The Rag Blog

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I gratefully received advice about the danger of personality cults. My enthusiasm for the vision of Hugo Chavez made me forget that I witnessed as a child popular enthusiasm for the good things Mussolini was doing for the people until power went to his head and lead Italy to war. No human is immune to pride and the seduction of success. Chavez is doing good things, but he is a mortal, and I believe he would admit that he is not perfect. Respect for dissent and respect for the Constitution are the first things Hugo Chavez spoke of upon returning to Caracas after being kidnapped during the 2002 coup. The dangerous suppression of the U.S. Constitution by G.W. Bush with the excuse that he is the Commander in Chief in an oil war of aggression stands as a warning to all who love Democracy to keep their eyes open, no matter who is in power.

“Democratic Socialism is love of the people.” These words of Venezuela’s President announced the birth of a different world – a just and peaceful world the youth of the entire planet believes is possible.

Hugo Chavez’ speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations inspired my article, “Hugo Chavez and the Devil’s Recipe,” which first appeared in The Lone-Star Iconoclast of Crawford, Texas, on January 29, 2007, and later in Venezuelanalysis.com on March 15, 2007. That story compared the vision of Mr. Chavez to the worldview of Federico Fellini, the great Italian film director. Both Fellini and Chavez express love and empathy for the people with their work. Fellini, as a cine-magician, helped give birth to a more human culture, and Chavez, as a revolutionary liberator and statesman, is creating a different world that may save the planet from destruction.

“Hugo Chavez and the Devil’s Recipe” attracted so much international attention that people from all over the globe asked: How is it possible to compare a great Italian film author to a visionary South American statesman? The answer: Hugo Chavez shows by his actions that he not only loves the people, but fully understands the needs and aspirations of the world’s youth.

Like Fellini, Chavez does not hate the rich, but knows that they are psychologically deformed by excessive and un-earned opulence and by the guilt that being oppressors of millions festers in their hearts.

The lunacy and cruelty of the global situation is caused, therefore, by the fact that both oppressors and oppressed are dehumanized by the odious reality of fear, greed, and an absurd spiritual myopia that the natural abundance of the Earth is not enough for all to share.

The rich are making themselves sick and dangerously unsafe by inflicting criminal misery on others. The oppressed and poor are sickened by lives turned into miserable destitution and hopelessness from birth to death.

Both ‘haves” and ‘have-nots” are in different ways completely dehumanized and evermore hateful of each other. The unhappiness of the rich and powerful is well known to the psychiatric profession. The poor’s sickness is evident in our crowded prisons and slums. This expanding evil eventually erupts in crime, suicidal terrorism, the reactive police state, and criminal wars of aggression. The obscene plunder by a ravenous and blind few results in universal wage slavery and/or desperate poverty for millions, making this world dangerous and unhappy.

Chavez’s enlightened peaceful revolution is reversing this global lunacy and will even help the rich from becoming further mentally retrograde, like medieval lords. The Bolivarian revolution will help many of these pathetic materialistic souls regain a sense of proportions, become human again, and meet life with renewed hearts. Only a socially responsible democracy and economic justice can bring about this kind of renewal. Such a renewal will protect reformed oppressors from the danger of growing resentment and outrage of the majority as abuses become increasingly transparent to a larger and larger portion of the world population.

Unless change comes fast enough, it will soon become self-evident — even to the simplest minds — that all of us have been fleeced of our universal birthright to share equitably in the bountiful commonwealth of this planet. Some believe that –as the current insurgencies in various parts of the earth evidence — heightened awareness may bring back the revival of the guillotine (to use a stark illustration) as an expeditious instrument for cutting down to size despots, exploiters, oil and gas gougers, highway robbers, and all high ranking thieves in the military industrial complex. That would restore our Republic and bring an end to the Evil Empire as fast as France got rid of its crowned heads and aristo-pigs feeding at the royal trough.

Recently, President Chavez has attracted world attention and become the recipient of increasingly vicious attacks from neo-fascist media whores in direct proportion to his growing fame as a great leader. He is gaining a reputation as the uncompromising and outspoken nemesis of the troglodytes that turned the White House into a fetid Neolithic cave.

“Troglodytes” is a fitting offence that must be clearly understood (Thomas Paine, one of the fathers of our Republic, wrote: “He who dares not offend cannot be honest”), so here are four dictionary definitions of “troglodytes” that prove it to be an the ideal insult for the current White House simians dragging their knuckles on the carpet at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: 1. Pre-historic cave dwellers; 2. Persons of degraded, primitive, or brutal character; 3. Persons unacquainted with affairs of the world; 4. Animals living underground. Hence, President Chavez was perfectly correct to call the troglodyte-in-chief an “ass,” a “coward,” and the very incarnation of evil: “the devil.”

On Monday, December 5, 2005, the following posts appeared on an anonymous blog: Planetofa$$holes, run by political satirists who target traitors, religious fanatics, and other lunatics — like the recently departed Jarry Foulwell (good riddance) — from an underground wine cellar named: In Vino Veritas. Their therapeutic use of insults to retain a sense of reality in our 21st Century bedlam is refreshing.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched. ~Aldous Huxley

On March 2, 2004, in Caracas, Hugo Chavez wisely proclaimed: “George W. Bush is an IDIOT!” With this truthful pronouncement the great President of Venezuela launched a new era of outspoken honesty in international relations, making it easier for decent people everywhere to see what global oppressors and phonies really are and to properly frame them as miserable idiots.

When a head-of-state who loves his people, as Hugo Chavez does, uses the most popular and versatile of all insults: “IDIOT” to describe the perverted liar-in-chief of the most powerful empire on earth, the time for praising the great Latin American President has come.

Hugo Chavez holds in contempt the excessive desire for private wealth, the criminal culture of corruption, and unregulated materialism that grips the vast majority of human beings in hopeless poverty. No one has the right to own in excess, he believes. Opulence in a world so full of poverty is obscene, degenerate, and criminal, no matter how much fat cats protest about having earned their billions legally, even if immorally. Legality is not equivalent to honesty.

Understanding this about Chavez and watching Fellini films like “La Strada,” “Nights of Cabiria,” and “La Dolce Vita,” it becomes easy to see that both Fellini and Chavez are clearly aware of the soulless cruelty and brutal dishonesty of unregulated capitalist-corporate systems that are devouring the earth before our very eyes.

With their great hearts, Fellini and Chavez saw that it is the goodness of simple people — working very hard just to have enough to feed their own families — that keeps the world from collapsing into utter chaos. Both saw the limit of tolerance getting very close and the failure of social compassion.

The vision that makes millions of hearts beat with great hope is Hugo Chavez’s mission for a world without oppression and poverty. Chavez is one of the few statesmen with an understanding of history and realism about the future. Demonic materialists are afraid that he may wake up the sleeping masses to see the nakedness of their blood-soaked oppressors. Their mad hatred of Chavez is like the screeching reaction of a hyena caught by a sudden spotlight in the act of trying to devour a sleeping child. The innocent child represents the TV-hypnotized millions, watching meaningless crap that prevents them from noticing that the hyenas are devouring their country. Chavez understands all this.

His first step toward that different world is the revival of Simon Bolivar’s dream of a united Latin America with democratic, social, and economic justice for its people. The union of a truly democratic Latin America will establish a shining example that can expand social progress on a global scale and spread the ideas of a sustainable way of life based on nurturing, responsibility and equity rather than hoarding and oppression by a few.

Recent news reports have revealed that the Bush Administration has bestowed upon itself the right to grant itself absolute power if “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions” might come to pass.

Actually, the hypothetical catastrophes stated above sound very much like the veritable calamities inflicted upon the nation by the Bush presidency itself. Worse, at present, many of our Democratic representatives are showing their outrage regarding the disastrous policies of the administration — by agitating to bomb Iran.

Regarding such circumstances, Eric Fromme warned, “the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it.” Ergo, we witness these collective pathologies play out in the perpetual aggression of American foreign policy, the exploitation inherent in our corporate workplaces, marketplaces, and healthcare practices and the exponentially expanding destruction of the environment.

How, then, can we begin to alter these seemingly ineluctable circumstances?

First off, don’t give the elites credit for being more intelligent than they are. Ruthlessness, striving and cunning should not be mistaken for intelligence. The only real accomplishment of the present day ruling class has been to transform their self-justifying lies into a form of performance art.

In reality, they have left private institutions bloated and public ones bankrupt. And left us, as a people, directionless and bereft of hope.

But that is not the totality of the situation: We must muse upon our own complicity in creating this cultural catastrophe. We’ve all been employed as landscapers on this blood-sodden deathscape.

At present, in our alienation and attendant passivity, our plight is analogous to that of so-called “crib babies,” those socially and emotionally arrested, orphaned children who were left to languish in indifferent institutions. Culturally, we seem devoid of the ability to respond to each other, to create a just society — or even envisage one.

Such is the extent of our alienation and it is reflected in the media clowns and confidence artists who comprise our (misnomer alert) leadership. We can produce slick, television-friendly self-promoters — i.e. Thompson and Obama — but we can’t rebuilt New Orleans or devise an exit strategy from Iraq.

Creating mass media is not tantamount to creating society. When we live in an era wherein image trumps reality, it follows that an infantilized populace will be transfixed by the shiny objects of media culture — that the tiny dramas of shallow celebrities will work like crib mobiles to distract us from the deep anguish of being a species standing before the crumbling edifice of paradigm collapse.

If media culture seems so unreal, it is because it is a reflection of our chronic alienation — our systemic disengagement from communal involvement; so profound is our alienation — not only from our environment — but also from our inner lives that we pose a danger to ourselves and others — which is, of course, the clinical criteria describing those unfortunate souls whose sanity has deteriorated to the point in which they require institutionalization.

Conversely, a populace being in possession of an inner life would prove a dangerous development to the one percent who hold ninety percent of the nation’s wealth — those who prosper from our alienation and its attendant apathy. It is a given these corrupt elitists will try to maintain our estrangement from our inner realities — because if we were to be roused to awareness insurrection would result.

Being internally colonized by consumerism, we have lost the ability to imagine meaningful change, because our inner lives are no longer our own. Benumbed by our complicity in corporate blanding, by means of ceaseless branding, our inner beings, rather than resembling a teeming, vital polis of meaningful engagement, now seem closer in resemblance to the cold florescent light-flooded shelves of off-the-interstate convenience stores. Impulse and shallow need — in other words — utter desperation — has usurped the deepening eros of communal engagement.

Hence, the thronging avenues of imagination, personal and collective, have been replaced by a soul-numbing proliferation of Starbucks and Banana Republic outlets that serve palliative remedies masking the pain of our powerlessness to alter the tragic trajectory of the times. All transpiring as the sky burns and Arctic glaciers melt into rising seas — and we’re driven to distract ourselves from descending dread by means of another latte buzz, shopping excursion, the unreality of Reality TV, and the pathetic pandering of a political class of shallow hacks who are themselves powerless before their Thanatotic addiction to power.

Such are the colic nightmares of us cultural crib babies. What comes of this degree of alienation? Violence (from shooting sprees to perpetual war). Addiction (from mindless consumerism to prisons overcrowded with drug users). Magical thinking (from neo-con fantasies of global dominance to Christian End Time hallucinations). Paranoia (The abiding delusion that little brown people cross our borders in order to take our jobs, force us to speak their language, and blow up our malls … after, of course, they’ve swept the floors and scrubbed the toilets). Depression (from wide-spread use of anti-depressants to the massive demoralization that reveals itself in pandemic levels of social apathy).

What if the media were to begin to chronicle this collective nervous breakdown? What if we became unable to avert our gaze from the tragedies of our time? What if we were induced to not only stare into the abyss — but were grabbed by the lapels by it?

Then, I suspect, our apathy would grow unpalatable. We’d choke on our fetid self-justifications; swallowing our rationalizations would prove about as appetizing as eating a foot-long hotdog inside a slaughterhouse.

At some point, try driving out into the American countryside (as I’ve spent the last six months doing). See for yourself the drought-desiccated Everglades and Okefanokee swamps ablaze, where clouds of smoke are enswathing the states of the Deep South like a death shroud. Walk through the splintered, toxic rubble of New Orleans. Although do not go to gawk, but to grieve — and rage –and then meditate on how we came, as a people, to abandon an entire American city. Then continue, as I did, down Interstate 10, onward through the concrete-encased, “heat dome” of the stripmall archipelago that is Houston; its ugly, ad hoc architecture glazed in the Greenhouse Gas-trapped infernos known as weather in Sun Belt cities. Then proceed out into the West Texas prairielands and approach the areas where enormous, industrial livestock holding pens and slaughterhouses are located. Places, where exploded-from-high-speed-impact carcasses of swarms of black flies stipple your windshield, where the reek of death cannot be masked, even if you possess a car-deodorizer the size of Arkansas.

In these places, you’ll find the reek of empire; as well as, the reason the people of the world have turned their faces away from us in revulsion. This stench permeates the air of our nation and clings to the fabric of our lives. Moreover, although George Bush is a veritable idiot savant in the art of creating the stench of death, our Little Prince of Putrefaction is not taking the reek back to Texas with him when we’re finally rid of him. No, it is our own essence now. Iconography-wise: Let’s lose the imagery of noble and lofty bald eagles: rotting road kill should be proclaimed our national animal.

Yes, we’re powerless before the enormity of the age — but we cross the line into complicity when we’re oblivious to our own individual stake in it. At this point, we can no longer afford the luxury of retreating to our comfort zones. Tears must scald our eyes; horrific visions should haunt our nights. The hour has come when we must wrestle with the demon of our own indifference who gains his sustenance and strength from the bribes, large and small, we accept from this death-sustained system.

Worse yet, our pathologies are embodied in our infant/tyrant leadership who throw global-wide tantrums of mass destruction because as a people we have forgotten how to give ourselves over to the eros of engaging the world by social and political involvement.

How do we begin to restore ourselves and reclaim our nation? — First, by remembering we’re alive — and that life is finite. The awareness of the urgency of the situation at hand will quicken one’s pulse and the demon will lessen its grip as one’s blood rises in mortification and outrage.

How will we know we are turning the tide? — When our listless sleepwalking gives way to participation mystique — to vivid, waking dreams of living flesh.

How will we know if we’re losing? — Simple: We will remain as we are, at present: bloodless, wane spirits imprisoned within our own clammy skin.

This is the archetypal criteria at the root of the mythic imagery of raising the dead: The simple realization that one is alive within life; that the ennui engendered by the illusion of atomization has ended; and that one’s individual dreams and longings — and even one’s flesh — are not exclusively our own, but are part and parcel of the implicate order of a living planet.

Accordingly, there is neither an omnipresent, ever-watchful Sky Daddy divinity above nor a Risen Son savior proffering redemption, yet there is engagement (action and inspiration) within the vastness of the world — a redemption borne of risk that serves to re-animate a necrotic heart. In short, we so love the world we give ourselves to it.

To do so, it is imperative we begin unshackling ourselves from the noxious orthodoxies of church, state, political party, and corporation, as well as from our own narcissistic strivings within those hierarchies of vampires and wean ourselves from the petty perks we garner from group approval and institutional bribes.

Accordingly, the first step is an awareness of the problem and a willingness to reveal it in all its shabby-ass human glory — even if the implications of doing so are ugly — even if to do so will be to risk scorn in one’s personal life and reversals in one’s professional standing.

Years ago, I heard the tale of a fellow, a struggling artist, who had bought an old, dilapidated house. Upon moving in, he discovered the place was infested with cockroaches. Worse, the house sat close to railroad tracks and when trains trundled by, shaking the house, its floors, walls, and ceilings literally seethed with agitated cockroaches.

Since no amount of bug spray could lessen the massive infestation, the artist began zapping the bugs with glow-in-the-dark spray paint. Later, when friends dropped by in the evening and a train rumbled down the adjacent tracks, he would switch off the lights and all present were dazzled by the moving, organic mobile of scuttling, multi-colored lights he created.

At present, this is where we find ourselves as a people: powerless before the ugliness of the age. Therefore, we have little choice other than to light the ugliness up and turn the objects of our revulsion (personal and collective) into something resembling the truth of art.

What will we gain?

Only this: the enduring beauty of ugly truth — one of the few balms available within the agonies of a dark and ugly age.

The story is big and dangerous. It’s everywhere you look. It’s part of a history that grows worse with the decades. “One step forward, two steps back” as someone once said.

It’s all about selling Canada out economically, culturally, politically, socially. It’s about selling out the country by handing over our resources, our industries, our cultural anchors, the glues that bind us together as a community – all as part of re-colonization, part of Canada becoming a mixture of Guatemala, Saudi Arabia, and Colombia – a special, rich, fawning client-state of the USA, bled of the independence to make choices on behalf of the Canadian people and their future. Bled willingly and wholeheartedly by the new reactionaries in – it seems – all the Parties and all the major economic think tanks and private corporations. How long will Canadians put up with it?

The cultural part of the sell-out presses forward like a huge sunny-day garage sale. Losing millions a year, every year of its life, The National Post is kept afloat by its reactionary owners to preach the gospel of greed, the idiocy of traditional Canadian values, the “rightful” domination of Canada by the USA, and the necessity to support political parties that embody those ideas.

Canada is peculiar in the respect that it has a large class persistently determined to deny the Canadian right to Canadian wealth. That class denudes Canadians of their right to have initiative, imagination, and to undertake independent action. Simply consider that Alberta admires itself for building its Heritage Fund to something over 12 billion dollars. Norway which manages its wealth ownership differently has a Heritage Fund of over 200 billion dollars. Think about that across the spectrum of Canadian resources being pumped out by foreign owners and sent to foreign places, some for refinement and “value added” treatment.

Maclean’s Magazine, a cultural anchor, for decades a reasonably serious though not strong advocate of an independent Canadian society, has fallen into the hands of reactionary, sell-out muckrakers. Maclean’s now offers in its sleaze menu – it would appear from its emphasis – an on-going icon to represent and “embody” Canada: Lord [Conrad] Black of Doublecross Harbour. No more needs to be said.

Meanwhile back at CBC – being carefully hollowed out in preparation for “the big chop” – CBC Radio Two is more and more a home for mentally challenged pre-adolescents on a diet of US rock magazines. Real differences in cultural understanding between Canadians and tastemakers in the imperial centre obstruct imperial marketing policy – even resist it. So orders are out: flatten CBC.

Coincidentally, Tony Burman, top-ranking journalist with CBC, editor-in-chief of CBC News, Current Affairs, and Newsworld is leaving. Flatten CBC. Midwife at the separation – a name that recurs in CBC dumbing-down stories – is Richard Stursberg, CBC television executive vice president. He oversees much of the increase in pap, cold porridge, and pong. Do I remember correctly that – wearing another hat some years ago – Richard Stursberg suggested the CBC be terminated?

All are to assist in the flattening. Michael Enright assists. Love of yankees of any kind pervades the People’s Corporation – to the point that it hires yankees whenever possible. Take Sunday Morning, hosted by that most self-satisfied of voices on Canadian radio, Michael Enright. Refer to Sunday, June 17 07. Enright and his bright programmers decided to deal with a perennial topic: empire, imperialism, its characteristics, the US Empire and its nature compared to the Roman Empire.

What better topic for Canadians to consider, people who occupy an economic, political, cultural and social US colony perched on thousands of miles of shared border? Who better to talk about and think about the effect and reach and nature of imperialism than Canadians – a people who began as French colonials and then became British colonials and now are US colonials?

Who better?

Aha! But in a colony the colonials can never have expertise – even in the matter of their own identity as colonials. Colonials can be experts in … nothing. And so Michael Enright interviewed two “experts”, one from a British university and one from a US university. No Canadian. Erase Canada. Flatten CBC. Michael Enright is on side.

Watch the “incorruptible” Brian Day erase Canada and Canadians. New president of the Canadian Medical Association, Day is back to the CMA of the Saskatchewan Doctors Strike in 1962, a period of wholesale misinformation from the CMA which fought a dirty fight to prevent publicly created medicare. Already Day has begun. Fear mongering. Bloated attacks. Dubious claims: “private clinics must run beside the public system to make it more cost effective”. Oh. Who says? And will there be US money for the new campaign against universal medicare? Ask Brian Day. US money was there aplenty to fight against medicare at the time of the Doctors Strike in 1962. Ask Shirley Douglas.

And the Canadian economy? Hollowing Out. What is Hollowing Out? It’s the handing over of ownership and control of Canadian life to (mostly US) foreign interests. It is the sell-out of industries and corporations essential to a balanced economy, and direction of their Canadian operation from foreign centres to suit foreigner’s policy. It’s the removal of independence and initiative from Canada and Canadians at all levels of society, especially in the economy. It’s the disguised re-colonization of Canada and the turning of Canadians into colonial serfs.

That process is ALWAYS at work in a colonial society. Colonial societies are societies that are, by definition, hollowed out to make the imperial society richer. That condition is growing dangerously worse now in Canada. We all know, for instance, that fawning governments have refused to let Canadian film-making become an international force. For more than sixty years Canadian governments have made deals with US governments to keep Canadian film-making a welfare activity. An industry that should be in full competition with US film making, that should be bringing kudos and billions of dollars in reward to Canada, is purposefully suppressed by Canadian government in order to please Washington. That is what we call colonialism. Shame. And double shame.

A wise investment analyst (Tom Bradley, Globe and Mail, Apr. 20 07 B16) records how in the 1990s he had to meet people in Dallas, New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey to discuss the servicing of Canadian pension plans. Why? “The parent companies had taken as many white-collar jobs out of Canada as they could and that included the pension department.”

Globe and Mail for June 20 07 trumpets the Stephen Harper belief that the “Hollowing Out” cry is mere “hype”. (A1, A4) Needless to say ”senior federal Finance Department officials “are doing the talking for Harper – traditional sell-out entities. Harper has been silent we are told not because he is a confirmed sell-out but because he doesn’t want to fan the flames of “misconception”.

On the same day the Globe and Mail reported that the brother to Hollowing Out – Globalization – (B 15) is hitting working people hard. What is Globalization? It is the takeover of governments by private corporate power; the peonization of working people everywhere; the stripping of all social securities from populations; and the employment of government power, the military, and press/media to further the wealth and the domination of private corporate interests. To put it into the words of Globe writer Marcus Walker: “many workers in developed countries are struggling to find well-paid work amid a combination of cheap imports, the relocation of factories and offices to low-wage countries, and changing technology”.

“Hollowing Out” holds hands with “Globalization”.

Even while the big trumpets are spreading the “keep happy” lie, smaller ones are telling the truth. In the Globe (May 19 07 N16) Heather Scoffield tells an old, old, old Canadian story. Stephen Harper’s propagandists say all is well, Canadians are shipping out money “to invest” in the USA. That’s a lie. US money is coming in to grab Canada. Canadian dollars are flowing out of Canada from US Branch Plants to US head offices. That is NOT Canadian investment in the USA. That is not “foreign trade”. That is imperial power wringing the wealth out of a colony. To avoid the sad, ugly term, “Branch Plants,” Statistics Canada has apparently discovered a nicer term: “sister companies”. The biggest Canada-to-US dollar flow, Scoffield reports, is Canadian subsidiaries [Branch Plants] handing money back to their US parent companies.” Economic colonialism.

Tom Bradley seemed a little surprised at the completeness of the takeovers he witnessed in the 1990s. He shouldn’t have been. From 1968 to 1972 Canada produced studies of the effects of foreign (mostly US) ownership. One after the other we had The Watkins Report, the Gray Report, and the Wahn Report.

They told us what Tom Bradley and Heather Scoffield report afresh as “news”. Very often (but of course not in every case):

(A) Foreign owners suck out Canadian jobs.
(B) They suck out capital that should be available for Canadian-initiated and directed enterprise.
(C) They work to destroy good working conditions and to destroy good quality social insurance.
(D) They block the development of Canadian invention and research, doing research and development elsewhere than Canada.
(E) Inventions made by Canadians in the employ of US Branch Plants are “owned” by the foreign companies in most cases.
(F) Foreign owners charge Canadian Branch Plants for the “use” of US technology, patented processes, and so-called US “management” expertise.
(G) They fiddle “production expenses” (and other matters) in order to cheat Canadian tax gathering authorities.

How can Canadian tax departments oversee all buying and selling activities between the Branch Plants and the parent companies? Tax departments can’t. So guess what happens?

Don’t foreign owners (mostly US owners) do ANYTHING good, you ask? Why should they? With the help of the US government they set up in Canada to grab Canadian resources, to corner markets, to kill Canadian competition, to brainwash Canadians that invasion is good for them, to make money, and to make money, and to make money – for themselves. Why would they want to do anything good?

They don’t. And only colonials, so brain-washed and indoctrinated they’re near-vegetables – only such people can believe that the wide-open, takeover-mad, unregulated market economy “Hollowing Out” Canada and “Globalizing” poverty, oppression, and despair is – to quote the Stephen Harper clones – “a net positive for the [Canadian] economy”.

I suppose that astonishment is not the word for it. Stupefaction comes to mind. I simply could not believe my ears in Beirut when a phone call told me that Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara was going to create “Palestine”. I checked the date–no, it was not 1 April–but I remain overwhelmed that this vain, deceitful man, this proven liar, a trumped-up lawyer who has the blood of thousands of Arab men, women and children on his hands is really contemplating being “our” Middle East envoy.

Can this really be true? I had always assumed that Balfour, Sykes and Picot were the epitome of Middle Eastern hubris. But Blair? That this ex-prime minister, this man who took his country into the sands of Iraq, should actually believe that he has a role in the region–he whose own preposterous envoy, Lord Levy, made so many secret trips there to absolutely no avail–is now going to sully his hands (and, I fear, our lives) in the world’s last colonial war is simply overwhelming.

Of course, he’ll be in touch with Mahmoud Abbas, will try to marginalise Hamas, will talk endlessly about “moderates”; and we’ll have to listen to him pontificating about morality, how he’s absolutely and completely confident that he’s doing the right thing (and this, remember, is the same man who postponed a ceasefire in Lebanon last year in order to share George Bush’s ridiculous hope of an Israeli victory over Hizbollah) in bringing peace to the Middle East…

Not once–ever–has he apologised. Not once has he said he was sorry for what he did in our name. Yet Lord Blair actually believes–in what must be a record act of self-indulgence for a man who cooked up the fake evidence of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction”–that he can do good in the Middle East.

For here is a man who is totally discredited in the region–a politician who has signally failed in everything he ever tried to do in the Middle East–now believing that he is the right man to lead the Quartet to patch up “Palestine”.

In the hunt for quislings to do our bidding–ie accept even less of Mandate Palestine than Arafat would stomach–I suppose Blair has his uses. His unique blend of ruthlessness and dishonesty will no doubt go down quite well with our local Arab dictators.

And I have a suspicion–always assuming this extraordinary story is not untrue–that Blair will be able to tour around Damascus, even Tehran, in his hunt for “peace”, thus paving the way for an American exit strategy in Iraq. But “Palestine”?

The Palestinians held elections–real, copper-bottomed ones, the democratic variety–and Hamas won. But Blair will presumably not be able to talk to Hamas. He’ll need to talk only to Abbas’s flunkies, to negotiate with an administration described so accurately this week by my old colleague Rami Khoury as a “government of the imagination”.

The Americans are talking–and here I am quoting the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack–about an envoy who can work “with the Palestinians in the Palestinian system” to develop institutions for a “well-governed state”. Oh yes, I can see how that would appeal to Lord Blair. He likes well-governed states, lots of “terror laws”, plenty of security–though I’m still a bit puzzled about what the “Palestinian system” is meant to be.

It was James Wolfensohn who was originally “our” Middle East envoy, a former World Bank president who left in frustration because he could neither reconstruct Gaza nor work with a “peace process” that was being eroded with every new Jewish settlement and every Qassam rocket fired into Israel. Does Blair think he can do better? What honeyed words will we hear?

I bet he doesn’t mention the Israeli wall which is taking so much extra land from the Palestinians. It will be a “security barrier” or a “fence” (like the famous Berlin “fence” which was actually called a “security barrier” by those generous East German Vopo cops of the time).

There will be appeals for restraint “on all sides”, endless calls for “moderation”, none at all for justice (which is all the people of the Middle East have been pleading for over the past 100 years).

And Israel likes Lord Blair. Indeed, Blair’s slippery use of language is likely to appeal to Ehud Olmert, whose government continues to take Arab land for Jews and Jews only as he waits to discover a Palestinian with whom he can “negotiate”, Mahmoud Abbas now having the prestige of a rabbit after his forces were crushed in Gaza.

Which of “Palestine”‘s two prime ministers will Blair talk to? Why, the one with a collar and tie, of course, who works for Mr Abbas, who will demand more “security”, tougher laws, less democracy.

I have never been able to figure out why the Middle East draws the Balfours and the Sykeses and the Blairs into its maw. Once, our favourite trouble-shooter was James Baker–who worked for George W’s father until the Israelis got tired of him–and before that we had a whole list of UN Secretary Generals who visited the region, frowned and warned of serious consequences if peace did not soon come.

I recall another man with Blair’s pomposity, a certain Kurt Waldheim, who–no longer the UN’s boss–actually believed he could be an “envoy” for peace in the Middle East, despite his little wartime career as an intelligence officer for the Wehrmacht’s Army Group “E”.

A glance at much of the media’s coverage of Latin America would suggest that there are two types of democracies in the region today: the good and the bad. Due to an almost pathological obsession by outlets such as the New York Times and the Economist, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador have been categorised as places where democracy is being ‘eroded’ and freedom of the press ‘curtailed’, and where popular demagogues are happily marching their people towards dictatorial systems.

In its 19 April 2007 edition, the Economist provided a classic example. Its target was the Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. Although the report noted that Correa takes many of his cabinet secretaries around the country with him “in an attempt to bring government closer to the people”; has doubled cash transfers to 1.3 million of the nation’s poorest people; provided a further $100 million to “housing subsidies for the poor” and “increased substantially” spending on education and health, unfortunately, it was hard to “find an independent political observer” who thought Ecuadorians had something to be hopeful about.

To make matters worse, “the growing strength of the president’s grip on power… is giving cause for alarm”, stated the Economist in the most predictable fashion. Back in Venezuela, Simon Romero on May 17 filed a story for the New York Times titled: “Clash of Hope and Fear as Venezuela Seizes Land.” With a combination of historical knowledge and imagination, Romero wrote:

For centuries, much of Venezuela’s rich farmland has been in the hands of a small elite. After coming to power in 1998, and especially after his re-election in December, President Hugo Chávez vowed to end that inequality, and has been keeping his promise in a process that is both brutal and legal.

Charging the Chávez government responsible for the “largest forced land redistribution in Venezuela’s history”, Romero notes that the “violence has gone both ways” with “more than 160 peasants killed by hired gunmen” and eight landowners also murdered thus far. The slight disparity in deaths between peasants and landowners however escaped Romero’s attention, as with the fact that the government has targeted landowners with non-productive haciendas who cannot prove documentation for their original titles of purchase – a wide spread problem in the region. In short, of course the conclusions one should draw from Venezuela are all too obvious.

So where can one find the good democracy in Latin America? Where is the ‘responsible’ government? For that, if we are to believe many commentators, one must travel across the Andes to Chile and meet socialist President Michelle Bachelet. As the second female President in Latin American history after Nicaragua’s Violeta Chamorro (1990-1997), Bachelet evokes a combination of admiration but unfortunately also disappointment due to the policies of her administration.

By now much of her personal story is well known. With a father, Brigadier General Alberto Bachelet, who served loyally with the Allende government (1970-1973), Michelle and her mother Ángela Jeria were imprisoned shortly after General Augusto Pinochet’s coup on the 11th of September 1973. Having fled with her mother after her father died under torture, Bachelet lived for various periods in Australia, the former East Germany and the United States. Trained in paediatrics and military studies, Bachelet received much attention after she was made Health Minister, and later Defence Minister, under the centre-left Concertación government of Ricardo Lagos.

As a minister and now incumbent President, Bachelet must be given credit for certain achievements. Given the task as Health Minister of drastically reducing waiting lists in public hospitals within the first 100 days of Lagos’s government, Bachelet generally achieved these aims while making it mandatory for all primary-care facilities to provide emergency contraception to all females over the age of 14 who requested it.

If you don’t read Newsday, you might not know (I didn’t until this week) that Rudy Giuliani was an original member of the Iraq Study Group — the blue-ribbon commission co-chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton — but he was forced out after failing to show up for any of the panel’s meetings.

The day after the Newsday story appeared, Giuliani explained that he’d started thinking about running for president, and his presence on the panel might give it a political spin. “It didn’t seem that I’d really be able to keep the thing focused on a bipartisan, nonpolitical resolution,” he said.

The more likely reason for Giuliani’s no-shows is much plainer — money. Craig Gordon, the Newsday reporter who wrote the story in the Long Island paper’s June 19 edition, discovered that on the three days of meetings that Giuliani missed (before quitting), he was out of town, delivering highly lucrative speeches.

On April 12, 2006, he was giving a keynote address at an economics conference in South Korea for a fee of $200,000. On May 18, he was giving a speech on leadership in Atlanta for $100,000.

At that point, Baker gave Giuliani an ultimatum: Start showing up for sessions, or quit. On May 24, he quit, noting in a letter (provided to Gordon) that prior commitments prevented him from giving the panel his “full and active participation.” (He was replaced by former Attorney General Edwin Meese, a puzzling choice for the job; maybe he was the only public figure Baker could find on such short notice. According to someone I know who attended one session, the elderly Meese “was barely conscious.”)

Meanwhile, Giuliani was raking in exorbitant speaking fees around this time—according to Gordon, $11.4 million in the course of 14 months, $1.7 million for 20 speeches during the monthlong period that coincided with the Baker-Hamilton sessions.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I doubt that I would have forgone six figures of easy income for the privilege of yakking about Iraq with a roomful of graybeards all day long. Then again, I wasn’t about to run for president—the highest office of public service—on a résumé bereft of a single foreign-policy credential.

Rudy’s choice — to go for the money—speaks proverbial volumes about his priorities.

His explanation for dropping out—that his impending run for the presidency would tarnish the panel’s apolitical character—is dubious, to say the least.

BAGHDAD — In 2005, Abu Rusil was a penniless Shiite Muslim taxi driver who could barely afford to rent a room. Then Sunni gunmen stopped his older brother at a checkpoint, checked his ID and discovered he was a Shiite. They dragged him from his car and shot him dead on the spot.

Now Abu Rusil lives for revenge. He brags about the people he’s killed; there are so many, he boasted in an interview with McClatchy Newspapers, that he’s lost count. His tales are horrific – people buried alive, others burned in their homes, still more who died when holes were drilled in their heads and shoulders.

“Life is about getting even,” he said coldly, dressed in the all-black uniform of the Mahdi Army militia. “There is no innocent Sunni.”

There’s no way to confirm Abu Rusil’s accounts, but there’s every reason to believe them and the challenge they pose to American efforts to pacify the city. He talks of fomenting a revolution to drive the Sunnis from Iraq, of his training trips to Iran and of his need to avenge his brother’s death.

In Adhamiyah, the Sunni neighborhood where his brother died, residents confirmed that he leaves signed notes on dead Sunnis. “Best regards,” they read.

“Half of Adhamiyah is gone because I killed them,” Abu Rusil said.

In Hai al Salam, a once peaceful mixed neighborhood where Abu Rusil is a Mahdi Army commander, fear of him and his compatriots is palpable. Residents confirm that the militiamen bury people in the dead of night.

The increased American presence means little, they say.

“We are playing a game of cat and mouse,” said Haider Shwail, a Shiite whose brother was shot dead as he was making photocopies. Abu Rusil’s militiamen took $500 that his brother had in his pocket as a contribution for what they call “the Martyr’s office.”

“When the Americans are inside the neighborhood, we go out to do our shopping,” Shwail said. “When they leave, we go inside because the killing begins.”

U.S. military officers plead ignorance to the extent of the brutality, though they say they’re going after “rogue” and “criminal” members of the Mahdi Army. They say there’s little they can do if Iraqis are too frightened to talk.

“It is all very interesting that the people that are witnessing such tragedies are too afraid to tell anyone about it, so they willfully allow the continued prosecution of terror by these criminals against innocent Iraqis,” said Col. J.B. Burton, the commander of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division, which has responsibility for Hai al Salam. “We’ve neither seen nor heard of this degree of horror because nobody wants to talk.”

McClatchy Newspapers interviewed Abu Rusil after asking an intermediary to find a Mahdi Army commander from Hai al Salam to comment on residents’ stories of brutality. Abu Rusil introduced himself as Abu al Hassan, then acknowledged his better known nom de guerre. He refused to be identified by his real name, though several residents said they knew it.

Abu Rusil said he’d never killed anyone until his brother’s death. He struggled to make ends meet as a taxi driver. When Sunni insurgents shot his brother, Abu Rusil and his family had to pool their money to come up with the $2,000 it cost to retrieve the body.

Now he enjoys the spoils of war as a Mahdi Army commander. He has a house and three sport-utility vehicles, which he uses in his transportation business. He confiscates cars from Sunnis to get around town. The cars, of course, now belong to the Mahdi Army.

The killings will end, Abu Rusil said, when every Sunni has left the country and Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric who heads the Mahdi Army, rules Iraq.

1. In the beginning was the Plan.

2. And then came the Assumptions.

3. And the Assumptions were without form.

4. And the Plan was without Substance.

5. And darkness was upon the face of the Workers.

6. And Workers spoke among themselves saying, “It is a crock of shit and it stinks.”

7. And Workers went unto their Supervisors and said, “It is a crock of dung and we cannot live with the smell.”

8. And Supervisors went unto their Managers saying, “It is a container of organic waste, and it is very strong, such that none may abide by it.”

9. And Managers went unto their Directors, saying, “It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength.”

10. And Directors spoke among themselves, saying to one another; “It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong.”

11. And Directors went to Vice Presidents, saying unto them, “It promotes growth, and it is very powerful.”

12. And Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him “It has very powerful effects.”

13. And the President looked upon the Plan and saw that it was good.

14. And the Plan became Policy.