Author: hankkalet

The national press corps has always been a little too ready to accept the Bush administration’s “call to democracy” as its raison d’etre in Iraq. Spreading democracy always has been more of a contrivance than a real rationale — as the president’s reaction to this week’s coup in Thailand (and his administration’s reaction to the Venezuelan coup earlier in his administration) show.

Bush made no mention of the dramatic events on Tuesday and left New York yesterday without ever seeing the deposed prime minister, much less offering any public support for a onetime strong ally of the United States. The president’s spokesman later provided a strikingly mild response only after being asked by a reporter, pronouncing the White House “disappointed” by the coup.

The timing of Bush’s address on democracy to the U.N. General Assembly and the overthrow of a democratically elected government underlined the complexities and contradictions in his “freedom agenda.” With the president’s attention focused on the Middle East, the state of democracy elsewhere in the world does not rate as high on his priority list. In the case of Thailand, the situation is complicated by growing U.S. unease with the ousted prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.

“The president’s freedom agenda is inherently selective,” said Thomas Carothers, head of the democracy project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We care very much about democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, but . . . Thailand’s just not part of the story, so this falls off the map a bit.”

Admittedly, the Thai government was not a good one — nor is Hugo Chavez’ in Venezuela, though many of my progressive friends might disagree. But democracy does not make distinctions between good leaders and bad leaders, even here in the United States.

Admittedly, I’m not that familiar with the Thai government. From what I’ve read so far, it was rife with corruption.

But replacing it via a military coup fails the democratic test.

The issue in Thailand, as far as the notion of spreading democracy, is that the corrupt Shinawatra regime was elected and should have been removed via the ballot box or a constitutional mechanism like impeachment. Public pressure could have forced him to resign, with a constitutionally defined replacement taking over.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post is fast becoming one of my favorite columnists. He is insightful, readable and usually right. Today’s missive on the torture debate is a case in point (my own torture column will run early next month in the Progressive Populist).

It’s past time to stop mincing words. The Decider, or maybe we should now call him the Inquisitor, sticks to anodyne euphemisms. He speaks of “alternative” questioning techniques, and his umbrella term for the whole shop of horrors is “the program.” Of course, he won’t fully detail the methods that were used in the secret CIA prisons — and who knows where else? — but various sources have said they have included not just the infamous “waterboarding,” which the administration apparently will reluctantly forswear, but also sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, bombardment with ear-splitting noise and other assaults that cause not just mental duress but physical agony. That is torture, and to call it anything else is a lie.

That kind of sharpness is lacking in too many writers in the mainstream press, who seem only to want to discuss the political implications of everything — as if “waterboarding” is the same thing as the hit and run. Please.

The thing about politics that is important is not the horserace, but the impact — it’s not whether George W. Bush is popular, has “political capital” or what-have-you, but what he does, to whom and why.

In the end, the torture question is a moral question and the questions it raises beyond the single immoral act are the keys to understanding where we are going with President Bush at the helm: “What kind of nation are we? What kind of people are we?”

To think we can torture, to think we can create a separate class under the law, that we can get away with a separate tiers of justice, that the threshold of humane behavior is different for different people — well, that does not bode well for anyone.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Lot’s of talk on Oprah about his historic struggle and decision to come out of the closet — a historic decision, no doubt — but nothing about the culture of corruption that made it impossible for former Gov. James McGreevey to stay in office. New Jersey would have accepted a gay governor; it just couldn’t accept the slime that came with the McGreevey administration.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

I received a number of letters and Web responses to a column I wrote recently on Bob Dylan‘s latest, Modern Times.

There were years when this didn’t seem possible, when the release of a new Dylan
album was met less with hope than with resignation, with a sense that maybe Dylan would awake from his musical slumber and once again make music that mattered but that the chances were slim. There were 20 years of uninspired music that had damaged his reputation, recasting rock’s first bard as a hokey has-been, a caricature of the man who changed both rock ‘n’ roll and folk music with a trio of explosive rock records 40 years ago.

The notes took one basic tack — one that I don’t necessarily disagree with, that the albums from that 20-year period between Desire and Time Out of Mind are better than too many critics are willing to admit. The problem, to my ears anyway, is that the defenders of this music have taken their response too far in the other direction.

I am the first to admit that there was plenty of good music made during the 1980s — the late ’70s is a more difficult proposition, given that the religious albums are a hard sell, though actually pretty good on an emotional level. I own most of it.

My argument about it is not that all of it is terrible, but that there really only was about three discs worth of good music during the time — Oh Mercy was the only fully realized disc, one that could have been viewed as the first comeback if it weren’t marred by David Lanois atmospherics or followed by Under the Red Sky (good musically, awful lyrically) and his two folk cover records.

There were five studio albums released between Saved and Oh Mercy, five albums of inconsistent quality. Only Down in the Groove lacks much of redeeming value (I blame this on his association at the time with the Grateful Dead).

The four remaining discs could be culled, I think, to make two good discs:

• Shot of Love: “Lenny Bruce,” “Groom Still Waiting at the Alter,” “Dead Man, Dead Man” and “Every Grain of Sand.”
• Infidels: “Jokerman,” “Sweetheart Like You,” “License to Kill,” “I and I” and “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight.”
• Empire Burlesque (probably the most consistent of these albums): “Seeing the Real You at Last,” “Trust Yourself,” “Emotionally Yours” and “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky.”
• Knocked Out Loaded: “You Wanna Ramble,” “They Killed Him,” “Brownsville Girl” (best song of the decade) and “Got My Mind Made Up.”
• Down in the Groove: “Let’s Stick Together” and “Silvio” (though I would probably not include either in a Dylan in the ’80s disc)

In the end, the decade’s music is marred by his disconnection from the times (something that he later realizes and uses to his great advantage), but his striving to be relevant. It led too often to unrealized lyrics and poor production.

So there you have it. I stand by my thinking on those albums and will continue to listen to them.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

America’s best columnist — or one of them, at least — on Bush’s torture policies.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick