Re: [Futurework] RE: Towards a sustainable balance (cOORECTION)

[Ray Evans Harrell]

Hello folks,   I'm in the process of learning 120 pages of hard contemporary music to be premiered in a week.   I also have to get this Arts Festival begun and I'm doing the teaching work to fund the management as well as the beginning graphics and then I have to put feet to doing some serious begging for money from people who claim to have nothing these days.   I'm going for a "poor" festival i.e. one that each person funds their own performance contributions but we still have to organize it.      I'm telling you this because I am embarrassed at the terrible post I put out below.    My head was there but I simply don't have time to check, reorganize my thoughts on paper and do what is necessary.   I enjoy your conversation and I like to contribute but this is getting impossible.   I either have to be on Future work or do the four jobs that I am currently committed to.   I hoped that I could just think and send but that doesn't work for me.   I have to struggle with both my past and the stress level of the present so sorry about this and if you tried to read that incomprehensible garbage that I posted then accept my apology and I will redo it.   And then I'm going to have to rethink things.   Best to all of you   Ray Evans Harrell     CORRECTED POST:   I question that  Lawry,   This is what I was told about the ideology of the Communist States for years.    I think their backwardness and poverty (based upon the fact that they were a peasant society less than 80 years before they fell) was only held at bay by virtue of their lack of information from the West.    Eventually, as the West outspent and flooded the East with information about choices and market plenty, those Communist ideologies were hard pressed to prove their ultimate success or even to stir the belief in their people that it might be possible.    Once the people asked the question the "hole was in the dike" and the ocean was not far behind.     How much television from the West - in Arabic - is there in the poorer Arab countries?    It doesn't really matter whether the censorship is from the KGB (as in the old Soviet system) or today's  local religious organization, ignorance is ignorance and if that ignorance keeps them in squalor it is not long before change reasserts itself through the power of information.       If you don't "know that you are as poor as American conservatives call 'sinful'' here, then you have little to be angry about or at least to focus your anger on.   I've been in that place in my life as a child of the reservation system.    It is the expectation of what is possible based in the context of where you are that creates change.       When information flows into those countries in Arabic with Western products, do you really believe it will not make a difference?    Especially if these are products that have to do with illness, life and death and other ultimate issues?       Affluent Israel is an abomination to them because the Palestinians realize that they are the "poorest of the poor" in their own societies.    They focus on the Israelis and posit the proverbial past "Golden Era" that these "infidels"  have removed from them.     They refuse to see - just as Americans do in their tax system for the "poor rich" - that their elites have been flowing in and out of the West's stores and businesses on the backs of their people's poverty.     Cultural information, (just as Verdi did in Rigoletto and Un Ballo in Maschera questioning the sense and morals of the authorities) destroys passive abuse and institutions change.    Why do you think that Art has been so trivialized in America?   Neutered by the Corporations and their minions?     Am I wrong?     I can only tell you what I see.   I don't have good feelings about people who do such things here or anywhere else in the world,   as is clear I hope, by what I have said thus far on this list.   People who are my own relatives, and who try or do it to me, are the most abhorrent of all.     People who are kept in ignorance by their religion and their leaders, "don't know any better."    In fact there is a kind of childlike quality about many of the people that I have been on panels with.    They often are subtle, clever and as good - as any American minority ethnic Neo-conservative - at Aristotelian argument tactics.   But when they are not allowed to set the parameters on the argument they are not as sophisticated as America's laziest news junkies.   Their world views are severely limited.    What is more, their apologists (whether Arab, Israeli or otherwise)  here are caught in the same "patriot trap" that Americans protesting our troops will be caught in once Bush starts his revenge for Daddy.   In the cause of liberal fairness I would add that there are people of similar naiveté's on the Israeli side as well.    People who would put their children and families in a Wild West situation on the West Bank.    That Brooklynite MD that walked into the grave of Abraham and started firing with an UZI as people prayed,  cared little for his family IMHO.    Such people are troublemakers and every group has them.    Fanatics know no country, religion or even family and usually hide behind all three to cover their psychopathological behinds.   An American Indian version of that person,  would be urban Indians who move back to a reservation and then try to "fix" the locals.     Our "locals" usually send them packing no matter how much blood quantum they happen to have.      I think the Israelis believe that they can "show the way" for these people both fanatical Jews and Arabs,  and that is a kind of chauvinism as well.     I believe it will have to come from within, in both peoples, before negotiation can take place.   Both Israeli and Arab will have to get over their anger and stop the tendency towards looking for a Hero to rescue them, that is a part of both people's manuals and was posted a couple of days ago in an editorial from an Israeli Newspaper on this list.   Denial of what is happening on both sides is a psychopathology and constitutes a flight from reality.    No one  is served by it and Religions die in such situations once the people realize their collaboration with nightmares.   All you need to do is watch your child die for want of medical attention that is available elsewhere.    Fanatacism can carry you so far but reality is a great teacher especially if you realize that those who claim to be your friends, relatives and fellow citizens are playing you for the fool.      Not being a genius, I know that there has been a massive denial on the part of everyone concerned.    I know this because even I predicted the psychology of the suicide bombers when the great "peacenik" Rabin started breaking peoples bones for playing "David"  and throwing rocks at the Israeli "Goliath."   There is something about situations like this that makes people incompetant.     When primal stories are brought into the actions of the present we are always caught in the middle unless we understand the power of myth.   They have trouble with "Wannabee" issues just the same as traps Indian people here.   That is a problem for both sides but especially for the Jews.    But.....what everyone concerned should remember about this is that Jews will not forget that Israel is the birthplace of their religion and that the other two groups grew out of the Jewish Genesis.    Through 2000 years of abuse from both Christians and Moslems as well as various political systems, their answer was always to be better businessmen and write the best books of the day and remember Israel    Their power was to look their God in the face and season their meat with the salt from Lot's wife's pillar.      Moslems condemn artists who even play with their stories, to death.    Jews elevate them for their ability to escape unscathed.    Remember poor Rushdie?   He was doing what his profession demanded and they wanted to kill him for it.   If he was Jewish they would have invited him to speak at synagogue.   If one is speaking of a transcendant reality then that means it can be taken to all of the places or it isn't transcendant.      There are Moslems who know that as well.    At the same time, those innocent and sophisticated Mullahs who tolerate such attrocities from their colleagues without exposing it, participate in it and damn their religion in the eyes of the world that is not afraid of their Gods and understands that on one level we all create what we worship.    These "poor souls" remind me of the way that trappers trapped Mink when they accepted the story that the Mink was no longer their little brothers.     They sprinkled salt on the ice and the Mink licked it and it froze their tongues to the ice and the Mink could not escape.    Lies have a way of sticking your tongue to the ice.      It would be easy to do away with these three group myths being propogated.    Just have an International scientific body come and dig up the Middle Eastern countries and tell the truth about what they find.     But that won't happen because all three groups have told lies about the past.   Each sought for salt in the desert and were inexperienced with glaciers.   The Christians: about their lineage and their selective choice of which rules they follow, the Moslems: about their lineage and who gave birth to whom, as if the prophet didn't appear centuries after the death of Jesus and the Jews: about their treatment of women in their male oriented and canonized texts.    Canonized only a few years before Mohammad and after Jesus.       Every religion does what it must to survive but there comes an accounting.    The Christians speak nobly of that day but think that they will escape it because they swore fealty to Jesus.    But English is right (for once) on this point.     It is the "Sacre" in "Sacrifice" that makes "Sacred."    Which adolescent "Holy" stories are each of these groups willing to give up in order to achieve peace?    "Sacrifice!"  and unless there is a serious willingness on people speaking truly and in good will to accept what is found in the "accounting" the "Dies Irae" the "Opening of the Book of Life",   then we will continue to have Christians praying for the end of the world and helping the Israelis to accomplish it.     We will have Moslems who use their texts to create old governments that don't work and are incapable of International cooperation and we will continue to have Jews who tramp into shared sacred places as if they were the only people in the world that mattered.   That is the opposite of the meaning of the English word "Sacred."     There is no sacrifice, just arrogance and insensitivity.   But no one escapes Judgment anymore than anyone escapes death.     This is complicated but that is no excuse.   Today,  America is about to blow one of the world's  cultural treasures off of the face of the earth.   That people's children have been murdered in the hoarding of medicine for political and  business  purposes.   And on  both sides the sacrifices of gallant soldiers are still unacknowledged as they continue to suffer from  the same spent uranium "shit" that still haunts this country where it was used for economic and expediant reasons.    It is time that we grow up and tell the truth.    When did the concept of social justice become a curse word and a person who wishes to see both sides of an argument in order to make a wise judgment become a disloyal "liberal."       REH     ----- Original Message ----- From: Lawrence DeBivort To: futurework Sent: Sunday, January 26, 2003 4:34 PM Subject: [Futurework] RE: Towards a sustainable balance Greetings, Ed, I think you are essentially correct in your assessment that a US attack on Iraq will aggravate the situation in he Middle East, and create a greater impetus for action against the US.   Westerners sometimes make the mistake of assuming that poverty and its alleviation are the keys to reducing anti-US sentiment. To the extent we are seen as imposing poverty on people, then, yes, the US is held accountable. But the terrorism with which we have become preoccupied is not motivated by poverty, it is motivated by our political policies and actions in the Middle East. Friedman would have us follow the red herring of poverty, when the cause of anti-US sentiment is much more proximate to US behavior toward the Middle East.   Cheers, L -----Original Message----- From: Ed Weick [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, January 26, 2003 3:29 PM To: Ray Harrell; Joan H.; Jane Harrell; Dawn Beam; Darcy Dunn; Ben & Roz Sleigh; Alex Sherker; Karen Watters Cole Cc: futurework; William Ward; Tom Lowe; Tom Walker; Stephen Straker; Paul Douthit; Mike Hollinshead; Brian McAndrew; Keith Hudson; August Watters; Frank Hample; Dennis Paull; Lawrence de Bivort Subject: Re: Towards a sustainable balance With all due respect to Thomas Friedman, the situation is a little more complicated than that.  Yes, indeed, the Middle East is replete with young people who are willing to turn themselves into missiles rather than tolerate life as it is.  However, how many regimes throughout the region will have to be taken out, and how many countries democratized, before conditions are improved to the point where young people see life on earth, not in paradise, as their best hope?  It is just possible, more likely probable, that Saddam Hussein is something of a hero to the non-Iraqi young because, unlike their regimes, he has stood up to the Americans.  The Egyptian government receives $2 billion a year in civil and military assistance from the US as a good-behaviour reward for having signed a peace treaty with Israel.  How much of this money goes to alleviating the staggering poverty of the country versus the pockets of the rich?  The House of Saud has grown enormously wealthy by pumping oil to the west and, even though it has done little for Saudi Arabia's ordinary citizens, it is well able to meet its historic obligations to the Wahhabist movement, one of the world's most potent generators of terrorism.  Kuwait is seen as totally under the American thumb while Jordan, which lies immediately east of Israel, is supposedly an American ally, but with its large, impoverished Palestinian population, it is a potential powder keg. How will any of this be solved by taking out Saddam?  It is far more likely that it will be greatly aggravated.   Ed Ed Weick 577 Melbourne Ave. Ottawa, ON, K2A 1W7 Canada Phone (613) 728 4630 Fax     (613)  728 9382 ----- Original Message ----- From: Karen Watters Cole To: Alex Sherker ; Ben & Roz Sleigh ; Darcy Dunn ; Dawn Beam ; Jane Harrell ; Joan H. ; Ray Harrell Cc: Lawrence de Bivort ; Dennis Paull ; Ed Weick ; Frank Hample ; August Watters ; Keith Hudson ; Brian McAndrew ; Mike Hollinshead ; Paul Douthit ; Stephen Straker ; Tom Walker ; Tom Lowe ; William Ward Sent: Sunday, January 26, 2003 12:46 PM Subject: Towards a sustainable balance Greetings from the Pacific Northwest, where the East winds have abated and we are socked in with gentle rain.  Everyone is trying to get their two cents in print before the President’s speech writers are finished with the final copy of the State of the Union speech, hoping to influence the thinking and presentation of an important, time-sensitive public policy moment that will be gleaned for the smallest details between the lines.  Friedman puts a lot of things into perspective we can understand while raising some contentious issues that need to be aired. We are discussing consequences here, not just morality about preemptive force.  Conservatives used to have a strong voice on the intended and unintended consequences of government.  Today, with this White House, they have lost that edge.  Karen Watters Cole The earlier column is at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/22/opinion/22FRIE.html  I urge you to read it also if this subject is important to you.   Excerpt from that:  “What liberals fail to recognize is that regime change in Iraq is not some distraction from the war on Al Qaeda. That is a bogus argument. And simply because oil is also at stake in Iraq doesn't make it illegitimate either. Some things are right to do, even if Big Oil benefits. Although President Bush has cast the war in Iraq as being about disarmament — and that is legitimate — disarmament is not the most important prize there. Regime change is the prize. Regime transformation in Iraq could make a valuable contribution to the war on terrorism, whether Saddam is ousted or enticed into exile.”  Thinking About Iraq (II) By Thomas L. Friedman, NYT, 01.26.03 @ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/26/opinion/26FRIE.html In my column on Wednesday I laid out why I believe that liberals underestimate how ousting Saddam Hussein could help spur positive political change in the Arab world.  Today's column explores why conservative advocates of ousting Saddam underestimate the risks, and where we should strike the balance.   Let's start with one simple fact: Iraq is a black box that has been sealed shut since Saddam came to dominate Iraqi politics in the late 1960's.  Therefore, one needs to have a great deal of humility when it comes to predicting what sorts of bats and demons may fly out if the U.S. and its allies remove the lid.  Think of it this way: If and when we take the lid off Iraq, we will find an envelope inside.  It will tell us what we have won and it will say one of two things.   It could say, "Congratulations! You've just won the Arab Germany — a country with enormous human talent, enormous natural resources, but with an evil dictator, whom you've just removed.  Now, just add a little water, a spoonful of democracy and stir, and this will be a normal nation very soon."   Or the envelope could say, "You've just won the Arab Yugoslavia — an artificial country congenitally divided among Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, Nasserites, leftists and a host of tribes and clans that can only be held together with a Saddam-like iron fist. Congratulations, you're the new Saddam."   In the first scenario, Iraq is the way it is today because Saddam is the way he is.  In the second scenario, Saddam is the way he is because Iraq is what it is.  Those are two very different problems.  And we will know which we've won only when we take off the lid.  The conservatives and neo-cons, who have been pounding the table for war, should be a lot more humble about this question, because they don't know either.   Does that mean we should rule out war?  No.  But it does mean that we must do it right.  To begin with, the president must level with the American people that we may indeed be buying the Arab Yugoslavia, which will take a great deal of time and effort to heal into a self-sustaining, progressive, accountable Arab government.  And, therefore, any nation-building in Iraq will be a multiyear marathon, not a multiweek sprint.   Because it will be a marathon, we must undertake this war with the maximum amount of international legitimacy and U.N. backing we can possibly muster.  Otherwise we will not have an American public willing to run this marathon, and we will not have allies ready to help us once we're inside (look at all the local police and administrators Europeans now contribute in Bosnia and Kosovo).  We'll also become a huge target if we're the sole occupiers of Iraq.   In short, we can oust Saddam Hussein all by ourselves.  But we cannot successfully rebuild Iraq all by ourselves.  And the real prize here is a new Iraq that would be a progressive model for the whole region.  That, for me, is the only morally and strategically justifiable reason to support this war.  The Bush team dare not invade Iraq simply to install a more friendly dictator to pump us oil.  And it dare not simply disarm Iraq and then walk away from the nation-building task.   Unfortunately, when it comes to enlisting allies, the Bush team is its own worst enemy.  It has sneered at many issues the world cares about: the Kyoto accords, the World Court, arms control treaties.  The Bush team had legitimate arguments on some of these issues, but the gratuitous way it dismissed them has fueled anti-Americanism.  No, I have no illusions that if the Bush team had only embraced Kyoto the French wouldn't still be trying to obstruct America in Iraq.  The French are the French.  But unfortunately, now the Germans are the French, the Koreans are the French, and many Brits are becoming French.   Things could be better, but here is where we are — so here is where I am: My gut tells me we should continue the troop buildup, continue the inspections and do everything we can for as long as we can to produce either a coup or the sort of evidence that will give us the broadest coalition possible, so we can do the best nation-building job possible.   But if war turns out to be the only option, then war it will have to be — because I believe that our kids will have a better chance of growing up in a safer world if we help put Iraq on a more progressive path and stimulate some real change in an Arab world that is badly in need of reform.  Such a war would indeed be a shock to this region, but, if we do it right, there is a decent chance that it would be shock therapy.   Outgoing mail scanned by NAV 2002