On Fire

On April 7 an Iranian man self-immolated in Dam Square, Amsterdam in front of horrified onlookers  after his third request for political asylum was refused. A spokesman for the Minister of Immigration and Asylum, Gerd Leers, pointed out that the procedures have been executed properly and that the man had all the remedies at his disposal.

With embarrassment I recall making use of the term self-immolation in a piece of high school protest writing to designate the insufferable state of my cohort  - who, I pointed out, were old enough to be drafted to war, yet incapable of being trusted to leave high school grounds during lunch hour. I'd appropriated the term from that she-devil authoress, Ayn Rand, I was hopelessly under the spell of. With embarrassment comes from such trivialized use of a term denoting an act of such import. And, of course, because I didn't know the fucking definition.

The practice of self-immolation is not new but has re-emerged - by virtue of its impact as a political tool, most notably in bringing about the first instance of regime change in North Africa, in Tunisia. Above is Thich Quang Duc, one of a number of Buddhist monks who immolated themselves in protest of the discriminatory treatment endured by Buddhists under the Roman Catholic administration of President Ngô Đình Diệm in South Vietnam.

On December 17, 2010, a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself afire after an episode in which his wares were confiscated, a female official humiliated him, her aides beat him, and the governor's office refused to hear his case. He died after an agonizing 18 days. He is pictured below - though not at the height of his agony.

In his video, Self-Immolation as a Political Tool, Rodger Baker remarks on the difficulties faced by those in power to counter such an action. Because the action is one in which violence is directed against self - rather than others or infra-structure - the retribution levied against the likes of, say, suicide bombers (who take many people with them) are inapplicable. What's more, public sympathy is clearly on the side of the victim: we all know, to one degree or another, the agony of a burn injury...yet the sympathy for a burn victim pales in comparison to both the courage entailed in subjecting oneself to both the pain of the action and the possibility of surviving it; and the hopelessness of the situation that drives one to this extreme. A suicide bomber may garner considerations of the latter, but because their violence is directed outward, the act is perceived very differently.

In places ranging from Afghanistan to India, the motivations and impacts can be on a much more personal level: many cases of self-immolation involve domestic violence, specifically beatings by husbands and the families of husbands. India is renowned for removal of the self - i.e. the woman is removed, but not by her own hand.

The Palimpsest Book Project

Viki Semou presents her Palimpsest Book project Thursday at the Unbound Book conference. A sort of Fluxus-inspired work, it "is an individual game and each one of the players ‘reads’ the story that the objects in the book-box tell and s/he continues ‘writing’ the story by adding one more object. The book-box, after that, has to be gifted to someone else who wishes to play the game." When she passed by one day in late February to talk about building a website to accompany it, the box contained these items:

Here's the story I more-or-less came up with - more or less since the original included the sock and the yoyo.
The rattlesnake that bit mah woman was as thick as my arm in its middle, though that may have been on account of a rat or a cat or a prairie dog it had swallowed the day before. In any case Esma was dead before she hit the ground. Her lucky chestnut - "lucky" i reckon, but in the worst sense of the word - will get buried with her, along with the silver spoon she was fed out of as a child, though anyone who knew her or her kin would snicker at the thought of any of them "being fed with a silver spoon." I  made my way up the dry riverbed here, with her body parked up top of the mule, who will be the only one of the three of us alive when the sun goes down behind the hills that line Slaughter Gulch this evening. This has always been one of my favorite spots…you see i was one always on the side of the Indians, what with all the butchery they was subjected to by us White Peoples, and here was where a small band of their fiercest women put to rest 87 settlers one February morning about four score years ago. I've got my tin of meat for my Last Supper, my pack of smokes (which is where you found this note, if you're readin' it) and my lighter. I hope I don't make too much of a mess of myself, as i wouldn't want to see a man with a hole blown into his chest by a 12-gauge shotgun, no-how and no-way - which is why I hope the contraption i rigged up dumps all the dirt on top of me after I fall back into the hole next to my beloved. I guess that's about it, and about twice as much as I've ever written in the last 10 years. Keep the pack of cigarettes with the piece of that motherfuckin' rattlesnake skin, be careful with the lighter, and enjoy what each day brings your way, hear? Sam August 12, 1921

The pit from my subconscious this emanated from is tied to a rattlesnake memory: while working my way up the steep incline of Hell's Canyon, near Riggins, Idaho, in 1993, I met a rattlesnake at eye level. If it had struck then, I probably wouldn't be writing this, since (1) it was big, (2) it would have injected venom into my face or neck, and (3) I had 20 minutes of climbing before reaching the car, and another hour after that to the nearest medical center. Before I knew what was happening I smashed it with a rock. After my heart began beating normally I began to wonder what to do to alleviate the guilt over this act of stupidity (I was in ts habitat, after all). At the tail end of my medical illustration career, I dutifully skinned and dissected it, kept the rattles and fangs, and had dinner. Yes, it tasted like chicken. A piece of it made its way into Viki's Box...which reminds me of a Throwing Muses song.

She's passing out 15 or so of these at the conference, so visit the project website for creative wordsmithing.

Nano Hummingbird

This bird flew into the window of my apartment and probably died of brain injuries. If I'd been more conscientious, the use of decals could have averted this accident - but with a housecat, Henry Buttons, who would often eat several birds/day, perhaps this was a quicker, easier death.

If it escaped the cat and the window, it might have to deal with one of the side-effects of one of the beloved components of green technology: getting chopped by a blade of a wind turbine. Its cohort may soon join the passenger pigeon - estimated to have numbered in the billions on the North American continent (and, therefore possibly one of the most numerous on the planet) - in the Extinction House one of these days, along with the 70-80 species the Hawaiian Islands have lost since humans dropped in nearly two millennia ago. Mass Extinction Events - the 5th (and first caused by humans) of which we are in the midst of - do, after all, happen one individual at a time.

Not to worry: as Nature's creations get munched in the maws of man, man replaces the missing with something better. Onto history's stage - and off the pages of science fiction literature - flits the Nano Hummingbird. The same beloved research entity, DARPA, that brought us the gift of self-hopping, self-healing landmines, gave about $4 million to AeroVironment to develop the prototype for this flying spying machine. Equipped with a camera and communications system, its operator can keep it from doing something stupid like flying into a window. Instead it can be maneuvered to land on your windowsill.



At age 17 I picked up a sci fi novel (whose name I can't recall) describing something akin to a flying ball bearing, a terror-inducing/crowd-controlling technology given that it could be guided by a remote operator to zoom into the face of anyone considered subversive. Then explode.

If you're a well-behaved person, though, why worry about the subversive intentions of the human guiding the device that comes to rest on your windowsill? Maybe it just needs a place to sit while it shits, and it's the workings of my paranoid mind to imagine an ill intent on the part of its makers...other than their desire to get the upper hand in whatever endless war is being waged against the Bad Guy. Easy! Just don't become one of the Bad Guys.

True to form, Wired describes this new avian gadget as "Awesome." M-W defines awe as "en emotion variously combining dread, veneration and wonder that i inspired by authority, or by the sacred or sublime."  Like shock and awe "a military doctrine based on the use of overwhelming power, dominant battlefield awareness, dominant maneuvers, and spectacular displays of force to paralyze an adversary's perception of the battlefield and destroy its will to fight." Whatever we can conjure up can eventually be made. If history is any measure, this new bird species will be doing things worse than shitting on your wndowsill.

Citing Security Concerns, Israelis Launch Pre-emptive Nuclear Attack on Cairo

Just in case you were lying down on the job of alertness, this headline was designed to startle you into wakefulness. Like the photograph. My Significant Other reacted with alarm when I read it to her, and this got me wondering about why such a sentence is so shocking. And I came to the conclusion that it is shocking because it's one of those things that tap into knowledge we keep buried under the surface and don't really like looking at too closely; and because it's not too distantly far from the truth.*

The international press paints a fairly consistent picture of both Israel and the U.S. in a state of distress over the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, whose nearly 30-year reign as near-dictator has been nearly as ugly as the event that brought him into power: he was one of several dozen officials wounded in the machine gun-assassination of his predecessor, Anwar El Sadat, in October, 1981. Torture. Secret Police. Disappearances. Surveillance. Suppression.

Mubarak is a perfect symbol of a foreign policy quandary that's haunted the United States for decades: what American capitalism wants is the security offered by autocracies like that of Mubarak, wherein trade agreements favorable to U.S. corporations are implemented and enforced; and the aspirations of labor, political and environmental movements - which run contrary to the corporate drive to maximize short term profits - are ruthlessly suppressed. Labor unrest? Kill them. Pollution controls? Strike them down. Political unrest? Stomp it out quickly.

Yet the promotion of what America trumpets as its first love - democracy - to the rest of the world has a tractor-trailer head-on collision with this desire for security. In this respect, America's foreign policy hypocrisy dovetails nicely with the hypocrisy of Israel's internal politics - the suppression of both its Arab and Leftist Jewish population.

To paraphrase a famous American terrorist** - They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. Both America and Israel have sacrificed many essential liberties in the name of security...and without any real gain in security. We've been lying down asleep on the train platform where that ole Democracy Train was moored, and the Democracy Train has left us behind.

We aren't welcome on this Democracy Train because we drove a different one up the ass of Iraq (specifically) and the Middle East (in general). The Neo-Cons - e.g. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Perle, Cheney, etc - implemented the "Bush Doctrine" which included forceful regime change with the stated intent of bringing democracy to the huddled masses of the Mideast.

Needless to say, this policy didn't work out very well. In fact when one measures it by the metric of "hearts and minds" it seems the whole misadventure truly backfired: in state after state throughout the Middle East, fledgling Democratic movements were crushed as the U.S. rushed to support autocratic regimes it deemed crucial to national security, inspired fundamentalists in Iran to crush dissent as we labeled them as part of the "Axis of Evil," and took the breath away from the young and hopeful as they watched the farce play out through the last decade.

Perhaps the only way in which we can claim a positive role in the unfolding uprisings of the region is through inspiration of despair: things have to become truly hopeless for someone to risk life, limb and family as they take to the streets to face rocks to the head, charging horses or torture and imprisonment. And now that the cat is out of the bag, a movement is underway which owes nothing to the U.S. - other than, perhaps, a sense of allegiance to a period in American history when more than just lip service was paid to democracy. Revolution is an exciting first step: the hard part comes in filling the vacuum that's left behind. In the heady coming months in Egypt, the hope for democracy is tenuous because the very institutions who could help guide the process from within have been so thoroughly suppressed over 3 decades.

*The "nuclear attack" scenario is a mash-up of 2 headline threads that captures the very real fear American and Israeli policy makers must be reeling under now that the status quo is no more: (1) Israel is terrified of Iran's growing nuclear capability - even though it has been granted exception from international conventions regarding its own nuclear capabilities - and has threatened repeatedly to attack Iran's facilities. This could entail nuclear retaliation by Israel on Tehran if it counter-attacked
*Benjamin Franklin. From the vantage point of the British, the leaders of the American Revolution would fall neatly into the definition of the word. (2) Without a strong man in power, the political landscape in Egypt could easily transmogrify into one dominated by sectarian rivalries and culminate in an Iranian-like theocracy - unsympathetic to U.S. or Israeli interests.

Cheney Has No Detectable Pulse. The U.S. May Not Be Far Behind

WASHINGTON - Though most have suspected for some time, the world was shocked to discover that former Vice-President Cheney no longer has any detectable pulse. The man with the famous sideways grin, remarkable resemblance to Dr. Strangelove and ruthless approach to engaging in colossal acts of national sabotage suffered the first of his 5 heart attacks in 1978,* and has fought a losing battle against heart disease ever since. Critics have been quick to point out the likelihood that the debilitating effects of the disease may explain not only his apparent heartlessness toward the rest of humanity, but also an oxygen deprivation to that portion of the brain that keeps the urge to engage in pathological lies in check...it is, however, not in the purview of a non-medical expert such as this writer to either confirm or deny this hypothesis.

In related news the newly-elected House Speaker John Boehner began the 102nd session of Congress with a promise to cut $100 billion from domestic spending. This is from the party that wants to repeal the recently-enacted health care legislation and which considers Homeland Security and Defense spending off-limits to any reduction. To place this into perspective, bear in mind that for fiscal year 2011, total defense-related expenditures are estimated between $1.060–$1.449 trillion¹ - or about 30% of the total budget.² The cuts proposed by the Republicans just might be the lethal heart attack for those programs - education, health and infrastructure - already emaciated from lean years brought on by Wall Street's party days and the Bush-Cheney Wars. Perhaps they might take a cue from Cheney's recent weight loss and go after the fat - defense-related spending - rather than the heart.

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_States_federal_budget

*precisely matching in count the 5 draft deferments he applied for and received - thus avoiding any of the pesky dangers of combat duty he has directed so many others toward, first as Secretary of Defense under the elder Bush with the invasion of Panama and Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East; then as the muscle behind the ill-fated Afghanistan and Iraqi Invasions/Wars