an excuse to celebrate

I'm embarassed to admit that one of my Lovely Housemates had to remind me about the holiday this morning -- Happy Bloomsday!

More Bloomsday info

Even if you're not fond of the book itself, today provides an excellent excuse to lift a pint and celebrate literary experimentation and a landmark legal victory against censorship.

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather..."

"It's a miserable ritual, a magical procedure. . . a homunculus of the consciousness of the new world -- our world passed away and a new world has arisen."
-- Carl Jung on Ulysses, in the Europaeische Revue

"In respect to the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring."
-- Judge M. Woolsey writing on the "obscenity" in Ulysses, 1933

"It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born."
-- James Joyce, _Ulysses_

-- Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the opposite of that that is really life.
-- What? Says Alf.
-- Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
--James Joyce, _Ulysses_

"Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The cold steelpen. "
--James Joyce, _Ulysses_

"I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
--James Joyce, _Ulysses_

hope and sadness

Guantanamo inmates can be held 'in perpetuity'- US

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican senators called on Wednesday for the rights of foreign terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay prison to be legally defined even as the Bush administration said the inmates could be jailed there "in perpetuity."

As I wrote a while back, the scandal is not primarily about mistreatment, though each allegation of abuse tarnishes the image and reality of the U.S. further. The issue is the complete lack of accountability and due process. I think Amnesty International overstated the case by calling Guantanemo a "gulag." That comparison does not necessarily do justice to those poor legions who lived and died in the real gulags. But we're certainly moving in that direction, and I can sympathize with Amnesty International's desire to do and say something dramatic to raise this issue to national and international consciousness, and precisely like a real gulag, prisoners at Guantanemo are imprisoned because "someone" decides they belong there, with no recourse to anything resembling actual due process, and they stay there until the same "someones" who put them there decide they can go free, with no hope of oversight or expectation of actual justice.

And even for those who disagree with the term Amnesty International used, would a group of Republican senators now be paying any attention to this issue if AI hadn't caused an uproar and made the news? Probably not. Because this has finally become a public issue, there is some hope for change.

"In perpetuity." What an inhumanly rational-sounding term to describe a modern-day oubliette. Shame on us.

more gulags

Followup to previous post --

original Truthout article here.

I didn't think I could be easily shocked by any of Bush & Co's antics, but the news that there is a Republican memo going around blasting the Red Cross for "losing their impartiality" (see below) makes me furious. I worked for the Red Cross for seven years, and neutrality and impartiality were the core values insisted upon from top to bottom, in every single thing we did. For instance, when giving out relief supplies after a major disaster, if people's homes were destroyed we usually gave out vouchers for clothes, etc, instead of handing out clothes themselves. Why? Partially to pump money back into local stores and shops and help restore the local economy, partially so that our relief centers and shelters didn't become so crammed full of every possible size of clothes and other goods that it hindered us from actually feeding and providing shelter for victims. But the #1 reason we did things that way, a decision which made things logistically more complicated for us, was so that everyone could get the exact same thing, a voucher good for up to a specific amount of money which could be used to choose whatever each person wanted. Otherwise, people could claim that someone else got Levi's jeans, and they only got Lee, and that was unacceptable, because it could be taken as showing partiality or bias in what we did. Sounds silly, doesn't it -- in a disaster relief situation, who cares about that kind of piddly detail? The Red Cross cares, because it has to. There is no other organization more dedicated to neutrality that I know of, and very few agencies which I would trust more.

And I don't think I'm the only one. Who more than the Red Cross/Red Crescent is trusted by the world to be impartial? Are we supposed to trust the point of view of the Republicans over the Red Cross? I don't think so/ If this memo ever sees the light of day, I hope those who wrote it get ridiculed and backlashed right into the dustbin of history where they belong.

(EDIT: an article on the memo is here: GOP Committee Targets International Red Cross)

And now onto an excellent commentary:

------
Bush Plays Politics with Guantánamo "Gulag"
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 16 June 2005

"Absurd!" George Bush exclaimed. "Reprehensible!" Donald Rumsfeld charged. "Ridiculous!" stated Scott McClellan. "I'm offended!" declared Dick Cheney. What are they all so upset about? Is it the stripping and shackling of Guantanámo prisoners low to the ground, the forcible squeezing of their genitals, the smearing of menstrual blood on Muslim detainees, the shooting of rubber bullets at inmates, the forcing of prisoners to stand cruciform in the sun until they collapse, the desecration of the Koran, or the psychological torture documented at Gitmo by Physicians for Human Rights? Are they concerned about the treatment of Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was force-fed liquids through an IV and then forbidden from urinating, and who evidenced "behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma," according to Time Magazine?

No, it's Team Bush engaging in damage control after Amnesty International labeled the United States prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, "the gulag of our time."
( Read more... )