Sunday, February 09, 2003

One quick thought

Here’s a small portion of Colin Powell’s speech to the UN last Wednesday, in which he makes reference to what he says is "a small part of a chemical complex called ‘Al Musayyib’".  According to the Secretary, it’s a way-station between chemical weapons factories and field sites. 

This photograph of the site taken two months later, in July, shows not only the previous site which is the figure in the middle at the top with the bulldozer sign near it, it shows that this previous site, as well as all of the other sites around the site have been fully bulldozed and graded.  The topsoil has been removed.  The Iraqis literally removed the crust of the earth from large portions of this site in order to conceal chemical weapons evidence that would be there from years of chemical weapons activity.

Powell implies, or perhaps I merely infer, that inspectors went to that site and obtained samples that did not contain even a trace of the offending chemicals or their byproducts. 

If it’s that easy to remove chemical contamination from a site, then why has the United States spent billions and billions of dollars and a couple of decades on trying to clean up and recover Superfund sites?

"Have a magical day..."

Whew…

Got back to Seattle late last night after a week at a convention hotel in Orlando.  While the meeting was typical for its genre—we contractors express our frustration with the Feds for their silly rules and/or lack of specificity in describing our required activities, and they shrug their collective shoulders—the setting was so pervasive, so stutifying, so Disney that it’ll take me a little while to settle back into reality-basis.  Fighting against that programming is tough!

Thankfully, there were no Disney characters at our hotel.  At other Walt Disney World hotels, it seems, you might be confronted by Snow White or Pluto while trying to keep your breakfast down.  I’m not sure that even the bar is sufficient refuge at some of them, though the idea of Goofy or Donald bellying up and throwing back a couple of shots of Black Jack does have a certain small appeal.  Even without the characters, though, the mind-control and activity-control was ever-present.  It was clear that they’ll do everything possible to get you out of your hotel room so that you’ll spend money.  The rooms were small and (to be charitable) spartan; all lighting was dim, there were no movies (HBO, Showtime, and such) on the TV, only a few room service items.  Even the TV remote was designed to frustrate you, as it had no number pad so that it was constantly necessary to page through all the intervening channels between the ones you wanted. 

In addition to the half-dozen channels touting pieces of Disney magic, the TV did have every variation of ESPN under the sun—ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, ESPNews, and maybe more.  Lessee now, ESPN is owned by ABC, which is owned by Capital Cities, which is owned by ... Disney, of course. 

Two Disney features stand out as particularly odious.  One of them is the title of this entry.  It’s the constant refrain from the staff—the doorman, the check-in clerk, the restaurant cashier, the telephone operator.  The second is the little sign posted next to particular doors, the ones that would say “Employees Only” or “Private” at any other hotel.  At a Disney hotel, it reads “Cast Members Only”!  Whether they’re waiters or janitors, computer operators or security guards, they’re all mere actors on the Disney stage.

After catching up with the 600 or so email messages that were in my in-box when I returned, I’ll get back into the blog swing.  In the meantime, a couple of thoughts on the political mood among the several hundred people at this nationwide meeting:

a) Granted that this is a group consisting largely of do-gooder types (we’re concerned with the quality of care within Medicare), I ran across very few supporters of GWB’s policies and actions.

b) That most definitely includes the federal employees, several of whom are just below the “political appointment” level in their agency.  Even those wearing the uniform of the Commissioned Corps of the Public Health Service were extremely distraught at what the government they participate in has been doing to us and to them.

c) Even the one unabashed Dubya supporter I ran into—he said he was an old buddy, and admirer, of Karl Rove—expressed strong reservations about the anti-Constitutional efforts of John Ashcroft.

Back to the email…

Saturday, February 01, 2003

On the road...

I’m leaving Sunday morning for nearly a week in Orlando.  It’s a business trip.  Even though we’ll be at a Disney hotel, I don’t anticipate that I’ll spend much time looking for Mickey.  If Goofy happens by, however…

Florida is not my favorite place in the world.  Though the weather will almost certainly be a good bit warmer than the Pacific Northwest (thankfully, the one time every decade that Seattle is warmer than Orlando in January was a couple of weeks ago), that’s nowhere near enough to recommend the Supreme Court’s favorite sandbar.  Maybe if this trip came a few weeks later, during spring training, I could rustle up some enthusiasm.

I don’t anticipate being near web browsers very often during the week.  And if I do sit down in front of a computer, it’ll be to check my email rather than to put up a message here.  So don’t expect to see any fresh Peace Tree Farm content until next weekend at the earliest.

Wouldn’t it be great if it turns out that nothing much happens while I’m away?  Wouldn’t it be a surprise?

How cynical have we all become?

Waking up this morning to the news of the breakup and destruction of the space shuttle over Texas, one of my first thoughts was:

They’ll find some way to suggest that there was some sort of connection to terrorists. 

By they, I mean of course the war parties like the Bushies, Fox TV, Rush, et al.  That one of the astronauts was an Israeli may be used in that manner by some.  Perhaps the ultra-Orthodox findamentalists will find it significant that Colonel Ramon was “working” on Shabbat during the landing.

For the moment, I’m chiding myself for my cynicism.  We’ll soon see whether that cynicism needs to be transferred elsewhere.

I hope I’m wrong about this.

Thursday, January 30, 2003

Loaded language

An undeniable success of the reactionaries is that they have consistently been able to frame issues in terms of their choosing.  I have no insight as to why that’s the case—are ad agencies hotbeds of ideological neo-conservatism?—but you can’t get around the fact.

The clearest recent example is the loaded phrase death tax, used to disparage and overturn the estate tax.  By the way, is the world outside of Washington state aware that William Gates Sr., Bill’s dad, is strongly and publicly opposed to estate tax repeal?  A recent Seattle Times story about that topic is here.  In fact Gates Sr., who recently chaired a statewide special commission that recommended introducing a state income tax, has even co-authored a new book in support of retaining the estate tax.

The conservatives won control of pro-life ages ago, leaving the progressives with pro-choice, a term that’s certainly descriptive of our position but not the winner when it comes to snappy advertising sloganeering.

Even when the loaded term-of-choice is objectively negative in its implications, the reactionaries embrace it and, amazingly, are able to convince large segments of the population that it’s a valid, positive selling point for their position.  The phrase I’m thinking of in this instance is trickle-down economics.  The Reaganites were proud as punch of that phrase, trumpeting it proudly.  But doesn’t it really tell us unashamedly that the intent of their policy of cutting rich people’s taxes was to allow a mere dribble of financial wherewithall to reach the general public?  What was (and still is) needed was gush-down or cascade-down, yet the Republicans somehow managed to frame the discourse in their own favor so thoroughly that the public accepted the scraps tossed their way as if they were receiving a huge windfall from on high.

And now we come to double-taxed dividends, marketed as if it’s the only class of income that is potentially subject to taxation at more than one point in the financial system.

I can offer no reasonable avenues for progressives to explore to counteract this phenomenon.  I merely observe (and rue) it.