I'm Just Sayin' or I'm Just the Messenger. A tiny messenger at that.

I'm not very politically savvy. I'm like a person who doesn't know much about art but knows what she likes. Oh, I am a person who doesn't know much about art but knows what she likes.

So, here's what I know today. I know that Avaaz exists and is working to become a grassroots power of support for people worldwide. I don't know how it will fare but in my non-politically savvy way I figure it's a step in the right direction. I'm reminded of Jeffrey Sachs' words about global poverty and starvation being not just their problem but everyone's. So if one doesn't feel motivated by altruism, the notion that the success of others breeds success for us might just do it. I know that when we objectify others, whether it be other humans or animals, we take away any imperative to act humanely.
So much for poetry. Grrrrr.

Next Mother's Day

This article published on Monday, May 12, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

Next Mothers Day Let’s Invite the Whole Family
by Medea Benjamin

Next Mothers Day, I don’t want to be organizing yet another rally of Mothers Against War in Washington DC and lamenting the state of our dysfunctional human family. I want to be celebrating the successes of the first 100 days of a new administration. I want to see us healing the collective traumas of the past eight years and becoming a nation that reflects the values of compassion and kindness that most mothers hold dear.

Next Mothers Day, I want us to be welcoming our soldiers home from Iraq and taking care of them when they get here. I don’t want to hear any more bickering in Congress about whether we should provide decent educational benefits to our vets — especially from those who supported the war! I don’t want to read more horror stories about dilapidated VA hospitals and bureaucratic sinkholes that keep veterans from getting the care they need. I want us to come together — whether we were for or against this war — to nurture our wounded sons and daughters.

Next Mothers Day, I want us to have come to grips with the disaster we have wreaked upon the Iraqi people. I want us to mourn their losses, express contrition and help rebuild the nation we destroyed. I want us to ensure a viable homeland for our Palestinian sisters and brothers. I want us to rebuild a relationship of trust and respect with our Arab neighbors so that we can mutually address the threat of terrorism.

Next Mothers Day, I want us to repair old family feuds. I want us to restore relations with the Cuban cousins we banished some 50 years ago, starting with lifting the embargo. I want us to sing and dance and drink mojitos with our Caribbean kin, relishing in our common zest for life.

We shouldn’t stop with Cuba. I want us to reach out with a mother’s open arms toward other nations we are today bullying, from Venezuela to Iran. I want us to bring out the carrots and put away the sticks, as we have recently done in the case of North Korea. I want us to abandon the “do as I say, not as I do” approach to nuclear deterrence and support global disarmament.

Next Mothers Day, I want us to be immersed in a crash course on overcoming our oil addiction and cleaning up the mess we have made of our Mother Earth. I want us to stop pillaging the family jewels and instead embrace conservation, restoration and a fairer distribution of our planet’s wealth.

Next Mothers Day, I want us to practice unconditional love. I want us to heed the words of Julia Ward Howe’s original Mothers Day proclamation when she said that “We, the women of one country, will be too tender to those of another country to allow our sons to injure theirs.” I want us to form kinship circles that stretch across the globe, to teach our children to feel empathy towards other children, to truly embrace the concept of universal oneness.

Next Mothers Day, when we sit down to a bountiful brunch, I want the other members of our global household to be seated at the table. That will truly be a fitting tribute to the women who brought us into this world.

Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of CODEPINK and Global Exchange. If you would like to help the Iraqi refugees, see www.codepinkalert.org.

If the show is half as good as the review . . .

I like radio. More specifically, I like NPR. TV, as Borat might say, not so much. One show that I always loved, although I've only heard it if I happened to be in the car at the right time, is "This American Life". I knew it became a television show, but not being much of a TV hog, I've yet to see it. Whoa. After reading the May 04 review of the second season by Heather Havrilesky in Salon, I'll be recording it now from now on. Here's a snippet.

Some days you merely survive. You brush your unwashed hair and pack something crappy for lunch. You trudge from the car to your office. You sit and check your e-mail, the highlight of your day. And now the real work begins. You pick up the phone and close your eyes. Your co-workers say "Hi!" and you struggle to muster an appropriately chirpy yet professional response.

And just when you think the day is all about getting by, a glimpse of sunshine out the window or a melancholy song playing in your headphones sends you out of survival mode into some dreamy, nostalgic state that makes the pragmatic world of work feel horribly mundane. Your quest to simply get through the day is replaced by a painful longing for more. The world is full of hope and heartbreak and lukewarm coffee and glasses that don't fit quite right, and you have to do something about it. You want to walk outside and spend the day wandering around in the springtime sunshine. You want to pick your kid up from day care and take her to the park. You want to bail on that lunchtime meeting and go see a movie down the block. You want to get a pedicure, and then have a sandwich and a big glass of iced tea. You want to stare at the wall and let your eyes go unfocused.

And then, when you go to lunch alone and you sip iced tea and stare at the wall with glassy, unfocused eyes, you recognize Glenn Miller on the stereo, and that gets you thinking about how romantic and unmatched the big-band sound was, how maybe it was the war raging overseas or the styles at the time. Thinking about it makes you want to go back and live in some smoky, noir, black-and-white version of the early '40s. You'd wear cinched dresses and uncomfortable pumps with neatly pinned hair and red lipstick. Even though you know your vision is formed from some sentimental, blurry mix of old movies, newsreels about Rosie the Riveter and your dad's Time-Life books about the Third Reich, you still think it would be nice to live back then, writing letters to the troops with an ink pen, and baking cookies in your bad shoes. You'd probably be married to someone rigid and unyielding, and you'd be forced to look good, forced to smile politely when people made ignorant, inane remarks, like the poor, pent-up, chain-smoking heroine of "Franny and Zooey." Modern times are too permissive, after all, and someone like you, with your unwashed hair and your dog-hair-covered sweater, would clean up nice and thrive, really, under oppressive societal conditions. --snip--

Lots of wonderful descriptions of the show follow, including a segment on Haider Hamza and his "Ask an Iraqi" booth. You gotta read about him and his conversations with "Americans". Havrilesky continues --

There's a feeling of magic in "This American Life," the kind of feeling you get when you read a great novel or listen to truly inspired music. After watching this show, you start to experience the little things around you through a different filter: the dogs sleeping on the bed, the clothes turning and turning in the washing machine, the sound of kids playing next door. Instead of intrusions, each of these mundane details feels like a gift.

Can you ask for anything more from a TV show? Of course you can, but you also want to wear tight dresses and bake cookies in your bad shoes, so we can't exactly trust you on this one.

If you've got TV, with a review like this, how can you resist the show. In the meantime, I'm gonna look for more stuff written by Heather Havrilesky. If it's half as good as this review . . .

The Lost Generation

This is quite some documentary. Brought to my attention by The Women's Media Center, it is about Iraq's refugee children.

Award-winning journalist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is touring the United States with her latest film, “The Lost Generation," a documentary on Iraq’s refugee children produced for Great Britain’s prestigious TV station Channel 4. So far, Obaid-Chinoy has been unable to find a U.S. station to televise the documentary. “A few of them have expressed reservations about showing this,” she says.

Focusing on children who have taken refuge in Jordan and Syria, the film addresses their future prospects back home, a country that has undergone constant turmoil since 2003. In the past five years, more than four million people, 20 percent of the entire Iraqi population, have been driven from their homes as a result of the war and sectarian bloodshed. Two million have become exiles, living lives across the border in Syria and Jordan.

Let's hope you can find it on the big screen. For now, here it is on the little one.



God damn George W. Bush and his cronies. Just god damn them all.

Iraq body count.

Thanks to Sharry at Embodied Aging I've just been introduced to the Iraq Body County Exhibit. The photos are powerful. Each red flag stands for 5 American deaths, each white flag for at least 5 Iraqi civilian deaths since 2003. I'm hoping to see lots more of this one as it travels. God damn George W. Bush and his cronies. Just god damn them all.

Poems from Guantánamo

Death Poem by Jumah al Dossari

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.”

Jumah al Dossari is a thirty-three-year-old Bahraini who has been held at Guantánamo Bay for more than five years. He has been in solitary confinement since the end of 2003 and, according to the U.S. military, has tried to kill himself twelve times while in custody.

From the University of Iowa Press, Poems from Guantánamo, The Detainees Speak:

“Poems from Guantánamo brings to light figures of concrete, individual humanity, against the fabric of cruelty woven by the ‘war on terror.’ The poems and poets’ biographies reveal one dimension of this officially obscured narrative, from the perspective of the sufferers; the legal and literary essays provide the context which has produced—under atrocious circumstances—a poetics of human dignity.”—Adrienne Rich

Since 2002, at least 775 men have been held in the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. According to Department of Defense data, fewer than half of them are accused of committing any hostile act against the United States or its allies. In hundreds of cases, even the circumstances of their initial detainment are questionable.

This collection gives voice to the men held at Guantánamo. Available only because of the tireless efforts of pro bono attorneys who submitted each line to Pentagon scrutiny, Poems from Guantánamo brings together twenty-two poems by seventeen detainees, most still at Guantánamo, in legal limbo.

What a way to celebrate National Poetry Month.

Bouncing around this morning

From AFP : The Pentagon on Wednesday said an eruption of violence in southern Iraq, where US-backed government forces were battling Shiite militias, was a "by-product of the success of the surge."

Wow, there's nothing like success to kill more people. I wonder how failure would manifest? Would that be with fewer people dead?

From Salon:
Poor America

"Blame our financial woes on poor spellers, like the intellectual charity case in the White House" By Garrison Keillor
People accuse us liberals of permissiveness -- no no no no no. We liberals are oppressive, not permissive, working day and night to take your guns away and make you apply for a permit every time you spit. In my heart, I belong to the Correctness Party, the party of good spellers, of people who pay attention to details. The Current Occupant is not one of us. He is not a man who puts pen to paper with any confidence. Intellectually he has been a charity case all his life. He is one of those men who are lucky that their fathers were born before they were."

Funny man that Garrison Keillor.

And also from Salon this quote from our favorite wordsmith:

"I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed.

It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks."

-- President George W. Bush, March 13, 2008

Jerzy and Jeffrey Sachs and I are Trumped or With friends like John McCain . . .

Jerzy and I are in New York. We took the Chinatown bus up to, among other things, hear Jeffrey Sachs and Charlie Rose at the 92nd St Y. Brilliant. I've got lots to share, like the fact that Alex, the cat at the Deli on 49th Street, is alive and well; that Amy's Bakery on 9th Avenue still has the most wonderful cookies around; that Magnolia now has an uptown location!; and that although there's more to "do" in New York than anywhere else in the world, for me it's enough to just "be" here.

I wanted to write about the lecture and Jeffeys Sach's new book, Common Wealth and tell you to read it and become informed so you can tell others and actually do something with the knowledge that global health and well-being promote global health and well-being. I wanted to write about my mother and how she loved Charlie Rose and that she always watched his television program that aired late at night because he was, according to her, "so damn smart".

And I wanted to talk about Jerzy and me getting our ears pierced at a tattoo place on 36th Street where I am considering getting a tattoo that says - "Jerzy and I went to New York and all I got was this stupid tattoo." Jerzy found a key on the ground to add to the key she found in Las Vegas that made up for the one she lost. But I can't tell you that story either because I ran into this about John McCain that came from a chain of links that began at AlterNet and went to FirstRead and from there to, of all places, USA Today. It trumps all.

"For the first time, I have seen Osama bin Laden and General (David) Petraeus in agreement, and, that is, a central battleground in the battle against al-Qaeda is in Iraq today. And that's what bin Laden was saying and that's what General Petraeus is saying and that's what I'm saying, my friends," McCain said.

"And my Democrat opponents who want to pull out of Iraq refuse to understand what's being said and what's happening — and that is the central battleground is Iraq in this struggle against radical Islamic extremism," he added. McCain also said Democratic rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton were naive and "dead wrong" to want to withdraw troops.

"We're succeeding. I don't care what anybody says. I've seen the facts on the ground," the Arizona senator insisted a day after a roadside bomb in Baghdad killed four U.S. soldiers and rockets pounded the U.S.-protected Green Zone there, and a wave of attacks left at least 61 Iraqis dead nationwide. The events transpired as bin Laden called on the people of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to "help in support of their mujahedeen brothers in Iraq, which is the greatest opportunity and the biggest task."

Talk about "dead wrong".

Don't Quote Me, Quote 23/6

Yesterday's quote of the day on 23/6.

"So?"

Can you guess who said it? No, not Ike, I quoted him a few days ago and his was actually wise. This one comes right from the mouth of our favorite sharpshooter, Dick Cheney, on being asked about the fact the two-thirds of Americans say the Iraq war is not worth it.

How much do you wanna pay for the war?

My accountant has a way with numbers.

Roy sent the following e-mail today, subject line "What is a billion, anyway????" Here's a copy.

This is too true to be very funny. The next time you hear a politician use the word 'billion' in a casual manner, think about whether you want the 'politicians' spending YOUR tax money.
This will put the cost of the Iraq war into proper perspective…

A. A billion seconds ago it was 1959.

B. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.

C. A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.

D. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.

E. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.

While this thought is still fresh in our brain, let's take a look at the costs for the Iraq War- you know, the one that the oil revenues that Iraq was generating was going to pay in full…..

We are spending MORE than $ 2 billion a WEEK. And, with a gross population BEFORE the war of 20 million, that works out to be a cost of some $ 1000 per week for every Man, Woman, and Child in Iraq. Oh, and before the war, their average income was some $ 3500 per YEAR. And, now- we are spending $ 50000 (or 14 times their annual wage) to keep them in worse (or at the very best- the same) conditions as before.

Just trying to keep our politicians honest (which requires more full time effort than I have available)….