“How fortunate,” I thought, when I saw a couple weeks agon in the NYT that the Sistani’s Shite coalition had won only 48% of the vote in Iraq.  This meant that they wouldn’t be able to dictate the terms of the constitution, and that a more secular form of government might result from a political process that would involve compromise.  The picture of a weeping cleric on the front page told the story.

Well, it turns out that that 48% of the vote somehow translated into 140 seats in the 275 seat Iraqi parliament.  If some news outlet has explained how the 48% turned into a majority of the seats in parliament, I missed it.  But it’s bad news for secularism in Iraq. 

Maybe the Shi’a shift from minority to majority was due to some obsure procedureal rules.  Or — as now seems more likely — this unexplained shift may have resulted from behind-the-scenes power struggles in the midst of a fixed election.  This second explanation would seem to fit with the claims made by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter at a talk two days ago in Olympia, WA:

    The former Marine also said that the Jan. 30 elections, which George W. Bush has called “a turning point in the history of Iraq, a milestone in the advance of freedom,” were not so free after all. Ritter said that U.S. authorities in Iraq had manipulated the results in order to reduce the percentage of the vote received by the United Iraqi Alliance from 56% to 48%.

    Asked by UFPPC’s Ted Nation about this shocker, Ritter said an official involved in the manipulation was the source, and that this would soon be reported by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in a major metropolitan magazine — an obvious allusion to New Yorker reporter Seymour M. Hersh.

So was it then the sweet smell of Democracy–or just a bunch of purple fingers?

It gets worse.  Ritter said also that the Bush admin has already decided to attack Iran:

On Iran, Ritter said that President George W. Bush has received and signed off on orders for an aerial attack on Iran planned for June 2005. Its purported goal is the destruction of Iran�s alleged program to develop nuclear weapons, but Ritter said neoconservatives in the administration also expected that the attack would set in motion a chain of events leading to regime change in the oil-rich nation of 70 million — a possibility Ritter regards with the greatest skepticism. [. . .]  Scott Ritter said that although the peace movement failed to stop the war in Iraq, it had a chance to stop the expansion of the war to other nations like Iran and Syria. He held up the specter of a day when the Iraq war might be remembered as a relatively minor event that preceded an even greater conflagration.

Here’s hoping Mr. Ritter is less correct about this possiblity than he was about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.  But a rigged election is the kind of thing that could begin to prove him right.

[via King of Zembla]

Erg.  That was surely the most grinding week of the semester.  Conferencing with all my rhetoric students in the morning and afternoon, and grading in the evening the papers to be handed back the next day.  Grade and discuss.  Grade and discuss.  With some occasional car-fixing errands in the late afternoon, and some reading and planning for my fiction class jammed into the cracks. 

But now, it’s done.  And I have time for a quick posting or two.  I must say that this week has been more than enough to inspire serious second thoughts in me about the whole academic project.  So much effort into the grading and conferencing, for such little recognition!  There are no classics of paper-grading.  My graded papers will not likely find themselves canonized and anthologized in the “Best American Paper Comments, 2004″ edited by John Updike.  Alas.

So, last week is gone.  And all that’s here now is an ickily warm Halloween weekend. 

But there is some good news.  My voip phone is up and running well so far.  My car has been somewhat repaired.  After getting the distributor fixed I drove the car home, where it promptly died again.  I had it towed to a new mechanic (who like the last one told the the problem was likely the distributor).  I had him replace the engine computer with the one I snagged from ebay, and the car to started right up.  So there.

Last weekend also I caught a couple neat spectacles.  Stanley Fish and Ann Kaplan came to town to debate with Cary Nelson on “The Future of the Humanities.”  Fish (is this man ever right about *anything*?) not only launched into a defense of a strictly apolitical humanities, but announced that if he were Cary Nelson’s Dean, he’d fire Nelson on the spot, for a classroom exercise in which Nelson said he substituted the names for Iraqi citys for Vietnamese ones, when introducing some anti-Vietnam War poetry from the 60’s.  (Fish recapitualted agruments you can find in the NY Times essay he published back in June).

Fish made a spectacle of himself and made useful discussion difficult.  He said some silly things about Samson Agonistes, too.  I may hunt down his article on the subject, although my dissertation studiously avoids Milton. 

The most interesting material from the talk came by way of reference to Bill Reading’s book on The University of Excellence, which seemed pretty useful. 

But more eloquent than Fish et. al. on the subject of the post-human and the post-humanities last weekend was the show I caught last Sunday by Captured by Robots!.  While the academics bemoaned the university of meaningless excellence, JBOT and his robotic captors delivered the post-human excellence via a gang of threatening robots and projections of sadly disturbing exercise tapes from the late 80’s.

The show was not musically amazing and was kind of frightening to watch.  JBOT’s band and captors are robots, which he must control (or, erm…be controlled *by,* I mean…) and speak for while playing his own instrument, making witty remarks, dealing with semi-heckling audience participation, and occasionally noting that “no, really” he *was* looking for a place in town to sleep for the evening.  He was good, vamping aptly, even if the whole thing had a kind of nervous tight-rope quality to it. 

The Humanities Lecture and Captured by Robots! exhibited the same eviscerated human figure,  surrounded by gleaming machine that present a hostile and meaningless excellence.  It was JBOT though, who’s entrails were literally hanging from his body,  who tightrope-or-no seemed to have more fun.

*-”Crudesence,” it seems to my surprise isn’t actually a word.  But it sounds good.  Not of course to be confused with “cruentation”–the bleeding of the wounds of the dead, that occurs when the murderer is brought near the body of his victim.

This is a bit too surreal.  You may have been following this story at the epicenter of the Bloggerized revolution, but an article I just spotted at Salon is making me take this seriously.

Remember Bush’s strange outburst during the debates, when he exclaimed “Lemmie finish!” while he had plenty of time remaining, and no one had said a word?  Well, the claim is now that George Bush was secretly receiving radio messages during his debate with Kerry, though a tiny earpiece.  And it is starting to look pretty credible.

Bloggers stoke the conspiracy with the claim that the Bush administration insisted on a condition that no cameras be placed behind the candidates. An official for the Commission on Presidential Debates, which set up the lecterns and microphones on the Miami stage, said the condition was indeed real, the result of negotiations by both campaigns. Yet that didn’t stop Fox from setting up cameras behind Bush and Kerry. The official said that “microphones were mounted on lecterns, and the commission put no electronic devices on the president or Senator Kerry.” When asked about the bulge on Bush’s back, the official said, “I don’t know what that was.”

So what was it? Jacob McKenna, a spyware expert and the owner of the Spy Store, a high-tech surveillance shop in Spokane, Wash., looked at the Bush image on his computer monitor. “There’s certainly something on his back, and it appears to be electronic,” he said. McKenna said that, given its shape, the bulge could be the inductor portion of a two-way push-to-talk system. McKenna noted that such a system makes use of a tiny microchip-based earplug radio that is pushed way down into the ear canal, where it is virtually invisible. He also said a weak signal could be scrambled and be undetected by another broadcaster.

Mystery-bulge bloggers argue that the president may have begun using such technology earlier in his term. Because Bush is famously prone to malapropisms and reportedly dyslexic, which could make successful use of a teleprompter problematic, they say the president and his handlers may have turned to a technique often used by television reporters on remote stand-ups. A reporter tapes a story and, while on camera, plays it back into an earpiece, repeating lines just after hearing them, managing to sound spontaneous and error free.

Suggestions that Bush may have using this technique stem from a D-day event in France, when a CNN broadcast appeared to pick up — and broadcast to surprised viewers — the sound of another voice seemingly reading Bush his lines, after which Bush repeated them. Danny Schechter, who operates the news site MediaChannel.org, and who has been doing some investigating into the wired-Bush rumors himself, said the Bush campaign has been worried of late about others picking up their radio frequencies — notably during the Republican Convention on the day of Bush’s appearance. “They had a frequency specialist stop me and ask about the frequency of my camera,” Schechter said. “The Democrats weren’t doing that at their convention.”

You can check out the rest of the story at Salon (you’ll have to watch an ad if you’re not a subscriber).  Or perhaps we’ll see this story jump out all over the media in the next few days.

[UPDATE]

Speculation over at Kos suggests this may not be a wire (though this possibility can’t be eliminated).  But rather a therapeutic back-brace or a bullet-proof vest.  One poster claims to know that the President’s bullet-proof vest is equipped with a handle that the secret service uses to move him about, in the event of an emergency, or to keep him moving in crowds, etc.  This might explain a lump that doesn’t seem characteristic of most such vests.  I must say that I may like the idea of GW with a secret E-Z carry handle even better than GW with a little radio in his ear.

In any, case credence seems lent to these non-radio theories by this image:

So was Bush wearing a wire?  I’m inclined to doubt it.  But maybe.  In any case, the story provided a welcome diversion from “Pen Gate” and “Oompaloompa Gate”

An interesting “Town Hall” style debate tonight.  Town-Hall style is *in*!  No predictions this time, but perhaps a little reaction afterward.

Four or five summers ago, I worked in the University Special Collections, updating a database on censorship and memory in Russia and the former Soviet Bloc.  I’d worked for the Rare Books room before, and for special collections, updating the Rare Book Room’s databases that record their collections of correspondence of Charles Sandburg, W.S. Merwin, and especially H.G. Wells.

So they hired me to update and maintain a database concerning censorship in Russia, although of course I speak not a word of the language.  The database’s retiring originator handled these items, or marked them up for me to enter.  I was happy to have work for the summer.

So I sat in a small room for several hours a day reading and summarizing articles about freedom of information in Russia, in the period immediately following V. Putin’s election.  From various sources and news feeds-for example the surprisingly reliable RFE/RL Russia, which I still check-in on occasionally, when I want to see how my old comrades, Boris Berezofsky and Vladimir Gusinsky have been faring.  (Not well).

Even then, in the hands of its nationalist KGB leader, Russia was obviously sliding into something bad.  I’d enter little stories into the database about the murders and shut-downs, carried out in ominous patterns across the former republics, and East of the Urals–stuff that would never make the CNN ticker, but would add up to something unavoidable.

Lately, things there have been changing fast, and becoming more visible:

President Vladimir Putin’s 13 September proposal to replace the direct election of regional-administration heads with a system under which local legislatures confirm candidates nominated by the president provoked very little reaction among the Russian public. In Moscow, liberals and leftists were able to summon no more than 100 people to their modest demonstration against the measure. Public-opinion polls generally show that society — tired of years of badly discredited local and national elections — is not particularly worried about this possible curtailment of its democratic rights.

Still no one seems too worried here.  The last question of the presidential debate concerned Russia.  But no answer seems forthcoming.  As an ally in an war on terror, any criticism of Russian must be delicate.  Bush noted that he’s publicly questioned Putin’s commitment to “checks and balances,” but added:

I mean, he’s also a strong ally in the war on terror. He is — listen, they went through a horrible situation in Beslan, where these terrorists gunned down young school kids. That’s the nature of the enemy, by the way. That’s why we need to be firm and resolve in bringing them to justice.

That’s precisely what Vladimir Putin understands, as well.

All this comes to mind as the result of an excellent article from The Chronicle on censorship and political and economic freedom in Russia.  The parallel slide of the US and Russia towards authoritarian nationalism, accompanied by similar happenings in Japan and elsewhere make the world bleak-seeming indeed. 

I can’t help thinking of H.G. Wells - who’s letters I worked on before turning to Russia.  I remember his 1946 end-of-life speculation, _Mind at the End of the Tether_, where amid the ruins of Europe and the destruction of Hiroshima he, like JC and Oscar Wilde, loses his faith at the end.  Wells rejects his life-long optimistic futurism, and his own moral code, concluding that “[T]his world is at the end of its tether.  The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded,” and declaring:

After all, the present writer has no compelling argument to convince the reader that he should not be mean or cruel or cowardly.  Such things are also in his own make-up in large measure, but nonetheless he hates and fights against them with all his strength.  He would rather our species ended its story in dignity, kindliness, and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze, or poisoned rats in a sack.  But this is a matter of individual predilection for everyone to decide for himself.

Wells’s position, held by him, was perhaps forgivable in 1946.  But it wouldn’t have been in 1904.  And it’s not one that I could forgive in myself now, however difficult it may be to resist.

Ok.  It’s a couple hours before the presidential debate.    I will of course be watching.  Predictions?

My instinct is that Kerry will do better than expected.  Despite his mean ‘rep, George Bush is acutally *not* a great debater.  On issues he loses.  He wins with swagger and “down home” style.  In a debate where people know about and and care a lot the issues at steak, Bush is vunerable.    Insofar as this debate may end up being more debate than style show, Bush could be in trouble.  His huge mistakes about social security etc when debating Al Gore went unnoticed.  Mistakes and confusions about Iraq will not be ignored in the same way.  People care about this stuff.  If Bush strays from his script even a little, the resulting confusions will hurt him. 

Kerry’s also become better at turning the tables, by pointing repeatedly to events on the ground in Iraq, instead of defending and explaining his vote to go to war.  For every Bush” “We were attacked.  [pause]  Attacked!”  Kerry can reply by pointing to the present disaster. 

So things have evened out for Kerry.  Moreover, Bush will have to lie tonight.  He’ll perhaps give up a little more than expected, by admitting to some difficulties.  But I’m guessing that the Bush penchant for lying big will overcome the more sensible method of deception that admits to obvious truths, and lies only where believability can be achieved.

Bush, lying, will be in a postion of covering up, which will eventually distrtact and annoy him, drag him down, by making him seem a little more hunted than he wants to be.

Hopefully Kerry will not look too Orange, or be dogged by little debate lights.  If his voice is in good shape and he looks ok, the dynamic of the dabate should be his, as he will get to occupy the moral high ground of truth teller–a role he knows and can reprise from the early 70’s. 

If the debate stays light and friendly, Bush wins.  If it gets serious, it will get *really* serious, and Kerry will end up the winner, if he can seem to issue statesmanlike, rather than shrill denunciations of Bush’s policy.  I think kerry knows this, can do this, and will press Bush hard.

Bush gets a little off-program, a little tounge-tied, and generally seems on the defensive against a presidential Kerry.  The media is feeling embarrassed and will try not to “Gore” Kerry as horribly as they did Al–and the issues at steak in this first debate will not be so easily overshadowed by micro-gaffes, skin-tone questions, or wardrobe issues. 

My geuss is that Kerry leads in national polls by the middle of next week.

That’s what I see.  I’ll post this now, and leave it up.  We’ll see shortly how very right I am.

I noticed today that our local Meijer superstore is selling little yellow ribbon stickers, that one can affix to one’s car to “support the troops.”  Meijer’s ribbon sticker is smaller and more subtle than most of those I’ve around, but I’m glad anyway to have finally discovered at least one source of such stickers.  Since seeing the first of them I’ve sort of been wondering where they come from.  Is there there somewhere a secret Tristero distributing these?  Were they coming from Clear Channel, or Wal-Mart, or some local churches?  It was a strange mystery.  (Oddly, these yellow stickers link service in the SCWOT to Irwin Levine’s simple,pretty song about a man returning form prison with a sense of moral guilt, who’s asking for forgiveness.  How much, I wondder, of Levine’s ambivalence is supposed to echo in these plastic magnetic ribbons?).

More the point however, I’ve been wondering where I can get my hands on one of those “Yesterday, Today, Forever: THE CHIEF” bumper stickers I’ve lately seen around town.  I wandered into one of campus’s most bitterly pro-Chief merchandisers yesterday, and cased the joint, to no avail.  So my quest continues for one of the oddly off color (orange and off-red?) and nasty little stickers.

You may perhaps ask why I would want one.  Well, I’ve been thinking about them lately and sort of wanted to scan it as an image for a possible article about the recent and sure to increase nastiness of the “Chief” Illiniwek acrimony here on campus.  It would be a sequel to this one.

I got the following email from the PRC a couple weeks ago:

Dear friends,

Have you seen the pro-”Chief” bumper stickers on vehicles around town?

(For those of you who haven’t seen them, they say, “The Chief:
YESTERDAY, TODAY, FOREVER” — a direct and disturbing reference to  racist
Governor George Wallace’s famous quote, “Segregation
yesterday, today, and forever”).

This is disturbing, but it is probably not exactly true, or is at least controvertible, since Wallace himself was quoting an old hymn.  I think it was this 1890 hymn that really popularizes the phrase, which is itself Biblical , coming from Hebrews 13:8 of the KJV.  This is all from the first page resulting from a google search for the phrase. 

So, do these pre-Wallace uses of the phrase let the pro-Chiefer’s off the hook?

No.  In fact they make the whole thing ever worse.    Why, we should ask, are the Pro-chief’ers using an expression of Biblical undefeatability to announce their determination to “celebrate” traditions and people who were historically non-Christian?

Moreover, it turns out that the writer of the popular 1890 hymn “Yesterday, Today, Forever” is Albert B. Simpson, who happens to have been a strident and influential champion of Christian Missionary work, meant to extirpate native religious beliefs and practice.  At the turn of the last century, Simpson was among America’s most influential American proponents of Protestant missonary work.  A world cat. search for works by or about Simpson produces 62 items, including a filmstrip and a musical (not yet available on DVD, I fear). 

In hymns like the ‘The Missionary Cry’ and tracts like his 1925 ‘Missionary Messages” Simpson insists that “the heathen world is still lying in darkness and crying to God against the unfaithfulness of His people,” and take as his life’s mission the effort to redeem Heathen souls by converting them to Christianity–”a religion that is not going to stop until all evils are banished from this globe.”  (MM, 110).

By taking a Biblical phrase, popularized by an anti-Heathen missionary and later famously employed to defend Southern Segregation, the Pro-Chief’ers are hardly being subtle.  This is the newly emboldened anti-intellectual rhetoric of the redneck Crusade that one hears from a Christian right increasingly ready to issue a brazen “fuck you” to those it opposes.

It stands in contrast to the recent “compromise” resolution passed by the BOT (since removed from all public UI webpages), that promises to keep honoring and celebrating Native Americans on the uiuc campus, regardless of what any any Native groups or individuals might have to say about it. 

Though the text of the BOT’s resolution has been removed from public view, you can get a sense of its flavor from honorthechief.org, which now announces on it main web page:

Not only do we want to honor the Chief, but we wish to offer a higher vision of the tradition and its future value, and encourage research and educational efforts that preserve, respect, and reaffirm our Illini heritage.

This is the face the pro-chief movement likes to put forward on its slick website.  But the orange-and-red stickers one sees around town, echoing the words of George Wallace, Albert Simpson, and Hebrews 13:8 tell a different and uglier story.

I wonder if you’ve seen this:

I hadn’t.  And sure, Kerry’s just an editor here, and presumably didn’t choose the cover picture on this 1971 collection of essays.  But still.  Despite the the odd expression of the fellow in the middle of the picture, this is pretty impressive.  As is Kerry’s 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Too bad I wouldn’t have come across this unless I’d poked around in right-wing anti-Kerry blogosphere.

It’s almost enough to make me like Kerry.  Or at least consider liking him, as a guy who’s a hardly the lamely chipper “reporting for duty” fellow we watched salute at the Democratic convention. 

What else would I’d like to see?  I’d like to ask anti-Kerry repubs who snipe at Kerry’s “unpatriotic” 1971 comments a simple question or two:  Ok, so you claim Kerry was unAmerican for criticizing free fire zone and search-and-destroy missions as “war crimes.”  Fine.  Ok.  So, then (Mr Rove, etc.), you *support* bringing back the kill-zones and destroy missions to which Kerry objected? 

How easy it would be to turn these questions into a consideration of the Bush admin’s disregard for human rights, and willingness to use torture violence as first resorts.

But we’ll see no radical Kerry this election cycle.  Except perhaps from the Republicans.  Who knows—watching Republican accounts of Kerry may be the only way to discover a chord of decency in him that makes him worth voting for.