Futbol or Football, it’s all about us

Americans already have a “football” and so come into conflict with a majority of the world when our television broadcasters have to say “soccer” and assuage the confusion of US viewers when confronted by everyone else’s “football.” And ironic too, the sportscasters like to explain, compounding their error, because it’s about the foot and the ball, unlike domestic football which is about using your hands to carry an un-spherical bladder. But this humor presumes another American overreach: “Futbol” incorporates “foot” and “ball” only if you speak English.

In a preponderance of languages, futbol defines neither foot nor ball, and mimics simply the phonetic term used by the British, whose colonial representatives were responsible for spreading the game across the world. As long time English speakers, the Brits have no difficulty with differentiating football from American Football. But Americans didn’t come by the term “soccer” on its own, which brings to light the other side to the complexity of FIFA’s hope to standardize the World Cup experience. Americans are not alone in resisting globalization’s attack on their cultural identity. A great deal of the world doesn’t call it FOOTBALL either.

To survey just the languages which share our Arabic alphabet, here’s how others refer to what we call soccer: Sokker (Afrikaans), Fodbold (Danish), Voetbal (Dutch), Jalgpall (Estonian), Jalkapallo (Finnish), Labdarúgás (Hungarian), Calcio (Italian), Sepak bola (Indonesian), Putbol (Filipino), Peil (Irish), Pêl-droed (Welsh), Pi?ka no?na (Polish), and Nogomet (Croatian).

World Cup victory dances demonstrate culture clash of national identities

World Cup Football champions España hopped up and down like school- boys in elation about their victory. More culture shock for NFL or MLB fans: FIFA goals were celebrated with the airplane, the “can you believe that?”, the pileup, the pyramid, the group dance, and team USA’s “America Fuck Yeah!”

Argentine players lose to their bosses, New World Order is Old World Order


Team Argentina unfurled a banner before Saturday’s match against Germany, against FIFA regulations, but it wasn’t the one above which calls attention to the organization of grandmothers trying to lift the veil on Argentina’s Disappeared, some of whose murderers still occupy high office. This picture was taken during an earlier practice session. Instead, before today’s game, the Spanish-speaking Argentines were joined by their German-speaking adversaries to hold a sign in English: “SAY NO TO RACISM.” It reached American and British viewers, but could the message have been more innocuous?

The admonition resembled “Just Say No To Drugs,” Nancy Reagan’s pseudo-urbane theme of America’s War On Drugs, an attack on the lower class that continues today and couldn’t be more racist.

Note how two dark-suited gentlemen unrolled the English banner while FIFA line judges enjoin a handful of players from both teams to form the backdrop. About the “bold letters” television commentators described the cause of the brief delay as “something we all believe in.”

Will we learn from those in the stadium that the Argentine team had unfurled its anticipated banner, but the TV cameras were kept aimed at a FIFA diversion?

One might be excused the impression that the soccer game that followed, Argentina’s catastrophic loss to Germany, appeared to have suffered a similar negotiation. Half of the excitement of an Argentine ascendancy was anticipating the mouthpiece it would give coach Diego Maradona, beloved star and great fan of international upstarts Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Maradona hasn’t been speaking truth to only Argentina’s power.

The Argentine dribblers dominated the Germans at every turn, but none seemed disposed to coordinate a goal. At keep-away, they surrendered the ball to Germany only four times.

The South American quarterfinal losses to Netherlands, Spain and Germany confirmed that as sports mirror life, the New World Order is the Old World Order. The Ghanian Black Stars are out, and the Dutch rise from the ashes of South Africa.

FIFA vuvuzela horns may prove to be thin-skinned America’s best friend

Gearing up for Saturday’s World Cup match between the USA and Ghana, media talking heads are already preparing US viewers for the home field advantage that will favor the remaining African team in contention. Convenient actually, because by chance our A-Team is booed in any arena it sets its invader’s foot. The now maligned South African horns have so far masked a third world animosity that might put most Americans over the edge. The nerve of those ingrates, to boo, hiss and whistle the emperor’s freedomTM fighters?

Soccer offsides rule is agreement not to score behind your opponent’s back

The US pretends the International Criminal Court doesn’t have jurisdiction over its war crimes, and thinks the same immunity should shield us from FIFA referees I guess.

The USA-Algeria match today was hard fought, admittedly team USA displayed an offensive edge. Rooting for Team Weasel Empire doesn’t automatically make you a Nazi, but I’ll be curious to hear firsthand accounts of the hostility our compatriots faced in the stands. The silver lining to a US victory is that eventually our sportscasters will have to apologize to American TV viewers about the constant booing whenever USA gets the ball.

Vuvuzelas may turn out to be a fortuitous annoyance for Western broadcasters. They mask the dynamics of how the spectators are really responding. I was slow to realize what I was hearing during the USA-Algeria match, a consistent switch from boos to cheers whenever the ball changed hands. I’m surprised I didn’t see more commentary about it.

Honestly, the TV talking heads spoke of the US supporter presence being “huge,” and didn’t bat an eye at the eruption of disapproval when Landon Donovan scored the last minute goal to net a USA victory.

The next match pits the US against Ghana, which sets up a plausible excuse for why the entire stadium will be cheering against the USA. Much as I’d like to see an African team advance, I hope the Americans survive, because the more American stateside see our athletes jeered and booed, the sooner our sorry imperialist swagger can face abrupt self-reflection.

Eduardo Galeano’s SOCCER IN SUN AND SHADOW offers a great explanation of the Offsides Rule. Simply put, it reflects the gentleman’s agreement not to go behind your adversary’s back. What sport is there to kicking at an unprotected goal?

Down to sports, empires are tribal

American World Cup viewers tuning in to watch their team face England on Saturday might be excused confusion about their adversary’s flag. Instead of the British Union Jack, English fans waved a red and white standard usually only glimpsed in movies where knights fight dragons, crusades, or Braveheart.

That’s the red cross of Saint George, dragon-slayer, minus the diagonal white-on-blue X of Scotland’s Saint Andrew and the red X of Ireland’s Saint Patrick. Where British dominion is concerned, natural resources and labor are commonwealth, assertion of athletic dominance is forever England.

But the England team crest, with the three lions passant-guardant, dates to lionhearted King Richard, the early realm’s warrior expansionist. Technically the heraldic cats are léopards, because the royal houses ruled in the language of the French, and these three show the empire’s spots: Team England’s badge invokes the era when “England” included the conquered Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

As far as world onlookers cared, the first round pairing of USA versus England was an intramural match among conspiratorial members of the Coalition of the Willing. At best one could only root for the good cop colonizer. Early enough in the game, a score fumbled past England’s goalie portended the Gods’ ambivalence over the outcome. Like Olympic teams, the FIFA contenders are groupings of soccer all-stars whose day jobs mean playing side by side, for either Man United or Real Madrid apparently. It’s hard to expect that team allegiances would defer to nationalism any more than to the federation’s television revenues. The achievement of a tie for match USA – England guaranteed to string along the barely interested American TV audience.

England, Scotland and Ireland were grandfathered into FIFA because, despite not being standalone sovereign nations, they originated the competition. Indeed Britain invented football, whose spread across the world is owed to European colonialism.

Sovereignty is no small distinction when it comes to legitimizing sports teams. Taiwan and Tibet are not recognized by China for example, as the Korean halves reject each other, as the US might object to Puerto Rican or Hawaiian bids for succession.

Today a pretense of sovereignty is enough to field a national soccer team. Take Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel, for example, and I needn’t stop there. By what standard are they independent entities versus US client states? They have their own flags, for all the US cares, and I daresay American pride would be sacrificed for the political gain of either of these puppets excelling their master in sport. A success in sporting circles would only bolster the facade of their indigenous national sovereignty.

Does it say something about the difference between contemporary empires and past, that the US doesn’t need to stamp the red, white and blue unto its colonial projects? Nor dominate them in the arena?

We can contrast America’s far-flung possessions and occupations with the British Commonwealth, whose flags closely mimicked mother Britain’s theme. But I’d like to clarify Ireland’s representation on the British flag. The cross of St. Patrick whose outline informs the Union Jack, represents Ireland before her independence. Still occupied Northern Ireland has a flag which duplicates England’s but for the addition of a loyalist co-opted red hand at its center.

While England holds fast to Scotland’s oil and Ireland’s loyalists, when it comes to sport, she wants all the credit.

S. Africa wipes Apartheid from the map

A unique subtext of the pre-game coverage of the 2010 World Cup is that South Africa was once banned from soccer competition because of its policy of Apartheid. Reporters ask how the host nation is faring post BDS. In the wake of Apartheid, South Africa has been trying to revert its place names to aboriginal origins, some buried by centuries of colonial heritage, to efface Apartheid’s dark legacy. Those hopeful about Israel’s sooner-than-later repudiation of its racism can take heart that for original place names of a re-christened Palestine, one need look no further than a 1947 map.

White Flight from football to assault rifle

Lacrosse baggataway warriorRyan dons the rest of his gear in the car. Pads, armor, helmet, even mouth guard. I adjust the rearview mirror downward until I see his small frame in the backseat. We’re only halfway to practice and he’s already biting down, breathing through his nose, focused straight ahead. It’s the same routine for football, except today he’s got a lacrosse stick across his knees. In his grip, I should say. When we pull the car to the edge of the parking lot, he jumps and literally hits the ground running. From my height he gives me the sense I’m a helicopter pilot who’s dropped soldier reinforcements to join the team on the pitch. There’s a steep hillock between Ryan and the field, but his charge never slows, he ascends like a Cavalry of One, his stick brandished like an assault rifle.

Would an M16 be held any different? The difference between football and lacrosse is that your little assault squad is armed.

In 1763 a band of Chippewa Indians seized Fort Michilimackinac by feigning a game of baggataway, the Native American origin of lacrosse. The Indians pretended that an over-spirited drive led players over the fortifications and within minutes they’d stormed the ramparts.

In a spirit of honoring American Indian tradition, like the harvest celebration of Thanksgiving, American dads are pushing a new sport unto the youth athletic season. Because the first early adopters where also the first white men to hit the New World, the sport now has a Mayflower WASP identity too.

Lacrosse has an exotic appeal in spite of its New England tradition. It’s sort of field hockey gone aerial, full court jai alai with armor, East Coast blue blood rooted with the authentic red bloods, the original old money land owners.

Is that what’s behind the lacrosse resurgence? As Ryan’s team wrapped up the other day, they passed baseball diamonds and could not hold back from chanting “lacrosse, lacrosse” toward the children playing baseball, as if to instigate a cross-sport rivalry. Lacrosse teams are still relatively scarce. On weekends they have to cross neighboring metropolitan regions to play each other.

How many sports programs do you need to round out your kids? Boys have baseball, football and basketball, among the big team sports. Neither of which are the biggest sports internationally. Soccer and handball. Curiously both those require little equipment. They are perfect for the Third World, but imperfect for consumer cultures which have wheels of commerce to drive, especially in recreational pursuits.

Which could explain why Lacrosse teams have to traverse great distances to encounter adversaries. The usual cross town rivals can’t pony up the money for this game.

Lacrosse is White Flight from football. Most schools have barely enough money to keep their athletes in football gear, let alone a completely redundant lacrosse kit. And so the only kids playing lacrosse are from families who can afford the hundreds extra for the specialized equipment. Added bonus, there are no players bringing a black athletic advantage to the game. Like the other equipment intensive sports of the northern climes, lacrosse is a venue where white boys can dominate, and give their accustomed advantage some elbow room.

I remember a fencing instructor encouraging prospective young pupils at a toney gym, about a peripheral advantage to the sport. Ivy League schools offered fencing scholarships, and prospects outside the usual New England states would be at an advantage for consideration. It was the first glimpse I had of counter-insurgency strategies in America’s race war.

Lacrosse may be the arena where prosperous families can let their white boys roughhouse with supremacy, but the joke’s definitely on them. It’s a sport for social climbers, and this ladder is definitely pointed elsewhere. Is your Playstation 3 teaching options trading or first person combat? Lacrosse is real world preschool basic training.

What does lacrosse impart that Football doesn’t? The teamwork is the same, the size differentials are still key. In both games there is only one ball, but in lacrosse, regardless who has the ball, everyone has a stick. If ever there was a sport which prepared athlete soldiers, lacrosse is it.

The sport of real blue bloods was always Rugby. In England, where commoners play rugby, you can always tell the rugby veterans by their broken noses and missing teeth. In America it’s the preference of the prep schools and private colleges, where offspring of the affluent can acquire scars without fear that it will hinder their job prospects because their futures are secure.

America’s white settlers weren’t blue bloods, they were the ground troops dispatched to seize the continent. It looks to me, the same American Dreamers are being tweaked again into service of the empire. The poor bigoted middle class is turning their boys out for real war.

Ward Churchill: Some People Push Back

British edition titled Reflections on the Justice of Roosting ChickensHere is Ward Churchill’s notorious 9/11 “Little Eichmanns” essay, published online September 12, 2001, presented here for archival purposes lest critics think they can silence one of our nation’s strongest dissenting voices. Churchill later expanded this piece into a book entitled On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: reflections on the consequences of U.S. imperial arrogance and criminality published by AK Press in 2003.

Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
by Ward Churchill

When queried by reporters concerning his views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm X famously – and quite charitably, all things considered – replied that it was merely a case of “chickens coming home to roost.”

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.

The Iraqi youngsters, all of them under 12, died as a predictable – in fact, widely predicted – result of the 1991 US “surgical” bombing of their country’s water purification and sewage facilities, as well as other “infrastructural” targets upon which Iraq’s civilian population depends for its very survival.

If the nature of the bombing were not already bad enough – and it should be noted that this sort of “aerial warfare” constitutes a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law, as well as every conceivable standard of “civilized” behavior – the death toll has been steadily ratcheted up by US-imposed sanctions for a full decade now. Enforced all the while by a massive military presence and periodic bombing raids, the embargo has greatly impaired the victims’ ability to import the nutrients, medicines and other materials necessary to saving the lives of even their toddlers.

All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered – are still suffering – a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.

The reason for this holocaust was/is rather simple, and stated quite straightforwardly by President George Bush, the 41st “freedom-loving” father of the freedom-lover currently filling the Oval Office, George the 43rd: “The world must learn that what we say, goes,” intoned George the Elder to the enthusiastic applause of freedom-loving Americans everywhere. How Old George conveyed his message was certainly no mystery to the US public. One need only recall the 24-hour-per-day dissemination of bombardment videos on every available TV channel, and the exceedingly high ratings of these telecasts, to gain a sense of how much they knew.

In trying to affix a meaning to such things, we would do well to remember the wave of elation that swept America at reports of what was happening along the so-called Highway of Death: perhaps 100,000 “towel-heads” and “camel jockeys” – or was it “sand niggers” that week? – in full retreat, routed and effectively defenseless, many of them conscripted civilian laborers, slaughtered in a single day by jets firing the most hyper-lethal types of ordnance. It was a performance worthy of the nazis during the early months of their drive into Russia. And it should be borne in mind that Good Germans gleefully cheered that butchery, too. Indeed, support for Hitler suffered no serious erosion among Germany’s “innocent civilians” until the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943.

There may be a real utility to reflecting further, this time upon the fact that it was pious Americans who led the way in assigning the onus of collective guilt to the German people as a whole, not for things they as individuals had done, but for what they had allowed – nay, empowered – their leaders and their soldiers to do in their name.

If the principle was valid then, it remains so now, as applicable to Good Americans as it was the Good Germans. And the price exacted from the Germans for the faultiness of their moral fiber was truly ghastly. Returning now to the children, and to the effects of the post-Gulf War embargo – continued bull force by Bush the Elder’s successors in the Clinton administration as a gesture of its “resolve” to finalize what George himself had dubbed the “New World Order” of American military/economic domination – it should be noted that not one but two high United Nations officials attempting to coordinate delivery of humanitarian aid to Iraq resigned in succession as protests against US policy.

One of them, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halladay, repeatedly denounced what was happening as “a systematic program . . . of deliberate genocide.” His statements appeared in the New York Times and other papers during the fall of 1998, so it can hardly be contended that the American public was “unaware” of them. Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Madeline Albright openly confirmed Halladay’s assessment. Asked during the widely-viewed TV program Meet the Press to respond to his “allegations,” she calmly announced that she’d decided it was “worth the price” to see that U.S. objectives were achieved.

The Politics of a Perpetrator Population
As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns.. There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting “Jeremy” and “Ellington” to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little “Tiffany” and “Ashley” had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays – for “our kids,” no less – as an all-absorbing point of political focus.

In fairness, it must be admitted that there was an infinitesimally small segment of the body politic who expressed opposition to what was/is being done to the children of Iraq. It must also be conceded, however, that those involved by-and-large contented themselves with signing petitions and conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing “moral witness” as vast legions of brown-skinned five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark, wide-eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the most agonizing ways imaginable.

Be it said as well, and this is really the crux of it, that the “resistance” expended the bulk of its time and energy harnessed to the systemically-useful task of trying to ensure, as “a principle of moral virtue” that nobody went further than waving signs as a means of “challenging” the patently exterminatory pursuit of Pax Americana. So pure of principle were these “dissidents,” in fact, that they began literally to supplant the police in protecting corporations profiting by the carnage against suffering such retaliatory “violence” as having their windows broken by persons less “enlightened” – or perhaps more outraged – than the self-anointed “peacekeepers.”

Property before people, it seems – or at least the equation of property to people – is a value by no means restricted to America’s boardrooms. And the sanctimony with which such putrid sentiments are enunciated turns out to be nauseatingly similar, whether mouthed by the CEO of Standard Oil or any of the swarm of comfort zone “pacifists” queuing up to condemn the black block after it ever so slightly disturbed the functioning of business-as-usual in Seattle.

Small wonder, all-in-all, that people elsewhere in the world – the Mideast, for instance – began to wonder where, exactly, aside from the streets of the US itself, one was to find the peace America’s purportedly oppositional peacekeepers claimed they were keeping.

The answer, surely, was plain enough to anyone unblinded by the kind of delusions engendered by sheer vanity and self-absorption. So, too, were the implications in terms of anything changing, out there, in America’s free-fire zones.

Tellingly, it was at precisely this point – with the genocide in Iraq officially admitted and a public response demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were virtually no Americans, including most of those professing otherwise, doing anything tangible to stop it – that the combat teams which eventually commandeered the aircraft used on September 11 began to infiltrate the United States.

Meet the “Terrorists”
Of the men who came, there are a few things demanding to be said in the face of the unending torrent of disinformational drivel unleashed by George Junior and the corporate “news” media immediately following their successful operation on September 11.

They did not, for starters, “initiate” a war with the US, much less commit “the first acts of war of the new millennium.”

A good case could be made that the war in which they were combatants has been waged more-or-less continuously by the “Christian West” – now proudly emblematized by the United States – against the “Islamic East” since the time of the First Crusade, about 1,000 years ago. More recently, one could argue that the war began when Lyndon Johnson first lent significant support to Israel’s dispossession/displacement of Palestinians during the 1960s, or when George the Elder ordered “Desert Shield” in 1990, or at any of several points in between. Any way you slice it, however, if what the combat teams did to the WTC and the Pentagon can be understood as acts of war – and they can – then the same is true of every US “overflight’ of Iraqi territory since day one. The first acts of war during the current millennium thus occurred on its very first day, and were carried out by U.S. aviators acting under orders from their then-commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton. The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course.

That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than anything a testament to their patience and restraint.

They did not license themselves to “target innocent civilians.”

There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center . . .

Well, really. Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire – the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to “ignorance” – a derivative, after all, of the word “ignore” – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.

The men who flew the missions against the WTC and Pentagon were not “cowards.” That distinction properly belongs to the “firm-jawed lads” who delighted in flying stealth aircraft through the undefended airspace of Baghdad, dropping payload after payload of bombs on anyone unfortunate enough to be below – including tens of thousands of genuinely innocent civilians – while themselves incurring all the risk one might expect during a visit to the local video arcade. Still more, the word describes all those “fighting men and women” who sat at computer consoles aboard ships in the Persian Gulf, enjoying air-conditioned comfort while launching cruise missiles into neighborhoods filled with random human beings. Whatever else can be said of them, the men who struck on September 11 manifested the courage of their convictions, willingly expending their own lives in attaining their objectives.

Nor were they “fanatics” devoted to “Islamic fundamentalism.”

One might rightly describe their actions as “desperate.” Feelings of desperation, however, are a perfectly reasonable – one is tempted to say “normal” – emotional response among persons confronted by the mass murder of their children, particularly when it appears that nobody else really gives a damn (ask a Jewish survivor about this one, or, even more poignantly, for all the attention paid them, a Gypsy).

That desperate circumstances generate desperate responses is no mysterious or irrational principle, of the sort motivating fanatics. Less is it one peculiar to Islam. Indeed, even the FBI’s investigative reports on the combat teams’ activities during the months leading up to September 11 make it clear that the members were not fundamentalist Muslims. Rather, it’s pretty obvious at this point that they were secular activists – soldiers, really – who, while undoubtedly enjoying cordial relations with the clerics of their countries, were motivated far more by the grisly realities of the U.S. war against them than by a set of religious beliefs.

And still less were they/their acts “insane.”

Insanity is a condition readily associable with the very American idea that one – or one’s country – holds what amounts to a “divine right” to commit genocide, and thus to forever do so with impunity. The term might also be reasonably applied to anyone suffering genocide without attempting in some material way to bring the process to a halt. Sanity itself, in this frame of reference, might be defined by a willingness to try and destroy the perpetrators and/or the sources of their ability to commit their crimes. (Shall we now discuss the US “strategic bombing campaign” against Germany during World War II, and the mental health of those involved in it?)

Which takes us to official characterizations of the combat teams as an embodiment of “evil.”

Evil – for those inclined to embrace the banality of such a concept – was perfectly incarnated in that malignant toad known as Madeline Albright, squatting in her studio chair like Jaba the Hutt, blandly spewing the news that she’d imposed a collective death sentence upon the unoffending youth of Iraq. Evil was to be heard in that great American hero “Stormin’ Norman” Schwartzkopf’s utterly dehumanizing dismissal of their systematic torture and annihilation as mere “collateral damage.” Evil, moreover, is a term appropriate to describing the mentality of a public that finds such perspectives and the policies attending them acceptable, or even momentarily tolerable.

Had it not been for these evils, the counterattacks of September 11 would never have occurred. And unless “the world is rid of such evil,” to lift a line from George Junior, September 11 may well end up looking like a lark.

There is no reason, after all, to believe that the teams deployed in the assaults on the WTC and the Pentagon were the only such, that the others are composed of “Arabic-looking individuals” – America’s indiscriminately lethal arrogance and psychotic sense of self-entitlement have long since given the great majority of the world’s peoples ample cause to be at war with it – or that they are in any way dependent upon the seizure of civilian airliners to complete their missions.

To the contrary, there is every reason to expect that there are many other teams in place, tasked to employ altogether different tactics in executing operational plans at least as well-crafted as those evident on September 11, and very well equipped for their jobs. This is to say that, since the assaults on the WTC and Pentagon were act of war – not “terrorist incidents” – they must be understood as components in a much broader strategy designed to achieve specific results. From this, it can only be adduced that there are plenty of other components ready to go, and that they will be used, should this become necessary in the eyes of the strategists. It also seems a safe bet that each component is calibrated to inflict damage at a level incrementally higher than the one before (during the 1960s, the Johnson administration employed a similar policy against Vietnam, referred to as “escalation”).

Since implementation of the overall plan began with the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it takes no rocket scientist to decipher what is likely to happen next, should the U.S. attempt a response of the inexcusable variety to which it has long entitled itself.

About Those Boys (and Girls) in the Bureau
There’s another matter begging for comment at this point. The idea that the FBI’s “counterterrorism task forces” can do a thing to prevent what will happen is yet another dimension of America’s delusional pathology.. The fact is that, for all its publicly-financed “image-building” exercises, the Bureau has never shown the least aptitude for anything of the sort.

Oh, yeah, FBI counterintelligence personnel have proven quite adept at framing anarchists, communists and Black Panthers, sometimes murdering them in their beds or the electric chair. The Bureau’s SWAT units have displayed their ability to combat child abuse in Waco by burning babies alive, and its vaunted Crime Lab has been shown to pad its “crime-fighting’ statistics by fabricating evidence against many an alleged car thief. But actual “heavy-duty bad guys” of the sort at issue now? This isn’t a Bruce Willis/Chuck Norris/Sly Stallone movie, after all.. And J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t get to approve either the script or the casting.

The number of spies, saboteurs and bona fide terrorists apprehended, or even detected by the FBI in the course of its long and slimy history could be counted on one’s fingers and toes. On occasion, its agents have even turned out to be the spies, and, in many instances, the terrorists as well.

To be fair once again, if the Bureau functions as at best a carnival of clowns where its “domestic security responsibilities” are concerned, this is because – regardless of official hype – it has none. It is now, as it’s always been, the national political police force, an instrument created and perfected to ensure that all Americans, not just the consenting mass, are “free” to do exactly as they’re told.

The FBI and “cooperating agencies” can be thus relied upon to set about “protecting freedom” by destroying whatever rights and liberties were left to U.S. citizens before September 11 (in fact, they’ve already received authorization to begin). Sheeplike, the great majority of Americans can also be counted upon to bleat their approval, at least in the short run, believing as they always do that the nasty implications of what they’re doing will pertain only to others.

Oh Yeah, and “The Company,” Too

A possibly even sicker joke is the notion, suddenly in vogue, that the CIA will be able to pinpoint “terrorist threats,” “rooting out their infrastructure” where it exists and/or “terminating” it before it can materialize, if only it’s allowed to beef up its “human intelligence gathering capacity” in an unrestrained manner (including full-bore operations inside the US, of course).

Yeah. Right.

Since America has a collective attention-span of about 15 minutes, a little refresher seems in order: “The Company” had something like a quarter-million people serving as “intelligence assets” by feeding it information in Vietnam in 1968, and it couldn’t even predict the Tet Offensive. God knows how many spies it was fielding against the USSR at the height of Ronald Reagan’s version of the Cold War, and it was still caught flatfooted by the collapse of the Soviet Union. As to destroying “terrorist infrastructures,” one would do well to remember Operation Phoenix, another product of its open season in Vietnam. In that one, the CIA enlisted elite US units like the Navy Seals and Army Special Forces, as well as those of friendly countries – the south Vietnamese Rangers, for example, and Australian SAS – to run around “neutralizing” folks targeted by The Company’s legion of snitches as “guerrillas” (as those now known as “terrorists” were then called).

Sound familiar?

Upwards of 40,000 people – mostly bystanders, as it turns out – were murdered by Phoenix hit teams before the guerrillas, stronger than ever, ran the US and its collaborators out of their country altogether. And these are the guys who are gonna save the day, if unleashed to do their thing in North America?

The net impact of all this “counterterrorism” activity upon the combat teams’ ability to do what they came to do, of course, will be nil.

Instead, it’s likely to make it easier for them to operate (it’s worked that way in places like Northern Ireland). And, since denying Americans the luxury of reaping the benefits of genocide in comfort was self-evidently a key objective of the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it can be stated unequivocally that a more overt display of the police state mentality already pervading this country simply confirms the magnitude of their victory.

On Matters of Proportion and Intent
As things stand, including the 1993 detonation at the WTC, “Arab terrorists” have responded to the massive and sustained American terror bombing of Iraq with a total of four assaults by explosives inside the US. That’s about 1% of the 50,000 bombs the Pentagon announced were rained on Baghdad alone during the Gulf War (add in Oklahoma City and you’ll get something nearer an actual 1%).

They’ve managed in the process to kill about 5,000 Americans, or roughly 1% of the dead Iraqi children (the percentage is far smaller if you factor in the killing of adult Iraqi civilians, not to mention troops butchered as/after they’d surrendered and/or after the “war-ending” ceasefire had been announced).

In terms undoubtedly more meaningful to the property/profit-minded American mainstream, they’ve knocked down a half-dozen buildings – albeit some very well-chosen ones – as opposed to the “strategic devastation” visited upon the whole of Iraq, and punched a $100 billion hole in the earnings outlook of major corporate shareholders, as opposed to the U.S. obliteration of Iraq’s entire economy.

With that, they’ve given Americans a tiny dose of their own medicine.. This might be seen as merely a matter of “vengeance” or “retribution,” and, unquestionably, America has earned it, even if it were to add up only to something so ultimately petty.

The problem is that vengeance is usually framed in terms of “getting even,” a concept which is plainly inapplicable in this instance. As the above data indicate, it would require another 49,996 detonations killing 495,000 more Americans, for the “terrorists” to “break even” for the bombing of Baghdad/extermination of Iraqi children alone. And that’s to achieve “real number” parity. To attain an actual proportional parity of damage – the US is about 15 times as large as Iraq in terms of population, even more in terms of territory – they would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people.

Were this the intent of those who’ve entered the US to wage war against it, it would remain no less true that America and Americans were only receiving the bill for what they’d already done. Payback, as they say, can be a real motherfucker (ask the Germans). There is, however, no reason to believe that retributive parity is necessarily an item on the agenda of those who planned the WTC/Pentagon operation. If it were, given the virtual certainty that they possessed the capacity to have inflicted far more damage than they did, there would be a lot more American bodies lying about right now.

Hence, it can be concluded that ravings carried by the “news” media since September 11 have contained at least one grain of truth: The peoples of the Mideast “aren’t like” Americans, not least because they don’t “value life’ in the same way. By this, it should be understood that Middle-Easterners, unlike Americans, have no history of exterminating others purely for profit, or on the basis of racial animus. Thus, we can appreciate the fact that they value life – all lives, not just their own – far more highly than do their U.S. counterparts.

The Makings of a Humanitarian Strategy
In sum one can discern a certain optimism – it might even be call humanitarianism – imbedded in the thinking of those who presided over the very limited actions conducted on September 11.

Their logic seems to have devolved upon the notion that the American people have condoned what has been/is being done in their name – indeed, are to a significant extent actively complicit in it – mainly because they have no idea what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

Now they do.

That was the “medicinal” aspect of the attacks.

To all appearances, the idea is now to give the tonic a little time to take effect, jolting Americans into the realization that the sort of pain they’re now experiencing first-hand is no different from – or the least bit more excruciating than – that which they’ve been so cavalier in causing others, and thus to respond appropriately.

More bluntly, the hope was – and maybe still is – that Americans, stripped of their presumed immunity from incurring any real consequences for their behavior, would comprehend and act upon a formulation as uncomplicated as “stop killing our kids, if you want your own to be safe.”

Either way, it’s a kind of “reality therapy” approach, designed to afford the American people a chance to finally “do the right thing” on their own, without further coaxing.

Were the opportunity acted upon in some reasonably good faith fashion – a sufficiently large number of Americans rising up and doing whatever is necessary to force an immediate lifting of the sanctions on Iraq, for instance, or maybe hanging a few of America’s abundant supply of major war criminals (Henry Kissinger comes quickly to mind, as do Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton and George the Elder) – there is every reason to expect that military operations against the US on its domestic front would be immediately suspended.

Whether they would remain so would of course be contingent upon follow-up. By that, it may be assumed that American acceptance of onsite inspections by international observers to verify destruction of its weapons of mass destruction (as well as dismantlement of all facilities in which more might be manufactured), Nuremberg-style trials in which a few thousand US military/corporate personnel could be properly adjudicated and punished for their Crimes Against humanity, and payment of reparations to the array of nations/peoples whose assets the US has plundered over the years, would suffice.

Since they’ve shown no sign of being unreasonable or vindictive, it may even be anticipated that, after a suitable period of adjustment and reeducation (mainly to allow them to acquire the skills necessary to living within their means), those restored to control over their own destinies by the gallant sacrifices of the combat teams the WTC and Pentagon will eventually (re)admit Americans to the global circle of civilized societies. Stranger things have happened.

In the Alternative
Unfortunately, noble as they may have been, such humanitarian aspirations were always doomed to remain unfulfilled. For it to have been otherwise, a far higher quality of character and intellect would have to prevail among average Americans than is actually the case. Perhaps the strategists underestimated the impact a couple of generations-worth of media indoctrination can produce in terms of demolishing the capacity of human beings to form coherent thoughts. Maybe they forgot to factor in the mind-numbing effects of the indoctrination passed off as education in the US. Then, again, it’s entirely possible they were aware that a decisive majority of American adults have been reduced by this point to a level much closer to the kind of immediate self-gratification entailed in Pavlovian stimulus/response patterns than anything accessible by appeals to higher logic, and still felt morally obliged to offer the dolts an option to quit while they were ahead.

What the hell? It was worth a try.

But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the dosage of medicine administered was entirely insufficient to accomplish its purpose.

Although there are undoubtedly exceptions, Americans for the most part still don’t get it.

Already, they’ve desecrated the temporary tomb of those killed in the WTC, staging a veritable pep rally atop the mangled remains of those they profess to honor, treating the whole affair as if it were some bizarre breed of contact sport. And, of course, there are the inevitable pom-poms shaped like American flags, the school colors worn as little red-white-and-blue ribbons affixed to labels, sportscasters in the form of “counterterrorism experts” drooling mindless color commentary during the pregame warm-up.

Refusing the realization that the world has suddenly shifted its axis, and that they are therefore no longer “in charge,” they have by-and-large reverted instantly to type, working themselves into their usual bloodlust on the now obsolete premise that the bloodletting will “naturally” occur elsewhere and to someone else.

“Patriotism,” a wise man once observed, “is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

And the braided, he might of added.

Braided Scoundrel-in-Chief, George Junior, lacking even the sense to be careful what he wished for, has teamed up with a gaggle of fundamentalist Christian clerics like Billy Graham to proclaim a “New Crusade” called “Infinite Justice” aimed at “ridding the world of evil.”

One could easily make light of such rhetoric, remarking upon how unseemly it is for a son to threaten his father in such fashion – or a president to so publicly contemplate the murder/suicide of himself and his cabinet – but the matter is deadly serious.

They are preparing once again to sally forth for the purpose of roasting brown-skinned children by the scores of thousands. Already, the B-1 bombers and the aircraft carriers and the missile frigates are en route, the airborne divisions are gearing up to go.

To where? Afghanistan?

The Sudan?

Iraq, again (or still)?

How about Grenada (that was fun)?

Any of them or all. It doesn’t matter.

The desire to pummel the helpless runs rabid as ever.

Only, this time it’s different.

The time the helpless aren’t, or at least are not so helpless as they were.

This time, somewhere, perhaps in an Afghani mountain cave, possibly in a Brooklyn basement, maybe another local altogether – but somewhere, all the same – there’s a grim-visaged (wo)man wearing a Clint Eastwood smile.

“Go ahead, punks,” s/he’s saying, “Make my day.”

And when they do, when they launch these airstrikes abroad – or may a little later; it will be at a time conforming to the “terrorists”‘ own schedule, and at a place of their choosing – the next more intensive dose of medicine administered here “at home.”

Of what will it consist this time? Anthrax? Mustard gas? Sarin? A tactical nuclear device?

That, too, is their choice to make.

Looking back, it will seem to future generations inexplicable why Americans were unable on their own, and in time to save themselves, to accept a rule of nature so basic that it could be mouthed by an actor, Lawrence Fishburn, in a movie, The Cotton Club.

“You’ve got to learn, ” the line went, “that when you push people around, some people push back.”

As they should.

As they must.

And as they undoubtedly will.

There is justice in such symmetry.

ADDENDUM
The preceding was a “first take” reading, more a stream-of-consciousness interpretive reaction to the September 11 counterattack than a finished piece on the topic. Hence, I’ll readily admit that I’ve been far less than thorough, and quite likely wrong about a number of things.

For instance, it may not have been (only) the ghosts of Iraqi children who made their appearance that day. It could as easily have been some or all of their butchered Palestinian cousins.

Or maybe it was some or all of the at least 3.2 million Indochinese who perished as a result of America’s sustained and genocidal assault on Southeast Asia (1959-1975), not to mention the millions more who’ve died because of the sanctions imposed thereafter.

Perhaps there were a few of the Korean civilians massacred by US troops at places like No Gun Ri during the early ‘50s, or the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians ruthlessly incinerated in the ghastly fire raids of World War II (only at Dresden did America bomb Germany in a similar manner).

And, of course, it could have been those vaporized in the militarily pointless nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There are others, as well, a vast and silent queue of faceless victims, stretching from the million-odd Filipinos slaughtered during America’s “Indian War” in their islands at the beginning of the twentieth century, through the real Indians, America’s own, massacred wholesale at places like Horseshoe Bend and the Bad Axe, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, the Washita, Bear River, and the Marias.

Was it those who expired along the Cherokee Trial of Tears of the Long Walk of the Navajo?

Those murdered by smallpox at Fort Clark in 1836?

Starved to death in the concentration camp at Bosque Redondo during the 1860s?

Maybe those native people claimed for scalp bounty in all 48 of the continental US states? Or the Raritans whose severed heads were kicked for sport along the streets of what was then called New Amsterdam, at the very site where the WTC once stood?

One hears, too, the whispers of those lost on the Middle Passage, and of those whose very flesh was sold in the slave market outside the human kennel from whence Wall Street takes its name. And of coolie laborers, imported by the gross-dozen to lay the tracks of empire across scorching desert sands, none of them allotted “a Chinaman’s chance” of surviving.

The list is too long, too awful to go on.

No matter what its eventual fate, America will have gotten off very, very cheap.

The full measure of its guilt can never be fully balanced or atoned for.

In response to criticism, Churchill issued this press release January 31, 2005:

PRESS RELEASE

In the last few days there has been widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning my analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, coverage that has resulted in defamation of my character and threats against my life. What I actually said has been lost, indeed turned into the opposite of itself, and I hope the following facts will be reported at least to the same extent that the fabrications have been.

* The piece circulating on the internet was developed into a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. Most of the book is a detailed chronology of U.S. military interventions since 1776 and U.S. violations of international law since World War II. My point is that we cannot allow the U.S. government, acting in our name, to engage in massive violations of international law and fundamental human rights and not expect to reap the consequences.

* I am not a “defender”of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people “should” engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.”

* This is not to say that I advocate violence; as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam I witnessed and participated in more violence than I ever wish to see. What I am saying is that if we want an end to violence, especially that perpetrated against civilians, we must take the responsibility for halting the slaughter perpetrated by the United States around the world. My feelings are reflected in Dr. King’s April 1967 Riverside speech, where, when asked about the wave of urban rebellions in U.S. cities, he said, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed . . . without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

* In 1996 Madeleine Albright, then Ambassador to the UN and soon to be U.S. Secretary of State, did not dispute that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of economic sanctions, but stated on national television that “we” had decided it was “worth the cost.” I mourn the victims of the September 11 attacks, just as I mourn the deaths of those Iraqi children, the more than 3 million people killed in the war in Indochina, those who died in the U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama and elsewhere in Central America, the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, and the indigenous peoples still subjected to genocidal policies. If we respond with callous disregard to the deaths of others, we can only expect equal callousness to American deaths.

* Finally, I have never characterized all the September 11 victims as “Nazis.” What I said was that the “technocrats of empire” working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of “little Eichmanns.” Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies.

* It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American “command and control infrastructure” in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a “legitimate” target. Again following U.S. military doctrine, as announced in briefing after briefing, those who did not work for the CIA but were nonetheless killed in the attack amounted to no more than “collateral damage.” If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these “standards” when the are routinely applied to other people, they should be not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them.

* It should be emphasized that I applied the “little Eichmanns” characterization only to those described as “technicians.” Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack. According to Pentagon logic, were simply part of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that’s my point. It’s no less ugly, painful or dehumanizing a description when applied to Iraqis, Palestinians, or anyone else. If we ourselves do not want to be treated in this fashion, we must refuse to allow others to be similarly devalued and dehumanized in our name.

* The bottom line of my argument is that the best and perhaps only way to prevent 9-1-1-style attacks on the U.S. is for American citizens to compel their government to comply with the rule of law. The lesson of Nuremberg is that this is not only our right, but our obligation. To the extent we shirk this responsibility, we, like the “Good Germans” of the 1930s and ’40s, are complicit in its actions and have no legitimate basis for complaint when we suffer the consequences. This, of course, includes me, personally, as well as my family, no less than anyone else.

* These points are clearly stated and documented in my book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which recently won Honorary Mention for the Gustavus Myer Human Rights Award. for best writing on human rights. Some people will, of course, disagree with my analysis, but it presents questions that must be addressed in academic and public debate if we are to find a real solution to the violence that pervades today’s world. The gross distortions of what I actually said can only be viewed as an attempt to distract the public from the real issues at hand and to further stifle freedom of speech and academic debate in this country.

Ward Churchill
Boulder, Colorado
January 31, 2005

Come march in favor of elections for all

ON MONDAY OCTOBER 20th, at 12:30pm, Colorado College students will hold a PUBLIC MARCH to mark the first day of EARLY VOTING in the 2008 presidential election. Students will assemble at Worner Center, and march straight downtown to the El Paso County Registrar. This action will call attention to the need to go early to the polls, in case voters encounter challenges to their registrations. I’m more encouraged simply that students are taking to the streets because I believe, like Emma Goldman, “If voting could change anything, it would be illegal.” Would Goldman be so revered a social reformer if people didn’t recognize, deep down, the wisdom of her words?

Students at Colorado College have in years past faced regular disenfranchisement at the voting booth because local election administrators chose to muddy the qualifications for whether out-of-state students could vote in El Paso County. This year, plans to enforce a similar policy were leaked, and the county was forced to deny its intentions. As yet, student organizers do not know what to expect on November 4.

In the past, El Paso County has been such a God-forsaken Republican bastion that election rigging was probably unnecessary. It’s conjectured that this year, facing a growing Democratic electorate, local officials will be so eager for the region to hold to its conservative-idiot tradition that they will justify any means to do it.

I’ve seen the Republican partisanship on display at even ordinary county meetings. The Clerk and Recorder, Bob Balink for example, wears his Republican allegiance like a soccer fan. It would be no exaggeration I’m sure to speculate that Bob Balink will bite off your left foot sooner than let progressive ideas contaminate his hillbilly heaven. He travels to the Denver legislature on a regular basis to report back about what the crazy Democrats are trying to do. Every county commission meeting begins with his scouting tips about what progressive threats his Republican colleagues face over the horizon.

Conservatism in Colorado Springs stands for cronies, imbecilic cretins and the clan. In the 1930s the Pikes Peak region was the Colorado stronghold of the Klan. I’ve no doubt a lot of these guys still have their clan robes. In fact most recently the Minutemen, the post-9/11 incarnation of the KKK, held its recruitment meetings in a Colorado Springs Police Substation community room. It included, I kid you not, a recruiting inducement lifted verbatim and without irony, from the KKK.

Maybe a daylight demonstration of public unwillingness to be represented by bigots –who continue to parade about as if their support is unanimous– will push their politics back into the stagnant backwater of their fenced no-immigrants-welcome backyards where it belongs.

USA! USA! Today on Jerry Springer- Alaska vs. Delaware!

Jerry SpringerSnooty, arrogant, Dupont chemical state Biden, versus Soccer Mom eating moose burgers with Alaskan Separatist hubby! Let’s hope they take their tops off and go at it! Joe, you can tag team with Hillary to make it more even if you want?

Lets’ face it, Biden= Palin! They’re both camp as can be! But America just can’t get that image of Frontier out of mind (NO, not the half bankrupt Frontier Airlines), and Alaska is just that! It’s the great military frontier, too! God Bless Us so.

Biden wants to send US troops to Africa, and Palin wants to send them to Ukraine and Georgia (NO, not the Peach Tree State). Let Israel decide where ‘our’ troops be sent then!

Oops, Biden has just left the floor and is bumping his naked chest up against that of an audience member’s tie! Wait! That’s John McCain! What’s he doing in the ring?!!!

And there goes Todd! He’s taken down audience member Barack (the only Black person in this trailer trash crowd!) with a bear-like tackle! Talk about Global Warming! (let’s not)! Todd is biting and a growling!

Now he’s got Obama begging for an aborted mission, and look at that Todd go ballistic! That Todd’s something else, and we can only hope that he and his purty wife can get into the White House for more tag team fun. Maybe with Vladimir and the now rather putrid and pickled Boris? Jimmy and Mikhail could referee that one! We can only hope… it could be a nucular blast!

And look what’ just come out! A live pig with lipstick on, a jackass with lipstick aglow too, and a pink elephant with the bright red stuff on (please, don’t write me about this slanderous ad hominem attack on Sarah)! Oh boy! This is going to be a big free-for-all that the whole family can enjoy! Look at them go! Yeah! This could only happen in a Christian nation where God’s people have the freedoms that only God’s people can have! It makes me proud to be an American to see a show like this! Thanks, Jerry Springer, thanks to you, KRCP Cincinnati. Thanks to Great America!

The difference between GOP and a pig? Lipstick.

Alaska governor Sarah Palin hunts wildlife from a plane doorIn her speech last night at the RNC, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin riddled us: What’s the difference between a HOCKEY MOM and a PIT BULL? LIPSTICK. Maybe those of us who aren’t Alaskans or Canadians don’t know what “hockey moms” are. The raised placards at the RNC would have us think, and the cheering response would have us believe, that this is an appeal to homemaker feminists. We’re meant to confuse “hockey moms” -I’m sure- with “soccer moms,” a term which has nothing to do with tenacious blood-lust / sports advocacy.

“Soccer Moms” is about multitasking mothers overtaxed by the myriad after-school activities which excuse their driving Subarus or SUVs. The lexicographic link must be “soccer hooligan” from which we can derive the disproportionate competitive fervor shown by Little League parents. (Soccer Mom — Soccer Hooligan — Hockey Mom?) Would that explain the pit bull comparison? Or are Alaskan pit bulls beasts of burden on the dog sled teams?

No. VP candidate Sarah Palin is a pit bull alright, with the lies she’s pulling her children into, and the bold faced misrepresentations she’s making about her political record as a reformer and corruption cop, which she is everything but. But where Palin really needs the lipstick is to disguise her pit bull blood lust. Palin shoots moose and wolves from airplanes. lipstick She championed a ballot initiative to protect the rights of “Safari” outfits to take “hunters” like herself aloft where they can spot wild animals against the bare snow, stalk them until they are out of wind, then fire at them with high power rifles until they splatter dead. No need even to land the plane.

Pit bulls are outlawed in many civilized municipalities and Human Societies throughout the lower forty-eight won’t let people re-adopt them, choosing rather to euthanize pit bulls sooner than expose more would be pet owners to the genetically malignant brutes. Pit bull skulls shrink in on their brains as they age. Ever since the Budweiser pitchdog, people think they’re cute, and owners will insist they are friendly just like any other dog, yada yada yada. Except they are the preferred pets of meth dealers to guard the stash while they are replenishing ingredients at Wal-mart. Pit bulls were bred to have heads like anvils and vice-like jaws. They look like steel-toothed pot-bellied pigs.

I’m surprised the GOP wants to remind TV viewers about an analogy whose punchline is lipstick.

Lipstick cannot disguise a pig, and it’s not going to disguise Sarah Palin.

Just say no, Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin familyExactly who is John McCain pandering to by adding Sarah Palin to the ticket? Talk is that he’s hoping to hook the evangelical crowd, but he’s obviously missing a few key bits of information.

Conservative Christians do not put their women in positions of authority over men. Ever. In my former church, women were not allowed to preach to the general congregation because this was seen as unbiblical, and a condescension to their male counterparts. Believe it or not, they aren’t even permitted to lead the “praise and worship” musical segment of the Sunday service for the same reason. Jezebel can forget about the support of evangelical males.

As for females, they present an even peskier problem. Christian women have strong opinions about the roles of wife and mother. In my experience, few evangelical wives are employed full-time outside the home. Their lives are about rearing godly children and glorifying their husbands. Many consider themselves helpmates, subordinate to their husbands and the church. They are not going to view Sarah Palin as a sister in Christ. She resembles a Biblical harlot, not a Proverbs 31 role model.

There is a nonreligious unbridgeable gap here as well. In case you hadn’t heard, there is an ongoing feud between stay-at-home mothers (SAHMs) and women employed outside the home. The SAHMs claim the moral high ground in the area of child-raising and husband-tending, while the working women, especially those in traditionally male-dominated professions, cling to feminist values of independence, equality, and self-actualization. Ms. Palin — the working woman who calls herself a soccer mom — may strike both camps as an imposter. And many women, regardless of work status, will wonder why Sarah would leave five children, including a special-needs infant, to be used as a pawn in a good-ol’-boys ploy.

I feel sorry for Sarah Palin. She’s being used as hastily begotten arm candy to pretty up an ugly ticket. Things won’t go well for her this election season. In my opinion, she should have refused McCain’s offer. She should have thanked him for the honor of being asked, and then used the national spotlight to showcase who she really is. Not the life preserver he’d like her to be.

Bad DNC protesters? get them to behave

That was embarrassing. The Indy asked me how to keep a protest peaceful, in light of participants who may be tempted to mix it up. The Indy said my advice was get them to behave. It’s what I meant of course, but I said: set a good example for others to follow.

I was talking to the Independent reporter about how one could participate in the DNC demonstrations without getting caught up in trouble. It is a perplexing balancing act. Despite every organizer’s best intentions, there are going to be soccer hooligans and plain-clothed provocateurs.

The best use you can put to all the digital video devices is to catch undercover cops trying to instigate crime. Young would-be rabble-rousers will have to offend for themselves because cameras might catch them too. Against police video surveillance, the bystander videotape will be the least of their problems. Principally, demonstrators will need to catch the various law enforcement agents trying to entrap participants and incite riots, for which they can blame their unwitting accomplices.

Don’t hold anything for a stranger, don’t follow the directions of someone you don’t already know to be an organizer.

And above all, remember why you’re here. To represent your message. To give voice to others. Taking to the street is as fundamental as fighting for your rights. They weren’t given us without somebody taking to the streets to demand them. Let the politicians and media and authorities know why you’re there. That’s real patriotism.

Air National Guardsmen are aiming Preditor and Reaper Drones from home

Bush has brought the Global War On Terrorism to American shores! Air National Guardsmen deployed at stateside bases are piloting and aiming the Predator and Reaper drones against peoples in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and victims yet unreported. Do you doubt they might be Filipinos, Colombians, Bolivians and South Georgians? If any of those aforementioned want to defend themselves, they could only attack those shooting at them from Arizona, California, Nevada and Texas.

Residents of those states should know they are living in war zones if they live adjacent these installations. Do you know any of these soldiers? The specialists who guide and track the munitions directly to their target’s alarmed faces are called “Sensor Operators” and have been experiencing PTSD right at home!

214th Reconnaissance Group
Tucson, Arizona

163rd Reconnaissance Wing & 196th Reconnaissance Squadron
March Air Reserve Base, California

432nd Reconnaissance Wing
Creech Air Force Base, Nevada

14th Reconnaissance Wing
Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base, Houston, Texas

In case the CBS article is removed, we’ll mirror it here:

The Air National Guardsmen who operate Predator drones over Iraq via remote control, launching deadly missile attacks from the safety of Southern California 7,000 miles away, are suffering some of the same psychological stresses as their comrades on the battlefield.

Working in air-conditioned trailers, Predator pilots observe the field of battle through a bank of video screens and kill enemy fighters with a few computer keystrokes. Then, after their shifts are over, they get to drive home and sleep in their own beds.

But that whiplash transition is taking a toll on some of them mentally, and so is the way the unmanned aircraft’s cameras enable them to see people getting killed in high-resolution detail, some officers say.

“When you come in (with a fighter jet) at 500-600 mph, drop a 500-pound bomb and then fly away, you don’t see what happens,” said Col. Albert K. Aimar, who is commander of the 163rd Reconnaissance Wing here and has a bachelor’s degree in psychology. “Now you watch it all the way to impact, and I mean it’s very vivid, it’s right there and personal. So it does stay in people’s minds for a long time.”

He said the stresses are “causing some family issues, some relationship issues.” He and other Predator officers would not elaborate.

But the 163rd has called in a full-time chaplain and enlisted the services of psychologists and psychiatrists to help ease the mental strain on these remote-control warriors, Aimar said. Similarly, chaplains have been brought in at Predator bases in Texas, Arizona and Nevada.

In interviews with five of the dozens of pilots and sensor operators at the various bases, none said they had been particularly troubled by their mission, but they acknowledged it comes with unique challenges, and sometimes makes for a strange existence.

“It’s bizarre, I guess,” said Lt. Col. Michael Lenahan, a Predator pilot and operations director for the 196th Reconnaissance Squadron here. “It is quite different, going from potentially shooting a missile, then going to your kid’s soccer game.”

Among the stresses cited by the operators and their commanders: the exhaustion that comes with the shift work of this 24-7 assignment; the classified nature of the job that demands silence at the breakfast table; and the images transmitted via video.

A Predator’s cameras are powerful enough to allow an operator to distinguish between a man and a woman, and between different weapons on the ground. While the resolution is generally not high enough to make out faces, it is sharp, commanders say.

Often, the military also directs Predators to linger over a target after an attack so that the damage can be assessed.

“You do stick around and see the aftermath of what you did, and that does personalize the fight,” said Col. Chris Chambliss, commander of the active-duty 432nd Wing at Creech Air Force Base, Nev. “You have a pretty good optical picture of the individuals on the ground. The images can be pretty graphic, pretty vivid, and those are the things we try to offset. We know that some folks have, in some cases, problems.”

Chambliss said his experience flying F-16 fighter jets on bombing runs in Iraq during the 1990s prepared him for his current job as a Predator pilot. But Chambliss and several other wing leaders said they were concerned about the sensor operators, who sit next to pilots in the ground control station. Often, the sensor operators are on their first assignment and just 18 or 19 years old, officers said.

While the pilot actually fires the missile, the sensor operator uses laser instruments to guide it all the way to its target.

On four or five occasions, sensor operators have sought out a chaplain or supervisor after an attack, Chambliss said. He emphasized that the number of such cases is very small compared to the number of people involved in Predator operations.

Col. Rodney Horn, vice commander of the 14th Reconnaissance Wing at Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base near Houston, said his unit went out of it way to impress upon sensor operators the sometimes lethal nature of the job. “No one’s walking into it blind,” he said.

Master Sgt. Keith LeQuire, a 48-year-old sensor operator here, said the 163rd asks prospective sensor operators whether they are prepared for the deadly serious mission. “No one’s been naive enough to come in to interview but not know about that aspect of the job,” he said.

Unlike soldiers living together in the war zone, the Predator operators do not have the close locker-room-style camaraderie that allows buddies to talk about the day’s events and blow off steam. But many Predator operators at Creech employ a decompression ritual during the long ride home, said Air Force Lt. Col. Robert P. Herz.

“They’re putting a missile down somebody’s chimney and taking out bad guys, and the next thing they’re taking their wife out to dinner, their kids to school,” said Herz, a Ph.D. who interviewed pilots and sensor operators for a doctoral dissertation on human error in Predator accidents.

“A lot of them have told me, `I’m glad I’ve got the hour drive.’ It gives them that whole amount of time to leave it behind,” Herz said. “They get in their bus or car and they go into a zone _ they say, `For the next hour I’m decompressing, I’m getting re-engaged into what it’s like to be a civilian.'”

Col. Gregg Davies, commander of the 214th Reconnaissance Group in Tucson, Ariz., said he knows of no member of his team who has experienced any trauma from launching a Predator attack.

Himself a Predator pilot, Davies said he has found the work rewarding. The Arizona Air National Guard unit flies Predators in both the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones. It has often provided protection for American convoys, and its personnel have seen insurgents planting roadside bombs.

“If we can have an effect there where we can take people out, that’s a real plus in terms of saving American lives,” Davies said. “Our folks look at it as they’re in the fight, they’re saving lives. They don’t feel too bad about that.”

Battlefield without Borders a reading

Battlefield Without BordersAn excerpt from STANDING THERE, After the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, June, 2006
 
Days before,
Rachael had told a story.
It seemed simple then.
“A bug flew into my eye
while I played soccer.
For a full minute,
I stumbled across the field,
half-blind, frantically blinking,
trying to free the bug,
holding my big, clumsy
fingers at my side.
It was hilarious.
Teammates told me ‘Just kill it,’
but I laughed and blinked
and the bug broke free.”

Poet David Ferri-Smith will be reciting from BATTLEFIELDS WITHOUT BORDERS on Sunday April 13, 7pm TONIGHT at the Gill Foundation.
    David’s Colorado tour raises money for Direct Aid Iraq:
Monday April 14, Pueblo 12noon CSU Aspen Room, 7pm UU Church
Tuesday April 15, Alamosa 12noon Nielson Library, 7pm Carson Aud.
Wednesday April 16, Montrose 7pm
Thursday April 17, Grand Junction, Grand Valley Peace & Justice
Friday April 18, Durango 7pm Fort Lewis College, 130 Noble Hall
Saturday April 19, Durango Bookstore
Monday April 21, Grand Junction 11am, Frisco 7pm Senior Center
Tuesday April 22, Fort Collins 7pm, Bean Cycle Matter Bookstore
Wednesday April 23, Boulder 7pm, Friends Meeting House

Castro Chavez Ahmadinejad Maradona!

Diego Maradona!
 
MARADONA!
has just given an autographed soccer jersey to the Iranian people, in care of their president Mahmud Ahmadinejad. The number ten shirt is inscribed: “With all my affection to Iranian people.” While Google News lists only FARS and AGI carrying the story, the Argentinian soccer legend has triangulated the axis of our empire’s last nemesis.

Call them SPECTRE, call them KAOS, or The Other Evil Empire, they’re the last rebel leaders defying our Death Star. In a ceremony with the Iranian ambassador to Argentina, Diego “Hand of God” Maradona explained: “I have already met Fidel, Chavez, now I just want to meet your president, Ahmadinejad.”

The iron fist of the marketplace

Burmese priests protestThink you’re the only one who’s come to the conclusion that the average person can be relied upon only as far as you can drag him by the ear? Do you lament that the common sense of common heads put together adds up to a hill of beans?

If you think you know better, your challenge might be to cajole or inform, in hopes of motivating the herd, where others high on the food chain would simply ride roughshod.

Burmese monks leave their sandals behindI find it odd to use animal kingdom analogies to explain human behavior when Homo Sapiens comprise neither competing species, genus, class or phyla stalking each other.

Of the nurture versus nature, I mean carrot versus stick herd management option, which approach do you observe governments most often employ? In public schools it’s authoritarian, on the streets it’s civility so long as people submit appropriately to their fleecing. But as recent events have shown, dissent has meant government reaction with black gloves, masks, armor padding, truncheons, and low tech brutality. Every aspect something you’d expect more from those traditional masters of persuasive communication, the mobsters.

The people most alarmed by totalitarian repression are the educated class who over the centuries have fought for every liberty their overlords were forced to yield. The working classes represented the leverage used to negotiate each concession, and thus came along for the ride. But its muscled ranks have always served as the labor pool for the thugs the governors would use to fight any progressive reformers.

Your police departments all have riot gear to don in the event of civil disturbances. Can you say you’ve approved of their harsh measures in the event of your getting hysterical? That equipment isn’t for soccer hooligans, it’s to break strikes and beat back political assemblies.

We’ve seen police around the world fire on crowds assembled peaceably in Burma, Mexico, Tibet and Iraq. In New Orleans we’ve seen police taser crowds of people just like us, who wanted to protest a public meeting where the decision was being made to condemn their houses.

If you think massacres are beyond the pale for our corporate overlord class, think again. If they can do it without inciting a mass rebellion, they will. The independent minded people of East Timor were massacred with US weapons and the tacit complicity of a media which let it happen off camera. So long as you don’t see it, it doesn’t bother anyone’s conscience apparently. Children labor as slaves in Bangladesh, Africa and Asia for our corporations. You don’t see it, so it’s not a problem. For the profit-mongers all corporate genocide is OK, be it by economic starvation, accident, contamination, or pollution. If you could understood the depravity inherent in their exploitation of world poverty and its resources, can you doubt they’d hesitate to fire live rounds into a crowd who threatened their rule?

In defense of Ralph Routon

Ralf RoutonRalph Routon’s recent diatribe in the Indy about the impending departure of Michael DeMarsche was lame. But you have to understand. Having Ralph write about the arts is akin to having John Waters write about the Superbowl. You can only imagine how funny that would be. To us. But not to sports fans. You might as well call Jesus a homo or spit on an Indian before you sully such sacred land.

People. Look at the picture of Ralph. Then consider that no one chooses their worst picture to present to the world.  This is likely as good as it gets.  Which means that he is a beer-swilling bratwurst-gobbling sports-worshiping manly man.  He spits.  He scratches.  He has issues with dingleberries.  But he LOVES sports.  And by sports, I don’t mean fencing or horse racing or curling.  Sport involves a BALL of some sort.  And a distinctively American connection (which rules out rugby and soccer, although rugby is the ultimate masculine sport…even basketball doesn’t totally qualify for reasons I can’t quite figure out, but I think it’s because there are so few good white players).

One of the most memorable arguments that Dave and I ever had involved music.  We were in our late twenties; we lived in downtown Denver and we were cool.  He was a surgical resident at the U and I was a financial guru for a hip software company.  As such, we were invited to many events. When these invitations came in through medical channels everything was great.  Orthopedic surgeons are always jocks who were inspired to become surgeons while recovering from their own sports-related injuries.  But when the invitations came from my side of the channel, things were unpredictable.

We were invited to Josephina’s on Larimer, to drink wine and listen to some groovy jazz with fellow yuppies, a term Dave hated.  We got there.  We drank Coors Light while they drank "whine."  They listened to the "music."  In a very unfortunate turn of events, the girl that Dave took to junior prom, Alison, the fantastic skier, the one that paid only friendly attention to him due to family connections, walked in with her new husband, Clark.  Clark was an attorney who was, tragically, wearing a knee-length fur coat.  Dave was wearing Levis, tennis shoes and a yellow t-shirt (with red letters, like a hot dog) that said "NO LIGHTS AT WRIGLEY FIELD!" (which is now framed in the basement, I kid you not).  Things went rapidly downhill from there.  ‘When’s the music gonna start?  I could probably fix that pinkie for a fee.  Let’s go to the sym-PHONY next week."

Dave is the guy who slept through the birth of most of his children.  Our 10-year-old had the lead role in Oliver! at the FAC and I had to beg Dave to watch a single performance.  Brendan was in Colorado Christmas at the Broadmoor, performing for 1,000 people every night and Dave came to watch only once and rolled his eyes at all the "religious" bullshit (he doesn’t know any Christmas carols).  Brendan was hand-picked by Debbie Allen to be in Pepito’s Story at the Pikes Peak Center and Dave was sort of embarrassed and wondered if Brendan might be gay.

This same guy sobbed like an 8-year-old girl when Brent Musburger retired from sportscasting.  I’ve been to two Broncos Superbowls, Northwestern’s first Rose Bowl in 80 years, several Olympic games, the Citrus Bowl when Peyton Manning was senior quarterback and headed for greatness.  Weeping and gnashing of teeth all around.  My children paint, and play music, and sing, and dance.  None of it matters.  But Dave is elated for days if 6-year-old Devon, the only girl on the team, makes a double play to win the game.  Booyah!  Fuck yeah!

My point in all this is that Ralph Routon DOES NOT and CAN NOT care about the arts.  We will have to leave it to the psychiatrists to figure out why. Ralph Routon does not care who or what is playing at the Black Sheep, Theaterworks, the BAC.  He won’t attend Pridefest, nor the Diversity Fair.  Not even Springspree.  But he will agonize over the legal troubles of Michael Vick and any injury sustained by LaDanian Tomlinson.  He did, after all, draft them to his fantasy football team and he’s got 50 bucks hanging in the balance.

John Weiss, not exactly a manly man and therefore less than qualified to diagnose the problem, better figure it out soon and bring in some new blood.  Or the Indy will become the Indy 500 and he’ll have to find a whole new group of advertisers and readers.  Of course I’m kidding.  Car racing is most definitely not a SPORT.  Duh.

Neighborhood fox

Red fox chasing a mouseFox in the plural.
 
It seems almost overnight in Colorado Springs now whenever you cross the street you see red fox. As much downtown as in the foothills.
 
The first night at Camp Casey fox stole two pairs of sandals, actually the equivalent, one of each. But not before comingling everyone’s shoes in what must have been quite an indecisive dance. I woke and thought I’d missed a party.

When Eyes Wide Open visited Colorado College, it involved a geometric arrangement of nearly three thousand army boots and an equal number of civilian shoes on the green of Armstrong Quad. I was among those who stayed up to watch for vandals. But through the night the only activity we observed was that of several pairs of young red fox, making off with boots until the scent of another pair drew their interest. We’d go out every couple hours and rearrange the memorial footware, losing in the end not one.

The fox are getting rather friendly. Colorado College students report one which comes to watch the soccer games regularly. A friend of mine pet a fox, having mistaken it in the dark for something domestic until the feel of the coarse fur tempered the vigor of her stroke. Another friend thought a cat was poking its head out of a canopy and he gave it a friendly pat. They both looked at each other in surprise.

The fox are beautiful to behold running with a cadence like they are swimming on the wind, probably their fluffy tails cannot do but otherwise. If it runs like a dog, then you’ve spotted a coyote. Not even felines have such grace. To see two fox siblings running together multiplies the impression. They may be hunting along opposite sides of the street but you sense it’s the same stream. No doubt it’s a haunting sense too if you are a small rodent.

I particularly like to watch a fox negotiate traffic. He may wait for cars to pass, but more often he’ll weave through, skirting the cars, not the least bit panicked, more intent it seems on keeping in motion.

Failed athletes in the military

Athlete dyingMuch was made of Uday’s wrath when athletes on the Iraqi soccer team would return untriumphant. If a player made a gaffe, Saddam’s evil son Uday would send him off to the front. The Iran-Iraq Front at that time.
 
Americans are familiar with the lingo. It was a running joke on Hogan’s Heroes and became a timeless adage. Displease Der Fuhrer, you’re sent to the Russian Front.

Well now, where do suppose members of America’s military sports teams go if they fail to deliver the goods? If you are cut from the Army football team, or baseball team, or volleyball team, or basketball team, or any of the four branches of our military’s athletic self-promotion programs? Where are our soldiers sent if they are not playing for the home team?

We even send members of the military bands there. Our Eastern Front.

Restarting economy with repurchased toiletry items

Never mind that the London plotters never got beyond plotting. Never mind that the likely success of their bomb smuggling strategy is yet unproved. Already the Department of Homeland Security has decreed that no one can take liquids or gels aboard a plane.

If the NSA should eavesdrop upon another group of dark skinned men discussing the smuggling of incindiary devices made out of toothpicks, no matter how improbable, would toothpicks then be banned?

To combust a passenger aircraft with explosives stored in contact cleaning fluid bottles would require two soccer teams of suicide brethren pooling their resources in a probably pretty conspicuous Islamic in-flight Tupperware party.

And now the foiled terrorist plot is looking like it was a hoax.
 
This latest Neocon fear-mongering looks more like a baby steps approach to increasing consumer spending. They’re giving up on the everybody-buy-a-hybred industrial initiative.
 
Instead they’re forcing airline passengers to repurchase the personal products they need at each destination. Are the conservatives thinking they will bolster consumer spending one plane load of toiletry items at a time?
  picture

Used American soccer balls

Soccer ball used in one gameThere’s a local drive to round up soccer balls to send off to the children of Iraq. And they don’t want new ones.
 
An eight year old friend of mine came home from school and explained the logic. “Iraqi children want soccer balls that have been played with by American children. Just like when I go to the ballgame and catch a ball that’s been hit into the bleachers. American kids are excited to have a baseball that’s been used by professional players. Iraqi kids are excited to have soccer balls used by American kids!”

Except that the distinction kids make between new and used is universal. Everywhere there are such things as hand-me-downs probably. Otherwise the concept of children of two nations sharing their toys with each other sounded nice.

Then I learned further instructions. If you do not have a used soccer ball to give and are inclined to purchase a new soccer ball, the organizers would like you to give the new ball to your local soccer league in exchange for a used one of theirs. Thus the local soccer teams will benefit from this program as well.

Does that sound like unmitigated self serving crap to you?

When charities solicit donations of toys for AMERICAN children at Christmas, they always specify that the toy must be NEW, not the least bit used.

Pictured: A soccer ball fit for Iraqi kids. Scuffed and scratched by American kids before the American kids got a new one.

War criminals at large

Serbian war criminal Mladic.Serbian General Ratko Mladic, seen here with NATO commander General Wesley Clark, wearing each other’s caps, is accused of the infamous massacre of 7,500 Muslims at Srebrenica. Separated from the women, all the men and boys from Srebrenica were gathered into a soccer stadium and killed.
 
Mladic is also sought as a war criminal for the bombardment of Sarajevo. Wesley Clark may still face war crimes charges based on the bombardment of the civilian population of Kosovo.

How are their crimes any different from what the U.S. did in Fallujah? We besieged the city, bombed and sniped at its civilian population, then we told the residents of Fallujah to evacuate or meet their maker. From the lines of refugees leaving Fallujah, we turned back all fighting-age men and boys, on the pretext that we didn’t want “insurgents” to escape our dragnet. We forced them back into the city where we then treated everyone as a combatant and we exterminated them.