Like anyone who writes regularly, whether professionally or just in a blog, I’m guilty of leaving in the odd spelling mistake in something I write. It pains me when I find them later, especially in something I thought I’d checked. Lord knows newspapers are guilt of it all the time, but it's often understandable that one or two get through when you consider the time crushing deadlines they have to work to (but of course, that depends on how charitable you are towards the particular brand of newspaper. For example, I’m sure Richard Waghorne hops with unrestrained glee and shouts “Aha, I gotcha!!” every time he spots one in the Irish Times).
I found one today in that most esteemed of American newspapers, the Washington Post and I only mention it now because the typo accidentally creates a pun that unwittingly undermines the argument that the politician being reported on is trying to make.
The article, called “Rice Disputes Report CIA Warned Her About Attack”, is all about how Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is vehemently denying the charges made against her by the veteran Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward. In his new book “State of Denial”, Bob is roundly accusing Rice of complacency when informed by intelligence experts during a meeting on the 10th of July 2001 that a terrorist attack on US soil was imminent.
The informers were none other than George J. Tenet, the then-CIA Director and CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black. According to the WP however, ‘the book describes both men as frustrated by Rice's polite but inattentive response, allegedly brushing them off’.
Rice, as part of her defence says that she thought they were talking about attacks somewhere in the Middle East, ‘Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel, Jordan’, someplace like that. If she was told about an attack on US soil, she would have sat upright and paid attention, no doubt. The intelligence was ‘nebulous’, she said, shadowy - full of suggestions and dark hints – not firm and hard, which is the way she usually likes her intelligence. So rather than do anything specific, she argues, while talking to reporters in a stop-off in Shannon today, she got other people to read it, such as ‘then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft’ and the FBI, etc etc.
It was as they reported her description of the intelligence being ‘nebulous’ that the Washington Post makes their telling slip.
“The central problem was that the intelligence reporting on the potential threat was "very nebulous . . . And so, when you're dealing with nebulous information that doesn't direct you toward a particular attack at a particular place at a particular time, you have to try board efforts," she countered”.
You’ve got to laugh. No, you must. Chavez, addressing the UN last week urges the assembled heads of government to read Bertie Ahern’s P.S. I Owe You.
Chavez said at the beginning of his speech: I would like to invite you, very respectfully, to those who have not read this book to read it. Bertie Ahern is one of Ireland’s, indeed the World’s, greatest shysters. The details in this book tell us about a coming disaster for the Irish Government.
Credit where credit is due for this. I got the Bertie book from Semper Idem and the Chavez photo with Celia Ahern’s book slapped on top of Hegemony and Survival from Joseph McManus. This is filched material, good and proper.
Isn’t Irish politics fascinating? It seems so piddling and minor when put up against the scale and significance of British and American politics. But just when you thought it was all about constituency walkabouts, tribunals that never go anywhere (its ineffectual in terms of being able to prosecute the abhorrent political miscreants anyway) and the daily to-and-fro-petty-squabbles in the Dail, along comes a complication so grand that you have to step back from it and wonder.
The complication is Bertie Ahern and the wonder is how he has managed to maintain the façade of the plain politician completely lacking in self interest while working closely with the biggest bunch of greedy thieves and political liars (Ray Burke, Liam Lawlor and Charles J. Haughey) this country has ever known.
Bertie has worked hard to keep this façade in place, appearing adorned in his anoraks, using everyday speech while other politicians turn an arch rhetorical phrase, cutting the crap and getting on with it. It has meant that as his party has suffered enumerable revelations due to their cosy relationships with wealthy Irish business people and have seen their poll ratings plunge (from time to time that is – they’re still the most popular party in the state after all) he has managed to maintain his high popularity. Michael McDowell, the more confrontational and sophisticated speaker perhaps, has pointed this out when reaffirming his commitment to another coalition coupling with Fianna Fail. The Irish electorate, he claimed, would much prefer Bertie to Enda to lead the next Irish Government.
Update Chavez's praise for Chomsky's Hegemony and Survival has sent it to the top of the bestseller lists.
"What was one of Professor Chomsky's lesser known works has surged to No 1 on Amazon's bestseller list, with bookshops making bulk orders from the thousands of extra copies being printed".
Just as I was reading Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech to the UN this week and thinking that his analysis about the West's hypocrisy towards Iran was taking a leaf out of Chomsky’s book don't I find out from Hugh Green at Most Sincerely Folks that Chavez turned up at the UN brandishing Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival.
All very hilarious, all the more so because Chavez said, according to the New York Times 'that one of his greatest regrets was not getting to meet Mr. Chomsky before he died'.
But hilarity aside it was Admadinejad’s attempt to persuade the UN and the world that Iran is actually very democratic that caught my attention. For example:
“The Islamic Republic of Iran is the manifestation of true democracy in the Region”.
And:
“The Islamic Republic of Iran is a symbol of true democracy. All officials including the Leader, President, members of the Islamic Consultative Assembly, city and village councils are elected through the vote of the citizens. The Islamic Republic of Iran has held 27 national elections in 27 years. This showcases a vibrant and dynamic society in which people widely participate in the political life”.
So why is Condi Rice and others in the US Administration protesting that the people of Iran need to be freed from the tyranny of their Islamic rulers and should be allowed to determine the course of their own lives – blah, blah, blah? Well, of course the truth is somewhere in between.
As John Dunne says in his book the Setting the People Free – The Story of Democracy, the President talks up democracy on the world stage, while the Grand Council dismisses it.
“Iran’s Guardianship Council seldom hesitates to express its contempt for the liberal reformers voted in with President Khatami, and still does all it can to place them beyond reach of popular election in the future. But even in Iran, the advantages of staging elections are implicitly accepted by those who most fear to lose them; and the principled rejection of elections has become very much a minority taste”.
I've just noticed that Steven Poole of Unspeak was thinking along the same lines as me when I was giving out about Martin Amis' use the term 'functioning insantity' in his Sunday Times article about the 9/11 bombers.
To remind you gentle reader, here's what Amis said:
"The spectacular attack, “the big one”, was a non-starter until the fortuitous arrival in Kandahar of the “Hamburg contingent” (Atta et al): these men were superficially Westernised, and superficially rational: possessed by just the right kind of functioning insanity."
In my post I said "by attributing its motivation entirely to a state of mind, of 'funtioning insantity' of either the 'right' or 'wrong' varieties smudges the political realities behind it and generalize it as simply 'mad'".
But Poole deals with it properly:
"A fascinating mini-psychodrama is packed into the phrase “functioning insanity”. With the first word, Amis glibly lays claim to clinical expertise, appealing to the sense of “functioning” used in psychiatric assessments. Yet in the very next word, manfully impatient with such bullshit, he invokes the brute, non-clinical idea of “insanity”. In lightning succession, he postures in pretension to medical authority, and then peacocks his courageous rejection of that same authority. Superficially rational, indeed."
It generated a huge number of interesting comments, the best of which to my mind was: "At least we should give Amis some credit for presenting the same type of bullshit in perfectly hard little shit nuggets".
Dark hearted singer Will Oldham is currently starring in a new movie which has just been released in the US to rave reviews. It’s called Old Joy and Oldham, an old ham himself (gettit?) having played a young preacher in John Sayle’s 1987 movie Matewan and more recently in the odd-things-happen-when-you-meet-the-inlaws classic Junebug, plays Kurt, one of two friends who head out on the road one last time before his travelling companion Mark (Daniel London) becomes a father.
The New York Times reviews the film today, saying that it’s the finest American film so far this year, and considering that most of the films released on the run up to Christmas rarely become instant classics of the cinema its fair to say that they’re implying that its the finest of the year.
Critics elsewhere are also frothing with praise and it’s already garnered a ‘Tiger’ Award from the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Its kind of a road movie in that they drive part of the way before hiking into a forest, get lost and finally find what they are looking for, a natural hot spring, as well as, if you’re to believe the NYT film reviewer ‘something that had gone lost, namely a sense of the other’.
The film, directed by Kelly Reichardt is based on a short story by Jonathan Raymond, who co-wrote the screenplay with Reichardt and much like other brainy US indie movies such as The Squid and the Whale the title points to a metaphor that underpins the theme of the movie.
Waxing lyrical, the NYT says: “At one point during their travels, Kurt tells Mark a meandering story that begins with a trip to a store to buy a notebook and ends with a scene from a dream. In his dream a woman gives Kurt a hug and tells him that “sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy.”
The sorrow in question seems to come from Mark, who has the worries of the world on him, even though he’s on the cusp of taking on more responsibilities. But his anxieties, it seems are a reflection of America’s anxieties at the present time.
This is an America “in which progressive radio (actually, snippets from Air America) delivers the relentless grind of bad news that Mark can only listen to without comment and with a face locked in worry, a face on which Ms. Reichardt invites us to project the shell shock, despair and hopelessness of everyone else listening in across the country”.
The Will Oldham character Kurt seems to be quite like the characters that Oldham portrays in his songs, namely men who lust for life and take what they can and look for no rhyme or reason in it. The film ends with the image of Kurt ‘out in the streets and alive to the world’, while his friend without any comment about when they would meet up again drives off with the radio news blaring.
Added bonus is that Yo La Tengo do the sound track.
Here's the trailer
Here's some Will on YouTube
And a great video from the Palace Brothers 'Come in'
