Archive for December, 2006
Dead at the Apollo
If I had the time, I’d build James Brown a proper online shrine, with “Night Train” welcoming you and Tom Tom Club’s exquisite JB tribute song “Pleasures of Love” bidding him farewell… (“What you gonna do when you get out of jail? We’re gonna have some fun…”) But I don’t have the time, so listen [...]
Saddam is But a Footnote, Now
No one should cry any tears for Saddam Hussein, who will no doubt be executed within a matter of days. He was a vicious butcher who terrorized his own people, and ran a regime of fear in which arbitrary execution and torture were a staple, and the majority of Iraqis — being Shiites and Kurds, [...]
Israel and Apartheid: In Defense of Jimmy Carter
Nothing makes liberal American supporters of Israel more uncomfortable than the comparison between the circumstances it has imposed on the Palestinians and those that the apartheid regime imposed on black South Africans. That’s precisely why it is so important and commendable that Jimmy Carter has tempted the wrath of the Israel lobby and many Jewish-American [...]
Cricket’s Coded Conversation
It is with unrestrained joy that I introduce my friend Balaji, a Madras-born scientist currently teaching at Princeton, who, in agreeing some months ago to write an analysis on the cultural and political subtexts of Australian umpire Darryl Hair falsely accusing Pakistan’s cricketers of ball-tampering, ended up delivering, as his first installment, this marvelous memoir [...]
What Arab Holocaust-Deniers Should Learn from Mandela
Haganah fighters take aim: Survivors of the camps arriving in Israel in 1948 having been denied anywhere else to go weren’t going to see the war as anything but a matter of physical survival No, this is not another one of those idiotic diatribes by Americans or Israelis who know nothing about Nelson Mandela, but [...]
Gracias, Pinochet — For Proving That Your Victims Are Better Than You
Milton Friedman comes to Chile General Augusto Pinochet died, Sunday, shamed as a butcher and human rights abuser — even an international terrorist, given the CIA’s finding of his complicity in the 1976 Washington, D.C. car bombing that killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit — and yet, as a free man. Some will argue that [...]
Bush, Baker and Iraq: Why the Patient Can Not Be Saved
Discussing the report of his bipartisan Iraq Study Group with the Senate Armed Services Committee this week, former Secretary of State and Bush-pere fixer James Baker must have already sensed the inevitability that nothing will come of his efforts to salvage the mess young Bush has made in Iraq: “I hope we don’t treat this [...]
And Bush May Ask Himself, How Do I Work This?
In lieu of scripture, the reading today comes from Talking Heads “Once in a Lifetime”: And you may ask yourself What is that beautiful house? And you may ask yourself Where does that highway go? And you may ask yourself Am I right?…Am I wrong? And you may tell yourself MY GOD!…WHAT HAVE I DONE? [...]
In Nuevo Jork, Jew Doesn’t Always Mean Jew
Long live Juan Epstein, sitcom land’s archetypal Jewish Latino! “Shut up! Shut up!” The petulant and rather camp fellow with the long hair (whose tone suggested to me that he may be an off-duty drag queen) and whose superior attitude to the stout, working class woman (Puerto Rican was my guess) with whom he was [...]
A New U.S. Option in Iraq: Panic!
Things really are coming apart so quickly in Iraq that some blogging appears to be in order. No sooner had we noted that Washington’s Arab allies are pushing it hard to remain engaged and protect the Sunnis then the Washington Post reports (thanks, Pat!) that the State Department has been pushing for the U.S. to [...]
RSS