Author: Aaron Weber

Upstanding Citizens Against the War

You may see protestors out there protesting and think, do they know what they’re doing? We can’t let the Iraquis know we don’t have the heart for a real fight. And look at them. They’re not organized. They haven’t bathed. White kids with dreadlocks! They think they can change the world by pretending to throw up at city hall?

Well, I’m glad to let them shout. This is my shout right here. I don’t give a damn about Mumia. I don’t want to smash capitalism. I think “globalization” is a a word and not an evil. I’m all for free trade and free movement of goods services and people around the world. And I’m opposed to this war.

So is George Soros. Yes, that George Soros. The billionaire financier and philanthropist is the latest to object, sanely and forcefully, to the Bush policies.

I call on moderates and conservatives, preppies and yuppies and button-down shirt wearers, to reject this war! Join me, and the fiscal-responsibility lobby, and the soverign-international-law advocates! Take common cause with the Pope and the WTO and the godless anarchist hippies!

I consider myself a patriot, I really do. And I do not object to all war or all violence. I know a bit about other countries and I like this one because it is my home. But because I love it I can acknowledge its flaws and mistakes (e.g. Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973) and speak out against repeating them. I love my country and I would be willing to die for it, and I appreciate the valor of the soldiers who are out there fighting for … whatever it is. But I know this: The US Armed Forces are not in Iraq to protect me or to promote freedom. They’re pawns bleeding for someone else’s empire, or madness, or blind rage. And all the while our executives in the White House and the board room stay home undermining everything we stand for, dividing us, tearing us apart.

I know it’s too late to stop the war, really. It’s obvious by now that a fair number of the Iraqi people support Saddam despite their dislike of him, just like a lot of Americans hold their noses and support Bush in wartime. Bush is our leader, we have to support him, for national pride and for strength in unity. Saddam is their leader, they have to support him for just the same reasons. People have begun to make comparisons with Stalingrad: as awful as Stalin was, and as much as the Russians hated him, they fought to the death to defend their country because Stalin was their evil and they would not trade him for another.

Well, we’ll see be fighting house to house, and civilian bombardment, and we’ll level Baghdad and Basra, and send another half a million troops and quarter trillion dollars before it’s over. We’ll all suffer for this folly. And because I am a patriot I I will suffer with the rest of my country. But I’m not going to just lie down and take it, and I have no intention of letting George W. Bush escape the consequences for what he’s done.

The Bright Side

Achievable goals. Sane list of tasks. Pressure is exciting but not overwhelming. Going home for lunch. Corner pharmacy open on weekends. Meetings with my boss Carlos that always help organize and focus. Taking my summer pants out of storage. Knowing how to salvage the shirt I spilled bleach on. A bar crawl for peace. Waking up to sunlight and then going back to sleep and still making it to work on time. Chocolate. Trail mix. Frank Black. Flirting over IM with people I have never met. Learning to enjoy singleness. Trying to persuade Helen to use the Darth Vader march as her wedding theme.

Home is Where the Hearth Is

Here’s a picture of the radiator in my apartment.

Sometimes when I was in therapy back in high school, I would stop talking and just stare at the floor. The doctor would wait a moment to see if I was coming back on my own before she asked “where’d you go?” I had a hard time explaining.

Daria was amazed once when she looked at me and noticed I was running through some hypothetical conversation in my head. “You’ve got a whole universe in there, don’t you?” It was a revelation to her about how my mind worked. She found it endearing, but I’m not sure what good she got out of it.

Last month I took her pictures off my wall and put them in my filing cabinet. Today I deleted the last two years of email. Ctrl-A select all, Ctrl-D delete, Ctrl-E expunge. If only the universe inside my head had keyboard shortcuts.

Where did I go? Hell, where am I now? How many times have I said to myself “I want to go home!” before realizing I’m at home, it’s just that I’m so completely alienated from the world around me that no place feels right. There’s no place like home. Nothing is homelike. Not even my inner world with its own little radiators painted institutional eggshell.

Commerce and Death

Commerce continues even in the midst of tragedy. It is, after all, one of the ways people can process the world around them: integrating it into their daily lives and rituals. So we get ads for chemicals of cockroach destruction. There’s a Taiwanese company making rice crackers that you can use to act out the conflict. Parodic products, too, like meals of mass destruction.

Of course, the world continues in ways that have nothing to do with the war, as well. It’s all very Auden and Breughel really. While allying with the US against North Korea, South Korea is still pursuing a WTO ruling against the US on tarrifs. Editorials in Taiwan use any opportunity to proclaim the Chinese government as despotic and awful, which is probably pretty accurate. Pioneers of technology and commerce die and are euologized.

Mobile Stupidity

I’m so immersed with the online world that when I saw an ad for a new Charlotte’s Web movie today, I wondered what a pig and a spider had to do with the Internet. So, pardon me while I rant about the fine distinctions between two things that nobody actually cares about anyway.

Well, I’m looking at cell phone upgrades. Mine is so old and ugly that it has induced people to point and laugh, so I figure it’s about time. And there’s all these new cool features, right? Like maybe this hot mobile web-browsing stuff I keep hearing about from places like Danger. And since I’ve got their DSL and long distance, I figure that Verizon Mobile Web would be a good place to start. After all, they give a discount for bundling sevices.

I got to the point of showing up ready to buy a phone when I found out that when they say “Mobile Web” they don’t actually mean that you can access the web from your mobile phone. Now, I don’t expect competing services like mMode or iMode to do this, but if it’s called “Mobile Web,” it sure sounds like a mobile web access service to me!

What do you get for your Mobile Web subscription? You get WAP. You get Hotmail and IM and a couple tidbits in their special walled garden of licensed content. WAP sucks. It has been a well-documented failure for years and you’re still promoting it like it’s the hot new thing?

For actual mobile web access — say, blogging from my phone — I’d need to buy a Pocket PC (up to $599 after rebate), and pay $60/month for the minimum plan, plus per kilobyte data charges if I go over the allowance. Per kilobyte.

You fucking assclowns! What fool branding agency came up with that? Whoever picked that name doesn’t know IP from taking a piss.

Morbid Fascination

Someone told me today that he reads my site with morbid fascination. I think that might be a compliment but I’m not sure.

I myself am morbidly fascinated by the world around me. I read all the news I can stomach.
The Motley Fool news summary grabbed my eye today: Halliburton has a $1B contract rebuilding Iraq (again.) The article doesn’t mention any conflicts of interest. Maybe because that’s obvious?

The Fool does come through with this little pearl of wisdom:

“I don’t read no papers, and I don’t listen to the radio, either. I know the world’s been shaved by a drunken barber, and I don’t need to read about it.” — Walter Brennan (1894-1974), actor.

Good point. One of my co-workers would agree. He gets annoyed by everyone else’s morbid war-obsession.

But I’m obsessed. I know I am. I can’t stop reading and spinning and thinking. There’s a great take on neologisms and slogans over at Carol Lay’s Story Minute. An interview with a British reporter who’s seen it all before, and apologizes for making comparisons to WWII. An unapologetic editorial about Stalingrad and morass. And meta-coverage of Iraqi TV.

I don’t even read whole articles any more. Once I’ve loaded the page I’m on to the next. Sometimes I bookmark them as I go, and then come back later to find a dozen or so unread outdated articles. It’s the sort of thing that can inspire morbid fascination: Google News is my only friend.

News Sources

If the domestic perspective seems a little right-of-center to you, and you want to know what people with other biases have to say, you could do worse than the English Al Jazeera, translations of the prime regional media outlet. Other sources include the Arabic News, which as far as I can tell is an online-only regional news site with content translated from the Arabic, in contrast to the Arab News, which is a Saudi-based English-language print paper with a web presence.

My conclusion is that we’re not going to see really cool-headed analysis for at least fifty or a hundred years. Read the protestor’s account and especially the comments at the end, which vary from “those fascist pigs!” to “you fucking hippies!” and tell me we’re not polarized here.

Peace is not the product…

AKMA points me to the fact that today is the anniversary of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, a tireless advocate for peace in El Salvador who was gunned down while giving mass. The day before his muder, he gave a sermon that included the statement

In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression.

Linky Link

Are you scared? Are you suspicious? Are you freaking terrified? My friend Duncan has family in Hong Kong and is pretty upset. I don’t blame him.

Some people think we can blame fructose for many of our health woes, if not the mystery plague. Of course high-fructose corn syrup is bad for you. That doesn’t mean it’s the one evil food you can cut from your diet and change your life. Remember: moderation, complexity, shades of grey.

For example, when you bring out the word appeasement you’ve usually ended the useful conversation right there. But it does seem that if we’d dethroned Saddam back in ’91 we wouldn’t be in this mess now. Of course, there are a lot of things we could have done to prevent this. What-could-we-have-done is a fun game to play, but it’s useful only to the extent that it can show us what we ought to do now.

In a few years, we’ll begin to see the wisdom of the 1990s welfare reform plan, and whether we should have done something different. We’ve got some data now– but we aren’t sure if fewer people on welfare is really good, or if it means there are a lot of poor people who aren’t getting help.

You can also turn to literature for guidance. Mark Twain is being quoted a lot recently for his rant about war and God. It reminds me a little bit Psalm 137:8-9, which goes like this:

O daugher Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!