And To Whom, Exactly, Does This Come as a Surprise?

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat

Bill Clinton Is the Last Democrat with Balls

Thanks to Antonius at Boring Diatribe for pointing this out. Bill Clinton has been all over the news for his recent billionaires-for-good-works schmoozefest (passing by which I saw former secretary of state Madeleine Albright getting into a car Friday, but that's neither here nor there) but when Fox interviewed him about it and shifted gears to talk about Osama Bin Laden, the former president handed interviewer Chris Wallace his head, along with the heads of a few other folks:

I’m being asked this on the FOX network . . . ABC just had a right wing conservative on the Path to 9/11 falsely claim that it was based on the 9/11 Commission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report. I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said that I did too much. Same people. . . . But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try and they didn’t . . . I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke . . . So you did FOX’s bidding on this show. You did you nice little conservative hit job on me. But what I want to know . . . I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked this question of. I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked: Why didn’t you do anything about the Cole? I want to know how many you asked: Why did you fire Dick Clarke? I want to know.

About time somebody laid it on the line a little more forcefully. The Democrats have spent too much time whining and pining and then pandering to the right rather than standing up and demonstrating the courage of their convictions--and the guts to lead. If they don't start doing that as a party, they can look forward to more defeats, and deserve what they get. I admire Al Gore's intelligence, I laud Howard Dean for his ability to mobilize the grass roots, I am a fan of Barack Obama's thoughtfulness--but so few of the party have been willing to face down the lies and the liars and call them what they are, and in so doing have become complicit in the lies by their inaction or weak protest.

If someone stands by and watches a murder, saying only, "Gee, man, not sure you should be doing that," would you praise him for his efforts to save a life? Of course not. At the very least, he needs to be screaming his lungs out for help, and if he truly wants to save a life, if he actually gives a shit, he ought to get in there and fight. It's wrong to stand by and let it happen without protest, or with only polite, safe protest.

So is this.

The Fucking Tourist Index

I wrote recently in a much more somber context about the New York Times article on the gap between people who were in New York when the towers fell versus those who have moved here thereafter. It has long been my view that one is officially a New Yorker when you catch yourself muttering "fucking tourists." (This is usually a reaction to a family of visitors strung out across the sidewalk hand in hand forming an impassable human chain as they saunter along looking upward at those great big buildings, causing all the people who have to be somewhere to clamber around them or walk in traffic to get past; or perhaps this family of visitors is taking up half a subway car, popping up and down every few seconds to look at the map, generally in groups; or maybe they are simply stopping short as they step off the subway escalator to take in the marvels of an urban transit station while the people behind them are forced to backpedal because the visitors are blocking their egress from the moving stairs . . . you get the idea--and now know what not to do when you get here if you want to blend. See, it's not just all about wearing black. Which, incidentally, tourists never do.) But I have come to think that the "fucking tourist" measure can be further refined.

• Lifelong New Yorker: Never passes through Times Square under any circumstances, because it's full of fucking tourists.


• Assimilated New Yorker: Same as above, but used to pass through Times Square sometimes before he/she knew better. Knows exactly where the Good Morning America studio and the MTV studios are as a result of this prior experience.


• Partially assimilated New Yorker: Still passes through Times Square periodically because he/she is still secretly enthralled with the Blade Runner spectacle of lights and signs and videos and news crawls, but is still ticked at the fucking tourists he/she is forced to wade through. (This would be me, pre-9/11; I was in Times Square just after the first plane hit.)


• Converted New Yorker: Missed the fucking tourists when they went away. Walked through the mostly deserted Times Square, fighting tears at the site of cops from Florida and New Jersey standing in for our own, who were busy downtown. Reflexively wanted to mutter "fucking tourists" at the few who came and who, upon finding the rare genuine New York City police officer or firefighter who was not otherwise engaged at Ground Zero, wanted a picture taken with him/her. Didn't mutter "fucking tourists," though, because it hurt too much to think about why they were so thin on the ground.


• New New Yorker: Goes out of his/her way to help those families stretched across sidewalks; either slows down to walk behind them (even if it makes him/her late) or asks them really nicely to move and explains why. Doesn't call people fucking tourists, and when he/she finally assimilates enough to do so, won't feel the tension between the gladness at finally feeling healed enough to bitch about fucking tourists again and the irony at the memory of when we missed them so much.

Backwards and in High Heels

Former Texas governor Ann Richards passed away the other day at the age of 73. Wish she had been the former Texas governor in the White House.

Wednesday at lunch I and a couple of colleagues were discussing whether the U.S. is ready for a female president. I don't think it's that the nation isn't ready for a woman in that role so much as that the right woman isn't on the scene. (Forget Hillary Clinton. She is a lightning rod for controversy, a political opportunist, not to mention a supporter of this--finally--unpopular war. It's not her gender that's the problem.)

Was England ready for a female prime minister when Margaret Thatcher took the reins? I wouldn't have said so, but they were clearly ready for Mrs. Thatcher herself.

The thing I always admired about Maggie Thatcher (since it certainly wasn't her political views) was that she was so clearly comfortable in her job and in her skin, and had no fear of confrontation--on the contrary, she seemed to thrive on a good fight. At her final prime minister's question time (a much more raucous spectacle, complete with heckling and booing and name-calling, than our own legislative bodies), she paused in the middle of a boisterous debate and said, "I'm having a wonderful time!" Which she clearly was.

And so was Ann Richards, I think. Richards spoke her mind boldly, fearlessly, and often wittily. She had the courage of her convictions (which ultimately cost her reelection to the Texas governorship when she vetoed a couple popular pieces of legislation, including a bill that would have freed Texans to carry concealed weapons and own semiautomatics) and made sure the voters knew what those convictions were. And she was apparently no less quick, sure, and courageous offstage: there's a much-repeated story in which a white man dismissed a black public official, refusing to shake his hand, and moved quickly past him to Richards, asking her name. Without missing a beat, she cheerfully introduced herself as the black man's wife.

Ann Richards once famously said that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but Rogers had to do it backwards and in high heels. Moreover, Rogers did it sufficiently effortlessly that she never got quite the same recognition for it that her dancing partner did. Likewise, for a woman to be elected to the highest office in this country, she will have to be better than her male rivals, not just in her ability to do the job (which, come on, is virtually impossible to assess in the course of a campaign of sound bites and attack ads; and in fact doing a bad job doesn't seem to keep someone from being reelected), but in her ability to win the hearts and minds of the American voter with apparent effortlessness. We have to not pay much notice to the fact that she's a woman, not because she's pretending to be or indistinguishable from a man, but because it's minor compared to what we do notice about her.

There's no woman in the national political arena today who fits the bill: Hillary Clinton is many things, but I wouldn't put "genuine" among them; Nancy Pelosi sometimes comes off as defensive, as if she's trying too hard, and lacks the speaking-from-the-heart confidence in her views that both Thatcher and Richards epitomized; and can you name another woman with national stature?

Thatcher and Richards were leaders with guts. Those are in short supply in both male and female political candidates and elected officials. If a woman comes along who has them, we'll be ready for her. Backwards and in high heels or not.

Call to Action

Monday I tried to give voice to feelings around 9/11; Antonius at Boring Diatribe finds in the aftermath a call to action: not the destruction of piling up more bodies (one notes that approximately as many American soldiers have died in our so-called war on terror as civilians were killed in the 9/11 attacks; and we don't even know for sure how many Iraqi civilians have died), but rather something constructive:

There has been much controversy over a memorial for the victims of 9/11, but any monument is so much empty steel and stone if we do not build the better world demanded of us.

Here, here.

Five Years in the Shadow

I was watching the French newscast this evening; they marked the eve of the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks with a retrospective of the events of the day--clearly, concisely, almost clinically. Compressed into a couple of minutes were the first plane hitting, the fire and smoke, the second plane, people waving from upper-story windows and finally leaping from one certain death to another, and then, one after the other, the buildings folding into dust.

Five years on, having seen the image of the second plane a thousand times from a dozen angles, I still found it hard to watch. Hours after watching it, I am still shaken. I can't begin to imagine how it must be for those who were there, or whose loved ones were to become part of that cloud of smoke and dust.

There are "where were you when" moments for every generation: Where were you when JFK was assassinated? (I don't remember; I was only four. I knew who he was, though, and I remember the funeral vividly.) When King was shot? (In school. They closed the school and sent us all home.) Bobby Kennedy? (Asleep. My mother shook me awake before the alarm when she heard the news. We had a school field trip that day to Little Red Schoolhouse Nature Center, during which the teacher silenced us periodically for updates from her transistor radio. I remember imagining that he would recover and make a surprise campaign stop at our destination, be waiting there to greet us. On the ride home was the final update that he was dead.) The two shuttle disasters? (Home, both times. Saw them on TV after the fact.)

9/11?

That last one is different. How we experienced those other earth-shaking events has its commonality in the moment, either of the event or of hearing the news: the when. But for 9/11 the impact is different depending where you were relative to the events. The New York Times had an article a few days ago about this.

Newcomers and survivors: those terms ring harsh and blunt only because the line is so often unspoken. It runs soundless and invisible down Broadway from Harlem over the Williamsburg Bridge out to Coney Island and to Fresh Kills, up past the airports across the Grand Concourse into Yankee Stadium, through the bleachers where you can’t drink beer anymore and up out of the park into the nighttime sky.

The line flashes into view on the city streets for moments at a time. When jet fighters buzz the skyscrapers for Fleet Week, some of the people below — the ones who were here on Sept. 11 — flinch. More frequently, though, the line operates beneath the surface of conversations, of interactions, of transactions, of life. The line controls small things, controls the way people react to the phrase “and then Sept. 11 happened,” as though a date on the calendar could “happen.”

Some of the newcomers in the article express dismay at the you-had-to-be-there reactions of those who were in the city when, as the article says, 9/11 happened. But unlike those other historical moments, this one didn't happen just to one or a few people--it happened to the thousands killed, the thousands more who were there and made it out alive, and the millions--like me--who were near enough to see . . . and to wonder whether we were next.

The where makes it vivid, unforgettable, even behind squinched-shut eyelids. Fiction writers are often told to make their work more vivid with imagery of smell and taste. How vivid is 9/11? How much of the rancid, dusty air did you breathe, the air that probably contained the dust of some of the dead?

I was 80 blocks away, in Midtown Manhattan. I read back over what I wrote at the time to friends in other places who were only seeing the flat images on their TVs. I repost those notes here in five parts:

• I: Manhattan Refugees


• II: Living in the Penumbra


• III: Becoming


• IV: Pilgrimage


• V: Coming of Age in an Imperfect World

The key part is not the attacks but rather what "normal" became in the days after, when the Korean ladies at the nail salon greeted returning regular customers with hugs--because who knew which of them had gone forever. When every surface was papered in photos of the missing, first labeled "Have you seen" and later changed to "In memory of" when hope finally gave out. Some of what I wrote then, and remember just as vividly now:

Thursday we went to work. We stopped at the Quik-Stop by the train for a newspaper (we couldn't get a paper Wednesday--they were all gone in minutes). Outside the door, a fireman heaped his gear, hat perched on top, as he and two colleagues went in for coffee. I'm not normally one to offer benediction to strangers--in a normal world, it seems kind of obnoxious; but this isn't a normal world--but I couldn't walk by without speaking. After a nervous "Hi, guys," I offered, "God bless." As we walked a few steps behind them up to the train, the senior of the three was explaining how to protect the eyes from the dust of the pulverized buildings once they arrived.

A couple months ago, three firefighters died here in an explosion at a hardware store in Astoria, Queens. The city slowed down to remember them. When a crowd of firefighters rode the train to their funeral, the conductor made an announcement on behalf of the passengers and crew of condolence, thanks for what they do, and begged them all to be safe. The dead men's pictures are still posted in various places--banks, stores--and there have been any number of charitable funds and events to raise money to support their families. Just to show you how this city feels about its firefighters.

There are maybe a hundred times as many firefighters lost this week as died in the Astoria fire. As a result, firehouses in the city have become places of pilgrimage--mounds of flowers outside, people bringing food inside. At HarperCollins, the company has set up bulletin boards for employees to place their notes, poems, pictures, anything they want to send to the firefighters, cops, and their families, and the company will take them down and deliver them periodically. The library promotions department made lunches for the firefighters at the firehouse on 44th. A colleague said he and his wife went to their Brooklyn firehouse Wednesday just to say thank you. (Brooklyn is, by the way, covered in ash blown from the disaster. Last night the wind changed and you could smell the smoke in Queens.)

Homes of the missing are sites of pilgrimage, too. We're lucky; as far as we know so far, no one on our street was in or near WTC. I keep hearing colleagues talk about candlelight vigils in front of the homes of missing neighbors. Meantime, the city is papered with photos of the lost, adult milk-carton photos: Have you seen my brother, wife, mother, uncle, who was last heard from on whichever floor of one of the towers? You can't help thinking, as we hear how even the steel of the building was reduced to dust by the fire and impact, that there will never be a body for many of these families to bury. To dust you shall return.

And it's not over. Thursday was a day of rolling bomb threats in Midtown. Every few minutes there would be a sudden sea of people outside a building that had been evacuated. Sure, we know that it's mostly fucking idiots with telephones, taking advantage of our anxiety. We also know that all it would take is one real bomb exploding in one of these buildings to shatter our fragile resolve to go on as usual.

When I left the house Thursday morning, I seriously considered leaving a note on the table with instructions for friends and family should we not arrive home. Each good-bye is invested with a lot more awareness of the tenuousness of life, that anything could happen and you might not see this person or place again. When I left Rob at his office to walk the couple blocks farther to mine, he said, "You'll be okay? You want me to walk you there?" On Monday it would have been an unthinkably ridiculous question. On Thursday it seemed utterly normal.

They tested the fire alarms in our office building; when the PA came on to say that, the "May I have your attention please" made most of us jump out of our skins. At lunch in a diner (Time Warner had been evacuated, so why not meet for lunch?), I caught sudden sight of a mural of the twin towers, and it startled me. When I reacted with "Oh my god" and pointing, Rob just about hit the ceiling thinking I had seen something on a TV or through a window, another building turned to dust.

No, just a ghost.

Yeah, it's different here. Even five years on.

They Died for Your Rights

I'm not quite in the frame of mind to go back to work tomorrow after the luxury of a long weekend of sleeping past the alarm. A few hours ago, I was watching fireworks after a ball game, accompanied by the usual mélange of patriotic music, or what passes for it (love Bruce's "Born in the U.S.A." but have the people who use this for every national holiday fireworks display really not clued in to the irony? it's not as if it's subtle) and the usual message about troops dying to preserve our freedoms.

But on Labor Day it seems more appropriate to remember some other men and women, those not in uniform, who fought and in many cases died for our rights: our rights to a limited work week--to have this weekend, or any weekend, off--and rights to a minimum wage, to negotiate our pay and work in safe conditions, to have recourse if we are treated unfairly or work in unnecessarily hazardous circumstances, to name a few. It's not so terribly long ago that asking for a raise in pay or an improvement in harmful working conditions might be met with a counteroffer in the form of a few hired thugs with clubs. And yet many men and women stood up, and when they fell others stood up in their place, to earn the workplace rights most of us take for granted.

Unions have lost their good name, perhaps because the largest ones have become, as giant organizations so often do, more focused on the interests of the organization and its management than on the needs of the people they exist to represent and serve. As a result, unions have lost their potency as a genuine force for progressive change, which is a sad thing for the working stiff but also is a poor legacy for those early union organizers--factory workers, sweatshop laborers, new immigrants--who faced intimidation and violence in the name of making a better life for themselves and for their heirs.

Their heirs: that would be us. This holiday would be a good time to remember the people who gave us Labor Day and much more.

Pretty / Ugly

Everybody judges everybody by looks--at least at first, appearance is one of the first clues we have about anyone we meet. But it has always been harder for a woman to overcome that, not least because American culture is so strongly tilted in favor of the beautiful (or at least some ideal that many accept as beautiful). Even the female TV and movie characters who are supposed to be the plain one are prettier than the general average (and certainly thinner). Remember Kate Jackson on Charlie's Angels? (Yes, kids, there was a TV show before the movies. Look it up in your history books.) She was supposed to be the average-looking one. Yeah, right. More recently, I read somewhere that Teri Hatcher of Desperate Housewives was refreshing for looking like a normal forty-year-old woman. Teri Hatcher?! Please.

just ran across a couple of things that suggest that maybe, just maybe, media is open to the idea of acknowledging that looks-ism for women is a reality. Nike is running an ad on the US Open coverage (you can see the ad at the Nike site) with Maria Sharapova. Sharapova walks through her hotel, rides a cab, passes reporters and fans, and enters the stadium accompanied by all the people around her singing "I Feel Pretty" with what's clearly intended as disdain. (And none of these people are conventionally attractive.) You're just another Kournikova, only here for your looks, they seem to be saying. Then Sharapova demolishes a shot for a point--and everyone shuts up about her looks.

Meantime, there's a new series debuting this fall called Ugly Betty, about a chunky Hispanic girl with braces on her teeth working at a fashion magazine. It's adapted from a Colombian telenovela which has reportedly been adapted in numerous languages and countries, and is hugely popular around the world. Entertainment Weekly (my bible of popular culture--I don't actually have to watch TV or see movies or listen to music to know what people are talking about--and it helps me get my money's worth out of TiVO) asked when Betty would get prettied up. She won't, the producers promise. I hope they're good as their word.

The actress who plays Betty, America Ferrera, came to notice in Real Women Have Curves is actually quite pretty out of the Ugly Betty drag, but she's not rail-thin--she is shaped like a real girl. At the same time, Sara Ramirez, who won the Tony award for her role in Spamalot on Broadway, has a regular role on the romance-novel-disguised-as-a-doctor-show Grey's Anatomy--Ramirez is another woman who probably wears a dress size with two digits but both on Broadway and in this program, nobody's casting her as the fat girl.

So perhaps we are not moving as far away from looks-ism as I might like, but at least we're starting to acknowledge a broader range of beauty--and that beauty and accomplishment are two different things. At least I would like to hope so.

Abortion Was Just the Beginning

I don't remember how I ran across the blog "Abortion Clinic Days," written by women who are counselors at a clinic that performs abortions. Certainly these women have an agenda: this is their chosen profession, so their views on the issue are quite clear. But by telling the stories of some of the women they have met, they defy the stereotyping of the women who seek their clinic's services.

A couple of recent posts there have addressed the spiritual and religious dimensions of these women, like this one:

what she wanted was not closure between her and god which she felt she was on her way to finding, but rather that her pregnancy be sent to god. i told her that she could view her tissue and say whatever prayers over it that she chose, but she said no that was not what she needed. she then asked me if i would baptize the baby and i agreed to. another staff person and i went to a private room, turned down the lights, then said the prayers together.

Then there's this one, a woman who is struggling to feed the children she has:

she wonders if she will go to hell for choosing abortion, but said she would risk going to hell after her death rather than put her children at risk now.

I ask those in her church: would you really damn a woman for making that choice?

This is the thing about abortion. Those who would outlaw it don't always address the realities of what makes women seek abortions (and I could go on at length about that, but I won't); there-oughta-be-a-law changes the legalities without changing the reality--you have to provide the infrastructure to support an alternative decision if you want to end abortions. (Perhaps the gentlemen of Boring Diatribe will weigh in with discussion of the Pro-Good agenda.) Moreover, calling the women having abortions baby-killers does little to recognize the circumstances that brought them to that place. At the same time, the knee-jerk abortion-is-a-right reaction of some on the opposite side is at risk of ignoring the complexity involved particularly for anyone whose faith does lead them to believe that their fetus is something more than a lump of tissue. Making abortion an undeniable right doesn't do anything either to address the issues that put women in the position of making a difficult choice, nor help them address the spiritual consequences of that choice.

I'm not saying anything new here, or anything that hasn't been said before--it's been the story of the abortion debate from the outset.

The devolution of political discourse overall in the U.S. was in many ways presaged by the abortion debate: one side claims absolutes and says they have the authority of God; the other side claims absolutes and denies any role for God. Where is the place for all the rest of us?

Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?

I've been to New Orleans a number of times (pre-Katrina; is it even the same city now?) but oddly enough, the enduring images I have of what the city was about come from a short-lived TV show called Frank's Place. The show starred Tim Reid (who played Venus Flytrap on WKRP in Cincinnati if you're old enough to remember that) as a Harvard professor who inherits his father's New Orleans restaurant and decides to try to make a go of it.

One of my favorite episodes is the one in which bartender Tiger and his friends want to have one last drink at the restaurant with a fellow member of their social club who has passed on--they are honoring a promise made to him. The slapstick of the hide-the-body schtick (the health inspector shows up while their late companion is still on the premises) is balanced by the bittersweetness of friendship and loss.

There's no humor about the loss so many people in New Orleans and surrounding areas have suffered, just the sadness of loss--along with the love that causes hope to spring eternal for some who still don't know the fate of their loved ones, even in spite of all odds and evidence against. Just reminds me that the city depicted in that brilliant TV series may have been destroyed, but its soul has not.