Sunday Round-up

Although I haven't turned on the cable yet, I was, through fiddling with rabbit-ears (antennas for those who are too young to remember life without cable/Directv) able to pick up a snowy-screened "Meet the Press." I could listen to it on podcast, but I like to see people's facial expressions and gestures—they are often more telling than their words. Anyway, today it was disappointing: a lot of "talking heads," such as the Frick and Frack/husband and wife political consultants, Mary Maitland and James Carville. It's really hard to take them seriously when they had a sitcom on HBO that parodied their own consulting firm (the cancelled "K street"). They were guests, along with a couple of other consultants that had run, sometimes disastrously, presidential campaigns. It almost wasn't worth the effort of manipulating the antennas.

But what struck me was that they were talking about the presidential election fifteen months before it occurs in a way that people used to talk about an election that was just a couple months away. Yikes! Also, Fred Thompson (of "Law and Order" fame, a tv show for those of you who are not familiar with the program) may throw his hat in the ring. He is a one-term, and an unremarkable term, congressman and actor who has a reputation for slacking. The consultants all agreed that he is a viable candidate for the Republican party, and that he may challenge Rudy and John McCain. I find this hard to believe, polls or no polls: people want experience or someone with a reputation for a good grasp of current and foreign affairs. I think nearly eight years of ignominious and ignorant stewardship has taught the majority of Americans that you had better damn well have a president whose best accomplishment is more than a role on a hit tv series. I could be very wrong on this point, but I certainly hope I'm not.

Whoever wins, from either party, will inherit two wars on two fronts, or now that we are firing missiles into Somalia, maybe more fronts. This is complex, and it calls for someone who can intellectually tackle the wars, not just lob more soldiers at it (or in Afghanistan's case, not enough soldiers). Fourteen more soldiers died in the last two days in Iraq. If this bloody pace keeps up at half the rate of the last three days, 709 American soldiers will have died by the time the election occurs in Iraq alone. Furthermore, there will be more American deaths in Afghanistan, along with the deaths of Afghan civilians. And who knows how many thousands of Iraqis will die; no one seems to be tracking their casualties very well. You can speak all you want about "fostering a new democratic Iraq," but when neither the Iraqi government or the American administration can really tell the world how many Iraqis have died, it screams "subaltern people."

Anyway, I hope all the consultants, or rather exorbitantly paid soothsayers, are wrong about both parties' candidates. And I hope that the next president grasps the fact that "al qaeda" is an ideology, not just a loose coalition of groups. And to combat a militant ideology, you must have a better ideology, one that provides jobs and stability as opposed to nostalgia for the 12 century. Militarism alone cannot fight an ideology. Turning on the electricity for twenty-four hours a day (especially during the summer) will be far more appreciated than someone ordering you to grow a beard or shaving your head because you aren't wearing a head scarf (as documented by "Treasure of Baghdad" and "Zappy" of "Where date palms grow"). I know that is easier said than done, but infrastructure should be paramount now, in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Without this, as Yeats put it, from his poem, "The Second Coming,"

Things fall apart; the centre will not hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats, in 1919, was a prescient man.