26 February 2010
26 February 2010
26 February 2010
THE J-STREET JUNKET…
0752 by Jeff HessLast week J-Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami led a political junket to Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. The wrong-wing here and in Israel continues to huff and puff that J-Street isn’t really pro-Israel because it has legitimate disagreements with the rump of the Neo-con right.
With Ben-Ami was our own Representative Mary Jo Kilroy (OH-15) along with reps. Lois Capps (CA-23), William Delahunt (MA-10), Bob Filner (CA-51) and Donald Payne (NJ-10).
One of the primary reasons I have a J-Street Pro-Israel Pro Peace (I can’t believe there’s no digital version available on the J-Street website) bumper sticker on the back of my laptop is that I agree with Ben-Ami’s conclusions upon the return from the trip.
From Word On The Street
There is in our community – and by that I include the whole of world Jewry as one people from Israel to the US and around the globe – a struggle developing between two camps with radically different visions of Jewish expression in the 21st century.
On one side of this struggle are those committed to our vision of time-honored Jewish and democratic values – grounded in respect for “the other,” a tolerance for dissent, and a willingness to sacrifice territory for peace.
On the other side are those who seem willing to muffle dissent, view all conflict as zero-sum, and place retaining captured land and territory at the center of its value system.
For a while now, it has been popular to say that for Israel there is a choice ahead between the land, being Jewish, and being democratic. Many leading Israelis have come to see that it’s possible only to have two of the three.I think the choice for world Jewry is similarly profound and stark. As a people – do we line up with those who seek to hang on to all of “Greater Israel” and watch our Jewish and democratic values erode in Israel and in our community, or do we stand up urgently for territorial compromise and for behavior in Israel and in our community that reflects our cherished and long-held values?
More than ever, it’s clear to me that we’re not fighting simply over Israeli or American foreign policy. We’re in a larger and more significant battle over who we are as a people in this new century and how our people are defined collectively for ourselves and for others by the behavior of the country that serves as our national expression.
26 February 2010
WHAT THEY SAY…
0715 by Jeff HessLeaders of a century ago invoked justice in remarkable language that is unimaginable today. President Woodrow Wilson called paying taxes “a glorious privilege.” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. observed that “taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
In 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt said, “In this time of grave national danger, when all excess income should go to win the war; no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000.” That $25,000 is the equivalent of $323,208 in today’s dollars.
Can you conceive of a modern president suggesting that no American should earn more than $323,000 after taxes? (President George W. Bush went to war twice without once calling for such a common sacrifice to pay for it.) And President Harry Truman in 1948 vetoed a broad-based tax cut, even in the face of an expected and eventual congressional override, and then asked for a tax increase following his upset victory.
26 February 2010
FROM MY DAD…
0630 by Jeff Hess
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog video excursion I present: From My Dad.
26 February 2010
FROM MY CHAPBOOK…
0030 by Jeff HessFound in my electronic chapbook.
Ideas turn up on television. p. 131
From Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block.
25 February 2010
GOOD MORNING MYANMAR…
2130 by Jeff Hess
Mercy, let alone civilized behavior, is clearly not a value instilled in the army commanded by Myanmar’s State Peace and Development Council (aka, its military dictators). With 40 percent of the countries population made up of ethnic minorities, we must expect reports of atrocities to only increase in the run-up to this fall’s maybe elections.
From The Washington Post:
Myanmar troops have gang-raped, murdered and even crucified Karen women, or those in their charge, who took on the roles of village chiefs in hopes they would be less likely abused than traditional male leaders, a Karen group said Thursday.
The atrocities, which also include beheadings, torture, forced prostitution and slave labor, are often committed as the troops attempt to root out a 60-year-old insurgency by guerrillas of the Karen ethnic minority, the Karen Women Organization said in a report.
Although the United Nations and other organizations have documented similar atrocities against Myanmar’s ethnic minorities, the government has consistently denied allegations of human rights abuses, saying its troops are only engaged in anti-terrorist operations.
The report said that the trend for Karen women to assume community leadership “has put women further into the front line of human rights abuses being committed by the Burma Army and their allies.” Myanmar is also known as Burma.
“I was not happy being village chief. It is similar to digging my own grave,” Daw Way Way, a 51-year-old woman who led her community for five years, was quoted as saying. Like a third of the 95 women interviewed for the report, Daw Way Way said she was tortured by soldiers during her tenure.
Please remind me again why we’re even talking about fair and open elections?
25 February 2010
25 February 2010
WHAT THEY SAY…
1541 by Jeff HessWhen it comes to politics, the consumer model has taken over just as our faith in politics and politicians has eroded. But this doesn”t mean that we still don”t want big solutions to big problems, problems like global warming and racial inequality (or at least personal distance from these matters). We just don”t believe these things will be taken care of through the ballot box or legislation anymore. If government can”t save the day, then we think our purchases can, and what makes this path even more attractive is that buying doesn”t call for much sacrifice at all.
Why worry about the political process when marketers tell us that we can pick up a grande latte or a new pair khakis and change the world? Even if the world doesn”t turn out better, we still get the things we want and look better for trying-and of course, there is always another product out there to try.
25 February 2010
25 February 2010
MY COMMENTS…
1112 by Jeff Hess25 February 2010
FECKIN’ A RIGHT IT IS…
0929 by Jeff HessIt really sucks when you spend the morning writing a blog-post, and you can’t convince yourself that you’re right. Hours of writing and thinking, and you don’t so much realize you’re wrong, as you’re just not convinced you’re right. All of that work for naught.
People who talk shit about bloggers need to try it. It’s fucking hard.
I have to believe that the words I’ve written and never posted easily out number the words I have posted 10:1.
25 February 2010
IN THE SPIRIT OF MORE MORAL COMPLEXITY…
0848 by Jeff HessI listened to John Yoo on NPR’s Talk Of The Nation on Tuesday and came away wondering if what Yoo told host Neal Conan was true, factual and legal. I still don’t know. I’m not J.D.-impaired so I freely admit that I miss nuances of Law. Adam Serwer’s musing greatly add layers of moral complexity for me.
The theological justification for al Qaeda’s wholesale slaughter of civilians was provided by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, one of the founding fathers of al Qaeda. Because the murder of innocents is forbidden in Islam and the murder of Muslims in particular, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden required some sort of theological framework for justifying terrorism. This was provided by al-Sharif, who essentially argued in his book, “The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge,” that apostates could be murdered, and that approach, takfir (which has come to be known as takfirism) allowed al Qaeda to, for all intents and purposes, kill anyone they wanted without violating the laws of Islam by declaring them to be apostates. In other words, Dr. Fadl helped provided a theological justification for something that everyone involved knew was wrong.
The legal memos justifying torture aren’t very different in terms of reasoning–it’s clear that John Yoo and his cohorts in the Office of Legal Counsel saw their job not as binding the president to the rule of law, but to declare legal any tactic that the executive branch believed necessary to fight terrorism. They worked backwards from this conclusion, and ethics officials at the Department of Justice, we now know, decided that they they had violated professional standards in doing so. Whereas al-Zawahiri and bin Laden turned to al-Sharif for a method to circumvent the plain language of the Koran, Bush and Cheney went to Yoo and Jay Bybee to circumvent the plain language of the law. Most Islamic scholars, just like most legal experts, reject their respective reasoning as unsound.
25 February 2010
25 February 2010
WHAT THEY SAY…
0829 by Jeff HessYou probably can’t convince me to support torture. But I don’t ask for a society that does everything I think is best. I ask for a society that doesn’t deceive itself. I don’t think I agree with dropping the bomb on Japan. (I think it qualifies as what we, today, call terrorism.) But I get the argument. And it’s important that I get the argument. It’s important that I’m able to put myself in Truman’s shoes, and in those shoes, not have any certain idea of what I would have done.
We need more moral complexity in our lives.
Yes we do.
25 February 2010
BUT PAYING ATTENTION COSTS YOU…!
0758 by Jeff Hess
I know that this is just a cartoon, but Lynn Johnston was real long before reality TV. I have students like Michael and sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference between non-linear thinkers and obnoxious brats. I wish there were a magic good-kid detector, but there isn’t.
I assume, until brutally proven otherwise, that the default is the former.
It works for me.
25 February 2010
WHAT THEY SAY…
0735 by Jeff HessAlex McGregor interviewing Kris Kristofferson:
And then he starts talking about William Blake.
“He was so committed to being an artist and preached that if you had the tools then you had a duty,” he says, and his voice gets lower as he starts to quote: “If you, who are organised by divine providence for spiritual communion, refuse and bury your talent in the earth, sorrow and desperation pursues you through life and after death, shame and confusion to face to eternity.”
25 February 2010
HE WROTE HIS ENDING…
0719 by Jeff HessEric has me in a Johnny Cash kind-of-mood this morning. What a brilliant artist.
25 February 2010
WHAT DOES THIS SAY ABOUT HIS MOTHER…?
0646 by Jeff Hess[Update–25 February @ 0646: Virginia state representative Bob Marshall is trying to stuff his words back in the bottle. Unfortunately for the silly little man, we have the video.]
25 February 2010
FROM MY DAD…
0630 by Jeff HessI could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog video excursion I present: From My Dad.
