Peace, order and good government, eh?

Making it up as they go along

The must read for the week has to be the new Seymour Hersh article in The New Yorker about the Bush administration's evolving strategy in the Middle East. Though to speak of the strategy as evolving makes it sound a lot more impressive than it actually is. The phrase "Rube Goldberg" was used at one point and it fits. Cheney and co. are in way over their heads and a lot of their recent efforts are devoted to dealing with the consequences of the mess they made just a few short years ago. It's also more than a little interesting to see how involved in American foreign policy Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia remains.

Should the Democrats make good on their insistence to resume real oversight, watch for increasing activity around the Intelligence Committee. As Hersh has it, there's been a lot of off-the-books, clandestine activity and we may actually get to find out about some of it. Some of the names will be familiar — just think Iran-Contra.

On the other hand, the whole region could blow up before the hearings start.

Go read. It's scary.

Internal Refugees in the USA

The ongoing story of Katrina is fascinating, in a horrible sort of way. It's kind of incredible considered on its own, but look at it again and it tells an amazing amount about US political economy, the nature of imperialism, the international linkages between different examples of elite control, and on and on. Consider: Here we have one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and certainly by far the biggest country with such a level of wealth, the country with more surplus to muck around with than any other. So, a disaster hits one of their cities—one of the great American cities, a city whose cultural importance to the United States is incalculable. What do they do? Now, the utter and complete bungling of the immediate response, and indeed the obstinate refusal for years to put the money into maintenance that could have averted the disaster in the first place, were pretty heinous, but in themselves speak only to neglect, of poor priorities.

What has happened since goes far beyond that. I'm forcefully reminded of that by this article:

I'm still in New Orleans. It's so much like Palestine it's eerie. It's a different kind of devastation than right after the storm. Some of the worst wreckage has been cleaned up -- there are no longer throngs of people camping out on the I-10 Causeway or waterlogged bodies lining the streets. Now it's the emptiness that is most striking. Some parts of the city are like a ghost town.

We walked down street after street the other day, canvassing in the Seventh Ward, and it was hard to find anyone at all. There's an extreme sense of shell shock. Every time we found someone there was a strange feeling that they were the only ones left after a bomb had hit.

Most of the people we saw were construction workers. A few bulldozers were depositing the gutted remains of people's homes in dumpsters. It reminded me of Palestinian bulldozers cleaning up the remains of houses after the Israeli army destroys them.

It doesn't feel at all like a year and a half has passed since the storm. The city is half the size it was -- from a population of 485,000 to around 250,000. . . . It's no surprise that the grassroots movement that has sprung up here is calling what has happened an "ethnic cleansing." Some people's homes have been bulldozed without the consent of the residents. Other people have returned home to find their locks changed or their doors boarded up. Most of the projects, although habitable, have been surrounded by brand new barbed wire fences. In poorer parts of the city, rent and utility prices have doubled or tripled, making them prohibitive to former inhabitants.

One grassroots organization, the People's Hurricane Relief Fund, recently managed to overturn legislation that would have given the city the right to claim property through eminent domain if it had not been reclaimed by its former inhabitants one year after the storm.
. . .
Many who would have liked to stay through the storm were forced to leave in a 'mandatory evacuation' and have been scattered across the country to FEMA trailer parks, unable to return for lack of resources. The trailer parks are an American version of refugee camps. Up to nine people share a tiny trailer in the middle of nowhere. The park is surrounded by fences and checkpoints. Security guards taunt the inhabitants. No one knows when they may be kicked out or left with nowhere to go. Many are transferred from park to park every few months, given no stability, and are too exhausted from repeated trauma to have energy for fighting the bureaucracy. FEMA will not release the list of where people are, so many still have no idea where their friends and family members have been taken. Although there are many places in Louisiana where these parks could have been set up, the people have been dispersed to many different states, making it very difficult to reunite or come back to New Orleans.

Different levels of government have collaborated to systematically dispossess whole neighbourhoods full of people, using Katrina as an excuse to simply steal their property to give to wealthy developers. It's a cumbersome process which hasn't been completed yet, but for anyone who spends any time looking, it shows a few things. The first is that even the most core principles touted by the right are basically lies to make their greed more palatable. If there is one thing any right winger will swear up and down, it is that all the inequities of the system they love are perhaps regrettable, but necessary because of the absolute sanctity of the principle of private property. Private property must be inviolable, they intone piously, and this principle transcends wealth and is the fundamental freedom; poor people may have less of it, but their right to it is equally enshrined; if they are thrifty and work hard, they too can accumulate it, and that is why everyone must resist the spectre of socialism which would deprive them of this essential right. BUT, Katrina makes it clear that this is rubbish. The sanctity of private property is a flag that is normally convenient for the right to wrap themselves in because it helps them fend off the horrors of redistribution, but if poor people manage to get their hands on any, their rights to it become irrelevant as soon as some rich people think it would be really nice if they had it instead. The law may get in the way because of its tendency to be framed in general terms, so that laws intended to protect rich people are in Katrina's case raising a number of hurdles in the way of finishing the job of dispossessing poor people. But there's certainly nobody on the right pointing out that this process violates their rights to their property. And of course this is just a magnified version of the usual "urban renewal" stuff--it's not a break from normality, just an intensification of "business as usual" that shows us how brutal "business as usual" is. In a small way, the same business is gearing up in my town of Vancouver as we approach the Olympics.

The other interesting matter is the process. Essentially, it seems as if the Americans are copying techniques for use on their own citizens from the Israeli experience in keeping the Palestinians down--e.g. checkpoints, displacement, making legalities moot with "facts on the ground", lotsa barbed wire. They in turn had to a fair degree made use of methods developed in South Africa, and I've heard it said that the South Africans drew some of their approaches from a study of Canadian methods of dividing and immiserating our First Nations. All the imperialists copy techniques from each other. This is nothing new; Americans have taught torture methods all over Latin America, and more recently in Iraq have been using Israeli procedures for dealing with Iraqi prisoners. But it's rather chilling to see the US government, near as I can make out not just at federal but state and local levels, applying such techniques to people who aren't foreigners, aren't immigrants, and indeed aren't even so much as alleged to be wrongdoers of any sort, just because it would be inconvenient for developers if they were allowed to return to their homes. Mind you, they are black. And, you know, poor. So I suppose they've committed the two worst sins you can in the States.

There are two points of hope to be drawn from this evil. First, it's kind of a graphic example of the hopes of many socialists that the capitalist system will be messed up by its internal contradictions. I mean, theoretically, a bunch of developers will make a stack of money off all this. But can the country possibly be more prosperous from the efforts required to keep tens of thousands of people stuffed in little fenced off trailer parks all over the place where they have no way to make a living, not to mention the efforts and bureaucracy needed to stop them from going home? Seems to me like the productive economy is being hosed for the sake of enabling theft, and it's becoming OK to do that on larger and larger scales. How sustainable is that? The second is that the people are fighting back despite it all.

And in smaller font but with the same bold lettering, the poster continues, "The people of New Orleans will not go quietly in the night, becoming the homeless of countless other cities while our own homes are razed to make way for your mansions, condos, and casinos. We will join together to defend our claim, and we will rebuild our home in the image of our own dreams."

Every Canadian's nightmare

If it wasn't already, given what happened to Maher Arar -- no: let me revise that: given what the Canadian state caused / allowed to be done to Maher Arar in your name and mine -- it should have been, and it had better be everyone's nightmare from now on.

Climb on a plane, any plane, any plane flying over American airspace, even if you never intended to land in the U.S. at all, and you too could be disappeared into the Bush-Cheney gulag ... even if you're Canadian-born and nine years old. They have facilities for you -- profitable privately run facilities too: nothing like good ol' American know-how, is there? -- and all your kidlets to live indefinitely in a state of suspended status. And Canada's New Government&trade may or may not be able to figure out what to do about you and your kidlets.

I'm just too angry to write a blogpost of my own on this outrage. Annamarie at verbena-19 has been tracking this story from the beginning. She is calling for urgent action now -- write to Peter MacKay today -- and she has all the links to fill in the background of what has happened to Majid, his wife, and their nine-year-old Canadian-born son Kevin, who is struggling with asthma in a converted prison cell with an open toilet in Texas, all because their plane was forced down in Puerto Rico (a U.S. possession) as they headed for the place Kevin thinks of as home. Canada.

From Annamarie's links, be sure to watch and listen especially to Amy Goodman's interview with Majid and Kevin. And note that Majid's family are not the only ones being treated to the tender mercies of the Hutto detention centre.

I'm so angry and ashamed I can barely type. But we have to do something this time. The bastards. The bastards. We have to stop them.

Friday night blues blogging

Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble. Texas Flood. The long version.

I won't dance -- don't ask me

So what was the point of my reading all the live-blogging of the Libby trial at two sites and much of it at a few others and following just about any link anyone gave me to brilliant close readers like Dan Froomkin and Sidney Blumenthal and Murray Waas if I wasn’t going to sift a few nuggets out of all that data and bring them on home here to POGGE?

Search me. All I know is that I am now far too intimidated by the encyclopedic minds I’ve met along the way even to attempt an original or independent comment on the trial itself or the many intertangled dramas that led up to it (although I can give you on the flip a modest summary of what smarter people have said, plus one of the real-life flips to end all flips).

In Anatomy of Criticism Northrop Frye remarks that our trials work according to the structure of classical comedy. They open on some revelation of a disruption in the social order, the rights and wrongs and truths of which must be unravelled by the action of the play / legal process, and they close with a ritual of some kind that is meant to reestablish a general sense of order. The reading of a verdict hammered out among twelve citizens who have sworn to be fair-minded is not exactly a wedding, the classic happy ending (ha!), but in theory it settles disputes of significance for us all and directs us towards reconciliation.

So much for theory. As weddings tend in real life to lead to many other things (don’t get me started), so will the verdict that the Libby jurors are currently working on (late Wednesday and early yesterday they sent out a request for a flip-chart and easel, Post-Its, masking tape, and documents containing photos of witnesses), in all but one scenario.

The jury could acquit, on all five charges, the most serious a single count of obstruction of justice. Influential voices [still have to find link to David Broder] have argued for acquittal, mainly by trivializing the offence of obstruction. Call me prejudiced, but I have a feeling that those people haven’t been walking through the testimony day by day alongside the jury that called for Post-Its. All the same, the entirely credible Jeralyn Merrit of TalkLeft, Firedoglake, and Huffington Post has worried intelligently and helpfully over the impact on a jury of the questionable credibility of several witnesses. It would take only one juror to defeat the prosecution’s case against Scooter Libby, which even those who most believe in this investigation concede could stop Patrick Fitzgerald in his tracks.

If you’ve been reading and watching Jane, Marcy, Christy, their FDL colleagues and the guest bloggers assembled at Plame House in Washington, though, not to mention the firepups in comments (a number speaking from backgrounds in the law), and especially if you’ve read Froomkin’s and Blumenthal’s pellucid summaries of Tuesday’s closing arguments, you are not expecting anything like acquittal on all charges. Nor do you believe that Patrick Fitzgerald has gone as far as he means to go, even with a conviction in the case against Scooter Libby. From Froomkin:

After literally years of keeping his public pronouncements about the case to an absolute minimum, Fitzgerald yesterday finally let slip a bit of the speculation that many of us have long suspected has lurked just beneath the surface of his investigation.

Suddenly it wasn't just the defendant alone, it was "they" who decided to tell reporters about Wilson's wife working for the CIA. "To them," Fitzgerald said, "she wasn't a person, she was an argument."

And it was pretty clear who "they" was: Libby and his boss, Cheney.

Back in the summer of 2003, after former ambassador Joseph Wilson had dared suggest that the administration manipulated intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq, "they" were obsessed with denying that Wilson had been sent on his mission to Niger as a result of a request for information from the vice president's office, Fitzgerald said.

"They" saw his wife Valerie Plame's role in suggesting him for the trip as a way to cast suspicion on his mission and his claim.

In Fitzgerald's last words to the jury, what had been a somewhat innocuous-sounding memo suddenly became something close to a smoking gun documenting Cheney's encouragement to his minions out to spread the word about Wilson's wife.

As Fitzgerald explained it: Right after Cheney first read Wilson's op-ed -- and wrote the question, "[D]id his wife send him on a junket?" in the margins of his own carefully clipped copy-- Cheney dictated "talking points" for his staff to use with the press about Wilson's mission.

As a result, the lead talking point morphed from "The Vice President's office did not request the mission to Niger" in a version drafted the day before by Cheney press aide Cathie Martin to "It is not clear who authorized Joe Wilson's trip to Niger" in the vice president's version.

Without quite coming out and saying so directly, Fitzgerald strongly implied that was an invitation for White House officials to talk about how Plame played a role in her husband's selection for the mission.

"There's something funny about how they want to talk about who sent him, but they don't want to talk about the wife," Fitzgerald said, mocking the defense's position that those two were somehow entirely separate issues.

Fitzgerald proved himself to be as well a great actor and more, a great scriptwriter, when he whirled defence counsel Ted Wells’s melodramatic closing lines and performance (“the madness of this prosecution” ... “Give Scooter Libby back to me” ... *sob*) right back at him in his own startling opening (“Madness! Madness! Outrageous!” – which apparently woke more than a few of the assembled up) and then closed powerfully with his own plea to the jury to “give the truth back” to the American people and their judicial system. I would call that spinning on a dime except, as a commenter at FDL observes, Fitz has been focused on precisely that principle since the press conference of 28 October 2005 at which he announced the Libby indictment.

So now we wait while the jury work away at their Post-Its and portraits. Some eat popcorn; some gnaw on their knuckles; some refresh FDL obsessively; and some look at groovy pics of the Prospero of this drama.

Sorry, but I have to do this. I’ve had two great companions-in-popcorn through the – gosh: is it years? – that I’ve followed Plamegate. The first is pogge hisself, who patiently educated a lot of us, first at babble and then at Bread and Roses, until he had us hooked. As we all know, though, there are some things pogge is not going to be doing, and swooning over Patrick Fitzgerald is definitely one of them.

But then I met Goddamnitkitty of Hope and Onions, and I tell you, she’s ‘way further gone than I am. For one thing she knows more than I do – she actually reads the evidence at the DoJ site. Even better, though, she knows where all the great Fitz gossip and pics are, and she is absolutely shameless in tempting me with fresh tidbits morning after morning. What would I do without her?

So I close by thanking both pogge and GDKitty, and then stealing from her this classic shot of our romantic hero doing a bit of a Monroe-ish flip of the skirts ... on his way to flipping the Cheney conspiracy back into self-destructive hyperdrive.

Mild is putting it mildly

Judge threatens to shut down Air India inquiry

The head of the Air India inquiry says he will shut down the probe into the 1985 disaster unless a dispute about how much evidence will be made public is resolved.

Former Supreme Court justice John Major called a halt to proceedings Monday until March 9 and said he would not resume the hearings if portions of documents from the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service remain secret.
...
Major has said repeatedly he wants most of the proceedings to be accessible to the families who lost loved ones and to the media.

He said Monday it would take years of court proceedings to get the thousands of documents declassified, which would make his inquiry "disappear into the quicksand of bureaucracy."

The impasse over what evidence can be made public has a mild resemblance to the Maher Arar inquiry, the CBC's Terry Milewski reported.

A mild resemblance? I seem to recall an 89 page report from CSIS in which every single word was blacked out until public pressure forced a do-over. I also recall a long hiatus in the public hearings while thousands of supposedly secret documents were reviewed and testimony took place in camera. There were frequent expressions of frustation by O'Connor and the inquiry's counsel about the feds insistence on keeping secrets. Apparently we've made little progress since.

On being there: weekend book-review reviewing

I’ve been thinking it would be good to have a book-review column here at POGGE. That would require someone’s reading some actual books, of course. Others may be able to promise to do that regularly, but I just know I would fall behind. When John Allemang started up his “Book a Day” review column in the Globe and Mail a couple of years ago, I read it for a while because I thought it would be good for me, but fairly soon it started to feel like a marathon. It became overwhelming just to contemplate Allemang reading that many books that fast and writing about them day after day into infinity, never mind reading what he wrote and for sure never mind reading what he’d read, and from overwhelming the whole exercise seemed to me to go on to exhausting, so I stopped.

We could have a book-pile discussion. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s accumulating piles of books I mean to read but just haven’t got to yet (lo these two or three years), and I suspect that that is a pretty democratically distributed talent. If you have a book pile of your own, please tell us in comments what you’re reading or have every good intention of reading sometime in the imaginable future, and maybe why.

I do read a lot of book reviews, not just to stay current but because I admire a good essay as much as I do a fine novel, and I think we live in a time peculiarly suited to essay-writing. My two favourite essay mines are the New York Review of Books and its sometimes smarter younger cousin the London Review of Books; I troll Canadian sources more to keep current, although that’s probably lazy and unfair of me because there are some lovely Canadian essayists out there.

The essay that inspired all these reflections this week is Janet Malcolm’s review of Allen Shawn’s memoir Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life, which is unfortunately behind the NYRB subscription wall (although you can buy access to it for a week for $3, I believe).

Both Shawn’s and Malcolm’s names may ring bells for readers of various backgrounds.

Malcolm’s turf as a writer has long been that shifting, uncertain point where reporting, the law, literary analysis, and psychoanalysis meet, and it is always fascinating to watch her use the tools of one trade to peel back the proprieties of one of the others. In her book about Joe McGinniss’s research for his book about convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, Malcolm famously remarked: “Every journalist knows that what he does is morally indefensible." She survived a years-long defamation suit brought by psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, and then she dared to tangle with the many keepers of Sylvia Plath’s flame, among them the formidable Olwyn Hughes, sister of Plath's husband Ted Hughes, in itself a measure of sheer nerve. Malcolm has occasionally set my teeth on edge: she can be oddly block-headed about the most ordinary human failings, and yet she can enter into the minds of people on the edge with compelling accuracy, and sometimes, as with Allen Shawn, moving sympathy.

Shawn is an American composer, pianist, and professor. He is also a son of William Shawn, legendary editor of the New Yorker from 1952 to 1987. His older brother is Wallace Shawn, the tiny perfect playwright and actor I first fell in love with when some smarter friends dragged a reluctant moi off to see My Dinner with André, which left me walking several inches above the pavement for weeks afterwards.

From Malcolm’s review we learn that Shawn’s memoir is partly about his family, partly about his adult struggle with agoraphobia, with the mysteries of phobias and the severe mental distress he has witnessed in his family – his father’s phobias, his mother’s depression, and most affectingly of all, his twin sister’s autism.

There is no easy transcendence in a history like that, and yet Malcolm manages to weave Shawn’s simple, lucid testimony into her own canny analysis of a notably uncanny family to marvellous effect. From their quite different perspectives – Malcolm, the cool analyst, and Shawn, the bereaved innocent – both resist sentimentalizing the profound tragedy at the heart of his family’s story, the day that an eight-year-old lost his twin to an institution and was plunged into a mental war between feelings of relief and feelings of loss that has never ended.

We know from her earlier books that Malcolm will always home in on the cracks in anyone’s façade of niceness. In Allen Shawn, she has met an author who is ahead of her in admitting his own “dark” side, as she is clearly pleased to discover:

The "good" self set out to write a book about his phobias and phobia in general, but the "bad" self ensured that the book would defy the conventions of its genre and become a "better, darker" thing. As Allen Shawn circles his mysterious putative subject, he is drawn to the mysteries that everyone who thinks bumps up against. When he writes about the death anxiety he experienced as a child—lying terrified in the dark at the thought that "there was no help, that my parents could not help me, and that there was no escape from the fact of it, not even some special hint of a way out that might just apply to me"—he is hardly describing thinking exclusive to phobics. Many— perhaps most—normal children and adolescents are terrified, if not traumatized, by the idea of mortality. Shawn returns to the subject in a poetic passage that suddenly and for no apparent reason floats into a late chapter, and takes on the weight of a vatic message:

And here is Shawn himself, facing that mystery and finding words for it:

Life's unknowns are often knowable; many can be rehearsed or at least imagined. But death is surrounded by an infinite fog on an ocean without end. It is perhaps simplistic to say it, but one can understand death only in terms of its opposite, life. For me, it was always the not returning part of it that made me start up in the dark, suffocating. Yet after my father, who had never even ridden on an airplane, disappeared into that fog, it began to take on other meanings, and I began to dimly see that the not returning part of it is there with us all along, inside us, from the moment we appear into the bewildering new stimuli of the world, even from the moment we start to form out of the fertilized ovum. Now that my mother is gone, it is clearer still. There is only forward motion, and there always was only forward motion. There was never any turning back.

Many of us have struggled privately with the puzzles of our own minds or those of the people we love and sometimes fear for. Libraries of practical, useful books appear every season and the websites proliferate for those who go looking for help in understanding the enigma of the human brain and all the ills to which it may be heir or prey. I’m not discounting the practical, useful books, either: I have my own collection of them, and they help.

But every once in a while someone who has struggled with his or her own mind manages to break through to a special receptiveness, as Malcolm puts it, to the subjectivity of others, and she sees that achievement in Shawn’s telling of his family’s many stories as well as his confrontation with himself.

I’ve never read Allen Shawn before, although I’ve read and watched his brother Wallace, so I am entirely prepared to believe the concluding paragraph of Malcolm’s review:

The editor, the playwright, and the essayist are bound by a thread of—what? Is the word "innocence"? Allen uses it to describe his father's capacity for listening to writers, in opposition to the word "jaded." The writing of both Wallace and Allen Shawn has, as the conversation of William Shawn had, a rare quality of cleanness—as if it came from a spring rather than from the stale pool of received ideas that most talk and writing comes from. Such purity would be chastening were it not accompanied by a playfulness that takes away the sting and puts in a kind of good word for us all.

The practical, useful books come and go – they will be overtaken eventually by even more practical, useful books, and that’s as it should be. But some testaments to the spirit will never be dated, and Shawn’s memoir sounds like one of those to me.

So. How's your book pile coming along?

Food for thought

Suppressed report shows cancer link to GM potatoes

Campaigners against genetically modified crops in Britain last are calling for trials of GM potatoes this spring to be halted after releasing more evidence of links with cancers in laboratory rats.

UK Greenpeace activists said the findings, obtained from Russian trials after an eight-year court battle with the biotech industry, vindicated research by Dr Arpad Pusztai, whose work was criticised by the Royal Society and the Netherlands State Institute for Quality Control.

The disclosure last night of the Russian study on the GM Watch website led to calls for David Miliband, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, to withdraw permission for new trials on GM potatoes to go ahead at secret sites in the UK this spring. Alan Simpson, a Labour MP and green campaigner, said: "These trials should be stopped. The research backs up the work of Arpad Pusztai and it shows that he was the victim of a smear campaign by the biotech industry. There has been a cover-up over these findings and the Government should not be a party to that."

Emphasis added. Why am I not surprised?

Hat-tip to Chris in Paris at AMERICAblog.

Friday night blues blogging

Here's a couple from Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
Stranger's Blues

Backwater Blues

Sometimes he just can't help himself

"Extremist elements" in Liberal party making Dion soft on terrorism: PM

"Extremist elements" in the Liberal caucus are leading party leader Stephane Dion to become soft on terrorism, Prime Minister Stephen Harper alleged in the House of Commons on Thursday.

The prime minister went out of his way on two separate occasions in question period to attack Dion's decision to reverse his party's support of an anti-terror law measures that provides police with additional powers to stop suspected terrorists.
...
When Dion asked Harper a question about the auto industry during question period Thursday, the PM used his response time to attack Dion for his new position.

"For the first time in history we have a leader of the opposition who is soft on terrorism," the PM alleged. "He is refusing to take the advice of Bob Rae, John Manley, Anne McLellan and to back the anti-terrorism provisions that his own government put in place."

Later in question period, the Tories used one of their questions to have a backbench MP ask the PM about Dion's position.

Harper again noted the Liberals who want the special powers extended and accused Dion of "being led by extremist elements in his own caucus."

Does anyone else remember the point in Harper's first campaign as leader when the Conservatives claimed the Liberals were soft on child pornography? I don't think the voters were too impressed. There are attacks you can score points with and attacks that just make you look silly.

I think you should pursue this, Steve. Go for it. Try accusing Dion of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. After all, it's worked so well for your role models.

"Evolution by stealth": deep integration update

If Dick Cheney keeps an eye on Alberta’s oilfields, can al-Qaeda be far behind?

DUBAI (Reuters) - A Saudi wing of al Qaeda called for attacks on suppliers of oil to the United States around the world, saying targets should not be limited to the Middle East and listing Canada, Venezuela and Mexico as under threat.

...

“It is necessary to hit oil interests in all regions which serve the United States, not just in the Middle East. The goal is to cut its supplies or reduce them through any means," it said.

...

"Targeting oil interests includes production wells, export pipelines, oil terminals and tankers and that can reduce U.S. oil inventory, forcing it to take decisions it has been avoiding for a long time and confuse and strangle its economy," it said.

In Calgary, the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board -- the regulator responsible for overseeing the bulk of Canada's oil and gas production -- said it was taking the threat seriously, but had not raised security levels.

Canadian government officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Canada is the biggest exporter of crude oil to the United States, followed by Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

The muted reaction of Canadian security and government officials appears to be sensible in this case:

While foreign affairs expert Eric Margolis said the threat is cause for some concern, he said this particular organization has proven "quite ineffective and inefficient" in its attempts to take out oil facilities in the past.

"This group has adopted the name of al Qaeda but it's not part of al Qaeda," Margolis told CTV Newsnet in an interview.

The organization was behind the failed February 2006 suicide attack on the world's largest oil processing plant at Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia.

"A lot of its members have been killed or arrested by the Saudi government. Their attack last year on a major oil refinery was a fiasco," Margolis said. "Threats coming from them cannot be taken too seriously."

Further, Margolis said oil and gas installations pose a formidable challenge for terrorists to knock out. They cover enormous amounts of ground and the type of damage these groups could inflict would be minimal and easily repaired, he said. Margolis cited unsuccessful attempts by Iran and Iraq to destroy one another's main oil terminals during the Iran-Iraq war.

So that’s moderately reassuring. That our security and government officials are capable of reacting sensibly and calmly to rumours of terror attacks is also moderately reassuring.

The eyes of the powerful of our own continent are still on us, though, and some of our security and government officials appear keen on the attention. That is not so reassuring.

On Sunday, Alison at Creekside reminded us of last September’s meeting at the Banff Springs Hotel of something called the North America Forum. You may recall the fine if, for a time, lonely coverage of that event by the Banff Crag and Canyon, who have an update for us.

Under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) another curious group called Judicial Watch requested documents concerning the participation in the Banff forum of then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and senior military and staff of U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM). The request to the Pentagon is still pending, but Judicial Watch have published the documents released by NORTHCOM.

Those documents don’t tell us much about the purposes of the Banff forum-goers that hadn’t already been revealed by Lockheed Martin’s chatty President for the Americas (and former Pentagon adviser to Dick Cheney, I see Alison telling us) Ron Covais in an interview with Maclean’s last fall. They do yield up a lovely new label for the continentalizers’ methods, though:

The secret guest list of the North American Forum included then-U.S. secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, Canadian Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Rick Hillier, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, Pengrowth Corp. CEO James Kinnear and Lockheed Martin executive Ron Covais.

Presentation outlines for the forum acknowledge that the concept of North American integration - which some call a "North American Union" - is unpopular, and note that it might be tough to sell as a concept.

"While a vision is appealing, working on the infrastructure might yield more benefit and bring more people on board ('evolution by stealth')," the notes said.

"Evolution by stealth" means using regulatory changes, such as food- and drug-safety benchmarks, which don't require parliamentary approval, to lay the infrastructure for North American integration. This allows for change with little or no public debate, critics say.

Media were excluded from the September forum, and Day, who gave a speech at the event, declined to reveal the contents of his talk.

"It was meant as a private meeting," said Melisa Leclerc, a spokeswoman from Day's office, although she conceded he attended "in his capacity as minister for public security."

"It is not encouraging to see the phrase 'evolution by stealth' in reference to important policy debates such as North American integration," said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a Washington-based conservative watchdog group that obtained the documents last week.

But, former finance minister John Manley, who attended the meeting, said the forum was "not part of a nefarious plan to yield sovereignty to the U.S. .... It was just some informed private citizens and government officials having a conversation" on how best to co-operate to ensure their citizens enjoyed a safe and prosperous future.

In fact, he said, Canada comes out stronger than ever from such meetings, which force "some senior American officials to think about Canada for a few days."

However, Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians said the reference to stealth is "a very telling and important statement."

Many of the politicians who attended the forum have been pursuing "integration by stealth" for the past two years, she said, pointing to a little-known but top-priority agreement called the Security and Prosperity Partnership [SPP].

The accord, kickstarted by U.S. President George W. Bush, then-prime minister Paul Martin and former Mexican president Vicente Fox at a 2005 meeting in Waco, Texas, is designed to streamline everything from food and drug safety standards to counter-terrorism measures.

Now, you’d think that at some point all these people who have gone to such lengths to keep their discussions secret -- for the obvious good reason that they are going against the popular will in Canada and they know they are – might begin to feel a little self-conscious about carrying on with the construction of the SPP in plain view.

But no. We’re talking shameless here. The meetings to which only a few select citizens and no media are invited continue apace:

North American integration will be the primary focus of a high-level trinational meeting scheduled for February 23, says the Council of Canadians. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff will be in Ottawa to meet with Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, Trade Minister David Emerson and their Mexican counterparts.

“While recent media reports have claimed that the meeting will focus on border security,” says Maude Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, “we know that the goal of this meeting is to advance a much larger corporate-led agenda for North American integration – something our government has been very secretive about.”

A September 2006 report issued by the governments of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico stated that the upcoming meeting would take place in order to “review progress” on the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) and “develop concrete initiatives” in preparation for the leaders’ summit expected to take place in Kananaskis in June 2007.

“The Security and Prosperity Partnership goes beyond simply the passport issue,” says Jean-Yves Lefort, trade campaigner for the Council of Canadians. “The agreement calls for 300 policy changes in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico and gives wide-ranging powers to the business elite without any consideration for the public interest or the environment.”

The North American Competitiveness Council, a business advisory body to the SPP representing North America’s largest corporations, will be presenting recommendations at the upcoming meeting.

In immediate response to the February ministerial meeting the Council of Canadians is organizing a letter-writing campaign, calling on Prime Minister Harper to “cease all talks leading towards deeper integration between Canada and the United States” that exclude the citizens of Canada or their elected representatives.

There is more, much more to do, though, if the people of North America are going to mount an effective challenge to the “stealth” campaign of corporate interests and ideologues to usurp the sovereignty that properly belongs to all citizens. And more is being organized:

You're invited to a teach-in March 30 to April 1, 2007

Free admission Saturday and Sunday. En anglais avec traduction simultanée en français.

Integrate This! Challenging the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America will be a chance to discuss an important issue our government wants to keep under wraps: continental economic and security integration. The gathering, being held March 30 to April 1, 2007, is sponsored by the Council of Canadians, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Canadian Labour Congress and will be held at Ottawa Technical High School (440 Albert Street, Ottawa).

Integrate This! will bring together activists, academics, workers, politicians and journalists from Canada, Mexico and the United States to challenge the big-business vision of North American integration contained in the Security and Prosperity Partnership – a vision that has yet to be debated anywhere but which will have major impacts on citizens across the continent.

...

Saturday Panels

Democracy and human security: How has the definition of “security” changed post-9/11? Why is Canada integrating its security and immigration policies with the United States and what are the risks of such cooperation? Why is corporate Canada intent on trading Canadian sovereignty for greater access to American markets? Why has the SPP not been debated by any government? And why does the corporate sector have a formal role in the SPP where there is none for civil society?

Resources, the environment and military integration: How will continental integration impact the environment? Why does the U.S. insist on a North American resource pact within the SPP? How will regulatory harmonization between Canada and the U.S. affect our ability to regulate industry to protect the environment and public health? What does military integration and a common North American foreign policy have to do with prosperity? Why should we be worried about Canada’s water?

Political Panel: Find out what Canada’s major parties have to say about the Security and Prosperity Partnership, and Canada-U.S. relations in general.

Media Panel: Find out why the media has paid so little attention to the SPP, why the government is making it hard for them to do so, and what civil society can do to draw more media attention to the issue of continental integration.

Tri-National Panel: Hear from progressive politicians and activists from Mexico and the U.S. about opposition to the SPP in their countries, and why the corporate vision of “security and prosperity” fosters inequality and poverty in North America.
Saturday Workshops

As well as the panels, attendees at the teach-in will have many workshops to choose from covering a wide variety of topics related to the Security and Prosperity Partnership as well as the broader corporate agenda behind it. A list of the topics covered in these workshops includes:

1. The oil sands and the environment
2. Water – commodity or right?
3. The future of public services
4. Atlantica, Pacifica and regional integration
5. Security certificates and Canada’s “war on terror”
6. Corporate power and democracy
7. Media concentration and foreign ownership

A teach-in! Gosh, that takes me back ... If you’re lucky enough to be in Ottawa that weekend, please go and report back.

A depressing thought: Alison ends her Sunday post at Creekside with this provocative comment from the garrulous Mr Covais:

Covais figures they've got less than two years of political will to make it happen. That's when the Bush administration exits, and "The clock will stop if the Harper minority government falls or a new government is elected.”

It would be pretty to think so, wouldn’t it. Given the heavy investment of Liberal party elders like Manley and McLellan in this process in the past, I suspect it will take a lot more to stop that clock than Mr Covais was admitting last fall, and I also suspect that Mr Covais and his ilk know that.

With several tips of the hat to Holly Stick and Toedancer at breadnroses.ca.

On changing the subject

Shorter Allison Hanes (National Post): There can't be anything wrong with politicizing the judiciary because the Liberals did it, too.

Scott Tribe has spent some time this morning arguing that the Conservatives are going further down this road than the Liberals did, and that criticism of Harper's methods and goals here isn't just coming from Liberals. But even if Harper was only doing the Conservative equivalent of what Libs have done in the past, that doesn't make it right. Getting drawn into that debate is a distraction, which is the point of articles like the Hanes piece linked to at the top and the comments to which Scott is responding.

Politicizing the judiciary is wrong, no matter who does it. The debate should be about the best way to choose judges, not which set of partisan hacks commit the worst kind of hackery.

The NDP has this one right

NDP to filibuster voter photo ID bill

The NDP vows to filibuster legislation that would require voter photo ID for the first time in Canadian federal electoral history and the handing over vital personal information about voters to political parties and election candidates.

Ottawa New Democrat MP Paul Dewar on Tuesday described the legislation as "a big brother bill" that risks widespread identity theft if voter lists with the birth dates of electors gets in the wrong hands.
...
They said the legislation also threatens to prevent thousands of homeless people and the poor from voting because they don't have personal ID.
...
The legislation would require Elections Canada to assign a lifetime identifying number for each of the more than 22 million electors and put their birth dates on the permanent list of electors, which would be updated annually and made available to the political parties and candidates in each voting district.

The bill specifically allows the parties to use the information for fundraising and soliciting electoral support.

And a political party's right to raise funds trumps an individual's right to privacy. Isn't that obvious?

So where are the Liberals who are so eager to accuse the NDP of propping up Harper's government?

Liberal whip Karen Redman dismissed concern about identity theft, saying Quebec, which allows the distribution of birth dates to political parties and candidates, has not experienced major problems

I don't recall hearing about a severe epidemic of voter fraud either, but it hasn't stopped all the other parties from supporting this. They're fixing something that isn't broken. In the process they risk disenfranchising a portion of the population and exposing a bigger portion to a needless risk. And that last is despite the fact that the privacy commissioner, who I believe was appointed by the Liberals, has warned against this.

Hat-tip to The Jurist who has it right.

Given that date of birth is used fairly frequently (at least from my experience [and mine, too - pogge]) as a check in verifying a person's identity, it would seem obvious that giving out such information to political parties could leave voters far more vulnerable to identity theft than they would be otherwise. But apparently the other parties are perfectly happy to impose that risk on Canadian citizens generally if the tradeoff is more information for them to use in targeting their messages.

Do I have to add that I condemn Canada's Silly Government™ from even going down this road? I didn't mention it earlier because I don't expect anything better from them.

The terrorists won

Chris Bowers at MyDD follows up on the resignations of Marcotte and McEwan from the Edwards campaign.

Terrorism and the threat of violence against American citizens remains a key political tool for the American right-wing. This is true both in the sense of conservatives and Republicans trying to scare people into voting for them / justifying their legislative agenda, and in the sense of actual terrorism and threats of violence against Democrats and progressives who stand in their way. The most important lesson we should learn from the entire "Edwards bloggers" incident is not that Edwards caved (he didn't), not that Amanda and Melissa let us down (they didn't), not that the media is dominated by a Republican Noise Machine that justifies any right-wing smear (it is, but what else is new under the sun?), but that physical violence and the threat of physical violence is still successfully being employed as a political tactic against individual progressives in America. Make no mistake: without threatening violence, Donohue, O'Reilly, Malkin, and everyone else associated with this smear campaign would have lost, and badly, just as we thought they had lost badly at the end of last week. In the end, their campaign was saved via death threats. You won't read about that in any of the AP stories, but it is something we need to address front and center -- even if just on our own at first -- none the less.

Earlier in the post he notes that the most effective weapon against reproductive freedom in the U.S. has been violence or the threat of violence. I guess we should change the name of the neocon marketing campaign to The War on (Some) Terror™.

Two down. How many more to go?

If you're a regular reader of political blogs, you're probably aware of the fuss that's been happening over the past week involving two bloggers who were hired by John Edwards' campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. (And if not, you can get the gist from this post at DailyKos and the links it contains.) Dave at The Galloping Beaver noted yesterday that one of the bloggers, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, had resigned from the campaign. (The link Dave has to her post won't work right now -- Pandagon is down because it's been overwhelmed.) Today, Melissa McEwan of Shakepeare's Sister announced that she, too, has resigned.

In a post early this morning at The Agonist — actually in the comments that followed the post — Ian Welsh took the Edwards campaign to task for not doing due diligence, for not reading the two bloggers closely before hiring them so they'd know what they were getting. And it seems fairly obvious that due diligence wasn't done else why the lukewarm response from the Edwards campaign? The response Edwards should have given to an attack mounted by William Donohue and Michelle Malkin was: The former is an extremist and a bully, the latter a bottom feeder and they're both bigots so why should I worry about what they say? Instead he apologized, had the two bloggers apologize and tried to pretend that would throw the hounds off the scent.

In a followup post this evening, Ian provides a taste of the aftermath for these two women: rape and death threats from the mindless drones that demagogues like Donohue and Malkin rely on.

No matter how some may try and spin this, Ian has it right: the assholes won this round. "They got their two scalps, and they'll be back for more."

This isn't to blame Marcotte and McEwan. The fault overwhelmingly lies with the Democratic Party and with the corporate media and these two bloggers simply got caught in the crossfire.

Aside from the fact that the Edwards' campaign doesn't appear to have thought all this through and prepared both themselves and the bloggers for what was surely to come, the Democrats still don't seem to have found their spines. They show signs every once in a while — until some attack dog like Donohue barks at which point they cower in a corner and apologize for their own existence. And this despite decades of evidence that being conciliatory with these freaks accomplishes nothing except to embolden them.

As for the American media, they're obviously still playing by what some have called Clinton Rules. When it comes to Democrats, no scandal is too small to blow up into a front page story. And almost no GOP scandal is too large to overlook. Donohue's attacks against the Edwards campaign were presented in too many venues without any context, without any reference to Donohue's own history of anti-semitism, bigotry and homophobia. He seems to be able to get a microphone any time he wants one no matter how outrageous his own behaviour has been. As for Malkin, two words: Fox News. So they get their soapboxes, the extreme elements among their followers are emboldened and the republic moves that much closer to being a memory.

The Democrats may yet realize that they have nothing to lose by standing up to people who are obviously never going to vote for them anyway. But that doesn't solve the media problem. When the right wing noise machine has Fox, Disney, CNN, the New York Times and more in its pocket, what good is farting against thunder?

Were you expecting a positive ending? I don't have one right now.

Monday afternoon Chicks blogging

No, it's not Friday night and this isn't blues. But who cares? Good for them.

Happy Birthday, Dad

My dad was born one hundred years ago today.

Actually, that would be “our dad.” There are five of us (plus significant others) sitting around today, in cybercommunion at least, swapping memories and old photos and feeling slightly stunned that we have personal memories of aunts born in the 1890s who still seem so present to us.

None so present as this fellow, though:

That’s Dad in 1948, pecking away at the old Underwood that each of us kids would practise on years later, that still keeps company in the little bro’s office. I don’t have to tell you that Dad was a reporter, do I. Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant: eat your hearts out.

Dad had also been a school-teacher, a cub reporter covering the Aberhart campaign in Alberta in 1935, a captain in the Canadian Army during WWII, and he would rise through the editorial ranks in later years. At heart he remained a reporter, though, and he knew that. We all knew that.

I was in my early thirties when a line Dad wrote in his memoirs jumped out at me and taught me a very fast lesson about parents and children. “I have always been a dreamer,” wrote Dad, then in his early seventies.

My dad. The Rock of Gibraltar. Father knows best and all that. The most responsible husband and father ever known in the entire history of humankind. A dreamer?

And yet I knew instantly what he meant and why he had written that line. Especially I knew that it was the truth. And suddenly I knew my dad as a person – not a member of the generation ahead of mine, not the man who lived out his several adult roles, including that of paterfamilias, so faithfully -- but a person, just like me. The reality of his life with or without me in it – his childhood, his adventures as a young man, his life after I grew up and left home, and yes, his dreams, remembered in age – hit me for the first time with such force.

I am aging now m’self, turning into one of those creatures the young can’t help seeing as faintly alien, even when beloved. No point denying that the young do that, either – I remember my own young eyes working that way, and why not? Everyone deserves that moment of ... (Please, someone: stop me before I quote Wordsworth!)

It makes me happy to realize, though, that the lesson Dad's memories taught me about him keeps on giving, speaks to the persistence of our own successive realities – the reality of my younger selves or yours, of everyone else’s many selves, always within reach just beyond the cranky complaints of the day and even after death, for as long as the rest of us remember to look.

Happy Birthday, Dad.

Friday night blues blogging

It seems I haven't offered up any James Cotton yet. How about a lesson in how to play a slow blues on the harp?

And here he and the band have a little fun with Mannish Boy.

Why not?

Stéphane Dion and Gerard Kennedy have been thinking – albeit cautiously – about women in politics, which could be a moderately good thing. A bit of credit where a bit of credit is due.

I’ll get back to Stéphane and Gerard in a moment, but gosh, if I’d known they were going to start thinking, I would have blogged this story for them last week to get them seriously fired up. This, boys, is what we – ok, some of us -- call inspiring:

A unit of United Nations peacekeepers with a difference has arrived for work in Liberia - they are all women.

More than 100 female peacekeepers from India are there to work as an armed police unit to help stabilise Liberia which, after years of war, is trying to rebuild its own police force from scratch.

Stepping off the chartered plane in immaculate blue uniforms and berets, the 103 women were immediately on parade and probably bewildered by the media frenzy.

It is just a coincidence that the first all-female peacekeeping force is in Liberia, the first African country to elect a female president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

...

"These girls are experienced and have been trained. They have worked in areas of India where there was insurgency. They will do a good job and the Liberian ladies will get motivated and inspired to come forward and join the regular police."

The UN mission in Liberia, which will cost around $750m this year, is helping rebuild the country's police force from scratch.

During the 14-year war, the police were involved in the fighting and were steeped in corruption. Having acquired a terrible reputation it is now hard to persuade women to consider the police as a career.

...

Liberia has an alarming incidence of rape which goes unpunished. The deployment of more female police officers could encourage the women and young girls to report the crime.

In the past, the UN mission in Liberia has been tainted by accusations of sexual exploitation: food given to teenage refugees by UN peacekeepers in return for sex. But Joanna Foster, the gender adviser to the UN Mission says that there is less sexual exploitation when more women are employed.

"It limits the sexual exploitation that our people get involved in. In the groups that have a lot more women we get very little reporting of sexual exploitation."

For reminders of the regional importance of Liberia’s still-tenuous recovery from the regime of accused war criminal Charles Taylor, see this BBC report and the reports on Liberia of the International Crisis Group.

Before you leave the UN peacekeepers, be sure to scroll down to that fine photo of them on parade:

"... Indian women are pretty so they are going to be whistled at and all sorts of things but they will have to take it in their stride."

But don't be deceived by the looks.

I saw an enthusiastic salute by one of the Indian peacekeepers almost knock a journalist's microphone half-way to Mumbai. Stand back - these women are serious.

That’s the thing about so many women these days, isn’t it? Which brings me back to Stéphane and Gerard.

Back in Canada, Stéphane and Gerard are nervously announcing a plan that counts as daring in this country – to ensure that at least a third of Liberal candidates in the next election are women:

So-called green-light committees, set up to run the party's nomination process in each province, have been empowered to ensure the 33 per cent target is met. Among other things, the committees can set dates for nomination meetings and approve or reject nomination papers from those seeking to carry the Liberal colours.

Where necessary, the committees will be able to simply refuse to allow men to run for nominations in some ridings.

"We're trying to find the techniques that are consistent with our democratic processes to the greatest extent possible," said Gerard Kennedy, Dion's special adviser on election readiness.

Local riding associations are being encouraged as much as possible to find women to seek nominations. But, with an election possible as early as next month, Kennedy said the party simply doesn't have the luxury of a lengthy recruitment drive.

Consequently, he said the party will have to use more drastic measures to ensure a sufficient number of women wind up on the Liberal election roster.

"We're still studying and discussing some of the techniques that we might use, such as women-only contests or what have you. But I think those measures will be somewhat exceptional," he said.

...

"We're going to pay some price," Kennedy said.

"We'd like it to be a relatively small price . . . but the price we're paying is because we didn't quite make as much success as we should have (recruiting women in the past) and everyone has come to the realization that we have to take extraordinary measures, that the Liberal party has to become a political organization that reflects the face of Canada."

In last winter's election, only 26 per cent of Liberal candidates were women, although women make up slightly more than half the Canadian population.

Now, I was thinking to give Stéphane and Gerard a grade of 66 per cent on this proposal, for what I think are obvious reasons.

But then I thought a little longer and realized that I was going to have to deduct some marks for short-term thinking. Remember, we’re not talking MPs here; we’re just talking candidates, most of whom are going to have to be found in ridings that the Liberals don’t currently hold, which means that most of them won’t have much hope of being elected:

The challenge of reaching 33 per cent next time is all the greater because Dion has promised to protect all incumbent MPs from nomination challenges. Currently, only 21 of the Liberals' 101 MPs are women.

Dion needs to come up with at least 80 women to run in ridings currently not held by the Liberals to arrive at 33 per cent overall. In other words, almost 40 per cent of the candidates in unheld ridings must be women.

The first thought that occurred to the CP reporter in response to that shocking news was to interview a couple of men who saw the entitlements they’d been feeling entitled to suddenly slipping away before them. I expect we’ll be hearing a great deal more from such men and from others who feel outraged on their behalf, all those nice young men who have assumed all their lives that they had a right to assume things that almost no woman ever simply assumes, however much she achieves. And I expect that Stéphane and Gerard are also expecting to face both anger from their own troops and opportunistic ridicule from their opposition to the right, whose official line on women’s equality is that women are now so officially equal that equality itself, not to mention advocating for it, had to be disappeared from the rhetoric of the ministry created to advocate for women’s equality. (No, I don’t follow that logic either.)

So. That whole repetitive, unproductive tangle – I mean, really, who hasn’t been 'round all those mulberry bushes too many times already? – led me to wonder: why did it not occur to Stéphane and Gerard to start talking, at least supplementarily, about the obvious serious solution to this problem?

Proportional representation. I know that no one has time to put any such system in place before the next election, but nothing short of a commitment to some form of PR is ever going to convince most honest citizens – including most women – that electoral politics in this country is worth the bother.

Think about the tired sputterings that we’re going to hear over the next few weeks in reaction to Dion and Kennedy’s really rather modest proposal. The claims that any self-respecting woman would be ashamed to be parachuted into a nomination ... just like Michael Ignatieff, yes? The hand-wringing over the fact that so few women come forward to contest nominations ... quite unlike the majority of men? Now, why do we suppose that would be? Do we look at our MPs and see, on average, persons of unusual distinction? Do we sometimes wonder what is driving this whole carnival?

And when we see how the very few women who manage to succeed in public life are still treated as sexualized curiosities, do we wonder that so many accomplished women take a good look at politics and continue to say “No, thanks”?

Canada has [a] dismal record of female participation in federal politics. Only 20.8 per cent of 308 MPs are women, putting Canada in 46th place in the world – right behind Singapore.

I used to be opposed to mandating these things, never mind quotas. But I think I’m getting over that. I’ve watched too many members of the old boys’ networks disappoint us to feel their disappointments all that deeply. And other countries have done it. Rwanda, coming out of trauma, simply declared that their strong women would be 50 per cent of their legislature, and so they are. The Welsh didn’t even need to declare a quota to achieve equal representation for women. I don’t know Welsh politics well enough to tell you how they did that, but I take it that they are an advanced civilization?

Enough of these silly, disingenuous games about who gets to be a candidate where.

Well – who do I think I’m kidding? It has been more than enough, for a very long time, and yet we all know that nothing is going to change very soon just because some of us observe that there are rational alternatives.

Anyway, you’ve been forewarned about the deeply boring mulberry-bush debates that are likely to follow on Dion and Kennedy’s hardly courageous proposals to give a few more women a chance to gain experience in losing a riding. In the meantime, I expect that intelligent women will be thinking of many better things to do with their time and energy and brilliance.

And for not talking about a serious system of PR that would ensure fairness of many kinds, I’m marking Stéphane and Gerard down to 50 plus 1 – what say y’all?

Just what we need: more hot air

It might be worth putting our minority government out of our misery if only to put an end to the gaseous emissions of pompous Liberals like this one (not that it would):

Jack Layton's New Democrats are alienating core supporters by "propping up" the minority Conservative government and attempting to influence the federal plan to tackle climate change, says deputy Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.

"There's something nauseating going on which Canadians have to notice," Ignatieff told the Star. "Layton gets up and pretends to oppose a government that he's propping up. He's got to decide what the hell he's doing here."

Something nauseating? I guess that explains the pained expression Iggie often seems to wear. Meanwhile I expect there are core supporters of the NDP who would be more than a little nauseated that Ignatieff presumes to speak for them.

There are a couple of problems with Ignatieff's storyline. In order for the NDP to actually prop up the Conservatives, there would have to be legislation for them to vote on. And the legislation in question — the proposed Clean Air Act — won't see the light of day until at least the end of March in part because of the Liberals themselves. It was the Natural Governing Party that got together with the Conservatives to pack the witness list for the committee hearings. And it was the Liberals who combined with the Bloc to extend the deadline for those hearings. When you consider that it was the Libs who signed on to Kyoto and who have never hesitated to trumpet their own cred on this issue — and that their current leader was most recently the Environment Minister — it's curious to say the least that they suddenly feel compelled to study the issue even more. I had the impression they'd already studied it to death. Pun intended. And all of that is in addition to the public indecision Iggie's boss has expressed about the merits of an early election. The message that sends is that the Libs are quite comfortable leaving Harper in Sussex Drive for a while longer.

I'm aware that there are NDP supporters who are restless and impatient with the way Layton's handling this. You can find evidence of that right here on this blog. And while it's possible that the Dippers will cut a deal with the Conservatives on this legislation, they haven't yet; they're still in negotiations and if those negotiations seem likely to drag on interminably it's the Liberals we have to thank for that as much as anyone. You might almost think they're doing it just so they can sell this story to the public.

Cry me a river

Update:
You might recall that representatives of the Fraser Institute are planning to release an "independent review of the science section of the 2007 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report" in London, England, on Monday.

Via Buckdog comes news that the tall foreheads at the Fraser Institute are just a touch miffed to have drawn attention to their deliberations from the, y'know, wrong sort of people (that would be us, as in citizens):

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(CCNMatthews - Feb. 2, 2007) - Proper identification will be required of all news media attending the 5th February media briefing on the release of the Fraser Institute's independent review of the science section of the 2007 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

Increased security at the media briefing has been prompted by information indicating that protestors will be present outside the venue and may try to disrupt the event.

Only reporters affiliated with recognized media outlets will be allowed into the briefing. All reporters attending will be asked to show identification or accreditation.

We regret this inconvenience brought about by those who would limit free speech and independent research.

The media briefing will feature noted climate researcher Dr. Ross McKitrick as well as Dr. Andrei Illarionov, former advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Professor David Henderson, former head of Economics and Statistics at the OECD, David Bellamy, noted environmentalist, and several of the 10 co-authors for the global launch and presentation of the Fraser Institute's Independent Summary for Policymakers.

Now, that's a knee-slapper, isn't it? The people, demonstrating peaceably and lawfully on the streets -- essence of democracy, yes? -- the people are trying to "limit free speech and independent research"?

Gosh. The fun they must have at the Fraser Institute. What cards.

What corking fun, as Wayne and Shuster used to say. Well, one of them did.

The Hunger Moon

The fat days of summer are gone. The food supply is running low for many. The full moon of February is known as 'The Hunger Moon'.

Tonight is one of those strange winter nights when the full moon reflecting off the snow gives enough light to read a newspaper. Except that it is -32C with a wind chill of -44C. The blocks of firewood sound like chunks of steel when you bang them together. It has been this way for most of the last couple of weeks and will be for at least another.

There was 14" of snow in 12 hours a month ago and life became easier for some. The ruffed grouse are sitting out the cold in their snow caves. The voles have their intricate tunnel systems ending in dry grass lined nests. For others, not so much. The great horned owl I used to see on vole patrol in the pasture every night has gone - hunting the heavier woods for snowshoe rabbits hungry enough to leave their forms under the dead falls. The fox, too, has come on hard times. Even his keen hearing has trouble detecting the mice moving in their tunnels and it is hard to plunge through a foot of snow to pin them to the ground.

The snow was hard on the deer as well. They are yarded up to keep their network of trails open. But the food along those trails is gone. Feeding means ploughing through the snow for ever longer distances. For the fawns, that means pushing through snow up to their bellies.

But the table is about to be set for some. The Hunger Moon means winter kill. Winter kill. It sounds almost benign. Until you realize it's a euphemism for weeks of slowly starving to death. The deer have lost their fat and the cold saps their energy. They sleep more and forage less. Their movements become hesitant. Their walk unsure. Slowly their bodies begin to break down until an adult deer is diminished to the point where you can pick up and carry the remains. And, eventually there is the sleep that ends all suffering.

The coyotes and the wolves will eat. As will the foxes and the flock of ravens that circles overhead everyday like winter vultures. In a normal winter, about 15% of the deer herd is winter killed. In an extreme winter, as high as 45%...of about 200,000 whitetails in the province. In nature, there are no seniors homes for wildlife to live out in time in relative comfort and die quietly in their sleep. The only time death is not slow and brutal is when it is fast and brutal.

And the same was true for people in years gone by. Some of my plant reference books are full of references to "starvation food" - what you ate during The Hunger Moon. The cruelest moon of all.

Friday night blues blogging

Roy Buchanan. When A Guitar Plays The Blues

Took you long enough

I said this was an oops and it looks like I got one right.

A senior Pentagon official resigned Friday over controversial remarks in which he criticized lawyers who represent terrorism suspects, the Defense Department said.

Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said Charles ''Cully'' Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, told him on Friday that he had made his own decision to resign and was not asked to leave by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

If that last part is correct then Gates should resign too. But I don't expect that to happen.

All we are saying ...

Peace train for Iran

That is Tehran. Those are the people of Tehran.

To life. To the dignity of every human being, and to the beauty of our planet.

Thanks to brebis noire at breadnroses.ca.

Stop me if you've heard this one

Oh, I shouldn't do this. I'm so afraid I'll jinx it. Every time I think that Tony Blair is going, he ... stays. Longer.

So on Tuesday night, pogge writes to ask "Have you seen this?" So the next morning I write back to pogge to say no, and thanks, but I just saw this. So then I say to pogge, I'd better not. You know what will happen ... Which was probably the wise thought.

But there is something different about the tone of today's update on the cash-for-honours scandal in the UK:

The day after it emerged that the prime minister had been interviewed for a second time by police in connection with the allegations, Mr Blair insisted he was carrying on with his normal working routine. He still had "certain things" he wished to finish, he added.

Ok, some of them are big things:

Mr Blair repeated his pledge to leave as prime minister before the end of this parliament, but insisted there were still initiatives - including health service reforms - which he wanted to see through before going.

But "certain things I wish to finish" doesn't sound to me quite the Tony Blair who was until recently determined to end his legacy year with yet another grand performance as indispensable international linchpin at the G8 in June.

Some further details of the ongoing investigation on the flip, along with signs that the party elders are getting restless:

It emerged yesterday that Mr Blair was interviewed as a witness for 45 minutes last Friday, but Downing Street had kept it secret due to a police request for a media blackout lasting a number of days.

During that time, Lord Levy, Labour's chief fundraiser, was arrested on suspicion of giving misleading or contradictory evidence.

Scotland Yard's inquiry was sparked in March last year following complaints that wealthy individuals who lent money to bankroll Labour's 2005 general election campaign were later nominated for peerages.

Four people have been arrested and many of Mr Blair's closest allies interviewed by police, but there have so far been no charges.

...

Senior Labour figures have begun openly to express fears over the "corrosive" effects of the cash-for-honours allegations.

The Labour party chair, Hazel Blears, said last night that the inquiry was damaging the government's ability to communicate with voters, and justice minister Harriet Harman said trust had been "eroded".

They both spoke out after ex-leader Neil Kinnock said it would take "years" for the reputation of the political system to recover.

Ms Blears - tipped as a contender to be the party's next deputy leader - said: "Inevitably, when you have this kind of thing going on for months and months, it does have a corrosive effect.

"It is damaging for politics because there is a corrosive cynicism around that I think is damaging for the country," she told the BBC's Newsnight.

"This whole affair has overshadowed our domestic agenda: it is quite difficult to get your message across."

Ms Harman - a declared candidate in the race to succeed John Prescott - told BBC1's Question Time: "It has eroded trust and it's been an unfortunate, to say the least, situation."

Just btw, could someone who knows British jurisprudence explain to me how people can be arrested and yet not charged? I thought that a clear announcement of the charge was part of the process of being legally arrested, but I sit to be corrected.

Meanwhile, I have some tea leaves that need reading.

Sauce. Meet Goose and Gander.

So the Conservatives have decided to run a bunch of television attack ads against Stephane Dion. I remember during the last election campaign how Conservative apologists were yipping and kiyiing about how unfair it was for people to bring up Steven Harper's more egregious past blasphemies against Canada and it's citizens. "IT'S NOT FAIR", they bleated in chorus, "to bring up statements someone made in the past and quote them back now".

How times change. Or, at least, how short memories are when it's convenient. Like everything else the Harpies have done since they assumed office, they say one thing and do the opposite. It looks like nothing so much as a major attack of desperation for a party flailing to even maintain its popular vote from the last election. The Conservatives also evidently lack the intellectual capacity to grasp even a concept as simple as "people who live in glass houses probably shouldn't practice the shot-put indoors". Everything Li'l Stevie has ever said about anything is now fair game and the Conservatives can say nothing when it's brought up. Have at it boys and girls.

And, while I'm busy pissing people off, Jack Layton, who I have less use for by the day (assuming that is possible), needs to start taking a long hard look at who he is in bed with and whose government he is propping up. Jack, Steve may have been dressed up to look like a 'nine' when he picked you up in the bar at closing time but he's not even a skanky 'three' when the sun comes up. And you will wake up one morning with a terrible hangover only to discover you have been used and dumped like a rubber glove after a rectal exam.

One evening in October, when Steve was one-third sober,
An' taking home a ‘load' with manly pride;
His poor feet began to stutter, so he lay down in the gutter,
And a pig came up an' lay down by his side;
Then they sang ‘It's all fair weather when good fellows get together,'
Till a lady passing by was heard to say:
‘You can tell a man who "boozes" by the company he chooses'
And the pig got up and slowly walked away.

Which only goes to show that pigs are possessed of significantly better judgment (not to mention better taste) than the leadership of the Layton Party.

So here we are facing another election at some point. And once again, I don't have a date for the barn dance. I won't vote for the Conservatives. I won't vote for the Conservatives with the John Deere paint job (that's Green with a yellow stripe for you city folks). I won't vote for the Liberals and I won't vote for the Layton Party. Oh, wait, is that the sweet siren song of the wallflower brigade wafting over on the winter breeze?

Where the hell is the Rhinoceros Party when we need them? I know the Rhinos closed up shop because they felt they couldn't do as good a job of satirizing Canadian politics as the "real" politicians were doing. But jeebus guys, with nattering imbeciles making up the vast majority of our political class, the Rhinos would be a shoe-in for a majority government.

Some time ago, a Liberal commenter here (who shall remain nameless) whined that this is the time he usually heard an irrelevant sixty year old story about cats of different colours. And there's the rub. I still believe the 'Story of Mouseland' is as relevant today as it was sixty years ago. I just no longer believe there is a "Bolshevik" mouse left to ride in and save us.

Pity that.

Cash for cred

When you read a statement like this, do you have the funny feeling you’ve heard this kind of argument a lot lately?

"Right now, the whole debate is polarised," he said. "One group says that anyone with any doubts whatsoever are deniers and the other group is saying that anyone who wants to take action is alarmist. We don't think that approach has a lot of utility for intelligent policy."

Sounds awfully reasonable on the surface, doesn’t it? Nuanced, even.

It comes from the guy who just sent out this offer to distinguished scientists and economists in the UK, the U.S., and elsewhere:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

Gosh. The American Enterprise Institute. You’re right: we’ve heard of them before (back to the Guardian report):

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

...

Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: "The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration's intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they've got left is a suitcase full of cash."

And gosh darn if there isn’t a Canadian connection too:

On Monday, another Exxon-funded organisation based in Canada will launch a review in London which casts doubt on the IPCC report. Among its authors are Tad Murty, a former scientist who believes human activity makes no contribution to global warming. Confirmed VIPs attending include Nigel Lawson and David Bellamy, who believes there is no link between burning fossil fuels and global warming.

liberal catnip was on this story last night, and follows through with a little background on that “former scientist” (wonderful description) Tad Murty, member of a Canadian group called Friends of Science, founded by Dr Barry Cooper, professor of political science at the University of Calgary and long-time friend and adviser to ... Sigh.

I’ve been overdosing on elite incest this week (yes, I’m following the liveblogging of the Scooter Libby trial) and on the neo-con memes that disguise it, here as in the U.S., that have been used to wrangle the North American mainstream (media and opinion both) ever rightward.

Crooks and liars. Our political and business elites really are, and the major media are suckers. It is so brutally obvious; it is so easy to track the incestuous connections. With their smarmy faux-democratic rhetoric (“We need a diversity of views”; “The whole debate is so polarised”), the powerful laugh at the people as they rip us off, relying on the persistent tendency of honest people to try to be fair and reasonable, to resist thinking that our elites are criminal.

Gah. I need more coffee.

On eggs and baskets redux

To follow up on this post about the resignation of the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and the closing of four Canadian consulates, James Travers has a piece in the Toronto Star that suggests Harper is continuing a process of sidelining DFAIT that began under previous Liberal governments.

Liberal and Conservative prime ministers contributed to the slide by using the department's remaining prestige to fix internal political problems.

Martin strengthened Quebec cabinet representation by bouncing Toronto's intelligent and competent Bill Graham for Montreal's smart but dilettante Pierre Pettigrew.

Harper both rewarded and isolated Peter MacKay by giving the unseasoned former Tory leader – and partner in uniting the right – with a job that puts a premium on experience.

No minister has made much of an international impression since Lloyd Axworthy proselytized soft power and protecting the world's most vulnerable people. Even he failed to give the department a lasting purpose or bring the most sensitive international files back under its control. Those are now Canada's relationship with the U.S. and the Afghan war. While more than a passenger, DFAIT isn't driving either.

Travers finishes up with comment on Peter's Harder's resignation.

While Harder is too much the consummate mandarin to air frustrations publicly, colleagues are now piling policy reasons for his departure on top of the personal rationale that, after 29 years, he had nothing more to prove or gain.

High on the presumed list are concerns over limited Conservative interest in China, the tilt away from a balanced Mideast policy and fear that globalization is leaving us behind.

Then there is the other problem, felt across the senior bureaucracy, that working for this government isn't rewarding. Instead of analyzing options and proposing solutions, those at the top of the civil service pecking order mutter that their jobs are being reduced to unquestioning executioin of the ruling party's ideas and platform.

That's felt particularly strongly at foreign affairs, a department once synonymous with creative policy thinking. Whatever the reasons, Harder's exodus is seen here as more evidence that the distance between the Prime Minister and the department has grown far beyond four city blocks and won't be bridged anytime soon.

It seems eerily reminiscent of the way competent bureaucrats have left the American government, or been forced out, in favour of Bush loyalists who do little more than take dictation. Not to mention the way the American State Department has been sidelined while foreign policy has been formulated by Dear Leader and the Dark Force in the Undisclosed Location (with a little help from the think tanks). And we've all seen how well that's worked out.

Fantasy and Politics

Well, this will be a long entry and a somewhat odd one. Bear with me if you will.
I'm a fantasy and science fiction fan. It's often been said that science fiction is really about the times it's written in. That is, the science fiction writer (often perhaps unconsciously) uses a projected future to talk about current issues and what their implications might be, in ways that might not be possible talking directly about the present-day real world. Because of this, while there's a certain amount of knee-jerk mockery of “sci-fi”, trekkies and so on, in many thoughtful circles science fiction gets a certain amount of respect. And while SF has often been dominated by somewhat right wing thinkers, from Heinlein to Jerry Pournelle, and has at times been full of sexism, at the same time its subject matter has always been associated with liberation, acceptance of difference, and exploration of new ideas, and left wing and feminist writers have had huge impacts both within the genre proper and when writers such as George Orwell have adopted the form to make statements. And science fiction tropes have always lent themselves to an implicit or explicit rejection of racism. With all this going on, it's often accepted that science fiction has political relevance. Fantasy, on the other hand, tends to get brushed off as escapist fluff. Which, to be honest, lots of it is (as is lots of science fiction, while a lot of taken-seriously mainstream books are both fluff and not escapist enough to be much fun). Not only that, it's often considered inherently reactionary escapist fluff—that the tropes and environment of fantasy undermine progressive ideas because societies in the genre tend to be medieval with kings and gifted bloodlines and stuff. Magic is rarely something that everyone gets equally, there's unique children of destiny left and right. Oddly, even left wing fantasy writers like China Mieville tend to scoff at the possibility that more typical, Tolkienish fantasy could be anything but negative.

As you may have guessed by now, I disagree.

I think fantasy books, even fairly typical large-audience mass market fantasy books, can also work out real-world themes using an alternative canvas. I'm going to ignore the master himself for now—Tolkien's too easy, because so many people have spent so much time thinking about his stuff. I'd like to briefly discuss Midnight Tides, by Steven Erikson, one book in a series referred to as “The Malazan book of the fallen”. This book is copyright 2004. Erikson is a rather new writer, the series having become instantly popular. The books in general feature complex, suspenseful plotting; interesting, fairly varied and complexly motivated if not truly thick characters; worldbuilding with a very strong sense of deep, multilayered time; and scale which deftly meshes the epic and personal levels. It's pretty dashed good stuff by a typical fantasy yardstick. But I've noticed some political and philosophical themes being worked out in the middle of all the intrigue, plot twists and mayhem.

The particular book, Midnight Tides, takes something of a side trip from the main developing plotline and deals with the unfolding conflict between a very wealthy, urbanized nation called Lether and a more archaic, clannish group, much less numerous, (who aren't actually human as such) called the Tiste Edur. Neither group is portrayed as anything like perfect, and both are being manipulated by other powers. But as the plot unfolded, descriptions of Lether kept leaping out at me and I became more and more convinced that Lether was essentially a stand-in for the American empire in decline. I was going to explain why I thought so, but having culled some of the most relevant quotations it's seems to me so hit-over-the-head obvious I'll mostly let them speak for themselves:

“Trull Sengar saw chains upon the Letherii. He saw the impenetrable net which bound them, the links of reasoning woven together into a chaotic mass where no beginning and no end could be found. He understood why they worshipped an empty throne. And he knew the manner in which they would justify all that they did. Progress was necessity, growth was gain. Reciprocity belonged to fools and debt was the binding force of all nature, of every people and every civilization. Debt was its own language, within which were used words like negotiation, compensation and justification, and legality was a skein of duplicity that blinded the eyes of justice. An empty throne. Atop a mountain of gold coins.”

“We have a talent for disguising greed under the cloak of freedom. As for past acts of depravity, we prefer to ignore those. Progress, after all, means to look ever forward, and whatever we have trampled in our wake is best forgotten.”
“Progress, then,” Binadas said, still smiling, “sees no end.”
“Our wagons ever roll down the hill, Hiroth. Faster and faster.”
“Until they strike a wall.”
“We crash through most of those.”

“Seren Pedac held no love for her own people. The Letherii's rapacious hunger and inability to shift to any perspective that did not serve them virtually assured a host of bloody clashes with every foreign power they met. And, one day, they would meet their match. The wagons will shatter against a wall more solid than any we have seen.”

“The Letherii will seek to do to us as they have done to the Nerek and the Tarthenal. Most among them see no error or moral flaw in their past deeds. Those who do are unable or unwilling to question the methods, only the execution, and so they are doomed to repeat the horrors, and see the result—no matter its nature—as yet one more test of firmly held principles. And even should the blood run in a river around them, they will obsess on the details. One cannot challenge the fundamental beliefs of such people, for they will not hear you.”

“The Letherii military was still strong, yet increasingly it was bound to economics. Every campaign was an opportunity for wealth.”

“For all the explosive growth driving the kingdom, it seemed an ever greater proportion of the population was being left behind, and that was troubling.
At what point in the history of Letheras, he wondered, did rampant greed become a virtue? The level of self-justification required was staggering in its tautological complexity, and it seemed language itself was its greatest armour against common sense.
You can't leave all these people behind. They're outside the endless excitement and lust, the frenzied accumulation. They're outside and can only look on with growing despair and envy. What happens when rage supplants helplessness?
Increasingly, the ranks of the military were filling with the lowest classes. Training, acceptable income and a full belly provided the incentives, yet these soldiers were not enamoured of the civilization they were sworn to defend.”

“Such dark moments in Letherii history were systematically disregarded, she knew, and played virtually no role in their culture's vision of itself as bringers of progress, deliverers of freedom from the fetters of primitive ways of living, the cruel traditions and vicious rituals. Liberators, then, destined to wrest from savage tyrants their repressed victims, in the name of civilization. That the Letherii then imposed their own rules of repression was rarely acknowledged. There was, after all, but one road to success and fulfillment, gold-cobbled and maintained by Letherii toll-collectors, and only the free could walk it.
Free to profit from the same game. Free to discover one's own inherent disadvantages. Free to be abused. Free to be exploited. Free to be owned in lieu of debt.”

“'This is a nervous city. The few non-Letherii remaining are being subjected to harassment, and not just by citizens. The authorities are showing their racist underpinnings with all these suspicions and the eagerness to tread over hard-won rights.'
'Proof that the freedoms once accorded non-Letherii peoples were born of both paternalism and a self-serving posturing as a benign overseer. What is given is taken away, just like that.”

“Trull Sengar could only wonder, what bred such certainties? What made a people so filled with rectitude and intransigence? Perhaps all that is needed . . . is power. A shroud of poison filling the air, seeping into every pore of every man, woman and child. A poison that twisted the past to suit the mores of the present, illuminating in turn an inevitable and righteous future. A poison that made intelligent people blithely disregard the ugly truths of past errors in judgement, of horrendous, brutal debacles that had stained red the hands of their forefathers. A poison that entrenched the stupidity of dubious traditions, and brought misery and suffering upon countless victims.
Power, then. The very same power we are about to embrace. Sisters have mercy upon our people.”

Well? You've all read progressive articles denouncing the Iraq war and tying it into wars past including Vietnam, picking apart the plutocracy and the self-righteousness and so on. Is this amazingly similar, or what? I don't think it's a co-incidence. There are other themes being worked out, some of them broader and more timeless. And this is a nine hundred page book. It's not filled with this stuff; the didactic commentary comes in bits and pieces, here and there. And I'd say that Lether itself is more than just a stand-in for the US, it's an example of all imperialist civilizations and all their conflicts with “natives”, “barbarians”, “underdeveloped countries” and so on. A point driven home by the transfer of the mantle in that last bit of quotation. But I still say Lether is awfully US-ish, far more so than, say, Roman.

Of course, being mass market fantasy, this book will sell better than any progressive piece of text short of Chomsky, and to a very different audience much of which would otherwise be highly unlikely to get exposed to any such ideas. I'd say it's certainly political. I think it's also working out some ideas in ways that would not be possible outside the fantasy genre; it's certainly speaking to an audience that would be hard to reach otherwise. So. Is it just irrelevant escapism?