Dan Harris from the China Law Blog has been Twittering on Afghanistan for a while now, and I should follow his lead and not take it onto my blog, but here I am not following my own advice. All the talk and news of Afghanistan has set me to reviewing some of my writings from late October 2001, forty days after 9/11 and two weeks after the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan.

That the U.S. is still there in the middle of June 2010 is, unfortunately, not surprising. Now that this war has been designated the longest in U.S. history, the recent acknowledgement that Afghanistan is a mineral Midas cache worth “1 trillion USD” is bound to ensure that it will continue ad infinitum with or without the U.S. Afghanistan as a pot of gold has been known but under-reported for several years. The Obama teams’ pre-election promise to get the U.S. out of this mess seems to have been hijacked by winning the keys to the White House then learning what’s at stake in Taliban country. It has now taken a Weyland Yutani “Building Better Worlds” turn.

In October 2001 I was a member of a Listserv, with members in NYC, others in NOLA, Texas, Philadelphia, New Zealand and several other places throughout America and the world; I was in China. Most, if not all, of the talk in that post-9/11 period had to do with the event itself, as well as the initial official combat response, which was the bombing of Afghanistan, an action I was opposed to. My opinions were minority to say the least. Some in the group asked questions, which I was not shy answering. The questions below are from two or three different people, though, for privacy sake, I have not included their names. I believed then that going into Afghanistan was a mistake, and in light of what unfolded, see it as the first step by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney to committing war on Iraq. Their decision to fail at Tora Bora was the indication that they weren’t really interested in Afghanistan. If they knew then what is known now I cannot imagine that Saddam Hussein would have seemed all that important. They would have settled down in their counting house and waited for their bags of money.

I begin by asking a question. Questions addressed to me are in italics.
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Do you believe Donald Rumsfeld when he says that the bombing has only killed four innocents (October 21, 2001), and that the other guys are just a drooling pack of dog-ass liars. This whole thing feels like a bad rerun of the Republican Guards getting to do war. I keep seeing the same old minds in different bodies. Am I the only one who thinks that dealing back planeloads of death is a bad way to go?

>Can you suggest an alternative?

Yes. A very simple one: not “dealing back planeloads of death.” Unfortunately, as obvious and simplistic as that might seem, it does not seem to have been an option on the table. By saying that “It is bad, but I still feel it is necessary,” is accepting the fact that there will be innocents killed, as you stated in another post on this topic:

>It is horrible that innocent civilians are dying. I wish it were not so. I am certain the military also wishes it was not so, but collateral damage was expected from the very beginning.

To say that it was expected means that at some point it became acceptable. And where is that point? If we accept one, do we accept two? Do we say one hundred is tolerable? What about 6,000? Acceptable? What about 6 million? At what number does the acceptance of the killing of innocents become unacceptable?

Is the acceptance of the death of an Afghan innocent rationale for the unacceptable death of  American innocents? Acceptance — not feeling horrible, but actually accepting the “collateral damage was expected” argument  (and by saying that it is “necessary” is acceptance) — is a tacit, affirmative nod that, yes, we will do this once again, and that, yes, it will come out as it always has: Badly. To say that it is necessary is giving in.

The next question, I suspect, will be, “Well, what would you do?” And at this point all I can say it, “Not bomb.” As humans we have come far in the deadliness of the designs of our conventional weaponry, though, in an odd way, their scaled-up “effectiveness” has probably only kept stride with the corresponding rate of population growth. Perhaps it’s time to step back and look for different solutions to the same old problems that have dogged us since Big Cane smote Lil’ Abel. I wonder if the Beltway drones will set aside a piece of the budget for that.

>But this alternative that you suggest does not stop terrorist attacks.

Will the dumping of thousands of tons of explosives on Afghanistan stop terrorist attacks?  I, for one, am not about to take that leap. All I am suggesting is that the same bad solution is being applied over and over again, and all we do is dig a deeper hole. What we are experiencing now is just the latest relentless sequel. Each and every one of “us” can point our fingers, while each and every one of “them” can point theirs, too, and we can all trace a line right back to a grunting congregation of rival apes at some nameless waterhole, the Clark/Kubrick bone as weapon scene. What we are experiencing now is what we’ve been experiencing all along, and this is what we get for not seeing our history as a continuum of bad decisions. We have done this before. We have watched it go badly. And I am thoroughly convinced that this one will go the same way. It always does. It has for as long as we have written records. Can we honestly think that violent reactionary responses to equally violent reactionary responses to a long list of previous actions will solve it this time? It’s as if we keep putting our money on the same bad horse that we just don’t want to admit is always on the way to the glue factory. Why do we keep doing it? Because it’s easy. But when does someone finally say, “You know, this doesn’t seem to be working. Why don’t we try something different?” It’s a long-shot, but given that the odds-on historic favorite has turned out to be a perennial loser, I think it’s time we start living up to our own PR as human beings, as homo faber, and try to fabricate a better response, a better peace, something that will endure the periodic violent aberrations that happen, which, I have no doubt, will continue to happen.  Dropping bombs isn’t going to do it. All we are doing is prepping the next generation of the powerless disenfranchised, who will turn to extreme measures to be heard. Some eight year old in NYC is trying to deal with the tragedy that Mom or Dad, or Mom and Dad are not ever coming home. And so is some eight year old in Afghanistan. That, to me, is unacceptable. How do we save them from the numbingly mindless path of the same old pain? By dropping more bombs? At what point does it stop making sense?

The solution, if there is one and if it really is being sought – a strong argument can easily be made that it isn’t – can only be found by stepping out of the same pointless script. This calls for creative solutions. But as long as the highly invested, politically interested are making the decisions we are not going to get beyond the next bombing event. That is not a hard one to understand. To look for a solution in the Bush camp is futile. I’d be willing to bet a lot of money that the number 2004 keeps coming up in the informing process. And it would be coming up now if Al Gore – who, lets not forget, crossed the aisle in 1990, giving Big Bush the go ahead for the Persian Gulf mess – was at the wheel. The overwhelming majority of politicians have proven time and again that they are not capable of making the leaps that are needed to actually take us into new territory. I think we need to look at our country’s actions and ask if what we are doing is going to move us in the direction of peace. Peace through war…well, it hasn’t worked yet.

>The term “dumping” suggest something other than the effort to be selective of targets.

Okay, substitute “dropping” for “dumping.” It changes nothing. They still fall, they still explode and they still do what bombs often do — end up in unintended places. You can quibble about my use of “often,” though “once” for some is often enough.

>I think this war is a first step in a number of steps that will, I hope, greatly reduce the number and size of terrorist attacks.

Since the boys at the table are doing what they and you think is necessary, I hope that both you and they are right. And since my opinion is obviously an overwhelming minority one, they will do it no matter what I think.

>I don’t see this as the same bad solution being applied over and over again. Wars have their own history and they have evolved along with everything else.

As best I can tell, they only evolve as far as the weapons used to fight them have.

>It must be I have missed something, but the only alternative I’ve read from you is just to stop without any other suggestion in place to hold back the terrorist threat.  Surely in addition to stopping you have something else in mind?  Or do you think the terrorist will just stop?  Or do you think we should capitulate and give up our existence?

I don’t have an answer, nor am I asking you to give up your existence. I am in the process of struggling along with everyone else on this one. I can only state that I feel this bombing is very wrong. This view seems to make some folks very uncomfortable. That is not my intent. I believe that it will not get us what some might think it will, and I also believe that the outcome, in the long view, will have the opposite effect.

I am disappointed in the “Peace through war” response given by another. We are still doing it as we always have, and at a greater clip than probably ever before. So when can we expect the next long period of peace? Does the carnage have to register at a certain level on the butchery scale before peace finally breaks into blossom? Are we close yet? Keep me posted.
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>I am trying to see, but I do not see well.  I have so many questions. Mostly, reading and re-reading this post, my question is:  How do you do it?  If you could go back in time to the afternoon of September 11 — the horrors have happened — and you were the duly elected leader (or were by some god magic in power), what specifically would you do?

I have run that one over and over and I just don’t know. My feeling is that I would have done pretty much exactly what was done on that day: try to do whatever could be done to save anyone from the wreckage of the buildings. The rescue effort that was undertaken is beyond my ability to express. What had to be done was done by ordinary people making extraordinary efforts. My sense is that at the federal level everyone had to be in a defensive state, to try their best to ensure that more incidents wouldn’t occur. I believe that even George Bush was acting in a way that befit his position. My rub comes in the somewhat distant aftermath. Between the event and the bombing strikes I feel that there was an opportunity to step even more out of script by working at defining a completely creative and radical response to the horror, something that would have even been a surprise to the Arab nations who find themselves caught up in the middle of this all. What that sort of response possibly could have been is hard to know, though I believe that the U.S. has plenty of very intelligent and compassionate people whose collective efforts could have been channeled into forging a new paradigm for a response, one that didn’t include the dropping of bombs on Afghanistan. The general nature of the initial incident was not a surprise. The vehicles of delivery were, but not the potential for destruction. There are enough people from widely different backgrounds to advise us on a different course. My sense, though, is that the course as it unfolded was the only one given serious thought, and it was the only one considered from the outset. Someone was going to die, and that someone will be measured in large numbers to match the numbers in NYC/DC.

But don’t we have to believe that we had an alternative? Because if we don’t we’re playing this game just like we were expected to do by the terrorists. In this sense I feel as if we are following their script. The near future will tell

>I certainly believe “Thou shalt do no murder.”  Yet, I can imagine situations in which killing someone would be the greatest good.

I can too.

>Buddha, Jesus, Confucius, Mohammed all changed the world — and yet the world didn’t change.  What are we to do?

Keep trying, I imagine.
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>I didn’t think you had an alternative, but so many words were set into motion, I was concerned that I might have just overlooked it.  I understand how you feel even if I don’t agree that we should act on such feelings.

Because I don’t have an alternative does not exclude the fact that there isn’t one (aren’t any). I am upset because we, the citizens, continue to drop unimaginably large sums of money into the halls and the hands of the humanistically uncreative, who continue to prove that they are incapable of solving very solvable problems (like society-wide health care), the kinds of problems which involve thinking outside the very limited box of continuous violence. Shouldn’t we be upset? We can get new and “smarter” weapons that seem disarmingly and deceptively bloodless when viewed from the relative safety of our TV screens, though we can’t seem to get newer and smarter non-violent solutions that would necessarily remove those weapons from our lives. Granted, there are seemingly insurmountable obstacles that need to be overcome, but to say that they are impossible to hurdle is to place and accept limits on human intellect that we don’t accept on that very same intellect when it comes to the construction of new weaponry used to slaughter each other. Why? Because it’s easier to kill than not kill. Maybe that’s why the whole “killing” issue is stigmatized in the Big Books of world religions. It is much easier to waste thy neighbor than it is to get along with them. This is not news, though it continues to sell news. Industries are built on this notion.

In my view it’s a question of will. What is necessary to provide for a less violent, safer future is a willingness to be creative in seeking solutions that don’t accept killing as a necessary evil. Being creative means imagining the unimaginable. Anything less is cliche.
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Nearly nine (9) years on and now under the Obama Administration’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan the civilian death rate has soared.

If somehow you’ve missed the Stewart vs. CNBC brawl, go to the Daily Show and watch for several days in the lead up to the bumbling Cramer interview. Or just Google it. It’s everywhere, as well it should be, but not for how the news folks are spinning it. Joe Scarborough of “Morning Joe” was particularly lame and off the mark, and he showed just how far off when he whipped up the hapless Jim Cramer, a minor off-the-bench player, into believing that he was their Goliath. But Stewart didn’t slay him, since that wasn’t the point. He wounded him pretty badly but stopped short of cutting his throat and watching him bleed out on camera.

AIG is on deck, and I can only hope that Stewart will do to them what he has done to CNBC. Or maybe, just maybe, CNBC and most other mainstream news orgs will have the stones to side with the people instead of their corporate bosses and sponsors this time around. (I know, I’m dreaming.) The list of recipients of the AIG “rewards for colossal failure” bonus package will eventually become public, by hook or by crook, and those who are on it will be outed. Then things will get very dangerous. The AIG folks have but one realistic choice: publicly renounce the bonuses and just walk away. Will they do that? It’s money, and reason rarely prevails when one-eyed greed is running the show. This may very well lead to large-scale problems that will not be able to be adequately addressed by Comedy Central.

Today I read a suggestion for a “million taxpayer march” on Wall Street. That might be something that would finally get me to travel back to the US., though, realistically a mass rally on what has become known as the center of unimaginable corruption would probably lead to mass violence. The NYT is reporting that the Obama White House is concerned about a populist backlash:

“We’ve got enormous problems that need to be addressed,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, said in an interview. “And it’s hard to address because there’s a lot of anger about the irresponsibility that led us to this point.”

Perhaps that is what Washington finally needs. Now we’ll find out what Obama is really made of, if he has the qualities to become one of the elites. This is looking more and more like his metaphoric 9/11. He’s in the middle of a much larger minefield than he was at the end of last week, and where and how he treads will determine who will follow. This one is not a joke.

A friend asked me if Obama is a lama.
I said I think he’s more like a Rama.
He fired back, they’re both into dharma!
And all I could add was (comma),

“I don’t know, to me he’s just Obama!
But maybe he really is a lama.
Just don’t try to make him a Brahma.
He’s got enough on his plate.”

© Jim Gourley, 2009

Listen to: obama-lama

But then, there he was, wheeled quietly in from the wings, down front and low down, a virtual non-presence, avoiding and avoidable. I believe his entrance via wheelchair was a compromise, an anti-pollution maneuver, an attempt to not spoil this day. A sneaking in and sneaking out. His final official slither.

“I’ve got a lot of rivers to fish,” he said. “So I don’t think anybody will feel sorry for me. They shouldn’t.” And I won’t. Never even crossed my mind. My wife, a Wyoming native and fisher-person, mentioned something about slippery rocks, fast currents, things happening before you even know they’re going down. I said that I’d thought that, too, but didn’t want to say it. Twenty years I’ve been thinking that: a hat and a sneer, somewhere downstream.

And yes, I think they should go after him. You can’t step back from the fear of future partisan retribution. That’s going to happen anyway. It took a quarter century to strike back for the Nixon debacle, and to think that this will not happen if we just let them fish and mountain bike into the future is naive. Screw ‘em all, and screw ‘em good. And screw their defenders. And then send them off to The Hague and let them sit behind a thick glass for the world to see and judge. That’s where they belong. That’s the way we get this thing back to where it so desperately needs to be. This is how we do our best to resuscitate the world. You walk away from this, you let it happen again. If our history tells us nothing else, it sure as hell tells us that looking away is a recipe for future disaster. Slavery and the inability to address it from the very beginning told us that. And it’s still telling us that, how much we need to not look away. How much we need to take a stand and make it stop here, so we can get our feet. Nunca Mas.

I wrote the following piece back in 1993, right after the Clinton inauguration, and it was published in a small journal (also now no longer with us) called The Free Cuisenart. Dick Cheney has been on my mind for a lot of years. I lived in the Bighorns nearly three decades ago, and I was onto him then, while he was still on the rise. He is our greatest public stain. And yes, today is full of lots of wah wah-pedaled hope, and maybe the lines of tribes may, in fact, dissolve (though I’m not looking for it in my lifetime), but the future will always have to deal with the mutants among us. So enjoy it tonight, but tomorrow’s a workday, and there’s a lot that needs to be done.  Obama knows the Constitution, and he knows how it’s been raped over the last eight years. And you don’t let that one get by. You never let that one get by. If you do, pack it in and give it back to the mutants and hang on to your hat as it all spins down into a glorious wreckage. We owe more to our kids than to let these criminals walk.  So, yes, I’m happy, but not stupidly so. It’s already tomorrow here.
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On the afternoon/early evening of Sunday, January 17, 1993, as President-Elect Bill Clinton was walking in procession across the Memorial Bridge on his grand entrance into the capital city, Dick Cheney, the Secretary of Defense under the direction of the outgoing president George H. W. Bush, was coordinating a Cruise missile attack on Baghdad.

This from the January 18, 1993 NYT – Raid on Iraq: Bush Launches Missile Attack on a Baghdad Industrial Park as Washington Greets:

But Pentagon officials said tonight that it was possible that one of the cruise missiles had slammed into the Rashid Hotel, a favorite of foreign journalists in Baghdad and the site of an Islamic conference. A Pentagon official said that some missiles had been routed near or over the hotel.

A Death
(1993)

It’s not the sneer as the Secretary of Defense talks of bombing Baghdad, and how he’ll miss his job after Monday; it’s knowing that he owns a ranch in the middle of Wyoming, is “Boss” to men with bad teeth who pinch snuff and know the kind of cold that freezes snot before it hits their ear-waxed upper lips.

In the warm sanctuary of his kinder East, comfortable and balding, he tells his colleagues who jog the Mall for the requisite chiseled look, tales of wind and ranching, of wild life and wilder men who age leathery like their saddles beneath the clear high-plains sun, for wages and the warmth of winter fire. “Real, by god, men,” he claims slapping his creased leg, then tells of how they call him boss, trust him implicitly, and believe, too, that Baghdad is full of dark and godless thieves.

There is never any mention of the families and the children; not the young woman, someone’s beautiful daughter, who went to work as she did each day at the al Rashid Hotel, dreaming of life. Of love. Of going home in the cool of the evening. But who, instead, died before the world’s eye, a numberless stray frozen in some awful blizzard.

When he leaves it will be with victory tales of war rooms not the war, of colored lights seductively winking across a plexiglas wall, of how they clapped each other’s backs long into the safe suburban night.

Tomorrow he’ll parade about in custom-fitted boots and tell the hired hands who jump to his orders and offer him the whiskey bottle as the cold sun falls into the Bighorns, that this is what right is, this is why wars are, this is what needs to be done to keep them free to ride.

© Jim Gourley, 2009

Looking out at the enormous and building crowd at a place I am very familiar with – where I have strolled with my wife and daughter, marched in protest with an old neighbor no longer with us, stood in an hours long line to get a glimpse of the works of Johannes Vermeer, and more than several times stood quietly at dawn with friends at the Wall – it is difficult to not want to be there. It is a proud day, an historic day, the first day of very hard work that it will take to get this wreck back on the tracks. I have never been accused of being an optimist, but I have a sense about this one that shakes me. I am glad to have lived to see this day. This feels like the way it was always meant to feel, though this is the first time I’m feeling it. Fifty-eight years, the first time.

Obviously politics is still on my mind. Though I am happy about the Obama win I am still smarting over the depth of the American plunge over the past decade, which I have spent in China in a permanent state of Cringe. From what I’ve heard from many friends in the US is that they too have been hunkering down. When I left America in 1998 the country was feeding on a young, hapless Jewish woman, an indiscreet Democratic president, a cigar and a stained dress, all of which combined to nearly bring our country to ground. As if that debacle weren’t enough, the General Election of 2000 did it’s best to dig the hole even deeper. The Bush presidential response to the tragedy of 9/11 and the subsequent lack of response to the near annihilation of New Orleans by hurricane were two of the incalculable travesties that not only took the winds out of the sails, but appeared to also consciously take a sword to them in what can only seem like a deliberate attempt to turn the ship of state into a dead-in-the-water creaking hulk. In the name of democracy and its criminally misguided neoconic programs of global “democracy” promotion I, along with much of the US and the world, have watched in horror as the senseless gutting of the nation’s ethical core seemed to stumble forward unchecked. My country, which I love and have fought for, appeared to be driven by a numbing fear, intent on utter wreckage. No matter how the first eight years of this century are eventually spun, there will no doubt be a consensus that it was the most incompetent and noxious White House in US history. The Bush/Cheney axis of disruption will forever be pointed to as the low point to which a democracy can plunge and still manage to officially spew. This administration has become the most convincing argument against the spread of democracy in the world. Why would any country, other than the most boorish, want to emulate a muscled executive branch as vulgar and mean as this one has been (and will continue to be for another two-and a half months). Their supercilious disregard for the Constitution has driven their national approval rating through the floor, and their unhinged shamelessness in pursuing what can only be described as a vigorous plutocratic global agenda has earned them, and, by national association all Americans, an international disrepute. We are lucky that there is no gauge to measure how far we have fallen in the minds of the global community. That this administration will soon be gone is, unfortunately, not soon enough. When they slink off to their respective secured ranches they will have left in their wake a country where only a privileged few will be able to say that they are better off now than they were eight years ago.

What we saw and heard in Grant Park on the evening of November 4th was the beginning of our recovery from national and international shame. It will be neither an easy nor a quick recuperation. And, unfortunately, it most likely will be hampered by the low-browed sniping from the permanently disgruntled and goofball extreme, which, I might add, is not the same as the Conservatives. This is what respectable Republicans know. And this is what they will have to confront in order to redefine themselves as more than just a magnet for the wing nuts.

I was raised in a large household that was politically divided: my father a Republican, and my mother a Democrat. I have no recollections of any parental political knock-down, drag-outs; there was a respect as well as diplomatic silence that allowed the two to not only live together in the same home, but to attend the same church and propagate at a baby-booming, Irish-Catholic clip. Personal politics rarely clouded the atmosphere within the home; there were other more pressing and urgent familial issues that managed to provide enough other weather to downgrade politic disagreements to sporadic drizzles. Though I consider my parents’ differing political opinions as both having come from reasonable – though not always highly reasoned (they were Catholics, not Jesuits) – interpretations of events and personal experience, I ended up leaning in the direction of my mother’s take on things. In 1972, when I briefly returned home from four years in the military, my father, a WWII vet, was so appalled by the Watergate scandal and the Nixon Administration’s mishandling of Southeast Asia, he actually voted for George McGovern, a seismic rip that afforded me a critical insight into the man who, from the crib forward, I had spent my lifetime battling, despite having inherited his love of baseball and the Phils. His admission on election night that he had pulled the Democratic lever (one of eight McGovern votes from that single household) taught me that change is actually possible, even if, at times, it seems more miraculous or humbling than we could have ever dreamed. It’s both the benefit and the cost of thinking. In the next two subsequent presidential elections I feel quite sure he went back to voting straight GOP. He didn’t make it to Reagan’s second term, though I cannot imagine him casting his vote for Walter Mondale.

The critical question for the Republican party now becomes how to deal with Sarah Palin, a self-promoting, revisionist fundie. How they handle this one will tell us if they will be able to recover. If they choose to continue sheltering and pandering to those who pride themselves on fundamentalist, anti-intellectual, and intolerant methods of understanding both politics and religion – “The way I see my god (and foreign policy out my window) is the only way to see god (and foreign policy), and if you don’t see it my way then there’s no need for further discussion” – will doom them to further muddling. This is not the basis for responsible political discourse. Haven’t we yet learned that hypocritical religious zealots are responsible for an inordinate amount of pain in this world? This sort of intolerance implies a basic fear of imagination, rather than the embracing and understanding of imagination as a tool that must be kept finely honed in order to responsibly respond to the constant changes that define all times. I expect “You betcha” and a wink at a county fair, not in the rooms where the serious business of governance and diplomatic negotiations take place. If the Republicans can’t see that they will deserve everything they will get. If they do not distance themselves from the whacko fringe then they will lose even more of their good faithful followers. This is not a secret.

So, that’s what I’m rehashing on my way to bed, listening to the wind.

The one topic I have not dealt here has been the US elections, though not from lack of want. I’ve wanted to badly. In fact, so badly, I have exercised enormous restraint in order to remain nominally within the “Chinese box” that I have set myself in. But sometimes you just have to step out and swing at something else. Restraint has been particularly difficult for me over the past two-and-a-half months, particularly after John McCains’ cynical selection of his running mate, a choice that proved to the core that they didn’t “get it.” And ultimately this was their undoing.

A further mark of this disconnection was deeply embedded in John McCain’s concession speech.

“This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight.”

The implications of this victory go far beyond the African-American community. They go to the very ideal heart of what America has imagined itself to be, even while it has not been. To explain that this victory has “special significance for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight,” proves that John McCain was fundamentally disconnected from what the United States has so desperately needed for as long as it has been a union. This was a victory of finally … finally rising above the empty rhetoric of high ideals. The United States can now say that it has squared itself with it’s Declaration of Independence where “all men are created equal,” and the subsequent terrible ‘silence’ of the Constitution where it was agreed that a slave was valued at three-fifths of a white male, and then only for the white male’s benefit: as a deflated number to tax and choose representatives in a single race, single sex national congress. (This is hardly judging the past from the comfort of the present; our history tells us very clearly that the voices who railed against these terrible inconsistencies were vocal and many at the time that this was all being hashed, though for the sake of ‘unity’ they swallowed their tongues.) It’s not often that we get to clear an ‘ideal’ and say, “Finally, we’ve gotten over this one.”

Here in this time of national crisis, we ended up electing an African American as president, the son of an immigrant, the most qualified of those who desired the position. It’s taken 221 years and millions of lives tragically lost to acts of unspeakable inhumanity, in order to make the critical correction at arguably the lowest point in our history – after eight years of executive pillage and crimes – to reach the point where we can look past the chains that the founding fathers shackled all of us with, not just African Americans. We have all, every shade and color, been diminished by a belief in an ideal that fell critically short of realization. This victory was of “special significance” to all of us, even for those who don’t yet understand it as such. We have all, finally, been freed, and that speaks to the possibility of America, where a member of a 13% minority can be elected by a clear majority to lead us into a very shaky future.

Now begins the real work, which I hope we are all up to.

I am a New Yorker reader and have been for the last twenty-five years, and I’d hardly call it “tasteless,” given the way that weekly magazine – arguably the best in America – has portrayed the current administration: Bush as Nero; Bush and members of his team in the flooded Oval Office in September 2005 after Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans; and the classic side-splitter in February 2006 of Dick Cheney blowing smoke from the end of a shotgun barrel with George’s head – both of them in cowboy hats – on Cheney’s shoulder mimicking a promo poster for the film Brokeback Mountain. This one appeared shortly after Cheney sprayed his hunting partner, Harry Whittington, in the face with buckshot on a Texas weekend bird shoot. It was chosen by the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Magazine Publishers of America as the best magazine cover of the year. Tasteless? To neocons, I suppose. And maybe George’s mother, if she got it, though she probably had to ask her husband who, no doubt, gave an answer something along the lines of, “Just the boys kickin’ a lil ass.”

It’s tough being at the top and, to some, it can be tasteless. I hope the Obamas relax a bit and take it in stride. Imagine what would happen if the leaders of China were parodied on a New Yorker cover in the current cultural climate. Hard to even imagine that one, though I am curious to see the cover during Olympic week, and if it will precipitate a boycott on all-things-New-York. If the New Yorker isn’t careful we baseball fans may not be seeing the Yankees or the Mets in Wukesong any time soon.