Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Weekend Roundup

Started this on Sunday, but too many distractions kept me from wrapping it up in a timely fashion. As I've noted already, my sister, Kathy Hull, died last week. We've had visitors and all sorts of chores to do, and I've been plagued by my own health problems. One thing that I did notice was that the sense of horror I felt on hearing the news was one I had experienced several times before: when, for instance, my first wife died, and most recently when Donald Trump was elected president. A big part of that sensation is the dread of facing a future not of unknown and unimaginable consequences but of quite certain pain and loss. The news since election day has merely born out that expected dread. Numerous examples follow, and I'm sure I'm missing at least as much more. One thing I suppose I should take comfort from is that when we finally have a memorial for Kathy (on March 31), we will have fond memories and a lot of art to celebrate. When Trump's term ends we're unlikely to recall a single shred of redeeming value.

Of course, the two events are not comparable in any regard except personal emotional impact on me. The key point is that the shock of the 2016 election, the immediate apprehension of what the American people just did to themselves, hit me pretty much as hard, with much the same body chemistry. Of course, the grief tracks have been/will be different. We will adjust to the impoverished world without her, but the blow has been struck, both final and finite. On the other hand, Trump and his Congress and Courts have barely started to take their toll, which will only grow over time and won't stop when his term ends. On the other hand, there are things that can be done to alter or even reverse the course Trump has set us on. And there is at least one thing I can take comfort in: I've spent literally all of my adult life in opposition to whoever has held political power, as indeed I would still be had Hillary Clinton won, but since the 1970s I've never been in such large or dynamic company. It's also nice to feel no need to defend Clinton when she says something tone-deaf (like her note that she won the urban areas that had fared best under her party's neoliberal advancement) or any of the other petty scandals she's prone to.

By the way, this week is the fifteenth anniversary of Bush's invasion of Iraq. I took another look at what I wrote on March 18, and much of what I wrote then holds up; especially:

As I write this, we cannot even remotely predict how this war will play out, how many people will die or have their lives tragically transfigured, how much property will be destroyed, how much damage will be done to the environment, what the long-term effects of this war will be on the economy and civilization, both regionally and throughout the world. In lauching his war, Bush is marching blithely into the unknown, and dragging the world with him.

I probably tried too hard to rationalize the Bush case, and I spent a lot of time fantasizing that Iraqis might wise up and figure out how to play the PR game in ways that might limit the destruction. That didn't happen first because the seemingly easy military victory unleashed an extraordinary degree of American hubris, and partly because it took very little resistance to change the American stance from would-be benefactor to occupier and schemer. My other mistake was in failing to see how much the US failure in Afghanistan, which was already obvious even if less observed, prefigured the very same failure in Iraq. Not that I was unaware of Afghanistan. Indeed, I've always known that the prime mistake Bush made after 9/11 was driving into Afghanistan.

Even though this isn't appearing until Tuesday, I've tried to limit the stories/links to last Sunday. Some later ones may have crept in -- especially on the Cambridge Analytica story.

Some scattered links this week:

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