the sculpture “Spirit of Light,” which emanates, like wings, from his outstretched arms of stainless steel. The building, considerably less polished today, is an asset of National Grid plc, a multinational utility based in London, but still invokes for me visions of Aryan supremacy as imagined by the late Lini Riefenstahl, the film director, actress and dancer who helped craft the aesthetics of the Hitler's Third Reich.

Attack where they least expect it, he advised

2011-08-26T21:33:00.002-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Reconnected over a cup of coffee, our conversation moved, as I suspected it would, to strategies of resistance outside electoral politics. A familiar topic lately.

The sanctioned political events have been pitched as the sum total of popular democracy because the forces of capital have infinitely more financial and cultural resources to manipulate the campaign/news discourse and ensure that the interests of poor and working class people will get clobbered again. Victories on behalf of the common good are few; apparent gains almost immediately rendered hollow, yes, Obama in 2008, thank you.

I also figure that it is bad strategy, maybe even stupid, to repeatedly engage the opposition at the point of their greatest advantage. “Never attack when the enemy is powerful,” advised Gen. Sun-Tzu. “Advance when they are unprepared and attack where they least expect it.”

I have been imagining other strategies of resistance, other means of democratic participation, in which the playing field is a little closer to level and the chances of success, even modest, are greater. I suspect that favorable terrain is more likely to be cultural. Local popular culture should be more malleable because it relies more on oral transmission, which can be endlessly rewritten, tweaked or subverted to express popular sympathies and preferences. But I have not lived in Albuquerque for while and if I remain here I will have to listen to and observe what is working and why.

Afghanistan war exposing U.S. policy failures

2011-08-23T19:53:00.000-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Insurgent strikes are increasingly occurring in central Afghanistan, partly in response to the counter-terrorist surge engineered by U.S-led forces in the Taliban heartland in the predominately Pashtun south. For almost a year, NATO forces under U.S. command have targeted the leadership of what was the original Afghan Taliban associated with Mullah Omar, the “commander of the faithful,” who was born outside Kandahar city.

Against superior western firepower, many of the insurgents shifted their operations, initially into the northern provinces (e.g. Kunduz, Baghlan, and Badakhshan) and more recently into central ones like Parwan and Wardak, both of which are near the capital, Kabul. That geographic shift paired with serious concerns that the Afghan military is ill-prepared to assume increased security responsibilities prompted a commentary in The Huffington Post today that argued against any political decision, like Pres. Obama’s timeline, that “will force a premature transition or withdrawal.”

Another way to read the same information is that the American-led military after almost a decade has failed to defeat or substantially “degrade” the Taliban. Many Afghans are deeply angered by the high rates of civilian casualties generated by bad intelligence or “night raids” on the homes of suspected insurgents. They distrust the government of Pres. Hamid Karzai, which was installed and is funded by the western alliance. Meanwhile, billions of dollars in international aid, much of it squandered, has failed to improve the lives of average Afghans. That’s a record that screams it is time for the U.S. military to leave.

Welcome rains bring reminder of earlier wildfires

2011-08-21T13:47:00.000-06:00

The irrigation ditch water near Albuquerque becomes a gray-black soup after recent rains, which wash down soot from the upstream high country that was charred by wildfires earlier this summer. In a nearby hayfield, a black deposit remained on the ground after the irrigation water had disappeared.

Path to democracy does not run through the White House

2011-08-12T18:23:00.000-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.— “What happened to Obama?” an op-ed by Drew Westen in The New York Times on 6 August, received a lot of attention from progressives trying to determine how and why the president has failed so miserably to meet the modest expectations of the people elected him in 2008. Westin’s commentary is reasoned, well-written but reinforces a dangerous anti-democratic myth.

Westen, a psychology professor, claims Obama failed in his job as America’s collective storyteller, a role in which former Pres. Franklin Roosevelt succeeded so admirably during the Great Depression.

The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred.

He laments what Obama did not say at his inauguration and imagines how he could have explained our nation’s economic meltdown, identified the causes and the responsible parties, and sketched out a broad strategy to use the full resources the U.S. government to solve the crisis.

“But there was no story — and there has been none since,” wrote Westen.

No counter-narrative, no alternative vision, and, even worse, Obama almost immediately after his inauguration began appointing economic advisors, e.g. Geithner, Paulson, and Summers, who championed the very policies that produced the crisis, which was akin to asking the foxes to safeguard the same henhouse they have been plundering for years.

The primary problem with Westen’s argument is that in a modern democracy an elected president should not be a substitute father or parental figure, which is a leadership archetype more suited for a dictatorship or a monarchy. The United States is a nation, not a family, and in a democracy we elect a president as part of a process of articulating a national political vision. I agree that a critical responsibility of an elected president is to help fashion a narrative that clarifies and sustain a political vision. However, if Obama cannot or will not lead, then it is the responsibility of the American people to write the story for him and compel him to speak it.

FDR did not propose vast political changes, nor become a leader, in a vacuum. He became a leader because he listened to the voices from above and below and accepted that he needed to make choices that were guaranteed to infuriate many Americans. FDR may have had a measure of courage that Obama lacks, but he was compelled to act by organized Americans.

Likening a president to a parent diminishes the responsibilities of the public to guarantee a functioning democracy. The administration of Pres. George W. Bush, despite what a lot of liberals believe, did not run roughshod over the Constitution without a lot of help from Democrats, the news media, and the American public. The political landscape is little different today. The key decisions in our political economy are being made by unelected combines of capital that answer only to themselves and fund the political campaigns of our “elected representatives,” including the president. Much of the American public is still passive and the mainstream news media too often reports as truth the self-serving claims of the politicians and patricians.

Democracy cannot be distilled into exercising a vote once every four years. The response to Obama’s failures is not to elect a better president, but to build a better democracy, which requires we organize in our own self-interests as workers, families, retirees, and students. The solution to a faltering democracy is greater democracy.

U.S., Taliban war strategies show some similarities

2011-08-09T18:59:00.002-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—The war in Afghanistan has evolved into clash of similar military strategies. Counter-terrorism is what the United States calls its program of targeted assassinations of key insurgents, typically “night raids” on their homes, where there is a high likelihood for collateral casualties.

The Taliban factions operate similarly, zeroing in on key members of the foreign occupation, particularly Afghan collaborators in the regime of Pres. Hamid Karzai, like his half-brother, Kandahar powerbroker Ahmed Wali Karzai, and a senior aide, Jan Mohammed Khan, former governor of Oruzgan province.

The United States never implemented a full-blown counter-insurgency campaign, which was envisioned as a joint U.S.-Afghan effort to win the “hearts and mind” of locals by providing good governance, jobs and security. Gen. Stanley McChrystal advocated counter-insurgency, but insubordinate remarks triggered his resignation in June 2010, and the plan implemented by his former boss, Gen. David Petraeus, began shifting toward the more narrow counter-terrorist focus of killing the bad guys.

What is harder to determine is the degree to which the Taliban are also abandoning some earlier efforts to earn local support by the purchases of foodstuffs, a functioning dispute resolution process, security, and compensation for military recruits and their families. This has never been a consistent practice and there are reports in which locals portray the Taliban as ultraconservative foreigners (e.g. Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens, Uzbeks), often quite young, who impose their will on their host communities.

The Petraeus counter-terrorist “surge” changed the war by de-territorializing it. The conflict today appears to place less emphasis on the occupation and control of specific geographies, like the Taliban heartland in Kandahar, than on destroying each other’s leadership and inflicting symbolic defeats that reverberate deeply in the public imagination.

The public relations plum for the United States was the assassination of al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May. The following month the Taliban attacked the Intercontinental Hotel, a popular roost for foreigners in Kabul, on the eve of a conference that was designed to address the transition to Afghan rule. Just days ago, Afghan insurgents took down a NATO helicopter, in which 22 Navy Seals, the same special operations unit that killed bin Laden, perished alongside eight other Americans and eight Afghans.

Rewriting history: what Obama learned from Nixon

2011-08-07T20:38:00.003-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—A couple of years ago, an Afghan-German colleague in Kabul told me the United States would have to achieve victory in Afghanistan, if only for the sake of its own national pride

“Oh no, I suspect Obama will do what Richard Nixon did. The nationalist army occupied Vietnam, drove the United States out, and Pres. Nixon claimed it was an American victory. Obama and his generation of warmongers will do the same. They will go the extraordinary lengths to convince the public that the U.S. achieved something noble, just like another generation of Americans did 40 years ago.”

Outgoing Afghan commander, Gen. David Petraeus testified earlier this year that U.S.-led NATO forces have achieved success in degrading the Taliban, especially in its southern homelands, so that U.S. troop withdrawals are justified. Petraeus, seemingly auditioning for his new post as CIA director in the spring, cherry-picked a few bits of favorable data from the record levels of violence and embellished the emerging myth of victory for the Congress. His comments were dutifully reported as authoritative but then in late June the Taliban resistance launched a spectacular strike on the Intercontinental Hotel and in July assassinated Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half-brother in Kandahar. Taliban fighters now appear to have used a rocket-propelled grenade to take down a Chinook nelicopter in Wardak province in which 30 Americans, including 22 Navy Seals, and six Afghans perished. This is not the trajectory of a military victory.

Off the battlefield, the picture is no prettier. “Afghanistan relies on foreign aid for around 90 percent of its spending, but many international donors are reluctant to channel aid through the country's ministries because of a lack of capacity and rampant corruption,” reported Reuters.

Recasting the U.S. debacle in Afghanistan is far from complete, but the heavy lifting of writing history is under way.

Budget talks reveal an alien universe of priorities

2011-08-01T21:05:00.002-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Congress has agreed in principle it will address U.S. budget problems without reducing the mind-numbing cost of imperial wars and without increasing taxes on profitable corporations and the wealthiest individuals, who have enjoyed steady gains since the 2008 crash while the rest of America has struggled.

Good lord, what planet am I living on?

By seeking balance through the spending cuts, vital and necessary programs like Medicare and Social Security are one step closer to the chopping block. A national healthcare plan and a jobs program are dead.

Planet? What solar system?

The U.S. government showered hundreds of billions of public dollars on the very financial industries that wrecked the global economy, but there are no funds to tackle unemployment and poverty, which are entrenched at record levels.

Maybe we slipped into an alternate universe, a reversed reality in which up is down, bad is good, and stupid is wise.

Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (and maybe someday soon, Iran) are draining trillions of dollars from the national economy. Even former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his successor, the recently retired Robert Gates, openly acknowledged wasteful and unnecessary military spending. But significant defense reductions aren’t on the table.

If you want to know a nation’s priorities, look at its budget; government spends money on the things it considers important. By that yardstick the United States doesn’t like most Americans, coddles the wealthiest and most powerful, and is addicted to military spending that produces war, death and misery.

Stop, slow down, I want off now.

Hollywood worlds collide on New Mexico film set

2011-07-31T16:15:00.002-06:00

Plaza Blanca, a white public square or area in English, located near Abiquiu, N.M., was used a film set inCowboys and Aliens, a late-summer entry in the Hollywood summer blockbuster season. New Mexico aggressively courted TV and film producers in recent years, but many of the favorable tax advantages have been rolled back, diminishing the economic impact. Breaking Bad, one of the hip network TV series at the moment, is still filmed in and around Albuquerque, boosting its cachet with locals.

All terrorism is not opposed, nor feared the same

2011-07-30T20:21:00.005-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—If deliberate targeting of civilians is the criteria, than the carnage created by Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo, Norway, on 22 July was an act of terrorism: dead and maimed bodies, similar to those produced by terrorists elsewhere, e.g. the coordinated strikes in Mumbia, India, on 26 November 2008, the pre-election bombings of the Madrid, Spain, train system on 11 March 2004, or the homegrown attacks on the London’s public transit system on 7 July 2005.

The perpetrators of the three attacks before Oslo were militant Islamists. By contrast, Breivik, 32 with a penchant for photogenic uniforms, is rabidly anti-Muslim, pro-Zionist and claims to be “100 percent Christian.” His ideology also is anti-Marxist, which is a requirement for any brand of violent extremism from the right, and he stridently opposes multiculturalism and feminism. These are perspectives embraced by many conservative Christians.

Police speculate that Breivik’s acts were those of a “lone wolf,” but his worldview was framed in dialogue with those of similar ideologies on both sides of the Atlantic, including German neo-nazis, other ultranationalists, white supremacists, and anti-Islamic hatemongers. He claims in his 1,500-page manifesto that he is part of "international Christian military order,” which has “cells” elsewhere in western Europe, according to published reports.

There are influential Christian equivalents of the Afghan in the United States, like the New Apostolic Formation, which counsels “strategic level spiritual warfare,” writes Paul Rosenberg.

The ultimate goal is to replace secular democracy, both in America and around the world, with a Christian theocracy, an ideology known as ‘dominionism.'

Yet it is doubtful the specter of a white supremacist Christian terrorist network could generate the fear in the west that Islamic terror does routinely. Breivik’s worldview, after all, is common is the west; it evoked daily by the U.S. chattering class, it has institutional support and political allies, so the relation is one of familiarity and sympathy. Islam, on the hand, is largely unknown in the west and widely portrayed as dangerous, with the consequence that empathy for the dead and maimed and opposition to any terrorist violence gets trumped by fear and hatred for the perpetrators.

Draft Sanders? Yes, but much more is required

2011-07-25T19:23:00.004-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont, should run for president as an unapologetic and independent socialist, which would allow him to tap into a wide vein of American political thought that has included anarchists, populist farmers, trade and industrial unionists, farm-labor coalitions, social democrats, communists and grassroots social movements in diverse aggregates.

Seeking the nomination of the Democratic Party would be suicide for the campaign because it would be proof to most Americans that Sanders does not represent an alternative worldview. His platform must be in service to the common good, not the welfare of the wealthiest, and that means, for starters, increased tax rates for corporations and the wealthy individuals, regulation of Wall Street and the financial industries, greater public ownership of mineral wealth and major utilities, aggressive reform of the military/industrial complex, a comprehensive health care plan, and a publicly assisted jobs program.

The Democrats, their Republican brethren, the mainstream news media, and the fire-breathing guardians of public morality would circle the wagons at the first sign of success, so a draft Sanders program should be one strategic effort in a broader movement to build a better society. That will require a common vision anchored in the presidential platform and built by activists in schools, workplaces, communities, churches and cyberhoods.

Democratic participation, when it is reduced to a trip to the voting booth every four years, is insufficient to build democracy, socialism or justice. A single election victory, even the White House at a cost in excess of $800 million, guarantees nothing. A Sanders presidential bid will be successful to the extent that it looks beyond 2012 and serves as a beacon of sane justice for a struggling nation.

Ruminating on what won't be around the next corner

2011-07-24T19:46:00.009-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—My footstrikes on the rain-dampened trail establish a rhythm for my breathing and chanting, so I try to focus on each word of my chant, each phrase and line I concocted over the winter and spring and concentrate fully on what is before my eyes, unfiltered by memory, lest I fail to see a vista, a glimpse of joy that might open up around the next corner.

It was worth a try.

Jean MacKenzie was stationed in Kabul, covered the war in Afghanistan for seven years and knew when it was time to leave. “My hope for the future was gone, and my tolerance for the present was rapidly wearing thin. So, yes, it was time for me to go.” Yet after a month on the
Massachusetts coast, she writes, “the pull is still there” to return to Kabul.

I can’t say I feel the same.

The killing of Jan Mohammad Khan, a key advisor to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and his bodyguards on July 17 forced some former colleagues in two nearby guest houses to sequester themselves into their respective “safe rooms,” which are typically an upstairs bathroom with a metal door stocked with a few necessities, like a flashlight. (As you might expect, everyone hopes that no one will need to use the toilet.) At roughly the same time, a suicide attack team was captured by authorities before a planned strike at a grocery store popular with international workers in the same neighborhood. “Let's wait and see who will come back, not to mention the new hires,” wrote a former housemate in a recent email.

Not me.

Photo: City of Albuquerque open space on the western border of the Sandia Mountain Wilderness.

Surveying the swirling Chama near fabled Abiquiu, N.M.

2011-07-23T22:20:00.003-06:00

My godson Luke and his father, Larry, survey the Big Eddy on the Rio Chama near Abiquiu, New Mexico. We met Wednesday while they attended a healthcare conference at the Ghost Ranch retreat center, which is operated by the Presbyterian Church but more widely associated with one of its deceased neighbors, artist Georgia O’Keefe who often painted the sublime landscapes nearby.

Navigating the transnational contours of denial and fear

2011-07-20T11:17:00.002-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—I had students in Kabul who consistently minimized the security threat of the war and were optimistic beyond reason that the U.S.-led NATO forces would accomplish their mission, leaving Afghanistan on the road to recovery after decades of violence and poverty.

But that isn’t the way the war was being played out. The number of casualties involving uniformed personnel or civilians and the number of incidents, whether roadside attacks with improvised explosive devices, suicide strikes, night raids or, firefights, steadily increased during the two and half years I taught at the American university. Just last week, for instance, the UN reported that civilian deaths for January through June reached a record high in 2011.

Certainly some Afghans, a small minority, have benefitted economically from international spending over the last decade and in a handful of cities women are working jobs outside the home that they denied under the Taliban. But most of Afghanistan remains a dirt-poor country with no economic base, save illegal opium, and for most Afghans, particularly those in the rural provinces, life is not getting better.

The vast majority of western aid to Afghanistan is directed to the military, but some civilian aid funds salaries for international workers, like myself, and while other aid provides comparatively well paid jobs for local employees. Many of my students took evening classes because they worked fulltime jobs with international non-governmental organizations, Afghan ministries, or foreign embassies. They were beneficiaries of the western presence and had plenty of reason to fear that their gains, and that of their families, would vanish with the withdrawal of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). So they ignored the evidence showing the war was becoming more fierce and deadly. Denying unpleasant realities is a coping strategy and often is an alternative to despair, the theory goes.

Social denial is no less rampant in the homeland of the collapsing American empire, in which 40 million people struggle in poverty while the political class engages in debt reductions talks without considering substantial tax hikes on the wealthiest Americans or major reductions in defense spending. Since 2000 the U.S. defense budget has increased an estimated 80 percent without including the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Harper’s Magazine. “Why is the one part of government that best epitomizes everything conservatives say they hate about government—- waste, incompetence, and corruption—all but exempt from conservative criticism?” wonders David Morris.

Morris’ question assumes there is an alternative to conservative voices, which of course there are, though they are not sitting around the tables of these talks. Those seats are reserved for the protectors of the rich and the war profiteers from both political parties who have no self-interest in criticizing the status quo from which their privileges flow. But what motivates the denial of many millions of Americans who are victims of this class warfare? What motivates their stubborn acquiescence in the face of their own decline? Is it a fear similar that of my former students from Afghanistan?

When I pushed my students, many of them would eventually admit that they had moved beyond feelings of disappointment and had come to resent and dislike the American government’s performance in their country. They were often reluctant to say that out loud, especially in an American university, but their unwillingness had a deeper logic. As much as they disliked the U.S. effort, they feared the return of the Taliban even more. Extending the comparison, what is it that many Americans fear so much that they will tolerate cruel oligarchic rule and the steady erosion of their dreams?

Returning to a house in the elusive search for a home

2011-07-14T15:06:00.006-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—I don’t know whether it is fateful, ironic or maybe humorous that after almost five years of searching for something that felt more like home that I find myself back in the house I left in the summer of 2006.

Home is a messy concept, an amalgam of personalized shelter and refuge from the world that is typically tied to a family (broadly defined), serves as a network of support, and is rooted to a specific place or places with a shared meaning over time. The relative and shifting importance of these elements vary by person, family, and circumstances as I discovered after 15 years of studying systemic poverty, much of it by working with agencies providing services to homeless persons. Homeless shelter operators know that a warm cot, a roof overhead, and meals does not constitute a home. Many shelter residents have, for a wide variety of reasons, lost or exhausted the ties that once bound them to a family, loved ones and a community.

By the time I decided to work overseas in 2006, oligarchic rule had effectively triumphed in the United States, key constitutional guarantees like the separation of powers had been trashed, and I felt like a stranger in the land in which I was raised. I am reluctant to pinpoint a specific date or event to signify the start of any historical shift, especially one of this magnitude, but the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 eliminated doubt for many of my most stubborn friends.

While working overseas in Kyrgyzstan, I thought I found a reasonable shot at a key element of home, a household united by love, with a woman I met in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital. We sustained a long-distance relationship for the next three years, during which I relocated to Afghanistan. At the start of this year, I expected to be married by this summer. Where we lived wasn’t particularly important to me because I knew on a visceral level that being together was more important to me than any particular place. But as my Buddha-self likes to remind me every so often, nothing in this world endures: the relationship ended and I was forced to re-evaluate my hope for home.

During my stay in Kabul, the security threats that terrorize the lives of ordinary Afghans and limit international workers’ movements got progressively worse, so in March I gave my notice, unsure what I would do next, but certain it was time for me to pull up stakes. I didn’t particularly want to return to the States, despite the presence of some family members and friends, but I still owned a house in Albuquerque and whether I sold it, rented it out again, or moved back into it, I needed to tend to its upkeep.

My last renter left at the end of April and the house was empty when I returned two weeks ago, which gave me the opportunity to refinish the battered and bruised wood floors. The desiccated yard also needed attention as did a handful of other improvements I had put off for too long. But it was evident I didn’t really want to be here because whenever I returned to my property my first week and calculated the work I needed to do, I soon figured out a way to avoid it.

I am starting to feel a bit more settled in the house, even though I know employment may take me overseas again. Maybe I just needed a little more time for my psycho-social transition from a war-ravaged corner of the developing world. I have some good friends here and my family is more accessible. In spite of the region’s drought, which stoked fears that I had returned to the frontlines of the ecological end times, the modest rainfall of the last couple of days have unleashed the smells of the earth, grasses, sage of the high desert and reminded me why I once settled here.

Photo: View from the front yard into the back with a Bird of Paradise in background in bloom.

Poverty, civilian war deaths can't rival Anthony verdict

2011-07-09T12:45:00.008-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Increased U.S. unemployment estimates released Friday rattled the investment class as stock prices slipped, thwarting already slim hopes for any sign of an economic recovery this year. “The United States is in the grips of its gravest jobs crisis since Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House,” reports Catherine Rampbell.

U.S. Labor Department unemployment rates, which measure only those people who report looking for work over the last four weeks, are misleading because they do not include underemployed or discouraged workers. Since 1995 the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a unit of the Labor Department, devised the broader U-6 classification to include persons “marginally attached” to the labor market. The U-6 unemployment rate for June 2011 is 16.2 percent and some alternative estimates are even higher: 22.8 percent, according to shadowstats.com.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world, U.S-led NATO forces conceded on Thursday that they “had unwittingly killed several women and children a day earlier during an early morning air attack against militants” in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan, triggering outrage in nearby villages and further eroding the fragile relationship between the Afghan government and western authorities.

But what is galvanizing America’s attention? While there is no single answer, one frontrunner has to be the outrage over the jury decision earlier this week that acquitted Casey Anthony, a 25-year-old mother, on charges that she killed her two-year-old daughter in 2008. It seems that the public who listened to 30-second trial reports by the mainstream news media, or watched portions of the exhaustive TV coverage of the trial, or nodded in agreement with the invective as analysis from the likes of CNN crime news pundit Nancy Grace, the angry former prosecutor, know more than the 12 jurors who listened to all the evidence and arguments made by Anthony’s defense team and the Florida prosecution. The jury took a single day to reach its decision that Anthony was guilty of only four misdemeanor counts of providing false information to law enforcement authorities, suggesting the prosecution’s case was at best unconvincing.

The U.S. economy is tanking and after almost a decade in Afghanistan the American military cannot distinguish between militants and civilians, or doesn’t think it’s that important, yet neither warrant the public anger directed against a single individual. It is so much easier to beat up on a flawed person than to tackle systemic injustices that create misery for millions of people.

First take on vibrators on TV, gas hogs and ‘Tree of Life’

2011-07-05T17:33:00.001-06:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —The TV ads I saw a few days after returning here involving three women in a spirited conversation about using vibrators for sexual pleasure represented a frankness about sexual matters that I haven’t witnessed in a while. Blunt discussions about sexual pleasure just do not occur in the public sphere in Afghanistan, even Kabul, the relatively liberal capital, where I have lived and worked the better part of the last two and a half years. Married couples in Afghanistan don’t hold hands in public, much less unmarried singles. Uncovered female hair in public is unacceptable virtually everywhere, save the American university where I taught.

Let’s just call it my cultural adjustment. A travel writer and historian I recently read said first impressions of a foreign culture are invariably more meaningful because they contrast so sharply with our ethnocentric norms. Within a week, we make adjustment to the new culture, and the contrast washes away, so record your initial impressions, he advised. That process works similarly returning to the familiar culture after an extended stay away.

The high-mileage Chevrolet Cruze (42 mpg on the highway, says the manufacturer) was the top-selling car in June in the United States, according to industry figures, suggesting that American public might be edging away from its obsession for large, low-mileage gasoline “hogs.” But a closer read of the story dampened that interpretation. The best-selling vehicles for the first six months of 2011 were pick-up trucks, lead by the Ford F Series followed by the Chevrolet Silverado, which get about half the mileage of the Cruze.

More than 80 percent of the U.S. population lives in urban areas, so it’s safe to conclude that most of these pick-ups are not working vehicles and that many are purchased largely to convey status with little concern for their global ecological footprint. Now this denial feels familiar, I thought.

Last night I saw Tree of Life, this year’s Palme d’Oro winner at Cannes, directed by Terrence Malick. It is wildly ambitious and almost unavoidably pretentious—how do you wrestle with the primordial existential questions and not run that risk? The film still succeeds, less as a literary exploration with crackling dialogue translated to the big screen, but as a fully cinematic text with arresting, sometimes hallucinatory photography, an anthemic soundtrack, and character development driven by behavior that we watch unfold with little spoken explanation.

I confess that I am surprised this film was even produced in the States because the “story” has little commercial appeal, although it does have the bankable acting presence of Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, the latter in a minor role. Without them, I suspect the film would have great difficulty gaining distribution.

Photo: Cottonwood tree in fall on irrigation ditch in Albuquerque's north valley.

Through spaces lush and arid, explosive and unhurried

2011-06-28T20:37:00.000-06:00

Syracuse, N.Y., had record winter snows, has been saturated with rain, and throbbed green last week.

Parched Albuquerque, where I arrived yesterday, is hot, windy, with a few teasing clouds this afternoon. North of here, the Las Conchas wildfire, which consumed 44,000 acres in the first 24 hours and is uncontained, forced the evacuation of Los Alamos, N.M. the town of 12,000 that was created during World War II to develop the nation’s nuclear weaponry.

In Kabul, which I left a month ago, at least six militants “armed with machine guns, anti-aircraft weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and hand grenades” attacked the aging Intercontinental Hotel, which is often frequented by foreigners. Rockets fired from NATO helicopters killed three insurgents today and appear to have eliminated the four-hour siege, for which the Taliban claimed responsibility. The attack took place on the eve of a conference about the transition of civil and military responsibility from foreign forces to Afghans, the Guardian UK reported.

Sandwiched between leaving Kabul and arriving in Albuquerque, I spent the better part of three weeks in Italy and Croatia, mostly on the languid Adriatic coasts.

Incarnation IV of fusion pioneers headline Syracuse fest

2011-06-26T15:54:00.001-06:00

Stanley Clarke on bass, Chick Corea keyboards, Jean-Luc Ponty violin, Frank Gambale on guitar and (out of frame) drummer Lenny White are Return to Forever IV, the latest incarnation of the legendary fusion band. Just off an Australian tour, they performed Saturday evening at the free, two-night Syracuse Jazz Festival.

What gains are jeopardized by U.S. withdrawal plan?

2011-06-24T11:18:00.002-06:00

One of the conservative criticisms of Pres. Obama’s withdrawal plan for Afghanistan is that it may threaten the "gains” achieved by the surge championed by Gen. David Petraeus, which begs the question, what gains?

Despite the elimination of mastermind Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, which had symbolic significance, al-Qaeda has not been a significant factor in Afghanistan insurgency for more than a year. The Afghan Taliban, which has splintered into at least four factions that sometimes fight each other, appears to be as collectively strong as they were a year ago. What is not debatable is that overall security, the key indicator for most Afghans, has progressively worsened for more than two years. U.S. civilian development aid—$19 billion since 2002, yet paltry when compared to military spending—has accomplished little and may be contributing to rampant corruption, according to a two-year study by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The government led by Pres. Hamid Karzai is widely distrusted and vilified by Afghans and is effectively non-existent in many areas of the country. The banking industry, after an epic and still unfolding scandal, is in tatters and the International Monetary Fund has delayed transfers of assistance until financial regulations of the nation’s 17 commercial banks are improved. The parliament, which has been attempting to assert its independence from Pres. Karzai, is now approaching a meltdown after a special court recently ruled that nearly a quarter of the members were elected fraudulently in the last election. While election deceit was rampant, many parliamentarians perceive the court ruling as an attempt engineered by Karzai to replace the ousted legislators with ones more supportive of the president.

Finally, the legal economy is utterly dependent on outside aid. The same U.S. Senate study that was critical of the civilian aid estimated that 97% of the Afghan gross domestic product was generated by spending on foreign troops and aid efforts.

Watery upstream walk at Watkins Glen park

2011-06-23T11:16:00.000-06:00

One of my brothers and I took a drive to Watkins Glen State Park in central New York yesterday and walked the trail that follows a series of 19 waterfalls.

2011-06-23T11:09:00.000-06:00

The Church of St. John on Lopuc, an island near Dubrovik, Croatia, was reportedly built in the 9th or 10th century, though the rose window was probably added when the church was enlarged in the 14th century, according to nearby signs.

Some indications of cultural globalization observed in Italy and Croatia in late May through mid-June:

Stop signs in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, in which the Slavic dialects dominate, are in English.
Passing by bus through a small inland town in rural Croatia en route to Plitvice Lakes National Park, one store sign was in multiple languages, including Chinese characters.
The leading currency listed at one exchange in Ravenna, Italy, was Bangladeshi taka. Elsewhere in same city, I encountered a restaurant advertising “Bangla Euro kebabs.”
Another restaurant I passed by on a train from Ravenna to the Ancona was named Pacha mama, the name for the “Mother World” goddess acknowledged by the indigenous people of the Andes.
And in case you were wondering, the 29^th World Logging Championships were held last year in Zagreb, Croatia, as evidenced by a tattered billboard.

Piercing the blur of an Adriatic journey just completed

2011-06-18T13:48:00.005-06:00

The mosaic work at the Baslica di San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, an early example of Christian Byzantine art and architecture in western Europe, is breath-taking.

Water isn't the only difference between Kabul and Venice

2011-06-05T08:18:00.005-06:00

One of the differences that struck me this past week in traveling from Afghanistan to Italy (and all of western Europe by extension) is demographic. Half the population of Afghanistan is under 18.2 years of age, whereas the median age in Italy is more than twice that, 43.5 years.

Re-encountering Christ in Rome in three acts

2011-05-31T12:29:00.002-06:00

The aquatic deities of Roman mythology are depicted at the Trevi Fountains.

ROME, Italy—Choking while the rosary was being prayed in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore here Saturday, I was reminded that I am already dead. If the promise of Jesus Christ is that there is life after death, then I am ready for my resurrection now.

Second act: Seated at a streetside table at a café on Via Cavour after visiting the Coliseum and the Forum with my travel partner, a colleague from Kabul, I caught myself watching the couple at a table next to us. He was considerably older than her and they reminded me of you and I when we were a couple in love and traveled together. I wondered about their relationship, how they negotiated the differences in their ages, experiences and expectations.

Third act: In the Sistine Chapel, humbled under Michelangelo’s iconic ceiling, I wondered why it was necessary for the guards to cry “silenzio” to the crowds. What was the point of speech, but how much of my awe was only the consequence of having had Roman Catholic narratives to frame and interpret reality for me?

Omar's death, if true, could ratchet up security

2011-05-23T21:55:00.003-06:00

KABUL, Afghanistan—The university’s 2010 graduation, scheduled for a single student, was halted last May a few days after a suicide attack by minivan exploding across the road near a crowded bustop on the south side of Kabul, killing 17 people, mostly Afghan civilians, four NATO colonels, and injuring scores of others.

Later this week, with a class of less than 30, the first graduation is scheduled on campus amid mounting violence, including deadly attack on Kabul military hospital, an outdoor market in Laghman, and a government building Khost in recent days.

Multiple news sources yesterday and today are reporting Afghan claims that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the religious authority of the Afghan Taliban, has been killed by Pakistani authorities “while on the way from Quetta to North Waziristan.” Another reports said Pakistanis were rushing the body to Afghanistan to suggest he was killed there. However, the Taliban claim Omar is alive and Afghanistan. His death, if true, could have a greater impact on the war than bin Laden’s killing.

Al Qaeda was a global phenomena and bin Laden wanted to bring holy terror to the U.S., its western allies, Saudi Arabia and unfaithful Muslims around the world. Mullah Omar wants to create an Islamic theocratic state in Afghanistan. Those are very different goals and in Omar has much popular support in Afghanistan than bin Laden, much it tied to the former’s peasant origins in Maiwand area of Kandahar province, his success as anti-Soviet mujahideen and an Afghan anti-communist before he decided to hang up his guns to teach at a madrassah in Pakistan. The corruption and violence of the warlord era brought Omar and his students (Talibs) back to his homeland and they created the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which ruled from 1996 to 2001. For some Muslims, Mullah Omar is Amir al-Mu'minin, the highest possible Islamic title, often translated as "Commander of the Faithful."

Omar’s death, if true, will likely raise the security risk for the graduation ceremonies.

Swinging in metal in blue at the Kabul zoo

2011-05-21T08:54:00.003-06:00

KABUL, Afghanistan—I was the youngest person on this pendulum ride at the city zoo by about 35 years (no exaggeration). There is a small "ferris wheel" to the left. Most public space is decidedly masculine and the ratio of boys to girls at the zoo on Friday, the Islamic day of public prayer, was least 10-to-1. Even still, the zoo is one of the few spaces in which boy and girl mix at all, university students tell me. Afghanistan is a young country, with more than half the population of some 30 million under the age of 19.

An open letter to my Pol. 110 students

2011-05-19T05:52:00.002-06:00

KABUL, Afghanistan—From the start, the two sections of Introduction to Politics I taught this semester felt like the most difficult teaching assignment I can remember. Within two weeks, it was evident that only a minority of you possessed the necessary skills (reading, writing, critical thinking, analytical, etc.) to do well, and that was only if you also worked with the materials outside the classroom.

Most of you were not prepared, some of you will leave this university, voluntarily and involuntarily, but you should know that the American model of education guarantees neither success nor failure. In fact, the model anticipates a certain level of “attrition” or “failure,” if defined as the number of students who take classes at a university but for some reason or another fail to earn a degree there.

Now, in some educational models, drop-out rates are seen as indication of poor performance or incompetence on the part of the university. Some students here and elsewhere I taught have suggested that their personal failures reflect poorly on their instructor. However, the American model assigns a disproportionately large share of responsibility for success and failure to you, the student. You can earn an A or you can do nothing and earn an F. The choice is yours.

I was confident that my course expectations were realistic at the start of the semester because they were almost identical to the same course I taught a year earlier here. I did not expect that many of you would be familiar with the basic political concepts and terminology common to North Atlantic social sciences. But I did expect a little more humility, and a lot less whining, than what many of you exhibited for much of the semester. After your first couple of assignments I began to suspect that many of you were going to do very badly, especially in the final assignment, a short research paper. But I stuck with my instincts and with what worked in the past.

In the end, I am happy to say that many of you rose to the occasion and that your research papers, in spite of the fact that many you had never written one before, were on average much better that I thought they would might be. I am not saying you will all get the grades you want (a guaranteed impossibility) but the grades you earned were in many cases a very pleasant surprise for me and an accomplishment for which you should be congratulated.

Melding music at the French/Afghan edge

2011-05-15T10:46:00.008-06:00

Ustad Urfan Ehsan on sitar, cellist Charlotte Castellat and Mahmood Mohammed Jawid on tabla were part of Aux confins des mondes.2 ("The edge of worlds.2") ensemble that performed Saturday at the French Cultural Center in Kabul.

Three women negotiating busy Kabul street

2011-04-28T04:41:00.003-06:00

Security measures limit western workers' movement into downtown Kabul.This image was snatched from a vehicle in the pursuit of groceries and sundries.

Slap me. Tell me this is just a bad dream.

2011-04-28T03:33:00.004-06:00

KABUL, Afghanistan— I wish I was rendered speechless by the advanced TV coverage of the royal wedding between Prince what’s his name and his fiancée, Kate the commoner, by the breathless “news” teams of BBC World News and their anglophile brethren on CNN International News. But my response rushes from disgust to disbelief.

A few days ago, one these talking heads was stunned that someone from the guest list of royals elsewhere in world, a prince from a southeastern Asian country, said he would not attend. Apparently he has something more important to tend to, the reporter hissed.

Monarchies are vestigial organs in modern society, the social equivalent of the coccyx, or the human tailbone. They provide some insight into our evolutionary past but serve no useful function in the present. Yet the fact remains that many, perhaps million of people, care about young Willie and his blushing princess bhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifride to be. What desire is being addressed by this spectacle? Is this, for Brits, simply a nostalgic means to deny the U.K.’s position as a third-rate economic power more than a century after the death of the British Empire?

My countrymen and women, on the other hand, are no better. While the U.S. economy is collapsing, one of the leading presidential candidates for 2012, you know, the fat cat sporting the worst comb-over in recent history, claims he has “accomplished something really, really important” by finally shaming Obama, the do-nothing president, into producing a copy of his birth certificate almost two and a half years after taking office.

Slap me. Tell me this is just a bad dream.

Holiday offers many Afghans little to celebrate

2011-04-26T21:28:00.002-06:00

KABUL, Afghanistan— “There is nothing worth remembering. There is nothing worth commemorating,” said one student, explaining why he will not acknowledge Mujahideen Victory Day, the Afghan national holiday on Thursday.

The day recognizes the defeat of the Soviet-backed Afghan regime on 27 April 1992, three years after Soviet troops were driven out of the country by the mujahideen armies. The victory over the communist government did not produce peace but instead ushered in four years of sectarian wars among the same militia, which were organized along ethnic, regional and tribal lines. The mujahideen, who were valorized as “holy warriors” in ousting the Soviet occupation army over a blood-soaked decade, became the warlords who brutalized, raped, tortured and killed each other for another four years—so much so that many Afghans welcomed the Taliban’s capture of Kabul in 1996. Today many of the most influential government positions in Afghanistan are held by former mujahideen or warlords, a difference that is significant to some but meaningless to many of my students.

What might have been a significant national celebration will probably only be a sad military display attended by government functionaries but otherwise ignored by a war-weary public. I expect one or more the speakers festooned with medals or other symbolic displays of power to say the Afghan people must again unite to expel the new forces of occupation in language clear enough to eliminate ambiguity but vague enough to allow deniability.

If my students’ observations are true, then much of the public in the nation’s capital will attempt to enjoy the day off with friends and family, hoping that the quiet will not be ripped apart by the latest assemblage of men with guns and bombs intent on imposing their political will on others. Meanwhile, my colleagues and I will be confined to quarters today and tomorrow with our movement limited to the university and the handful of guesthouses.

Classical music prodigy performs in Kabul

2011-04-24T09:41:00.006-06:00

Vocalist Wali Fateh Ali Khan, who began studying south Asian classical music at the age of 8, performed Indian and Afghan music before a packed house last night at the French Cultural Center in his native city of Kabul. In 1999, at the age of 13, Wali was the youngest classical singer recognized by the Pakistan’s Minister of Culture & National Council of Arts, according to his website.

Teaching in the pursuit of inspiration

2011-04-20T04:07:00.003-06:00

KABUL, Afghanistan—Working at a new university in a war zone has its challenges, but a brief conversation I had with a student last week explains why I have taught here for the better part of the last two and a half years.

Farida, not her real name, will graduate this year with a bachelor’s degree in business. She works fulltime, takes in excess of a full-time course load each semester, does summer classes as well, and will graduate in less than four years. She also shares a large burden in caring for her family in Kabul. She is one of the hardest-working, most disciplined students I have encountered anywhere.

Farida is in her late 20s or early 30s and unmarried, which makes her a rarity in Afghanistan. Given her marital status, her career with outside the home, and her pursuit of a formal education, she stands in sharp opposition to conventional gender norms, which had made her extremely unpopular with her more conservative relatives in Kandahar province, she said. Farida recalled one uncle who would allow her to spend the night at his home—hospitality, even to non-relatives, is widely seen as social obligation in Afghanistan—but he would not allow her to eat at the same table with him or to talk with any of his children. Among those relatives, it was not uncommon for girls to be married as young as age nine but more often 12 or 15, Farida explained.

Despite the familial opposition, Farida persisted and in the fall she hopes to attend graduate school outside the country so that she can develop the skills that will allow her to return to make an even greater contribution to the development of her native land. Her visit last week was to ask me for a letter of reference, which I will eagerly provide.

“You described your uncle’s behavior in the past tense,” I said. “Does he still feel the same way today?”

Oh no, she said, his attitudes are changing and he is even thinking of moving to Kabul so his children can get a better education. Farida, smiling, told she is now allowed to talk with her cousins and even believes the girls look to her as a “role model.”

“Those girls could not have made a better choice,” I said.

Threats are real, but still pale by comparison

2011-04-12T04:36:00.001-06:00

KABUL, Afghanistan—The advent of the spring fighting season in Afghanistan and the deteriorating security here in the capital is being felt a little closer to home.

On Sunday residents of my guest house discussed the concerns of the security forces protecting our next door neighbor, the second vice-president of Afghanistan. “They believe they could be attacked by the Taliban,” explained one of our residents who spoke the VP’s security detail.

Security measures next door have been stepped for months. Sandbags filled with a front-end loader are more than 10 feet high and surround much of his property, a new gate was being installed this morning, and the vice president has been acquiring nearby properties in an efforts to “securitize” the neighborhood. The “weak link” in his protection is our guest house, a three-story building, gated and surrounded by a concrete and metal wall ringed with razor wire, and protected by two guards 24/7. Woefully inadequate, according the folks next door.

Our guards share one automatic weapon, which is stored in the guard shack, and the guest house’s security could easily be breached a well-armed and determined attack team, which could then easily get to third floor, where it could launch a strike against the vice-president’s compound some 10 meters away.

A related concern: How determined a fight should anyone expect from private security guards who are paid about $200 per month to protect foreign workers, who earn exorbitant salaries relative to theirs and are increasingly resented by much of the Afghan general public? I have heard unsubstantiated stories that some of our guards and escorts do not discuss the nature of their work with their peers for fear of censure.

Within 24 hours, my employer decided to shut down the guest house and move seven of us to accommodations elsewhere. I am packing at the moment.

I leave with one caveat: The danger foreign workers face in Afghanistan is miniscule relative to the threat ordinary Afghans live with every day. Even when foreign workers are the target of an anti-government attack, the victims are overwhelmingly Afghans and Muslims. I cannot offer an informed perspective on this brutal, misguided war from their viewpoint. I cannot hope to genuinely understand the sustained trauma and fear experienced by most Afghans. My perspective, for whatever insight it might offer, is privileged and pampered by comparison.

Hold the ransom! That's not his dog's name!

2011-04-08T04:15:00.004-06:00

Security guards shooting the breeze outside a guesthouse for international workers in Kabul.

KABUL, Afghanistan—The “proof of life” form distributed at my workplace earlier this week asked me to write four questions and answers that only my loved ones and I would know in the event that I was abducted and there were negotiations for my release. After all, no one would want to pay a ransom demand for me if I was already dead.

A week ago today, Afghanistan erupted into violence that was triggered by reports that an American Christian pastor had torched a copy of the Quran, Islam’s most sacred text. Published news stories indicated that at least two dozen persons died in bloody protests that began last Friday in Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan and quickly spread to other cities. As recently as yesterday, there were still protests and at an otherwise peaceful demonstration in Kabul participants were chanting “Death to America,” according to one of the organizers. "We blame Terry Jones for his action (but) we also believe that American government is behind this burning of the Quran," he told CNN.

So against that backdrop, the text message I received two days ago that a convoy operated by NATO's International Security Assistance Force had killed an Afghan civilian in a traffic accident about 200 meters from my workplace, an American university, captured my attention. NATO convoys don’t like to slow down, much less stop, when zipping through urban areas because that makes them more vulnerable to attack. A lockdown, meaning no movement in out of the workplace or the guesthouses for international workers, went into effect but was lifted about an hour later because the incident ignited only a brief flurry of stone-throwing by irate pedestrians at the scene.

With tensions still high yesterday, my employer announced a “preventative” lockdown for today. Mass demonstrations here and elsewhere in other Muslim countries often occur after Friday prayers, which ended about an hour ago.

Christian bigot rallies Muslim extremists

2011-04-02T10:33:00.009-06:00

KABUL, Afghanistan—Terry Jones, the bigoted Christian pastor from Florida provided one of the few focal points capable of uniting the diversity of Muslims around the world: desecration of the Quran. His self-serving act of stupidity will be exploited by the Taliban factions in Afghanistan and Muslim extremists elsewhere.

The death toll in Afghanistan as a consequence of violent demonstrations triggered by the Quran burning orchestrated by Jones is mounting: 12 dead, including seven United Nations staff members, in the relatively quiet city Mazar-i-Sharif in the north on Friday and nine more in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Talban in southern Afghanistan today. Insurgents attacked the Camp Phoenix NATO base just outside Kabul this morning and there are currently demonstrations in Kabul and Herat near the border with Iran, reports the Washington Post. The U.S. Embassy, several non-governmental organizations, and the American university closed operations in Kabul and banned non-essential travel before 8:30 am local time.

Jones reportedly told a French news service that he takes no responsibility for the protest deaths. Astonishingly, in a statement he said the United States and UN should take “immediate action” against Muslim nations in retaliation for the deaths, The New York Times reports. “The time has come to hold Islam accountable,” he said.

Jones ignited a global response last September when he announced plan to burn the Quran burning on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but he canceled it under worldwide pressure. The U.S. news media, apparently smarting from accusations that it fanned the discontent by overplaying Jones’ threats, did not trumpet the actual burning when it took place March 20 at his 50-member church in Gainesville, Florida.

Two days ago, the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, an inspiring group originated in isolated Bamiyan province, did a presentation of the possibility for peace for students at the university where I work. In a show of hands, 20 percent of the university students said peace was impossible. The exchange, conducted largely in the Dari language, revealed these obstacles.

The historic divisions based on ethnicity, region, and gender are unabated. There is little national identity. Not everyone wants peace, the student said. The country is wracked by poverty, illiteracy, and corruption. Economic development has been largely ineffective. Afghanistan “is almost a failed state,” weak and ineffective, non-existent in many areas, and utterly dependent on outside funding.

Peace is largely an abstraction, there is little agreement about what it would look like, so there are no plans to get there, they agreed.

“The history of this country seems to be locking us into a future of wars,” said one student.

The self-interest that drives regional and international interference fuels the conflict and cannot improve Afghanistan, they said. Many of the actors that need to be at the same peace table, including Pakistan and India, Iran and the United States, don’t even talk with each other. The global economy’s interest in the Muslim world seldom extends beyond its oil and gas fields. Many Afghans are unimpressed by that they’ve seen of western democracy and ideals and “anti-American sentiment is at record high levels, reports Eurasianet.

What is widely expected to be another bloody spring has arrived and the forces of violent intolerance were granted new rallying fury by a similarly small-minded spirit from half a world away.

On beach culture and jobs in coastal Oman

2011-03-29T01:26:00.005-06:00

The harbor at Sur, Oman, about 220 kilometers southwest of Muscat by car.

With a week for a break from my job in landlocked Afghanistan, I chose to visit Oman, which has abundance of coastline and beaches and is relatively nearby. However, beaches in the undeveloped Arabian Peninsula are where fishing boats are launched and docked, not places where people routinely swim or socialize. In places like Oman, where cloudy days are rare, the sun is understood as something that can be mercilessly lethal, so if you go to a beach in, say, the early afternoon, when most commercial and outside activity ceases, you will likely be alone.

That even included the spectacular beach at Ras al Hadd, where the Gulf of Oman, which appears sublimely green near land and blue at a distance, rolls over pristine beige sand. In fact, if you are from the global north, the virtual absence of human activity makes you feel like you are doing something horribly wrong—or at least hard to comprehend by local standards.

In the several days I was in and around Sur, Oman, some 220 driving kilometers southwest of Muscat, I have found local residents to be friendly without being obsequious and the commercial culture to be mercifully free of those persistent peddlers of overpriced doo-dads I find annoying. There is a concerted effort in Oman effort to develop tourism to diversify the economy from its historical dependence on a diminishing supply of oil. The pedestrian area in beachside Sur, for instance, is undergoing a substantial rehabilitation with new walkways, seating areas, and streetlights. However, tourism seldom creates widespread local benefits and typically favors developers, hotel and restaurant owners, the airlines, and tour and travel operators while creating an abundance of low-paid jobs for most everyone else. The process also substantially increases the chance that the local culture will be commodified to meet the tastes of relatively affluent travelers.

In all likelihood, the lowest-paid jobs in tourism or any other industry will not be filled by Omani nationals. While about 19 percent of Oman’s population of a little more than 3 million is from somewhere else, very often the countries of south Asia, “non-nationals” make up a whopping 60 percent of the Omani workforce. The cold reality is that immigrants from relatively poor countries often fill the lowest-paid jobs in developed nations, whether they are Turks employed in Germany, Mexicans in the United States, or Indians in Oman, yet their income is often greater than what they could ever expect to earn in their nation of origin.

Mixing over the fish masala in coastal Oman

2011-03-24T02:38:00.002-06:00

Fishermen haul in their nets at sunset in the harbor at Sur, Oman.

SUR, Oman—The dusty downtown that I passed through early afternoon yesterday had more goats than people, but by evening it was brightly lit and teeming with shoppers, workers, pedestrians and even a handful of western tourists.

Traveling alone makes it easy for me to retreat into solitude, but I have tried to stretch myself and mix. A couple of days ago after a swim in the Gulf of Oman outside the village of Ras Al Hadd some 47 kilometers east of here, I picked up three boys, who appeared to be no older than, say, 13, and were hitching a ride back to Sur. They spoke as much English as I speak Arabic, but we overcame the quiet and amused ourselves listening to some Arabic pop music on the radio of my rental car. (If popular music has any universal qualities, they must include anemic vocalizations of an indeterminate gender and smarmy string sections.)

On my way to Ras Al Hadd, the easternmost point of the Arabian Peninsula and where I was I told were the cleanest beaches in the area, I stopped by a coffee shop and chatted with its operator, an Indian Muslin from Mumbai who says he has worked and lived in Oman for 20 years. I stopped by the shop again yesterday while cruising in and around Sur and the coffee that I paid 150 baisas for a day earlier cost me 100 baisas. (Ah, the rewards of friendship.) With two of his male relatives, we watched some live televised testimony of the Indian Prime Minister before the Legislature. “India has many problems,” he told me. The search for employment and a living wage explained his presence in Oman and much of the Indian global diaspora, he said. “Your people appear to be everywhere,” I agreed.

The fish masala that evening at the restaurant in downtown Sur—Arabic, Indian and Chinese foods are common menu items in Oman—was quite good and my primary source of entertainment was a pair of middle-aged Omani men who appeared to be complaining about every aspect of their food and service. After their meal, the gruffer of the two, who had kept glancing at me while eating, walked over to my table and took a toothpick from the dispenser on my table. “Welcome to Oman,” he said before turning and leaving.

Confronting U.S. duplicity seaside in Oman

2011-03-23T02:41:00.002-06:00

SUR, Oman—I didn’t need anything more to convince me of the hypocrisy of my nation of citizenship, but I got it anyway by reading Zeitoun (2009), the disturbing tale of the abuse of a Syrian-American and his family orchestrated by the inept and paranoid Federal Emergency Management Assistance agency in the days and weeks after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast.

FEMA, the once functioning bureaucracy, became synonymous with incompetence during its trial by fire in the late summer of 2005 and has since come to represent the indifference shown by the Bush administration at the time and the U.S. elite in general toward average Americans.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the Muslim protagonist, and his American-born wife, Kathy are portrayed by writer Dave Eggers as possessing all of the qualities valorized in American popular culture: hard-working, honest, tolerant, principled and devoted to their family and friends. Zeitoun, who is widely known by only his surname, stays behind to protect his construction and property management business after Kathy and their four children leave New Orleans for safety with family in Baton Rouge and later with friends in Phoenix. Paddling a canoe through the city he has come to love, Zeitoun helps and rescues his neighbors and clients, feeds abandoned dogs, and begins to feel he has been called by his God to be of assistance to others during this disaster. His reward is to be arrested without charge and warehoused and ignored for 23 days in inhumane conditions that recall Guantanamo Bay. In the end, his virtues are miraculously intact, though they failed to protect him from being victimized by sadistic security forces, a criminal justice system that disregarded all safeguards to protect basic civil liberties, and a political environment ruled by fear and bigotry.

Perhaps my response to this engaging story would not have been quite so visceral had I not encountered it while traveling in the Arab Middle East in which the long suppressed cries for democracy from largely Muslim people are being met with violent repression as the United States does its duplicitous dance of balancing its rhetorical goals with its national security interests. The Obama administration jumped into the Libyan civil war by enforcing a no-fly zone ostensibly designed to protect civilians from being killed by their dictatorial government, yet it continues to look their other way while U.S. allies in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Bahrain brutally suppress their own citizens’ calls for greater freedom. It’s almost enough to make a grown man wretch.

Woman in orange on balcony overlooking Muscat

2011-03-22T02:41:00.004-06:00

Her view from the second-floor balcony overlooks the harbor at Muscat, the capital, on the Gulf of Oman.

Oman, which is ruled by a Sultan, has seen expressions of civil unrest from organized labor and others in recent weeks but it has not experienced the convulsive outbreaks of the pro-democracy movement that is sweeping the Arab Middle East and dominating the daily news.

I don’t know what news reaches the average Omani, but the TV news channels via satellite in the hotels catering to tourists are crammed with reports from divided and bloodied Libya, disintegrating Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Syria, which suddenly seem vulnerable, and of course the unfolding devastation from a Japan ravaged by earthquake, tsunami and a nuclear disaster. Spare me the claptrap about endtimes, but the old political and economic orders are reeling.

For a first-time visitor, the diversity of Oman, at least Muscat, is striking. There are south Asians everywhere and while they seem to perform much of the poorly paid and low-status jobs, they are also represented in the business and professional ranks. Despite its relative affluence, wealth and income disparity and unemployment appears to be significant, particularly among young non-Omanis.

Oman before air-conditioning, especially inland away from the sea breezes during the midsummer, is difficult to imagine, but like other societies in similarly blistering climates, socioeconomic life makes adjustments. Traditional businesses close for between three and four hours before 4 p.m., when they reopen for trading though the early evening. With few visible trees, the preferred building materials are stone and more often concrete. Muscat, the capital, is surrounded by sharp, dry peaks and valleys and it seems every flat, gravely spot unoccupied by a building is converted to a football pitch with a net-less metal goalpost on either end.

Hazara leader lionized on anniversary of death

2011-03-12T09:54:00.005-07:00

Sixteen years ago this month, Abdul Ali Mazari, a national hero for ethnic Hazaras in Afghanistan and the first leader of Hezbe Wahdat ("Unity Party"), was reportedly thrown to his death from a helicopter by members of the Taliban. Mazari, a former anti-Soviet mujahideen, is credited with uniting the largely Shia Hazara people during the sectarian wars that followed the Soviet departure and the ascendancy of the Taliban in 1996. Posters of Mazari were installed last week in Hazara neighborhoods of Kabul in recognition of the anniversary of his death.

After labor’s spanking, a prayer from miles away

2011-03-11T08:52:00.002-07:00

KABUL, Afghanistan—After its “epic defeat” in which defeat by Gov. Scott Walker stripped Wisconsin public employees of most of their bargaining rights, organized labor is talking tough, claiming it can transform deep opposition into a major “counterattack” against the Republican Party at the polls in 2012.

A brave face indeed after such a major whooping, but if this can be a moment of historic opportunity, then the battles cannot be fought at the ballot box and must be grounded in the workplace. The interests of the working class—by which I mean everyone who exchanges labor for an income, including those who process, analyze, and re-imagine number, words and other symbols— get clobbered year in and year out at the polls because we our engage our enemies on their turf, their terms, at the point of their greatest strength. This is a stupid strategy.

The forces of capital have every advantage in terms of advertising, campaign contributions, lobbying, influence-peddling, and coordinated strategies to mold the public imagination. They largely own the mass media, for which electoral campaign spending is a regular and predictable source of income. They have an insatiable financial self interest in maintaining the myth that real social change only occurs at the ballot box. Yet in recent decades, U.S. electoral campaigns have generated defeat, hollow victories, political betrayals, or grinding alienation for most Americans.

Good guerilla logic says you selectively engage the enemy on those terrains upon which you have a fighting chance for success. The landscape of activity most of us know best, where we have the highest level of mastery, is the workplace. It is also where we confront every political value, e.g. dignity, a living wage, respect, humane working conditions, and the promise for a better future, on an everyday basis. Strategies of resistance must be situational, local, and imaginative. Victories here will be difficult, always partial and capable of being lost, but I have to believe they are at least possible.

Waiting for buses near the traffic circle

2011-03-05T05:17:00.004-07:00

KABUL, Afghanistan—My colleagues were in a photo shop waiting for passport multiples while I stood outside on the bustling street corner under a bright noonday sky and watched the movement of walkers, passengers, drivers and vehicles.

There may be no one in Afghanistan who has been untouched by the last three decades of violence, poverty and chaos, but the everyday business of life in Kabul and elsewhere goes on the best it can. Disruptions are common, but nothing stops for long and all the stops occur somewhere, not everywhere at the same time. Afghans who have jobs work them and those don’t—an estimated 35% of the population, U.S. Depression-era rates—look for them and hustle a living as best they can. There is no shortage of human industry and activity anywhere I have been.

Head gear, like the red skullcap on the right and the tight black turban on the left, usually identify some social identity, or qawm, an Arabic term for any solidarity based on ethnicity, tribe, place or sometimes occupation.

Contrast the local fashion with the “Argentina” sweatshirt worn by the boy. Outside the frame a young man wore a bright yellow jacket with “Mizzou cheer squad” stitched to the back. And just ten years ago Afghanistan under the Taliban was one of the most culturally closed societies in the world.

Trauma mounts in advance of uncertain spring

2011-03-04T10:21:00.008-07:00

Aerostats, unmanned airships designed for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, are common in the skies over Kabul.

KABUL, Afghanistan—There is a seasonal ebb and surge to warfare fought on the ground in places like Afghanistan. The winters, especially in the frozen mountains, limit the movement of men with guns and explosives, but when spring thaws, the troops and weapons move more easily, the attacks escalate, and the blood flows more readily.

The generals in the field and behind the desks are predicting this spring will be particularly violent as the resurgent Taliban factions attempt to wrest more control of the countryside from a paralyzed and corrupt state.

Unlike recent years, there was little lull this winter. Insurgent strikes have occurred with alarming regularity in banks, supermarket, government offices, along roadsides, at homes, even at dog fights and fields for buzkashi, the national sport in which men on horseback vie for possession of a goat carcass. Their relatively low-tech weapons are small arms, grenades, shoulder-fired missiles, and endlessly improvised explosive devices. The most effective attacks as of late have involve the self-detonation of human bodies, which are almost too commonplace to shock.

The western powers support ground operations from the air with sophisticated helicopter gunships, fighter planes or missiles fired from unmanned vehicles, which are less affected by cold and snow. On Tuesday, two NATO attack helicopters, responding to a rocket strike in Kunar province that wounded a U.S. civilian, opened fire on what proved to ten boys collecting firewood, killing nine of them. Pres. Barack Obama expressed “deep regret” for what U.S. Lt. General David Rodriguez called “a terrible mistake.” And last month, in the same province, 64 civilians, including 20 women and 15 children, were killed a joint operation by NATO's International Security Assistance Force and Afghan troops, reports CNN.

Meanwhile, mounting casualties in a traumatized civilian population are public relations victories for an insurgency eager to portray itself as nationalist resistance to an occupying foreign army.

Call of doves preferred over call to prayer

2011-02-25T02:20:00.000-07:00

The dead body of the once-pudgy puppy, sprawled out as if sleeping, was in the same spot this morning that I found it in a few day earlier while running on the undeveloped lot of land on Kabul’s south side.

Students in my U.S. foreign policy course last Sunday told me about the revulsion they experienced watching the closed-circuit TV footage of the man who methodically shot and killed customers in the lobby of a bank in Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan a day earlier. Five armed suicide attackers killed 38 people and wounded 71 others, according to published reports. Four of the attackers were killed when their suicide vests detonated during gun battles with police. The fifth, who was filmed killing bank customers, was captured, according to Afghan police.

“I couldn’t sleep after watching it on TV,” said one student.

Nearly two months after the parliament was inaugurated by President Hamid Karzai, Afghan lawmakers have failed to agree on their leader. The credibility of the last September’s elections to the lower house of the parliament, or Wolesi Jirga, was shredded by widespread evidence of fraud. Demonstrations against the outcome as well as investigations have continued since then.

Last Tuesday was recognized as the 31st anniversary of Kabul residents’ revolt against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Outside, the amplified call to afternoon prayer drifts into the backyard of my guest house, though I would prefer the soft, familiar sound of mourning doves.

Looming drought could worsen Afghan security

2011-02-11T08:44:00.005-07:00

Man crosses the street near the traffic circle in the Puhli Surhk neighborhood of Kabul. Despite some light snows in the last week that made streets sloppy, Afghanistan is facing a serious drought that could make “millions of poor go hungry and fuel instability as foreign troops seek to reverse surging violence in the battle against the Taliban," according to Reuters.

Muted morning after overdue rain in Kabul

2011-02-04T09:50:00.008-07:00

Thin, freezing rains over the last few days scrubbed the smoky skies, generating snow, fog and muted light just outside Kabul, Afghanistan, near the familiar palace ruins. Ground parched for months sucked up the moisture, and the colors of the dead vegetation, the soil, and the stones almost throbbed, or so it seemed this morning.

Number, identities uncertain after Friday attack

2011-01-29T08:39:00.006-07:00

KABUL, Afghanistan—The identities and the number of the dead after Friday’s suicide-bomb attack on the Finest supermarket in the Wazir Akbar Khan section of Kabul remain unclear Saturday evening.

The Associated Press reports:

Six members of a prominent Afghan family were among those killed … Dr. Massoud Yama, a young doctor at a military hospital, his wife, Hamida Barmaki, a political science professor at Kabul University, and their four children. She was an activist and served on the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.

Yama’s mother … is former Afghan senator Maboba Hoqiqmal, who currently is Karzai’s legal affairs adviser.

Earlier reports indicated as many as nine dead, but eight more often, and that five were women, including four Filipino nationals. Those numbers fail to adequately account for the employees, who are overwhelmingly local males.

Body counts in Afghanistan are routinely understated, says a well-informed colleague. Data collection is unreliable and information has political value. The reported death toll from the suicide bomb attack by motorcycle on Jan. 12 in Puhli Surhk was two, then four, but was almost certainly more, he says. A Toyota minivan and driver that exploded in front of a crowded bus stop and a military convoy on Darulaman Road last May killed a reported 18 persons. The carnage and wreckage afterward strongly suggested a higher number.

Nine killed in attack on Kabul supermarket; "Blackwater security" was target, says Taliban

2011-01-28T04:15:00.034-07:00

Military vehicles operated by the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan domestic intelligence agency, were poised Saturday outside my guest house, which is near the Parliament and next door to residence of the second vice president, suggesting there is concern about new violence in Kabul after Friday’s suicide attack on a supermarket that killed nine people.

KABUL, Afghanistan—Four hours after I left a downtown Kabul supermarket Friday, it was attacked by a grenade-tossing suicide bomber who detonated himself, killing nine persons, including five women and a child, reports The New York Times.

A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility, explaining it was targeting the Afghan head of "Blackwater security company," now Xe Services. The entire first floor of the recently renovated supermarket was destroyed.

The store, part of the Finest Supermarket chain, is located in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood near the British, Canadian and Pakistani embassies. Finest stores cater to western and southeast Asian workers, as well affluent Afghans. Four of the deceased were Filipino women and four others were Afghans. At least 17 persons were wounded.

The head of security for my employer was near the supermarket at the attack, but I read about the incident in online reports by Reuters, Associated Press, New York Times, Guardian UK, Telegraph (UK) and Fox News before security texted employees with the basic details.

“Aren’t you comforted by the speed with which we were informed?” I asked some colleagues over tea in the kitchen of our guest house.

“Oh yeah.”

“Now let’s get this straight,” I said, gesturing to one of my mates, “you missed the attack in Puli Surkh (our neighborhood in Kabul in which a suicide bomber on a motorcycle on Jan. 12 blew himself up alongside a bus, killing two people and wounding 36) by 15 minutes…”

“Five minutes,” he indicated.

“And last May, you and I came within 60 meters and a stone wall of an explosion that killed 18 people, right? Now at what point do we have to concede that we are just flat stupid for staying here?"

Friday’s attack may represent a strategic shift in the war, in which Afghan civilians have paid the heaviest price, reports Julius Cavendish for Time. “This kind of attack will happen again," warns security analyst Sami Kovanen: "It's a new kind of attack—in many ways the first direct attack against the whole international community, against civilians."

Violence, tension return to Kabul despite denials

2011-01-26T10:13:00.005-07:00

KABUL, Afghanistan—Air pollution that burned my eyes and limited visibility to about 100 meters in the center of city yesterday was one of the first palpable signs that I was back in Kabul. The security in the Afghan capital clearly deteriorated in the month I was out of the country, but while the attacks, mostly bombings, have increased, the casualties have largely been Afghan civilians and security forces, which means the incidents are not widely reported by the Western press.

I went to the university where I teach the same day I arrived, but before I left faculty and staff received an email that said the school would be closed today because of the threats of violence surrounding the seating of new Afghan parliament. The September elections for the lower house were widely perceived as fraudulent and controversy, investigations, and criticism have swirled ever since. A special court appointed, perhaps unconstitutionally, by President Hamid Karzai recently ruled that the newly elected members should not be seated until an investigation of the fraud charges was completed. Karzai then ordered a one-month delay of the swearing-in ceremonies. However, the new parliamentarians responded with a vow to meet anyway, with or without the president’s approval.

“After marathon bargaining sessions and pressure from the United Nations, the European Union and the United States, Mr. Karzai agreed to seat Parliament while the court continues its work,” The New York Times reported today.

In the guest house where I live, which is located near the parliament, helicopters gunships flew overhead starting in the morning. Elsewhere, CNN reports today that Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is claiming that “coalition and Afghan troops have made progress in Kabul.”