It depends on who you are as to what you see when you look out the window at the world. Howard Zinn, our preeminent people’s historian, peering through the “window” of the Declaration of Independence at a country celebrating military victory (and remembering that we Americans began our national career as rebels against empire) sees a hidden defeat in our urge to commemorate triumph and suggests at the Tompaine.com website that we consider other definitions of patriotism.
As a boy, Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore, who died this week, looked out the window of the family limousine in the midst of the Great Depression, saw a terrifying vision of poverty, and felt instinctively the “vast gulf” that separated him from it as a kind of shame. That he never forgot, as the Boston Globe‘s James Carroll tells us in an obit column, and the image, the memory, the view from the window helped direct his life toward the task of narrowing that gulf. (If you want, by the way, to get a view of the modern version of that “gulf,” which the Bush administration is now in the process of widening drastically, take a look at the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ruth Rosen’s most recent piece, It’s still the economy.)
And then there’s L. Paul Brenner III, the Bush administration’s “civilian” appointee as viceroy of our newly occupied Iraqi domains, who is now supposed to turn that occupation from an ill-assorted pack of lemons into sweet-tasting lemonade. One night soon, he will undoubtedly peer out the window of some well-armored vehicle at the still largely darkened and stoplight-less streets of Baghdad. David Isenberg of the Asia Times gives us a canny hint of what he may see, of what he may, in fact, be looking for, and of what really concerns the Bush administration — not budding democracy but the threat of terror. Though largely billed as a civilian appointee and a State Department triumph over the Pentagon’s control of Iraq policy, he looks to be something rather different. The New York Times today offers us a tiny but telling detail from his recent life of public service (James Dao, At the Helm in Shattered Iraq: Lewis Paul Bremer III,), “Mr Bremer advocated dropping Central Intelligence Agency guidelines restricting the recruitment of sources with records of human rights abuses, over the protests of human rights groups.” (Interestingly, Brenner refused to be interviewed for the Times piece — a signal of the new openness we are to promote in Iraq?) Tom
My Country: The World
By Howard Zinn
Tompaine.com
May 5, 2003Our government has declared a military victory in Iraq. As a patriot, I will not celebrate. I will mourn the dead — the American GIs, and also the Iraqi dead, of which there have been many, many more.
I will mourn the Iraqi children, not just those who are dead, but those who have been blinded, crippled, disfigured, or traumatized, like the bombed children of Afghanistan who, as reported by American visitors, lost their power of speech. The American media has not given us a full picture of the human suffering caused by our bombing; for that, we need to read the foreign press.
We will get precise figures for the American dead, but not for the Iraqis. Recall Colin Powell after the first Gulf War, when he reported the “small” number of U.S. dead, and when asked about the Iraqi dead, Powell replied: “That is really not a matter I am terribly interested in.”
Our government has declared a military victory in Iraq. As a patriot, I will not celebrate. I will mourn the dead — the American GIs, and also the Iraqi dead, of which there have been many, many more.
I will mourn the Iraqi children, not just those who are dead, but those who have been blinded, crippled, disfigured, or traumatized, like the bombed children of Afghanistan who, as reported by American visitors, lost their power of speech. The American media has not given us a full picture of the human suffering caused by our bombing; for that, we need to read the foreign press.
We will get precise figures for the American dead, but not for the Iraqis. Recall Colin Powell after the first Gulf War, when he reported the “small” number of U.S. dead, and when asked about the Iraqi dead, Powell replied: “That is really not a matter I am terribly interested in.”
Howard Zinn is an historian and author of A People’s History of the United States.
To read more Zinn click here
Moore’s vision of justice
By James Carroll
The Boston Globe
May 6, 2003A child born to wealth and privilege is riding in the back seat of his family limousine. It has never occurred to him that there is any other way to live than with abundant pleasures. But then the limousine draws alongside a line of men dressed in tattered clothes, their faces etched with a desperate longing that snags the gaze of the child. The men are standing in a bread line. It is the Great Depression. The child sees at once that a vast gulf separates his world from that of men who must beg for food. The child’s reaction, as reported years later, ”was to hide on the floor of the limousine in shame.” That child was Paul Moore Jr., who grew up to be the Episcopal bishop of New York and who died last week at age 83.
To read more Carroll click here
Iraq’s special envoy, with a special task
By David Isenberg
Asia Times
May 7, 2003Once upon a time, in an administration both far away and far right, a newly-hired bureaucrat, known as Jerry to his friends, sat at an office desk at the US State Department; room 7224 to be exact.
Now that bureaucrat is about to become America’s proconsul, or top civil administrator and special envoy in diplomatic jargon, in Iraq. Congratulations L Paul Bremer III, you’ve come a long way, baby.
Bremer, 61, received his BA from Yale, a CEP at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of the University of Paris, and a MBA from Harvard, and entered the Foreign Service in 1966 where he stayed for 23 years. During his time at the State Department he became a career member of the Senior Foreign Service. His assignments have included posts in Afghanistan and Norway, and among his posts since 1981 he has served as executive secretary and special assistant to the secretary of state.