It’s interesting that the Bush administration changed its tune on a cease-fire in the latest Israel-Hezbollah conflict right after the Saudis came out on the side of and end to hostilities, isn’t it?
But I’m going to leave that alone for a second to look at the longer view. Yo! Israel! Yo! Hamas! Yo! Hezbollah! You’ve been at this for almost sixty years now. You have all used the same strategies, the same tactics; you have spouted the same inflamed rhetoric. Guess what? It hasn’t worked!
If, after sixty years of doing things basically the same way and failing at it, don’t you all think it might be time to try something different? Don’t you all think you should face some basic realities and begin to deal with them instead of playing a deadly game of the Hatfields and the McCoys?
Reality #1. Israel is here to stay. Arguments about its legitimacy, about its past treatment of Palestinians, about its inherent Jewishness are pretty moot at this point. It is going to be a permanent and powerful player in the region. Learn to live with it.
Reality #2. The Palestinians have a point. I’m enough of a Zionist to say that Israel does have a right to exist. But the Jewish people were absent from the area to a large degree for a thousand years or more during the Diaspora. That did not mean the area was unoccupied, and those who were there have a right to live, even if they have to share. But sharing means the kid with all the marbles, in this case Israel, also has to play fair.
Reality #3. The fighting is based on the inability of the other side to recognize that both sides reason the same way. The Civil War historian Shelby Foote once recounted a conversation between a Union soldier and a Confederate in which the Union man asked the man in Grey why he was fighting the war, and the Confederate responded “Cuz ya’ll are down here!” When you realize that your own reaction to violent incursions, random shelling, rocket attacks, and suicide bombs would itself be a violent one, then you can begin to realize why your own violent actions are doomed to fail. It doesn’t make the other side stop; it just makes them hate you more.
Reality #4. If it weren’t land considered holy by the world’s three largest monotheistic religions, no one would care. Look at Darfur. Look at Somalia. Tragic. But nobody sings Christmas carols called “Little Town of Mogadishu.” There is little but history in the area of Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon that has any actual value. Oh date palms, I suppose, olive groves. But we’ve got those in California. This means one thing: the only way you people are ever going to be really successful financially is if you all calm the hell down and work together to rob rich American Christians and Jews and rich Arab Muslims of their free-flowing tourist dollars. Now, with $3 billion a year in U.S. subsidies, Israel doesn’t really have to worry, but nobody is going to go there if they think they’re going to get blown up, and that hurts the merchant on the street come Christmas and Passover.
We’re so busy playing “You started it!” and “He’s the bad guy!” that we forget the real problem: there are no good guys in this case. Everybody is to blame. It’s time we all started to act like grown ups on the international stage and accept our guilt. And then move toward a functional solution.
I don’t know if this is true or not, that a dog smells the way we see, but his olfaction is so much richer. It’s both more broad and more deep: a dog is aware of the tiniest gradations of airborne chemistry; he can pick out a man’s stink from the cacophony of ragweed, mildew, cottonwood bark. But we share in some of that glory. To wit: the lust I feel when I smell Fendi has nothing to do with the actual smell, but with the channel of carnal power that is the scent memory. In full-cocked, trigger-happy youth the bond with the body is strong.
Scent wells up, wafts across, melds with the nerves and overcomes. Sight is much less intimate: popcorn fumes from a distant microwave are more of a distraction than a short skirt and a highly-stockinged thigh. You can avert you eyes from that beckoning length of leg, but you’ll have to leave the building to escape the popcorn’s buttery insinuations. And even then, its shadow lingers in your sinuses, a sultry gastronomical siren.
We’re beholden to smell in ways we’d refuse to admit in good company, or even with close associates and friends: a lover’s sweat, a diesel’s outgassing, the funk of a turning river. And we claim cats are crazy when they stick their heads into well-worn shoes for a long and wonderful whiff. Maybe on the face of it this is why we spend so much on sinus medication: happiness is a healthy nose.
Since the bulk of my work involves teaching freshman composition, I’m frequently confronted with the prototypical disaffected late-adolescent who finds everything boring. He is bored by politics, bored by peculiar social practices, bored by gastronomy, astronomy, theology and beer.
Yes, that’s right: today’s college freshman is even bored by beer, or claims to be anyway.
This makes it very difficult to find suitable subjects about which to write. And, as much as I hate
to say it, the disaffected late-adolescent has a point. As Paul Roberts notes in his classic essay on the topic of the freshman theme, pretty much all subjects, except sex, are really tedious on their own. Sex, of course, sells itself, which, I suspect, is one of the major reasons pornography so
upsets politicians. Purveyors of porn basically have a license to print money, and politicians cannot stand the idea that such a right would devolve to anyone else but themselves.
But I digress.
In order to make dull thing interesting, Roberts claims, you have got to find what is interesting about it and explain that in your writing. Take quilting, for instance. Most of those my age and gender would quickly assume that quilting was boring, and one can only imagine the sheer speed of eye-glazing the subject would no doubt produce in someone under the age of 25. Oh, they might be made to agree that quilts can be functional and maybe even pretty, but they would no doubt assert that the elders who tend to make such a fuss over quilts and quilting are probably overly sentimental and out-of-touch with “today’s society” with its cell phones and high-speed Internet and first-person-shooter video games, all of which provide a far more stimulating experience, as far as experiences go.
But then one spends some time actually looking at quilts. Even common star and wedding-ring patterns are highly complicated exercises in symmetry and form, the visual equivalents of the contrapuntal music of the Baroque. Unique variations on patterns are often produced spontaneously and by the quilters themselves. What other product of contemporary culture
creates durable, often heirloom-quality, material goods custom designed and individually made without the direct aid of industrial processes? Quilting is one of the last holdouts against a society built on infinite replicability and bottom-line approaches to manufacturing that alienate both quality and worker.
In other words, quilting is subversive.
If that does not persuade you that this subject is interesting, consider this: each quilt represents a stultifyingly difficult set of visuo-spatial problems. At each stitch, the quilter must coordinate her actions at a level of a fraction of an inch in order to produce an effect that plays itself out as a
pattern that occurs over many square feet. She must constantly imagine the whole, concentrate on the stitch at hand, and bear in mind the relationship between the two. The “multitasking” the young are so keen on just seems silly in comparison to what quilters are able to do–and do quite
well–for hours on end. And quilting is often a collaborative effort, so quilters must also coordinate their actions with those of several others simultaneously. That they do all this while also carrying on conversations that have nothing to do with the quilt and succeed in producing a thing of such intricacy and beauty is even more astounding.
Quilting is aesthetic, economic, psychological, physiological, and sociological. It is considerably more complex and, yes, interesting at close range than it is at the distance the young and fit seem happy to keep it. Quilting reveals itself to be a mighty good subject to write about after all, and it proves my last and most important point: if you are bored with the world around you, it probably means you aren’t paying attention.
Yesterday, the blogger ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mcsnee noted that the Bush administration’s lack of diplomatic efforts to stop the current conflict between Israel and Palestine is influenced by the President’s adherence to an apocalyptic form of conservative Christianity. And this is no doubt a big part of what is going on. But we can’t discount the power of the almighty dollar.
Consider that President Cheney and his second in command have largely ignored this conflict for the six years they have been in office, recently coming out in support of Israel. This not only rolls back eight years of careful and quite successful diplomacy by the Clinton administration, it also adds fuel to the fire of political instability in the region. This is particularly rankling to Iran, which funds Hezbollah, the pro-Palestinian militia group based in Lebanon and which the Israeli army has recently invaded Lebanon to in order to combat. Cheney and Bush were also responsible for the war in Iraq, a conflict ginned up by Cheney when he was still at Halliburton and strongly pushed by him and a proxy intelligence group he had installed at the Pentagon when he got into office.
Then consider this: the always jittery commodities market, which is sustained and energized by speculation, has responded to these crises by raising the price of oil to record highs. It peaked last night at over $78 a barrel. Note that this price is not based on any real crimp in supply, aside from a pipeline bombing in Nigeria, part of a separate regional conflict. Therefore, all of that run up in the price of oil is pure profit to the oil companies, companies that have close ties to both Cheney and Bush. And while they both moved assets into “blind trusts” when they got back into office, the family fortunes of these men, and the fortunes of their friends, are still very much bound up with the price of oil. They have a vested interest in political instability in the Middle East. Their policies have amounted to doing on the world stage what Enron did in the U.S.: they create crises in order to make money off the misery of others and the twitchiness of market speculation.
To make matters worse, due to term limits, Cheney and his Puppet-In-Chief are essentially politically untouchable. They don’t need to get re-elected in 2008. They are basically accountable to no one. The American people could turn all the Republicans who are running in the fall out of office and it would not make a bit of difference to the White House. Cheney and Bush can hold the entire American economy hostage through Big Oil, and, short of impeachment, there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
And it really won’t matter to Cheney and Bush if the American economy tanks due to increased energy costs. By then they will be out of office, no doubt working as lobbyists for the oil companies, making lucrative deals with the governments of China and India.
I suppose the Cheney/Bush administration could resort to diplomacy to stop the crisis, but, perhaps for reasons detailed above, it has no desire to do so. And one wonders if it would be capable even if it wanted to. American foreign policy of the last half decade has consisted of the Secretary of State saying something “firm” about the nations involved followed by Dick Cheney threatening to bomb them the next Sunday on the morning talk shows. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence as the world becomes more in need of international caution and tact, but it sure has made a few people very, very rich.
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