Spidergrrl's Web

Red Sox & Kerry, Bush & Creon

According to an NPR segment I heard this afternoon, John Kerry showed up at a gathering in Ohio wearing a Red Sox hat. He said that a year ago when the campaign wasn't doing so well, a snide listener called up a radio show host and said, "John Kerry will get elected president when the Red Sox win the World Series!" There ya have it. Complete with lunar eclipse? What could be more fortuitous.

Report today from health officials...I've got to find the source...that says over 100,000 civilian Iraqis killed in the last 18 months -- mostly due to U.S. air raids. We should be a nation in mourning.

During the first presidential debate, all I could think of was Bush as Creon. We were doing Antigone in my world lit. I course, and Creon lived in George W. The leader of the state who demands unquestioning loyalty, who refuses to change any decision even with new information, who believes certainty is strength...who belittles women, doesn't listen to the people, and imputes motives of greed on seers and sentinels.

Now we're finishing up Douglass's Narrative in my world lit. II class and I'm struck yet again by the Appendix, in which Douglass explains his perceptions of slave holding Christianity and Christianity proper. Again, slave holding Christianity is Bush's faith, the Christianity where the church bell and the slave auctioner's bell ring in unison. Where practitioners of a faith that says "Thou shalt not kill" decide that commandment surely must not apply to Iraqis.

Mark Danner's "Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story"

In The New York Review of Books (volume LI, no. 15, 7 Oct. 2004), Mark Danner has a powerful piece reviewing the Abu Ghraib documents (Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations (The Schlesinger Report) and AR 15-6 Investigation of Abu Ghraib Detention Facility and 205th Military Intelligence Brigade). Here's a line that hit me:

The fact that the legal trail at Abu Ghraib has been directed toward the abuses that appear in the photographs means that the question of policy -- of whether the United States should be torturing prisoners, of what the political and moral costs of this will finally be, and of what responsibility those who ultimately direct that policy really bear -- has hardly been seriously debated, whether in Congress or anywhere else. ... So far, officials of the Bush administration, who counted on the fact that the public, and much of the press, could be persuaded to focus on the photographs -- the garish signboards of the scandal and not the scandal itself -- have been proved right. This makes Abu Ghraib a peculiarly contemporary kind of scandal, with most of its plotlines exposed to view -- but with few willing to follow them and fewer still to do much about them. As with other controversies over the Iraq war, the revelations have been made, the behavior exposed, but the moral will to act, or even to debate what action might be warranted, seems mostly lacking. (50)

I still haven't seen the pictures, but Danner's article makes that unnecessary. He describes the visuals, but the main obscenity he outlines is the administration's responsibility for policy and its attempt to scapegoat those lower in rank.