“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
H.L. Mencken, July 26, 1920
Category Archives: politics
Someone Remind Me – Why Am I Paying US Taxes?
The US is one of the few countries in the world that requires its citizens to pay income tax no matter where they are actually living. I’m beginning to wonder why I bother. I am dubious that the Social Security system will be worth much by the time I retire, and I won’t be in the US to "benefit" from Medicare.
Until recently, I saw my citizenship (and the taxes I pay for it) as a kind of insurance: if things were to go really rotten in some foreign country where I happened to be, the US Marines would come and rescue me.
I have now learned that, while they might come and rescue me, they’ll make me pay for the privilege, as they are doing with American citizens in Lebanon. (I’ve been unable to find out how much they’re charging.)
Hmm. Maybe I should just give up US citizenship. Then I might be less likely to ever NEED rescuing.
Stephen Colbert Roasts the White House Press Corps
Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert was the featured speaker at this year’s White House Correspondents’ dinner. The White House correspondents are, of course, those journalists we see in the White House briefing room, asking questions of presidential spokesmen and (under this administration) getting few answers. Their dinner guests are the President and many of his staff. The event is an opportunity for the two sides to trade humorous barbs in a sort of mutual roast, but the jokes are usually clawless.
Not this year. Standing six feet away from George W. on the speakers’ dais, before a crowd of media luminaries, Colbert (an actor who plays a rabid right-wing journalist on “The Colbert Report”) proceeded to rip everybody a new one, with a biting sarcastic wit that was evidently not appreciated by the President or his nominal adversaries in the press – neither side was spared.
Live coverage of this event was carried by C-Span, the station usually devoted to boring wall-to-wall coverage of votes and hearings in the US Congress. I suspect that relatively few people saw the event live on C-Span TV, but C-Span posted it on their website for a day or so, and it quickly made its way onto popular video sharing sites such as YouTube and the torrent networks, where it’s been thoroughly enjoyed by millions of ravening liberals like myself.
The mainstream media was slow to pick up the story, preferring to focus their coverage of the dinner on Bush’s own act, a comedy routine featuring himself and a Bush impersonator. The denizens of the blogosphere cried foul at the press’ failure to mention Colbert, so loudly that their outcry is now the story being covered, finally, by the New York Times et al. (Some of the press claim that they didn’t have much to say about Colbert’s routine in the first place because they didn’t find it funny.)
Whether or not the mainstream media tried deliberately to ignore Colbert, the role of by the Internet has been critical: the event was widely seen because it was distributed online where everybody could judge for themselves, regardless of whether the press chose to cover it. Copyrights be damned – this is important! Somebody finally got through Bush’s protective bubble, right in the face of the professional press who have so notably failed to do so. Chalk one up for the forces of online democracy.
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Crawling to Conclusions
I mentioned that I was going to be on TV, part of the audience on the Italian political talk show L’Infedele hosted by Gad Lerner.
Lerner showed far more political bias than he had in the previous show I attended (partly about Microsoft, partly about taxes – two inevitabilities of modern life?). My friend David Callahan and I were flattered to be specially shown to seats in the second row, stage right, until we realized that they had put us on the side of the cattivi (bad guys), as Lerner jokingly remarked. I was seated behind Gianni de Michelis, a long-time bastion of the Italian Socialist Party (abundantly disgraced by the Clean Hands anti-corruption investigations years ago), who had been Italy’s foreign minister for years during his heyday. Staring at the back of his greasy head for hours was not particularly edifying, his political opinions even less so.
The topic of the evening had been changed from “George Bush and Iraq” to “Are we winning the war [on terrorism]?” More broadly, should the war in Iraq ever have been started and have we (the Coalition) won it? There were several videomontages of recent violent events, with disingenuous voiceover narration. And, as I had expected, Giuliana Sgrena took part, remotely from a studio in Rome.
Someone had told me she wasn’t likely to participate, as she hadn’t given any interviews since her disastrous exit from Iraq, and was still recovering from being shot by American troops at a blockade as she was being carried away from her kidnappers (the Italian secret service officer who had secured her release was killed outright). But there she was, and, after so long a silence, she had plenty to say. As did everyone else, though few said anything sensible or surprising. This, too, was disappointing. Lerner picks intelligent guests from both sides of his topics, but these two groups were each entrenched in their own positions, and nobody was listening to anybody else.
The show was being broadcast live, with commercial breaks every 20 minutes. As break time approached, a young producer would hold up a sign for all of us to see: 4 minuti. 2 minuti. 60 secondi. Pubblicita’. These were largely ignored by whoever had the floor at the time, in spite of Lerner’s efforts (more determined in some cases than others) to shut them up. We missed one break by at least 10 minutes. Even on a TV schedule, Italians will be Italians… The show ran overtime by about 15 minutes, as is common for many live shows in Italy. Tivo would have a hard time working correctly here.
The one distinguished guest I felt any sympathy with was Anna Prause, seated on the “good guys” side. She had gone to Iraq with the Red Cross, then was hired by the Iraqi government to help set up the new Ministry of Health. As the situation for foreigners in Iraq deteriorated, she was eventually advised to leave, advice which she took only reluctantly.
When she finally got the floor, she exploded, saying that, while things in Iraq are still bad, and more dangerous than they were before, things are also better in many ways that are not understood or mentioned by the press. She gave an example: one of her tasks for the Ministry of Health had been to set up a new headquarters, planning everything right down to office fixtures and furniture. A year ago, she could not get her Iraqi colleagues to make a decision on anything even as minor as the color of the office furniture. Not because they were stupid or had no opinions, but because they were accustomed to watching carefully to see what opinions they were supposed to have, so that they could parrot those back to their political masters.
A year on, they not only had opinions, but were very happy to argue about them. This, she said, demonstrated an important change for the better in everyday Iraqi life, in spite of the ongoing violence. Is security more important than liberty? That’s a fundamental question which almost every country faces today. Personally, I come down on the side of liberty, but I’d like to hear from Iraqis themselves how they feel about it.
That evening forced me to confront and clarify my own very mixed feelings about what’s going on Iraq and how it all went down.
I always knew (who didn’t?) that Saddam was very bad news for the world and especially for his own people. He was a monster, partly of American creation, so the US had some responsibility to clean him up. The sanctions imposed after the first Gulf War caused tremendous suffering among the Iraqi people, without adversely affecting their “leaders”. I have mentioned my schoolmate who was married to an Iraqi and lived in Baghdad -through two wars – until her death from cancer last year. When I met Shahnaz and Achmed in 1996, Achmed’s salary as a schoolteacher was 3000 dinars a month: just about enough to buy a pack of cigarettes. Of course they couldn’t survive on that; their extended family, like everyone else in Iraq, was scraping along by selling off valuables and assets, and getting poorer all the time.
Yet Saddam seemed to have accomplished a sort of brainwashing (not surprising – as absolute dictator, he controlled all the media). People didn’t like him but, as Shahnaz insisted, “In Iraq we have a saying: better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”
Post facto, it’s clear that most Iraqis didn’t feel that way, and are relieved to have got rid of the devil they knew for so long. So I can’t regret that the US military went in and removed him. I am, however, furious at how Bush & Co. lied, cheated, and manipulated the American people into agreeing to this, and then managed it so badly. There are plenty of other reasons to be angry at the Bush administration, but on this issue I may come out feeling much as I did about Reagan: I hated his methods and attitudes, but must, however grudgingly, applaud some of his results.
Dec, 2006 – No, never mind. Removing Saddam was never worth what’s happening now.
Pirate Politics
The Usenet, that free-for-all haven of digital pirates, is an interesting place to observe grassroots political opinion. Generally, any new movie is uploaded (made available, illegally that is) for only a week or two around its release date, but “Fahrenheit 9/11” has been uploaded over and over again for months. Michael Moore has said that he wants the widest possible audience to see it, so presumably he doesn’t mind – though his distributors may feel differently.
Lesser-known films in a similar vein are also repeatedly uploaded, with titles like “A Colossal Mistake – Iraq, the Whole Truth Uncovered.” And some conspiracy thing about how Bush was actually responsible for 9/11 (I have not seen either of these, and can’t comment on how silly they may or may not be).
For the opposition, we have: “In Memorian [sic] 9/11 – an event that John Kerry, Michael Moore and the Dumocrats FORGET!”
People from both sides of the political spectrum have been posting clips from the conventions, and other items of more or less weird political rantery.
The audiobooks groups feature books from Maureen Dowd (of the New York Times – this is probably good), Jim Hightower, and Molly Ivins (these last two are Texas liberals – yes, there actually are Texas liberals, in large numbers even; they mostly seek refuge in and around Austin).
