Told Ya'

No Palestinian state by 2012, Israeli envoy says (Washington Times)

Israel's hard-line foreign minister said Tuesday there was "no chance" a Palestinian state would be established by 2012 — a message that threatened to cloud the latest visit by President Obama's Mideast envoy.

The comments by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman drew swift Palestinian condemnations and could put Israel at odds with the international community, which has set a 2012 target for brokering a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

"As an optimist, I see no chance that a Palestinian state will be established by 2012," Mr. Lieberman said at a news conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. "We can express interest, we can dream, but in reality, we are still far from reaching understandings and agreements on establishing an independent state by 2012."

Exposing Israeli Apartheid (CBS, 60 Minutes)

I was slightly shocked to find this very well done 60 Minutes report on the Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. It gives me hope that the media are slowly coming around to being critical of a state that has contemptuously ignored (with the United States' help through the United Nations) international law for the last forty plus years. The key note here, dark and despairing in its implication and spoken with candor by Palestinians themselves, is that Israel is making it clear that any chance for a two state solution is becoming impossible. It should be noted that this video was made months before Israel's invasion of Gaza, where according to Amnesty International approximately 1400 innocent Palestinians were killed intentionally, of which 300 were children. The kill count is heavily in favor of the Israeli government -- which is an important distinction, given that there are hugely significant groups of Israeli citizens who oppose and criticize the coldblooded hegemony of their government.

This documentary is, all things considered, the nicer side of a revolting murder of Palestinian rights.

One line summarized the entire occupation with haunting concision: "Arabs tried to save their homes, but the Israelis had the guns." Add to this the unimaginable religious idiocy by an Israeli who makes no apologies for perpetuating the building of illegal settlements. There is no better current example of the easiness of killing the soul of another human being in the name of God.

Sports

As I write this, the USA soccer team is still perhaps clouded in the pain of their loss against Ghana in the World Cup. We went further than any other time I remember watching, and catching this rare, four year interval event makes me think of how The World Cup is truly an excellent event, simply because it unifies the world like no other sporting medium (aside from the Olympics) can do. When countries play against each other, respect and appreciation are almost impossible not to experience; we're dealing with the face-off between histories, cultures, trial and errors and overcomings writ large, rather than corporate-sponsored single stars and cocky states. With an event like this, only the staunchest jingoist could possibly fail to see his own team as a translucent image behind which the entire world beams in recognition.

But this isn't how the vast majority of sporting events function.

Especially in the age of social networking, the virtual sight isn't hard at all to come by. You can easily imagine a one-liner by a friendless friend on Facebook who said that she "won the game," although you may have no idea which sport she was referring to. In almost every single situation, the "win" part always stands out to me. Our sports-centric culture enjoys the mad memes that basketball, football, soccer, baseball, or whatever is all about exercise, the refinement of the physical nature of the human being, the athletic excellence of the individual, and such and so on. We're hardly honest enough to call it what it all really is: a collection of almost ridiculously trivial physical acts qualified by the same old ancient drive toward winning, of seeing the other team (albeit perhaps with noble feelings projected their way) in the inferior slot.

Yes, we're playing the power card yet again, and if you can imagine any sporting event being any bit of sensationalistic fun without the idea of winning against another person or team, you've got it wrong, but not (as will be argued below) not quite all wrong. As a recreation assistant for a church years back (easy, lazy, check please), we had a nicely thought out basketball organization called Upward. Kids would compete in teams as usual, with each player assessed for talent so as to create as closely as possible teams of approximate ability. What made the game both admirable and absurd was the underpinned theme that was often made public: there are no winners. Scores weren't kept. The closest you could do was keep track for yourself, which always led to a sense of injustice when both teams went off the court as cute little egalitarians ready to consume the cheap snacks altruistic parents had blessed upon them. I remember watching these games (quite a few, in fact), and how odd it was that my mind naturally turned from determining which team was winning to which player was the best. I'd find myself involuntarily seeking the team outlier, who scored half of the time and often had the flashy moves.

If I hadn't done this, what would the sport become? What would it be without comparison and overcoming, with one kid ripping it up over everyone else, or the others in the team who hold a moment of excellence through a steal or a well-shot score? The purely objective act of throwing a ball through a hoop. And that, of course, is a quintessential bore. It is quite simply close to impossible to take away the point tally without reducing sports to an unenthusiastic pass of the time. There just isn't much of a point of lobbing around a spherical rubber object unless I somehow know that it's a mediator for my (our) victory, and even where no score is explicit, there could easily hide a better-than-thou spirit with every chug of the ball, focusing our sights on the best player on the team in all his kinetic excellence.

Almost. There is a spiritual element to overcoming, which lies in the way to freedom and breaking the shackles that would try to hold us down. An animal may fight to win, but a human being can fight in order to progress according to the ideals he holds. If you can prune sports to overcoming, suddenly it goes from the most animalistic to one of the most spiritual of activities. Not about competition and winning, but rather about liberty, sweat-soaked and smelly it may be. And this, I think, is what it is all about for the players on the field, and an excellent reason against spectator sports. The longer you watch and root for a certain collection of individuals, the more likely you are to be drawn into the brutish push for us over them.

It's the people watching on the outside who corrupt the game to an activity of winning. It's the asshole Uncle Chuck, perpetually decked out in his Rockets jersey, shouting at opposing fans in stadiums, propagandizing his relatives with how good his team is. It's the corporations who are looking for a recognizable name to attach to their logo for the sake of money. It's the machismo father who forces his child into football and screams bloody murder for his own son's team that they might annihilate the opposition. This is where gold turns to straw and power becomes the goal, and with this comes an understanding of the pervasive irrationality behind rooting for your own side. The conversational words of Chomsky encapsulate the whole thing on this point:

Spectator sports also have other useful functions too. For one thing, they're a great way to build up chauvinism -- you start by developing these totally irrational loyalties early in life, and they translate very nicely to other areas. I mean, I remember very well in high school having a sudden kind of Erlebnis, you know, a sudden insight, and asking myself, why do I care if my high school football team wins? I don't know anybody on the team. They don't know me. I wouldn't know what to say to them if I met them. Why do I care? Why do I get all excited if the football team wins and all downcast if it loses? And it's true, you do: you're taught from childhood that you've got to worry about the Philadelphia Phillies, where I was.... But the point is, this sense of irrational loyalty to some sort of meaningless community is training for subordination to power, and for chauvinism.

The consequences are obvious enough: the more emphasis you place on your team, the less you place on other teams in general, the more they become the enemy, and in time the more anyone who opposes becomes an enemy by definition. It's extremely easy to imagine how this exclusiveness can turn into a type of anti-cosmopolitan and herdlike personality (or magnify an already present seedling), where everything associated with my group is by definition superior or better than anything associated with them, whether we're talking about the family, the nation, or the collection of our own skin cells. Thus,

All of this stuff builds up extremely anti-social aspects of human psychology. I mean, they're there; there's no doubt that they're there. But they're emphasized, and exaggerated, and brought out by spectator sports: irrational competition, irrational loyalty to power systems, passive acquiescence to quite awful values, really. In fact, it's hard to imagine anything that contributes more fundamentally to authoritarian attitudes than this does, in addition to the fact that it just engages a lot of intelligence and keeps people away from other things.

The formula is simple : the moment a team becomes my team and the goal is to beat everyone else, then the animal drive returns, qualified by consciousness yes, but still the same brutal push for conquering the other guy. Sports is sanctified insofar as the opposition reflects the faces of the persons seeking to overcome it. The moment the mirror becomes a window and the opposition gains flesh and blood, then the drive to be greater (rather than great) blooms, and by then the mountain treads downward. It thus becomes about seeing the other team insubordinate, and hence reflexively your team the best in the world, rather than the athletic charge against a faceless existential force which would try to conquer you. It's precisely this latter perspective that can allow two teams to struggle against one another for ninety exhausting minutes, with anxiety and sweat and the uncertainty of hope, and upon finishing humbly, happily greet each other for playing such a grand game. And it's this same perspective that allows us to root for anyone, and woe unto the shallow self whose respect is constrained by anything less.

Stewart, At His Best

Apologies from myself and the flagging muse, but graduate school has kicked in, which means a momentary hiatus from the blogosphere. But I couldn't pass the chance to forward one of Jon Stewart's classic sarcastic performances, which trucks out in seven mere minutes yet another shade of the absurdity of BP's oil-soaked sighs:

The Spilling Fields -- BP Ad Campaign

For anyone with a conscience, Green technology sure is looking good now. To modify a quote from the notorious Nixon: I guess we're* all Environmentalists now.

*"We're" here implies a brain, which would exclude many either on the political scene or fanatic for it.

Why Have I Laughed Hysterically Today?

An experimental Google search:

Type in "should I have" and wait for the results to automatically fill:

a baby

another baby

a baby quiz

an abortion

kids

a third child

an affair

another baby quiz

children

my gallbladder removed

The dialectic of American ambivalence as channeled through Google: to multiply or not to multiply, or get down with someone with whom I could extramaritally multiply, or an abortion, or, you know, what do do with that damn gallbladder?

Oh, shoot me with harmless little bullets of uncertain joy.

Journalistic Jitters, Israel Style

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com hits the nail right on the head. So hard and precise, in fact, that I must quote three-fourths of the article (sans updates, which are hefty and very much worth peeking into) in its entirety, keeping his original emphases intact.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What Does Israel Fear From Media Coverage?
Glenn Greenwald

The New York Times, today:

A day after Israeli commandoes raided an aid flotilla seeking to breach the blockade of Gaza, Israel held hundreds of activists seized aboard the convoy on Tuesday . . . .Reuters reported that Israel was holding hundreds of activists incommunicado in and around the port city of Ashdod, refusing to permit journalists access to witnesses who might contradict Israel's version of events.

Physically blocking journalists from reporting on their conduct is what Israel does (as well as others); recall this from The New York Times on January 6, 2009, regarding Israel's war in Gaza:

Israel Puts Media Clamp on Gaza

Three times in recent days, a small group of foreign correspondents was told to appear at the border crossing to Gaza. The reporters were to be permitted in to cover firsthand the Israeli war on Hamas in keeping with a Supreme Court ruling against the two-month-old Israeli ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza.

Each time, they were turned back on security grounds, even as relief workers and other foreign citizens were permitted to cross the border. On Tuesday the reporters were told to not even bother going to the border.

And so for an 11th day of Israel’s war in Gaza, the several hundred journalists here to cover it waited in clusters away from direct contact with any fighting or Palestinian suffering, but with full access to Israeli political and military commentators eager to show them around southern Israel, where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians. A slew of private groups financed mostly by Americans are helping guide the press around Israel.

Like all wars, this one is partly about public relations. But unlike any war in Israel’s history, in this one the government is seeking to entirely control the message and narrative for reasons both of politics and military strategy.

Isn't it strange how Plucky, Democratic Israel goes to such extreme lengths to prevent any media coverage of what they do, any journalistic interference with their propaganda machine, in light of the fact that -- as always -- They Did Absolutely Nothing Wrong? Is physically blocking the media from covering what happens the act of a government that is in the right? Thomas Jefferson answered that question quite some time ago:

Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues of truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is freedom of the press. It is therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.

Within Chaos

Sucked up

In this mucked up life

I drink my tea

Unhappily

To the tinfoil sounds

Of background idiocy

And ever vaguely

The footprints about me

Abound in a soiled snow

Soon melted by catastrophe

With each man approximate

Spoken through the drug of pride

A self-claimed captain

No ship can swiftly sail

On the tides of our times

Still I drink my tea

Now vaguely merrily

To the unworded howls

In the hearts around me

And ever strangely

The call of a slowly

Spoken stillness

Resounds within me

And I am free

More Sins From Israel