Morphing on: a note to readers

Entries on Runes this year have morphed from the mostly political into the exclusively cultural, with an emphasis on literature, blues and, lately, African and Indian music.

This shift is partly due to the fact that a major focus in the past, the torture regime under the Bush/Cheney administration, has finally emerged as a national controversy that might yet lead to the appointment of a special prosecutor and eventual legal action. Various bloggers and columnists have pursued this goal for years without getting much attention, but the recent Red Cross Torture Report and a related article (and here) by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books helped to belatedly expand public awareness of the issue.

While I'm certainly not saying that work by progressives in this area has been completed, the issue has developed a momentum of its own — for now. The tension between the ethical obligation to prosecute war crimes and the desire to move on might yet be resolved in favor of the latter. The scope of the planned investigation already seems too narrow, since it seems to accept as legitimate any "interrogation techniques" condoned by the torture memos of Jay Bybee, John Yoo and the White House Office of Legal Counsel.

Meanwhile, Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings, one of my favorite bloggers, is retiring. As she explains it:

"The main reason I started blogging, besides the fact that I thought it would be fun, was that starting sometime in 2002, I thought that my country had gone insane. It wasn't just the insane policies, although that was part of it. It was the sheer level of invective: the way that people who held what seemed to me to be perfectly reasonable views, e.g. that invading Iraq might not be such a smart move, were routinely being described as al Qaeda sympathizers who hated America and all it stood for and wanted us all to die.

"I thought: we've gone mad. And I have to do something -- not because I thought that I personally could have any appreciable effect on this, but because it felt like what Katherine called an all hands on deck moment."

All this rings true for me, too. Hilzoy will be missed, though I'm not quite ready to follow her (and Sarah Palin's) lead by shutting down this forum. In keeping with the eclectic nature of Runes, more entries on political topics seem inevitable. For now, though, it's great fun sifting through my bookshelves, photo collection and YouTube for items that might otherwise be overlooked. If nothing else, Runes can always function as a kind of personal archive, journal and storage locker.


PHOTO: From a men's room at Goldman Sachs, which just reported record profits of $3.44 billion. GS is the largest remaining investment bank on Wall Street.

Three jugalbandhis from India

Rahul Sharma is joined by his father, Shivkumar Sharma, in an intricate santoor jugalbandhi (or duet), with Anindo Chatterjee on the tabla and an unidentified accompanist (Paris, 2001). The closest western equivalent to the santoor (originally an Iranian instrument) is probably the hammer dulcimer. They perform a vachaspati, or raga, in the Carnatic scale of southern Indian classical music.

In the following clip, two western instruments are seamlessly adapted to Indian classical styles: the incredible Uppalapu Srinivas performs on the mandolin and the equally masterful D. Bhattacharya on guitar, with B. Harikumar on the mridangam (drum). The tabla player isn't identified. They performed in Paris in May 2007. Unfortunately, the music is interrupted twice by interviews which, though interesting in themselves, should've been grouped together so that the music could be continuous. (You can easily skip ahead to the next musical segment. The interaction between the musicians in the last minute is both amazing and amusing.)



Finally, here's a keervani raga with Srinivas on mandolin, the phenomenal Zakir Hussain on tabla and Sultan Khan on the sarangi (Indian violin). The sound reproduction and video quality aren't exactly optimal, but it's still worth a listen.

ReJoyce on Bloomsday

"The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works." —James Joyce

This slideshow, accompanied by Toumani Diabaté on the solo kora, is Runes' tribute to James Joyce on the 105th anniversary of Bloomsday.

Observed annually on June 16^th in Dublin and elsewhere, Bloomsday celebrates the life of the Irish writer and his novel Ulysses, whose events occurred over a single day and night in Dublin in 1904. The name derives from Leopold Bloom, the protagonist (some would say "antihero") of Ulysses. The same day in 1904 was also the occasion of Joyce's first romantic encounter with his future spouse, Nora Barnacle, on the beach near the village of Ringsend, outside Dublin.

"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives." —James Joyce

The following excerpt, from Finnegans Wake, is recited by the master himself:

[Slideshow produced by M.J. O'Brien, 2009.]

Earth Day - Aldo Leopold

"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

--Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), A Sand County Almanac (1949)

PHOTO: Northern Pickets from Hannagan Peak, North Cascades National Park, Washington State (by M.J. O'Brien). An hour after this picture was taken it was raining — hard.

Blues Break: Two versions of "Mockingbird"

Aretha Franklin is joined by Roy Johnson in a rollicking version of "Mockingbird" back in the sixties on an unidentified TV show. (Aretha finally can't stay in her seat any longer at around 1:10.)

And here's a another version, with lyrics that are very much her own, by Regina Spektor. Her cover of "Little Boxes," written by Malvina Reynolds in 1962, is the perfect introduction to various episodes of Showtime's "Weed" series.

Quotes of the week: Anthony Lewis and Samuel Beckett

On the issue of tort "reform" and high litigation rates in the U.S., Anthony Lewis writes in the April 9th issue of the New York Review of Books:

"This country is notoriously lacking in safety nets that are taken for granted in other advanced societies. Medical care is guaranteed by the state, by one method or another, in Canada and all European countries; in the United States upward of 40 million people have no medical insurance. Around 46 percent of employed Americans get not even one day of paid sick leave—which is guaranteed by law in 145 other countries. Lawsuits are often a substitute for safety nets."

The latest volume of Samuel Beckett's vast correspondence is creating a lot of buzz (and here), apparently for good reason. On more than one occasion, Beckett was ready to abandon writing altogether. As he wrote in 1936:

"I hope I am not too old to take [flying] up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them."

PHOTO: Samuel Beckett by Louis le Brocquy, 1979 (Wikimedia Commons)

Quote of the day: Orhan Pamuk - "Snow"

Just finished Snow (2001), by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, and it's a suitable read for our gloomy winter nights here in Oregon — in fact, very reminiscent of Dostoyevsky at his darkest and most philosophical. In one chapter, set in the remote border town of Kars, the narrator invites a group of young people to give Westerners a message. One of them responds:

"Mankind's greatest error," continued the young Kurd, "the biggest deception in the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity...People might feel sorry for a man who's fallen on hard times, but when the entire nation is poor, the rest of the world assumes all of its people must be brainless, lazy, dirty, clumsy fools. Instead of pity, the people provoke laughter. It's all a joke: their culture, their customs, their practices."

PHOTO: Orhan Pamuk (Wikipedia Commons)

Blues Break: Cohen & Robinson - "Boogie Street"

Boogie Street - Lyrics

O Crown of Light, O Darkened One,
I never thought we'd meet.
You kiss my lips, and then it's done:
I'm back on Boogie Street.

A sip of wine, a cigarette,
And then it's time to go.
I tidied up the kitchenette;
I tuned the old banjo.
I'm wanted at the traffic-jam.
They're saving me a seat.
I'm what I am, and what I am,
Is back on Boogie Street.

And O my love, I still recall
The pleasures that we knew;
The rivers and the waterfall,
Wherein I bathed with you.
Bewildered by your beauty there,
I'd kneel to dry your feet.
By such instructions you prepare
A man for Boogie Street.

O Crown of Light, O Darkened One...

So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear.
Tho' all the maps of blood and flesh
Are posted on the door,
There's no one who has told us yet
What Boogie Street is for.

O Crown of Light, O Darkened One,
I never thought we'd meet.
You kiss my lips, and then it's done:
I'm back on Boogie Street.

A sip of wine, a cigarette,
And then it's time to go . . .

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

An animation backs up this fine performance of "Boogie Street" by Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson, who co-wrote the lyrics.

"Boogie Street" was composed for the "Ten New Songs" album, released in 2001. Another song from the album, "A Thousand Kisses Deep," picks up the Boogie Street motif.

"Ten New Songs" contains some of Cohen's best work and reflects his emergence from a deep depression. For years he lived in a zen monastery with Roshi, his master, on Mt. Baldy in California. During that time his business manager embezzled nearly all his savings . The whole sad story is revealed in interviews with Cohen in the 2006 film "I'm Your Man" (which includes a musical tribute performed in Australia by Nick Cave, U2 and various other musicians). He admits, at one point, that all those years in a zen monastery contributed little to his mental health. He says that other people commented on how calm and "centered" he seemed, yet it was all a facade devised to conceal a prolonged rage that he couldn't escape.

Even though he's now 74, Cohen has been touring in Europe, North America and Australia so he can recover his financial footing.

2,192 days later

On the sad occasion of the 6th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, this observation by Fareed Zacharia in Newsweek is worth repeating:

"The problem with American foreign policy goes beyond George Bush. It includes a Washington establishment that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise as treason and negotiations as appeasement. Other countries can have no legitimate interests of their own—Russian demands are by definition unacceptable. The only way to deal with countries is by issuing a series of maximalist demands. This is not foreign policy; it's imperial policy. And it isn't likely to work in today's world."

To date, at least 4,260 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq, and another 31,103 wounded. Estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties vary wildly, from a conservative estimate of 44,645 deaths to the high six figures. (The meticulous compilers of this data at icasualties.org note the following: "This is simply a compilation of deaths reported by news agencies. Actual totals for Iraqi deaths are much higher than the numbers recorded on this site.") An estimated 8,958 members of the Iraqi security forces have also been killed since the beginning of the Bush/Cheney war of aggression.

The situation for most Iraqis remains appalling despite recent improvements in security. AFP reports:

"Millions of civilians are still facing hardship every day," ICRC [Red Cross] president Jakob Kellenberger said in a statement after a five-day visit to the country.

"Indiscriminate attacks continue to leave dozens of people killed or injured on a daily basis despite improvements in the security situation in many parts of Iraq."

In 2007, 17,430 Iraqis died in violence. In 2008, 6,772 people were killed and the first two months of 2009 saw 449 die, the lowest official death toll since the invasion on March 20, 2003.

Basic services like public water supplies are still deficient, as described by Matthew Schofield of McClatchy Newspapers:

The stench of human waste is enough to tell Falah abu Hasan that his drinking water is bad. His infant daughter Fatma's continuous illnesses and his own constant nausea confirm it.

"We are the poor. No one cares if we get sick and die," he said. "But someone should do something about the water. It is dirty. It brings disease."

Everybody complains about the water in Baghdad , and few are willing to risk drinking it from the tap. Six years after the U.S. invaded Iraq , 36 percent of Baghdad's drinking water is unsafe, according to the Iraqi Environment Ministry — in a good month. In a bad month, it's 90 percent. Cholera broke out last summer, and officials fear another outbreak this year.

"Even if the water is good today, no one would trust it," grocer Hussein Jawad said. He said that about 40 percent of his business was selling bottled drinking water, crates of which he's stacked 7 feet high on the sidewalk. "We've learned to be afraid."

The irony of bad water is lost on few here. When the city was founded 1,200 years ago, it was named Baghdad al Zawhaa, " Baghdad the Garden," because water was plentiful. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers formed the boundaries of Mesopotamia and fed the fields in the cradle of civilization.

Meanwhile, George Bush, during a speaking engagement in Calgary, is already plugging his memoirs, tentatively entitled "Decision Points." On CNN, Dick Cheney declares that "stuff happens" — and we "ended up" with two of the longest wars in U.S. history. For Cheney, it's as if the illegal invasion of Iraq was the result of irresistible natural forces rather than a deliberate policy choice. So far there are no indications that either Bush or Cheney will ever be held accountable for that choice, except by historians.


PHOTO: Antiwar demonstrator in Portland, Oregon - March 19, 2006 [M.J. O'Brien]

[H/T to Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings.]

Werewolves and zombies

The AIG fiasco leads to a few unavoidable conclusions:

1) Tim Geithner and Larry Summers need to join the growing ranks of the unemployed, who already number 10.8% of the workforce here in Oregon. Joblessness would only be temporary for them, no doubt. They're old-school crony capitalists who fundamentally don't get it because they're too embedded in the culture of Wall Street. They should be replaced by advisors who aren't totally clueless — people like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman, for example.

2) The behavior of the werewolves who occupy the AIG corporate leadership may be politically tone-deaf, but it was absolutely predictable. The rage is more suitably directed at politicians: the very people who either saw this coming and accepted it, or should've seen it coming and acted to prevent it. The feigned naïveté of politicians who are "shocked" by the AIG bonuses is a nauseating sight to behold.

3) If U.S. taxpayers own AIG (nearly 80%) and the zombie banks, they should exercise a proportionate amount of control over their management.

4) Legal platitudes about the sanctity of contracts were notably absent when the Big Three abrogated agreements with the United Auto Workers and other unions. Worst case: unilaterally rescind the contracts and let the executives make their arguments to a jury.

5) Scary as it sounds, bankruptcy is a better alternative for AIG and the zombie banks than endless bailouts with no transparency. For one thing, Chapter 11 filings would allow these corporations to avoid pre-existing contractual obligations to provide bonuses and golden parachutes. It would also allow them to dump their most toxic assets.

6) Barack Obama's adaptive skills are impressive enough that he can quickly clean house, learn the necessary lessons and move on to a more populist model for economic recovery (with a little help from Reich and Krugman, among many others).

And not least:

7) The whole cultural obsession with short-term gain needs to be examined at the deepest levels, from politics (with its focus on "short-term outcomes dictated by the electoral cycle") to the economy. Short-term gain often produces long-term pain, as the AIG fiasco again demonstrates. [To start, here's a minor suggestion: amend the Constitution to allow for 4-year terms in the House of Representatives to promote long-term thinking and reduce nonstop campaigning and fundraising.]

GRAPHIC: The werewolves at AIG (Wikimedia).

[Note: versions of this entry were cross-posted at Obsidian Wings and Lawyers, Guns and Money.]

One planet. One people.

As a compulsive collector of quotations, I hereby add the following to the bulging shelves of my archives:

All the world’s stories are America’s stories now, and this is the current glory of our literature; as never before in our lifetimes, so many histories are flooding into America, and so many Americans going out to claim the world as an extension of their homes, that our imaginations are being stretched (one hopes), along with the words we use, the wisdoms we inhabit, the sounds and philosophies we can begin to reinvent. What Barack Obama represents on the global stage, those of his generation and younger (from Ken­ya, from the Dominican Republic, from Korea) are bringing to life on the planetary page.

—Pico Iyer (from a review of Yiyun Li's The Vagrants in the March 6th edition of the New York Times Book Review)

Iyer's essay for Salon on "Why We Travel" is also worth a look. Though Iyer was born in the U.K., his parents were Indians who taught philosophy at Oxford. For many years, he commuted back and forth from schools in England to California, where his parents moved to accept other teaching positions. Iyer has written a biography — which some critics might describe as a hagiography — of the Dalai Lama.

Disobeying a traffic control device, Oregon-style

Deschutes National Forest - Oregon Cascades
[Photo by M.J. O'Brien, 2002]

Rachel Maddow interviews Michael Isikoff on the torture lawyers

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Rachel interviews Michael Isikoff at the end of this segment (February 16th) on the latest revelations about the Bush Justice Department. Isikoff makes a compelling, if somewhat obvious, argument:

1) IF the Yoo/Bybee memo was intended to gave Bush officials legal cover for waterboarding and other forms of torture, AND
2) Those same officials pressured Bybee, Yoo and or AG Gonzales to produce exactly that justification, THEN
3) The whole legal cover evaporates, taking with it the "good faith" defense.

"Good faith reliance" on a legal opinion still has some political credence as a barrier to prosecutions, as Barack Obama himself has declared. But, legally speaking, acting in "good faith" is not, and has never been, a defense to a federal torture charge.

Morally speaking, we can hope that a person instructed to waterboard a detainee would hesitate and refuse — even if a "legal opinion" said it was okay.

Slapping a few wrists

In the February 14th issue of Newsweek, Michael Isikoff writes:

"An internal Justice Department report on the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics is causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials. H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the department's ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), confirmed last year he was investigating whether the legal advice in crucial interrogation memos "was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys."

[snip]

"If [Attorney General] Holder accepts the OPR findings, the report could be forwarded to state bar associations for possible disciplinary action."

Jay Bybee and John Yoo, authors of the infamous torture memo, must be quaking in horror at the prospect of disciplinary action that could range from a reprimand to suspension to disbarment.

As a practical matter, any disciplinary proceedings against Yoo would have little effect since he teaches law as a tenured member of the faculty at Berkeley. Jay Bybee sits on the 9th Circuit, and it's no small matter to discipline or remove a sitting federal judge. However, it seems highly unlikely that either Yoo or Bybee would face grave sanctions for "'deeply flawed' and 'sloppily reasoned' legal analysis." If they had been in the private sector when their opinions had been offered, a lawsuit for malpractice might prove more productive.

While professional discipline wouldn't be much of a sanction, given the war crimes these officials directly facilitated, at least it would be a start.

Under the Nuremberg principles, there's ample ground to launch a criminal investigation of Bybee and Yoo, along with former AG Alberto Gonzales. The true purpose of their "advice" was to give legal cover to practices that were blatantly in violation of U.S. and international laws prohibiting torture. Reliance on that advice is no excuse whatsoever. This hasn't been a gray area of the law for at least 63 years.

Nazi lawyers and judges were successfully prosecuted at Nuremberg — by U.S. prosecutors — for making the kinds of technical, bureaucratic arguments that Bybee, Yoo and Gonzales devised.

Obama needs to reconsider his apparent reluctance to investigate the Bush years and his inexplicable statement that officials who relied on legal opinions shouldn't be prosecuted. As a lawyer who has taught constitutional law, he surely realizes that there's no "good faith" defense to torture, and any reliance on legal opinions must be "reasonable." Moreover, the "good faith" argument is all too evocative of the discredited Nuremberg Defense ("I was only following orders").

Disciplinary proceedings would send a "signal," but not a very strong one — unless they provide a legal and political foundation for actual prosecutions of Bybee, Yoo and the rest of the Bush/Cheney cabal. A stronger move would be the creation of a "truth and reconciliation commission" along the lines proposed last week by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT).

Unfortunately, Leahy qualified his proposal by stating that "he was only offering the idea to see how much support it had:"

"We need to see whether the American people are ready to take this path," he said, adding that he did not have anyone in particular in mind to lead the commission, but wanted "people with real credibility."

Why should the "level of support" really matter if war crimes were committed? (No doubt there was little support for the Nuremberg prosecutions in Germany in 1945 [1].) As Obama stated last week:

"Nobody's above the law and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing then people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking back," said Obama. "I will take a look at Senator Leahy's proposal but my general orientation is to say, let's get it right moving forward."

In the face of such headwinds, it will require someone with raw political courage to pursue this issue, and that's traditionally been a scarce commodity in Washington (with some notable exceptions). But without an investigation, there's simply no way to evaluate whether any "wrongdoing" has occurred.

Finally, the least serious crimes committed by the Bush/Cheney administration are the ones that seem to be getting the most attention: torture and "abusive interrogations," detentions without due process, warrantless wiretaps, improper hirings and firings in the Justice Department. Sadly, the most serious offenses get little attention: crimes against peace, including such crimes against humanity as waging an aggressive war in Iraq and "the wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity" [Nuremberg Principle VI (b)].

Unless these questions are thoroughly addressed by an investigation, we — like the rest of the world — will be left to wonder what kind of people we are.


NOTES:

[1] This is not meant to suggest that the war crimes of the Bush administration are comparable, qualitatively or quantitatively, to those of the Nazis. But some of the same legal considerations apply to prosecutions under the Nuremberg principles and other provisions of international law. This topic has gotten a lot of attention on these pages, including (most recently) here and here.

PHOTO: Speaking of political courage, where's the great Telford Taylor (1908-98), a chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, when we really need him? [Wikimedia Commons]

[H/T to Lawyers, Guns and Money and Obsidian Wings, where
versions of the above were cross-posted as comments.]