For a change, nothing happened at work that I can even blog about. Unless you prefer mind-numbing tedium described, as opposed to that evoked by actually
reading my typical blog entry. :P
Instead, let me say that I'm pretty happy, and looking towards the future both near and distant, and anticipating harmonious joy, unbounded happiness, and frequent washing of bedding. ;)
On to the news:
Canada Lawmakers Craft Gay Marriage Bill
It's going to happen people. Canadians know it, even those few opposed or those that actually believe it will lead to polygamy or somehow lessen their own heterosexual marriages. A quote:
"Canada is a land built on a tradition of equality and respect," [Justice Minister] Cotler said. "It is the responsibility of Parliament to ensure that minority rights are uniform across the country. The government cannot, and should not, pick and choose which rights they will defend and which rights they will ignore."
Well said. Also:
"Cotler noted that seven of Canada's 13 provinces and territories already allow marriage between gays and lesbians, and he said it was time to make the law uniform nationwide. "
To those of you in the US, I've been told that gay marriage was
the deciding factor in your recent elections. That's astonishing to me that such a non-issue would influence your vote, instead of things that need to be stopped, and things that need to be started.
You can still get married (or not) just like you always have. Nothing changes, except that some couples who've been unfairly discriminated against merely because they both check the same box in question
[ ] Male [ ] Female now get to be treated a little more like
you'd expect to be treated.
Oh, and our economy isn't going to tank because of it either.
Although there
is something going on in your country that I wanted to bring to your attention:
First Amendment No Big Deal, Students Say
"The original amendment to the Constitution is the cornerstone of the way of life in the United States, promising citizens the freedoms of religion, speech, press and assembly.
Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes "too far" in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories."
And this little gem: "Three in four students said flag burning is illegal. It's not. About half the students said the government can restrict any indecent material on the Internet. It can't."
Wow, lots of Fox viewers in the US, huh?
People, I know you look up here to Canada (up because we're north, not because we're a condescending authority figure to you) and see that by and large we trust our government.
Sure we bitch and complain about it, and we have our little scandals and waste and whatnot, but by and large it's served us pretty well.
Yes, our tax is higher than yours. Yes our infrastructure isn't as good as yours. Note that with a population roughly 1/9 of yours (note that I can use fractions - can you use decimals?) and a country that's a fair bit bigger, not everybody gets wireless high speed internet.
That said, just because trusting our government has worked out pretty well for
us, doesn't mean that blindly trusting yours is the way to go. Because yours kind of sucks, and when it sucks it sucks at the catastrophic level.
Television is a great thing. I wouldn't be who I am today without having watched all of those countless hours of Sesame Street and the Polkadot Door, not to mention Babylon 5. But try this little experiment: shut it off. Walk on down to the library. Go pick up a book that talks about history from the past one hundred years or so. And
read it.
There's a lot of shit going on right now, and lots of it really
is cause and effect.
I know, it sounds like I'm talking crazy. But dig this: none of you know how to make a lightbulb. Most of you wouldn't be able to explain to a child why the sky is blue, or how we know the earth is round (and we knew it before we were up in orbit looking down). Basic, basic stuff.
So is history.
Nobody's expecting you to memorize a bunch of dates, or funny-sounding names, or speak in ye olde englishe. But look and see how things that happened yesterday contribute to what's happening now, and what's going to happen tomorrow.
Which brings me to something written by Christopher Hitchens for the May/June 2001 issue of
Mother Jones.
WARNING (especially for Jay)! This is long and there are no pictures to break up the text.
So if you're tired of reading my shit, this would be a good point at which to stop. I mention Jay specifically because she uses the plunger
before she flushes, and I use it
after I flush, to force gigantic amounts of rambling excrement down your esophagus and into your stomach, which is directly connected to your brain, while the heart pumps blood to the liver, which burns it for fuel. Are we all clear then? Alrighty!
Rogue Nation USA
Quick -- no peeking. Who was the last American to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?
I try this in front of audiences, including quite "concerned," liberal ones, all the time. It's shocking to hear the enveloping silence that falls. All right -- it was Jody Williams in conjunction with her organization, the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines. Now why is it that so few people know that? It's not as if the American press doesn't print prominent annual coverage of U.S. Nobel laureates, and it's not as if the Peace Prize goes very often to an American citizen.
There are probably two reasons why Ms. Williams is not more famous than she is. The first has to do with the fact that the late Princess Diana sucked up all the available oxygen on the land-mines issue by the simple tactic of staging a couple of photo ops in Bosnia and Angola. The second is that President Bill Clinton did not follow the usual practice of telephoning the winner with his congratulations. Perhaps this reluctance derived partly from the fact that Ms. Williams had publicly called him a "weenie" for refusing to put an American signature on the treaty, which (though it was a great triumph as international agreements go) did look a bit threadbare without the assent of the world's largest exporter of arms. In the end, there was a Clintonian compromise. He belatedly made the call of felicitations. But he didn't sign the treaty.
What was the reason given by the United States for being the holdout country? It was candid enough: We quite like land mines, and may need or choose to employ them. You don't just have to be a very big country to say that. You have to be a very arrogant one.
A small but interesting thing happened in the last year of the Clinton administration. The State Department decided to drop the term rogue state as applied to unpopular or unpleasant regimes, such as those in Libya or North Korea. This was a relief; a serious nation has no business employing cartoonish designations or schoolyard epithets. But one of the reasons for the decision, as I was told in confidence by a person at Foggy Bottom, was that the phrase could be too easily turned around on its author. Time and again, the United States exempts itself from the standards that it applies to others.
This is not a new contradiction. In the late 1970s the U.S. government quite rightly took Iran to the World Court for the crime of diplomatic hostage taking, and secured a judgment in its own favor. A few years later, Nicaragua took the United States to the World Court for the crime of mining its civilian harbors, and secured a judgment in its own favor. On this occasion, Washington refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the court. So it goes.
The word for this might be unilateralism -- a superpower that openly proclaims that it recognizes no interests except its own. The so-called Powell Doctrine, named for Colin Powell himself, states with beautiful simplicity that the United States reserves the right to act only in its own interests, to do so with overwhelming force, and to disregard any tedious legalisms that might stand in its way. (This also exempts the United States from participating in bleeding-heart humanitarian missions it doesn't like.) Currently, a version of the same doctrine is being wheeled out in order to demolish the most important treaty that the United States actually did sign -- the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, forbidding the development of shields such as the Star Wars fantasy. Ah, say the Bush people, we didn't sign that treaty with Russia. We signed it with the Soviet Union! (And they like to mock Clinton's tricky way with words.)
Remember the invasion of Panama in the winter of 1989? A full-scale military operation to apprehend a drug-dealing head of state who had turned sour on his partners in Washington, it was given the grand-sounding title "Operation Just Cause." Reviewing some of the more pathetic justifications offered for this operation, in which young Colin Powell so distinguished himself, my then-colleagues at Harper's came up with the brilliant slogan "Just Cause We Say So."
This fat and superior mentality can be found all over our official rhetoric. Not long ago, Madeleine Albright was asked why the United States imposed diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions on Cuba, but not on the far more repressive People's Republic of China. Her reply, essentially, was that China is a world power whereas Cuba is only a regional nuisance. Regional to whom, one might ask? The unexamined assumption is that something is what it is because a superpower says so. (She might as well have answered that China is a big potential market for American corporations whereas Cuba is not, but that would be making the same point in a different way.)
The United States is a founding and senior member of the United Nations and also its host country, but it doesn't feel like paying its full membership dues. (The current U.S. proposal to pay perhaps half our debt to the U.N. is even more arrogant than the original deadbeat line: As Alfred Rubin, a Tufts University professor of international law, points out, you express more contempt for your obligations if you acknowledge them but say you'll meet them as and when you feel like it.) The United States nonetheless reserves the right to veto U.N. resolutions, to insist on their full implementation, or to ignore them.
Does it make wise use of this luxurious range of choices? In 1994, several smaller states went to the U.N., urgently pleading for a small but decisive increase in the world body's presence in Rwanda. Advance warning had been given of the intentions of the Hutu militia, and word of their plans had been authoritatively leaked to local peacekeepers. Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. envoy to the U.N., was instructed to block the proposal to send more troops. After the self-inflicted debacle in Somalia, the United States had decided that Africa was boring and dangerous and that its pleas should go unheard. The Hutu genocide plan went off without a hitch; the United States then approved a military intervention by the French government, which sent its troops to protect the mass murderers against the rebellion of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.
Do yourself a favor and look up the date on which the United States actually ratified the 1948 Convention on Genocide (40 years after its passage at the United Nations) or the last time it refused to recognize a genocide (the 1915-1923 massacre of Armenians, the subject of a failed congressional resolution last fall).
On the other hand, when it wants to mobilize the international community, the United States is prepared to expend a lot of effort. The same Madeleine Albright supported the passage of the Helms-Burton legislation, which sought to extend the embargo on Cuba to any third country or corporation doing business with Havana. This is probably a violation of international law; it is certainly a violation of the norms of international trade. Countries not party to the U.S.-Cuban quarrel, like Britain and Canada, objected to being sanctioned for carrying on ordinary commercial relations. They were told, basically, that this was just too bad because the Senate has a mind of its own. They are told the same thing when they inquire about the U.S. refusal to pay U.N. membership dues or sign on to the land-mines treaty. Sorry, our Congress can't be persuaded. But if an administration wants to persuade Congress on a foreign policy matter, it generally can do so -- as the Gulf War demonstrated.
One definition of a "rogue state" was that it engaged in the promiscuous sale of weapons. North Korea, it is true, does sustain its near-dead economy by this means. But the United States helps float a whole booming industry on the manufacture and sale of all kinds of weaponry, and is not in the least bit choosy about where it distributes the stuff. (The latest, and perhaps the worst, example of this involves the means by which Pakistan, our client in the Afghanistan nightmare, acquired the makings of a nuclear capability.)
The term double standards became customary in the time of Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who famously distinguished between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, allegedly preferring the first to the second, but actually preferring authoritarianism to democracy. The same three-card monte operated when it came to terrorism; guerrillas in El Salvador were terrorists by definition, but French agents blowing up an unarmed Greenpeace vessel and killing a crew member were not. (In those days, Nelson Mandela's African National Congress was on the administration's list of terrorist organizations, as of course was the PLO.) At the time, even some Democrats made critical noises about this hypocrisy, but that didn't prevent it from persisting across changes of regime in Washington. Thus, for example, Libya is quite rightly subjected to sanctions until it gives up two wanted men in the Pan Am 103 atrocity, but Saudi Arabia escapes even rebuke for sheltering Idi Amin. After a bit, this stops looking like a double standard and becomes a single one: It's okay if we do it or if it's done by one of our friends.
I happen to be one of those on the left who was sufficiently impressed by the threat of war and fascism in Bosnia to urge that international military help be given to the Bosnian resistance. (This meant that I sometimes found myself signing the same petition as Jeanne Kirkpatrick.) And I still can't read the urgent faxes and cables sent from Rwanda in the last days before the genocide without a feeling of insurmountable rage and frustration. Many on the left do not especially like to admit it, but there are probably other genuine "just causes" in our future, where American help will be solicited by deserving victims. It will be harder to argue about this logically or intelligently if the political establishment allows itself to go on picking and choosing from its own standpoint of impregnable moral self-regard.
Recently there was a semiserious proposal that European Union countries be graciously allowed to join nafta and share in its fabled benefits. But suppose the offer was reversed and the United States was seeking to join the European Union? It probably would be refused membership, because it has not yet ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which forbids the execution of minors. The only other holdout country when last I checked was Somalia.
Actually, the United States might also be refused membership because it, along with China and a handful of other execution states, voted at the United Nations against an E.U. proposal for a moratorium on capital punishment for the underage, the insane, and the pregnant. In fact, it might be refused membership because of its addiction to capital punishment across the board, and for its occasional boastfulness about the fact.
The classic statement of arrogant fatuity in this department was made by our president while he was still governor of Texas. A Canadian citizen had been executed in the Lone Star State in violation of a treaty that mandated consular access to prisoners accused of serious crimes. When asked why the Canadian had been snuffed without proper notification to his embassy, Bush replied that this sent a message about not committing murder in Texas. It did not even strike him that, by this standard, the Canadians could sentence an American tourist to life imprisonment while ignoring his request to contact the U.S. consul. Of course, the Canadians wouldn't do that. But that's because they don't suffer from a superpower superiority complex.
The laws, it was said by cynics in classical times, are like cobwebs. They are strong enough to hold the weak, but too weak to detain the strong. Case in point: the International Criminal Court, which has been set up as a kind of permanent Nuremberg tribunal by a large majority of the world's democratic nations. Bill Clinton could not bring himself to sign the treaty establishing the court until his last weeks in office, and Congress has yet to ratify it. However, this abstention does not prevent the United States from demanding that other smaller countries such as Serbia (but not yet Chile) adhere fully, deliver their own wanted war criminals, and generally shape up.
And what is the reason given by the military and political right wing for opposing the establishment of an International Criminal Court? Why, such a court might impede the orderly conduct of American foreign policy. Think about it. What kind of implicit admission is that?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
All done. Was that really so bad?
Oh, it was? Then before you get all defensive (and pre-emptively bomb my country, which is Canada and directly off your west coast under a patch of slightly darker blue water), allow me to soften the blow.
I like the US. It's the only place you can get decently made Cajun food. Not to mention that I can pick up stuff for cheaper there than I can here, even though our respective currencies have narrowed the distance between us.
Most of the movies and television I see comes from the US. And I mean the good shows, like South Park and The Daily Show. Not that laughable "suck the White House's cock"-oriented programming that you call the news.
You guys aren't bad, but you
do have this crazy reflex of sticking your collective heads up your asses before you vote, or before you express an opinion.
You are not special! At least no more special than the rest of us. So if you want to be the loutish oaf that pushes in front of us in line, and runs off with all the toys and won't share, suit yourselves. But we won't play with you anymore. And you're going to get lonely.
And don't forget about the start of my blog, where I mention the frequent washing of bedding! :P~~~~~
