I was looking through my blog archives for the post below and ran across a photo of an early prototype of the ill-fated Sparky and Blinky statues. Man, I was excited about that project. They really were extraordinary items, beautifully produced, absolute pieces of art. Anyway, it reminded me that we still have some unfinished business. Sorry to address this so publicly but I don’t have any other way to get ahold of you right now.
Unfortunately, of course, things didn’t work out so well with our partnership. You had some sort of run of bad luck that summer — I don’t know exactly what happened, you never really gave me the details — and eventually shut down production and closed your business. And then sort of disappeared entirely. I don’t know what was going on, but I’m sorry it worked out the way it did. The statues were really quite wonderful, and I’ve always regretted that we weren’t able to make them available to more than the first few customers who were lucky enough to get their orders filled.
That was a disappointment to me, but I understand that sometimes life spirals out of control. I don’t even care about the royalties I never received (for the handful of statues that did ship out). You put a lot of time and effort into this project, and my guess is you took quite a loss in the end. So that’s water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned.
The thing that really disappoints me is that you’ve never fulfilled your promise to send me the remaining stock of statues. At this point, I don’t care if they’re painted or unfinished. They’re the only copies that exist in the world, and I’ve been waiting for you to send them for — what, a year and a half now? Well, I’d still like to get them (as well as the molds if any still exist). So I’m hoping you’re out there, and that you see this.
I’m still at the same address. Send them COD, I’ll cover the postage.
I hope things have turned around for you. The world is a poorer place without your creative efforts.
Your friend,
Tom
(Note to anyone who received a set of these: my standing offer to trade an original strip for a set of these statues is still in effect).
But still, something must be said. Indeed, the editors of The New Republic have convened a “special issue” dedicated to pondering that sad country. It features, among other things, an unsigned editorial observing that “at this point, it seems almost beside the point to say this: The New Republic deeply regrets its early support for this war.” And, well, so do I regret my support for it. But what is one to do to make up for it? Mostly, nothing can be done. At least, however, when surveying a fiasco one can attempt to learn something about what went wrong and change one’s thinking in the future. Such a change in thinking is precisely why I, at least, having fallen for the Iraq boondoggle one time, was not seduced by the siren song of the Arab Spring. Those of us who chose not to get fooled again were, of course, heartily condemned by a March 2005 TNR editorial that espied a “certain grudging quality” to liberal takes on events in Lebanon. “So far,” they sniffed, Daily Kos “has featured only two short posts on Lebanon’s equally stirring Cedar Revolution — and both were notable mostly for their pessimism.” This was, perhaps, the measured version of the April 11, 2005, take offered by the magazine’s owner and editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz. He analyzed “The Politics of Churlishness” in a cover story dedicated to the proposition that “if George W. Bush were to discover a cure for cancer, his critics would denounce him for having done it unilaterally, without adequate consultation, with a crude disregard for the sensibilities of others.” And, about sixteen months later, of course, these voices so eager to condemn liberals for not celebrating the new freedom of the Lebanese were the loudest in clamoring for Lebanese blood.
“As we pore over the lessons of this misadventure” in Iraq, explained the magazine in last week’s reassessment, “we do not conclude that our past misjudgments warrant a rush into the cold arms of ‘realism.’” Given what else is said in the editorial and in the special issue, it’s fair to interpret this as meaning that, in surveying the scene, they conclude nothing in particular. For my part, at a minimum I’ve concluded that it’s a mistake to entrust the cause of American idealism and Arab reform to a movement led by people who plainly loathe Arabs (Palestinians “behave like lemmings” wrote Peretz two weeks ago before observing last week that Iraqis now lack “even the bare rudiments of civilizations”) and couldn’t care less about their well-being except insofar as pretense to caring is a useful club with which to batter domestic political opponents.:
The term itself reflected an astonishing level of cluelessness. As I wrote at the time:
I’ve noticed that the premature triumphalists of the right have lately adopted the phrase “Arab Spring.” I assume this is a reference to the “Prague Spring” of 1968–the brief period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia which, as you may recall, was brutally supressed in August of that same year.
Small suggestion to my friends on the right: if you’re going to come up with a clever nickname for your triumphalist fantasies, you might want it to refer to, you know, an actual triumph.
I know it’s not even Thanksgiving yet, but every year I get flooded with orders for signed prints at the last minute, and it ends up eating up most of my time right before the holidays. This year to make sure I can get everything mailed out on time without going nuts, I’m not taking any orders after Dec. 7.
The point is, as of today, you have two and a half weeks to get your orders in.
Post-election Connecticut for Lieberman update from the New Haven Register:
JLamont beat Lieberman in a bitter Democratic primary, which forced the incumbent to use a backup option he’d been preparing for months. The day after the primary, Lieberman handed state election officials more than 7,500 signatures supporting his bid to run as a candidate of the Connecticut for Lieberman party.
At the time, Orman protested that there really was no such party, and that Lieberman was simply manipulating the election system to invalidate the outcome of the Democratic primary. Election officials disagreed and Lieberman said he’d been forced to take that route in order to allow all of Connecticut’s voters the opportunity to vote for him.
Lieberman promised over and over to be an “independent Democrat” if elected to a fourth term. With lots of support from Republican and unaffiliated voters, Lieberman won with 50 percent of the vote.
Orman’s response was to trot down to his local registrar’s office to try to switch his party affiliation from Democrat to Connecticut for Lieberman, which is something no one else has done.
Although that switch isn’t official yet, Orman waggishly proceeded to convene a one-man party organizational meeting and elected himself “chairman.”
Chairman Orman also passed some rules for the party, including one requiring that, “If you run under Connecticut for Lieberman, you must actually join our party.”
Another of his tongue-in-cheek party rules reads as follows: “If any CFL candidate loses our party’s nomination in a primary, that candidate must bolt our party, form a new party and work to defeat our party-endorsed candidate.”
Why make up new lies when you already have perfectly good old ones sitting around?
I’m pleased to see Alberto Gonzales is still trotting out the same old crap about the NSA surveillance program. Here he is at an event yesterday:
The TSP [”Terrorist Surveillance Program”] is lawful. The president established the Program under both the authority given to him by Congress when it passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and by his authority under the Constitution.
We’re confident because the Terrorist Surveillance Program rests on firm legal ground. The Joint Authorization to Use Military Force, passed by Congress after 9/11, provides more than enough latitude for these activities. Therefore the warrant requirements of the FISA law do not apply to this wartime measure.
What I like about this is that new lies on their part would require us to figure out exactly how they’re lying. Whereas if you want to understand this old lie, you can just read this old Mother Jones article of mine.
Imad Khadduri, the Iraqi physicist who escaped to Canada in 1998 and did everything he could to expose the Bush administration’s lies before the invasion, writes from Amman:
Yesterday, I received an Email from a friend citing a very touching obituary for a young Iraqi boy by the name of Ali who died of leukemia in his family’s self imposed exile in Jordan. It was written by one of his teachers and published in Al Rai newspaper.
I wrote back to my friend to express my sympathy and told him that I wonder how many Iraqi Alis are dying without a word said about them. I did not know then that only few hours later I would have my Ali to mourn.
Ali is the nephew of my wife…But he was much more than that to me. He was like my own son who kept my company for eight years in Baghdad when my own sons were away. He was indeed a son, a friend, assistant and a delight to be with…He was great in dealing with children and loved so much my granddaughter Mariam who in return loved him and wanted him to be around as much as she wanted her parents…
Ali was killed in Baghdad on Thursday, November 7 by the Americans or their protégés, the national guards who were manning a close check point…
Does anybody doubt that there isn’t a home in Iraq now which is not suffering the loss or injury of a loved one? When will this nightmare end? When will we regain our country and see the back of this occupation?
Why do “they” hate us? Is it somehow connected to the way we cut off their limbs with chainsaws?
Before the 9/11 attacks came along, I used to work with groups trying to get the U.S. to stop funding Colombia’s right-wing paramilitaries. The pretense, of course, was we were funding the Colombian military in their heroic struggle in the War on Drugs. The reality, that the paramilitaries were run by the Colombian government to murder anyone to the left of Elliot Abrams, is finally being acknowledged:
The government of President Álvaro Uribe is being shaken by its most serious political crisis yet, as details emerge about members of Congress who collaborated with right-wing death squads to spread terror and exert political control across Colombia’s Caribbean coast…All are from the state of Sucre, where the attorney general’s office has been exhuming bodies from mass graves…
It’s difficult to overstate the level of human depravity exhibited by the paramilitaries. One of their favorite techniques is to kill people with chainsaws:
“The Chainsaw Massacre is not a film in Colombia,” said government ombudsman Eduardo Cifuentes, referring to the April 12 [2001] paramilitary massacre in Alto Naya, 650 kilometers (404 miles) southeast of [Bogota]…
It left some 128 people dead, including 40 in Alto Naya, according to official reports quoted by Cifuentes in an interview with AFP…
Around 400 paramilitaries took part in this “caravan of death” against civilians accused of supporting leftist guerrillas, Cifuentes said in his Bogota office.
“The remains of a woman were exhumed. Her abdomen was cut open with a chainsaw. A 17-year-old girl had her throat cut and both hands also amputated,” said the ombudsman…
“A neighbor pounced upon a paramilitary that was ready to shoot him and took his weapon, but unfortunately he didn’t know how to fire a rifle. They dragged him away, cut him open with a chainsaw and chopped him up,” a witness of the massacre told El Espectador daily.
I once attended a lunch with a Colombian union official. He said the paramilitaries would generally warn people like him of their intentions, by visiting them and cutting their sleeves or pants where they would later cut off their arms and legs if they didn’t flee the area. Less important people didn’t get warnings.
This year we’re giving Colombia approximately 600 million dollars for these appealing activities. The biggest upswing in aid came during the last years of the Clinton administration. What’s really neat is the paramilitaries are actually the ones controlling most of the cocaine trade in Colombia. In other words, as part of the War on Drugs, we’re giving massive aid to some of the world’s biggest drug dealers.
If past experience is any guide, the people mentioned in the above article as investigating this (e.g., Colombian Senator Gustavo Petro) have maybe four weeks to live.
SPECIAL BONUS DEPRAVITY: I once worked for a right-wing corporate lawyer who had (1) a massive cocaine addiction and (2) a Colombian maid who’d been a kindergarten teacher until she fled. I often felt he should have made the connection explicit by telling her, “Look at me! I can destroy your country and your life using only MY NOSE!!!”
Of course, in the long human tradition of utter indifference to those less powerful than you, he knew neither that she’d been a kindergarten teacher nor even that she was Colombian.
[Blair] was challenged by Sir David that the Western intervention in Iraq had “so far been pretty much of a disaster”.
He replied: “It has, but you see what I say to people is why is it difficult in Iraq?
“It’s not difficult because of some accident in planning, it’s difficult because there’s a deliberate strategy - al-Qaeda with Sunni insurgents on one hand, Iranian-backed elements with Shia militias on the other - to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced by the will of the minority for war.”
Yes…there are many things you can plan for in war, but one thing for which it is impossible to plan is someone fighting you.
A new CD & DVD edition of Johnny Cash at San Quentin. When I was growing up, the original LP version of this concert was a staple of our household, so I’m really looking forward to sitting down with this expanded version.
Don’t know her source, but my favorite AM radio leftie, Stephanie Miller, reports that someone is producing an operatic rendition of the O’Reilly/Mackris filings.
Just to refresh your memory:
Even more graphic highlights here, in case you’re in the mood for a stroll down memory lane with Bill.
