The Civil War was the first war to be extensively chronicled with photography. One would think that just that fact alone would have caused humanity to have chosen other ways to settle disputes. Looking at the dead Civil War soldier in this photograph, we can see no glory. In the picture we don’t see the vainglorious portraits that painters had portrayed war to be for centuries before. This photograph shows war as it is in all its finality, all its brutality, all of its reality.

You see, there is absolutely nothing glamorous about war. Somehow, after the honesty of the photographs of the Civil War, the new medium became the vehicle of obfuscation. From the Spanish-American War, through both World Wars, the powers that were decided that war must be romantic. Soldiers were all good-looking and brave. (We did have Willie and Joe by Bill Maudlin during WW II, but those were drawings and meant to be humorous). Photography, the ultimate truth-teller, was used to lie, to pervert, and to propagandise.

Then, along came the Vietnam War. One day a photographer caught the instant when a South Vietnamese officer blew the brains out of a suspected Viet Cong. The suspect’s hands are tied behind his back. He’s wearing a plaid shirt. It’s not the black pyjamas we were told the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong wore. It’s a very western shirt. To the left of the officer, there’s a South Vietnamese soldier in camies and a helmet. He’s looking at the head of the prisoner and smiling as the bullet finds its target. The officer looks scruffy. His uniform is dishevelled as is his hair. His right arm, the one holding the gun, is strong and his muscles are flexing as he pulls the trigger. We can’t see the bullet, but we know that it’s found its target. The prisoner’s face is twisted in a grimace and the hair on the right side of his head, the side were the bullet has entered, is blown sideways. We are witnessing a man at the instant of his death.

This is war. No niceties here. No civil rights. No attorney. No judge. No jury. Rough justice means a bullet to the brain and you’re dead. This was not John Wayne in the “The Green Berets,” a movie that came out that same year of 1968. Wayne was, of course, playing a caricature of himself by then. But real war and its photographs bore no resemble to Wayne in any of his World War II movies, either. This is the war that ‘they’ talk about when they say is that it’s hell.

This photograph started our 1968. That would be the year that the whole world went mad. Rough justice would be played out on the streets of every country in the industrialised west. There was another photograph, however, that also became emblematic of the war in Viet Nam: it was the image of a naked Vietnamese girl, burning from napalm, running down a country road screaming with other children from her village. Soldiers stand in the background. No one is attempting to help her, to cover her up. She is innocence laid bare to the world, stripped of all dignity in the name of war.

So, the truth could be told with photographs. Since then, no matter how hard the military and various administrations try to suppress it; the truth would manage to get out. At the end of the first Gulf War, we saw a photograph of a highway of death where fleeing Iraqis had been killed in their vehicles. One could almost smell the stench as we looked at the burnt corpses caught in mid-action trying to get out of their burning vehicles. Yes, there were some military vehicles, but there were many more Toyotas, Hondas, etc. These may have been commandeered by the Iraqi military. We’ll never know. Because this is war. This is what war is about. No niceties, no civil rights, no attorney, no judge, no jury.

On this Memorial Day, the 5th since George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” on the deck of the aircraft carrier, Abraham Lincoln: let’s keep our volunteer soldiers in our thoughts and in our hearts. Let’s work to bring them home. Safe. Let’s also keep the Iraqi and Afghan civilians in our hearts and let’s work to be sure that they came get home. Safe.

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And, of course

Well, go figure the French. They stand in defiance of everything ‘Bush,’ and then turn around elect a man who states frankly that he plans on licking Bush’s boots. If only Ségolène Royal had been willing to say what the French electorate wanted to hear on policy issues . . . But, she wasn’t willing to do that. Yes, she moved to the middle, but she wanted a kinder, gentler France. The French wanted a more modern and productive France.

Nicolas Sarkozy, on the other hand, presented himself as the very essence of a very a very modern American of the western variety. He even posed for photos riding his white horse on a ranch in southern France. He promised to forge closer relations with Washington. Ah Madame France, où est vous?

Meanwhile, across the Channel, Tony “the poodle” Blair is on his way out. The closer Blair got to Bush, the more he was reviled by the British. Now, what will Blair do for the rest of his days? What can he possibly do to change history? The short of it is he can’t and he’s too intelligent to deny that history will write his epitaph.

And yet, intelligence seems to fall by the wayside when hubris corrupts the soul. Hubris has the power to turn intelligent human beings into idiots who have lost the ability to be self-critical. It’s the only thing that can explain how normally reasoning people get caught up in the most egregious kinds of scandals we’ve seen during the Bush administration.

So, now we can only wait to see if M. Sarkozy loses his way. Will he fall prey to the beast called hubris? He appears to have already taken on the role of the new French poodle. However, not even Nicolas Sarkozy will follow the “loyal Bushies” to the chasm, I suspect. Only time will tell. In the meantime, we can hope that he will refrain from calling the French of foreign descent, “scum.”

Please give what you can to Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) and support Kiva.

And, of course

*Mais c’est dur à supporter,
Un salaud préfabriqué
Qu’on habille de votre peau
Et qui porte vos chapeaux.

But it is hard to support,
a prefabricated bastard
Whom one equips with your skin
And which wears your hats.

Mr. Bush gave his State of the Union (SOTU) speech on Tuesday night. He got very high ratings. Some 45 million people were watching to see what he was going to say and propose for our republic. I don’t know what they were expecting or hoping for; but I do know what they got.

It was one of his shorter speeches, lasting only 49 minutes: It just seemed longer. Unlike his last speech to the nation, he didn’t admit that any mistakes had been made in Iraq. Of course when he did say the “mistakes had been made,” in his previous speech; he said it in the passive voice so that the blame couldn’t be placed at the clay feet of this administration.

He couldn’t avoid the subject of Iraq: it took up half of his 49 minutes. But, this time he was asking the newly-emboldened Democratic Congress to give war a chance (An aside here: he referred to Congress as Democrat, leaving off the “ic.” This is Republican tactic designed to annoy Democrats. Somehow it’s supposed to deny Democrats the ability to be democratic. What it is, in reality, is petty. It shows Republicans for what they are. Shall we now call Republicans, “Republics”?).

Returning to the SOTU: there were some subjects that came up more than in the past. These subjects were health insurance, oil, Iraq, Al Qaeda, terrorism, and deficits. What was even more interesting were those things that came up less or not at all in Tuesday night’s speech: surpluses, Social Security, taxes, and the economy. Finally, Osama bin Laden was mentioned just once. Yes, he is Osama bin Forgotten as far as George W. Bush is concerned. (more…)

Have you ever written a paper in a word processing program and had the damn thing tell you that you were writing in the passive voice? Well, Mr. Bush’s speech the other night would have brought the ‘passive voice’ flag up often. “Where mistakes have been made the responsibility rests with me.” That is the cleverest use of the passive voice that I may have ever heard. He appears to take responsibility; while, in fact, pointing the finger at unknown others. What is he saying? That others have made mistakes; and he is magnanimously stepping up and accepting responsibility even though, mind you, he didn’t make the mistakes. Of course, if he had said, “I have made mistakes,” he would have been taking the blame, but only grown ups do that.

In this administration, no one takes responsibility. Advancement is based on who one knows, not what one knows. Diligence is punished, and incompetence is rewarded. Americans going to Iraq to work in the interim government were vetted by their allegiance to the Republican Party and the agenda of the religious right. People were questioned on who they voted for and whether or not they supported Roe V. Wade. This is the same administration, remember, that has been trying to disembowel the civil service in the U.S. in order to return to a spoils system in bureaucratic appointments. But, I stray from the point of Mr. Bush’s speech.

In his speech Mr. Bush made many claims. Let’s look at just a couple: (more…)

Just a few thoughts now that that our long national funeral has ended. There’s a lot to be said for loyalty. However, one must always question what they’re loyal to: is it to their ‘school,’ or to their ‘tribe,’ or to their nation? It might seem an odd question, but bear with me.

After Gerald Ford died, we found out that he had not supported the war in Iraq. He told this to Bob Woodward in an interview 2 years ago with the caveat that it not be revealed until after Ford’s death. So, where was his loyalty, in the end? Was it to the country? Or was it to his school, his tribe?

Do you find it odd that I call the Republican Party a tribe? Well, what do you call it when someone puts his loyalty to his party above his loyalty to his country? When his voice was needed in the national debate, he chose to remain silent. He didn’t support the war, he thought that it was wrong from its premise to its execution; but he said nothing. Now, we have his hollow ghostly voice speaking up too softly, and too late. When he could have made a difference, he chose silence. (more…)

Well, I’ve been sitting on the sidelines for a while: watching and thinking about the world and the sentient creatures who occupy it. It’s funny what will set one off. It doesn’t have to be a huge occurrence. Sometimes it’s a trivial thing. For me it happened while the HB and I were channel surfing. We happened on to the Time “Person of the Year” show. It’s not something we’d ordinarily watch, but we were too lazy to click on.

The show revolved around the process that the Pooh-Bahs at Time magazine go through to pick their so-called person of year cover story. Now this ‘honor’ of dubious distinction has, in the past, been awarded to Hitler, Stalin and Wallace Simpson. So, it isn’t as if the ‘person’ has to be a good one. The criteria seem to revolve around who affected world the most in the year just ending and the year to come. (more…)

Here you see the DOD’s Central Command’s take on the civil conflict in Iraq as of 18 Oct 06. The HB looked at this chart and said, “Bloody, hell! What does it mean?” Well, any chart coming out of the bureaucratic quagmire that is the Department of Defence, will necessarily be obtuse. So, Anon will ‘splain it all.

The symbols on the left are defined near the bottom of the chart. So, we can see first that the political/religious leaders are increase(ing) their publicly hostile rhetoric (toward other groups, toward the U.S.? They don’t say) has been “routine.” Okay, now that you’ve got that; let’s see if we can put this in plain English. (more…)

What can you say when people, who are obviously intelligent, do truly stupid things? The easy thing to say is that they’re mad, insane; but that isn’t the answer. Life is far more complicated than that.

Let’s go back in time, over 30 years ago. No one ever accused Richard Nixon of being stupid; yet he did what seemed to be an incredibly stupid thing: he did not destroy the secret audio tapes he had made of his conversations in the White House. At the time amateur psychologists of every stripe tried to understand this truly bizarre behaviour. Why would you hold on to the “bloody knife”? Without the tapes it would have been John Dean’s word against Nixon, H.R. (Bob) Haldemann and John Ehrlichman. Most people did not believe that Dean had a photographic memory. Then a Mr. Butterfield came before the committee and admitted a system of taping had been put in place and used by Nixon. Much sturm und drang followed with the Supreme Court finally ordering that the tapes be turned over. (more…)

I’ve been away for a few weeks. I was in Vienna (Wien) and then Florence (Firenze). I had always said that I wouldn’t go to Austria as long as Jörge Haider was still drawing a breath, but I had a need to see Klimt and Schiele. So, off I went to Wien.

Wien was decimated during the Second World War (see: The Third Man) and it didn’t profit by its reconstruction. There are rows upon rows of ugly concrete apartment blocks. As I looked out of my hotel window, I realized once again that many people don’t care where they live. Or perhaps it’s that they can’t afford to care. We don’t all have a real choice as to our living arrangements.

Wien has its charms. Stadt Park and the Hofburg Quarter are two. It certainly has good food and lots of it. It has some of the most dramatic skies in the world. It’s exciting to watch the weather move through. Yet, somehow I kept thinking of that saying, “How clever those Austrians, they’ve made the world think that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German.”

There is a lively art scene in Wien, and the museums are top notch; but I kept wanting to stop old men and ask them what they did in the war. I had this same desire in Spain every time I saw an old man wearing a beret. “Whose side were you on?” In Spain no one would ever own up to having heard of Franco, so I couldn’t engage anyone in a discussion about him. This is why I should never go to places like Austria, Germany, Poland, or anyplace that capitulated or conspired with the Nazis. Of course, that would put most of Europe off limits for me. So, it’s best I don’t think about it. (more…)

The existential administration continues on its merry way. Despite the fact that approximately 2/3 of Americans have lost faith in their cause and their abilities, Mr. Bush, et al insist that good days are right around the corner. Unfortunately, that corner is at the end of the longest block in the universe.

So, when Reuters published this photo of Mr. Cheney last week; it was as if someone were sending him a message. Of course it’s not just Dick Cheney who needs this message. Now that the book Cobra II has been published, we can see that there were Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Franks and Bush. And they all need to retire

When so much blood and treasure has been spent, why is it so hard to pull back from the brink? (more…)