Breslin says it's in the faces of the people. But, no, it's not a reflection of memories of the the Trade Center destruction. It's the consciousness of the destruction yet to come.

On the streets yesterday, when greeting each other, people did it with no expression. Certainly, the cold had much to do with that, but this is a time when people do not smile anywhere.

You study the faces on television. I would not hire the press guy for the president, Ari Fleischer, for a job in a funeral parlor because he is too somber. I single him out because he is on TV a lot at this time.

Death.

But when you study faces anywhere, you can't find a smile.

The faces tell you the time in which you're living. The government is talking about a war with Iraq as if discussing a commuter train home. When we have the war, when we get the 101st Airborne in place, when the carrier group arrives, when the war starts at the end of February. The 8:42 to Long Beach.

The government talks about a war in terms of personal insults, deliberately keeping us waiting, by Saddam Hussein, of whom we're all sick and tired.

No one so far has talked about the number of people who will be killed in Iraq. We will lose great young people. Oh, there has to be tens of thousands of Iraq civilians killed. How can they bomb and invade without killing tens of thousands? Particularly those school children whose mothers dress them for the day and send them off to be blown apart by a smart bomb that turns dumb on the way down and hits a schoolhouse.

But death will not visit Iraq alone.

Of course, people display gloom. When you're in something this lousy it tells on everybody. The soul shows.

Bush talks about this war as if he is driving us to it on a one-way street. We bomb them. We flatten them under tank treads. What happens then? Why, America wins again! The Bush people want the thrill of the invasion news without having to read the casualty lists on the following days.

Neither he, nor anybody else, mentions the obvious fact that an attack on Iraq will cause a response someday. Maybe a month, a year, five years. They will come. And the only place they will attack is New York.

That came to mind naturally yesterday during a walk along the fence of the old World Trade Center site.

No suicide bomber wants to go Waco, Texas.

Nobody tries poison gas on Denver.

They can't wait to hit New York again.

And if there is one sure thing, this Bush and his southern Republicans will simply shuck off the news of anything happening to New York.

Thanks, Jimmy.

This blog is directed to the world outside of New York. Its message is hardly necessary for those who have lived in the Gotham City for the last ten years.

An opinion piece in Newsday today, from an author who once saw the former prosecutor as a hero, and who co-authored a book describing him as such, reminds us of the truth about the the man who later became an unpopular mayor. Giuliani had a 32 percent approval rating in 1999 and throughout his second term, until the destruction of the World Trade Center, he remained unable to claim any real popularity in the city itself.

It is an exhilarating experience to publish a book critical of a pop culture icon like Giuliani, who enjoys an 80-percent approval rating nationally, is routinely called "America's Mayor," and will be the subject of a made-for-television docu-drama in March. Friends think I am committing career suicide by deflating a political diety. TV talk-show bookers say Giuliani is too popular to dispute.

But there is a case against canonization. Something bogus is going on here. One day has become a career.

Jack Newfield hardly misses a beat in his account of Giuliani's failings. Even crime reduction, for which he boasts credit, was hardly accomplished by the mayor in a vacuum. The list of Newfields's indictments includes the mayor's pervasive racist policy, education system disasters, union antagonisms, violations of major constitution rights, the undermining even of existing programs for the poor and, most damaging from the point of view of the constituency which most enthusiastically supported him, fiscal irresponsibility.

John Berger, the Anglo-French writer and critic, recently wrote this, for a site which asks writers, artists and civic leaders for their words on what Bush has called "the first war of the twenty-first century:

SHAME, NOT INDIVIDUAL GUILT

I write in a night of shame.

Many fear that U.S. military forces will soon be launching its “preventive” war against Iraq. Others hope that this can be avoided. Between the announced decisions and the secret calculations, everything is kept unclear, since lies prepare the way for missiles.

By shame I do not mean individual guilt. Shame, as I’m coming to understand it, is a species feeling which, in the long run, corrodes the capacity for hope and prevents us looking far ahead. We look down at our feet, thinking only of the next small step.

The shame begins with the contestation (which we all acknowledge somewhere but, out of powerlessness, dismiss) that much of the present suffering could be alleviated or avoided if certain realistic and relatively simple decisions were taken.

To understand and take in what is happening, an inter-disciplinary vision is necessary in order to connect the “fields” which conventional arguments keep separate. The precondition for thinking on a global scale is to see the unity of the unnecessary suffering taking place. Any such vision is bound to be, in the original sense of the word, political.

I write in the night, but I see not only the tyranny. If that were so, I would probably not have the courage to continue. I see people sleeping, stirring, getting up to drink water, whispering their projects or their fears, making love, praying, cooking something whilst the rest of the family is asleep, in Baghdad and Chicago. (Yes, I see too the forever invincible Kurds, 4000 of whom were gassed – with US compliance – by Saddam Hussein.) I see pastry cooks working in Teheran and the shepherds, thought of as bandits, sleeping beside their sheep in Sardinia, I see a man in the Friedrichshain quarter of Berlin sitting in his pyjamas with a bottle of beer reading Heidegger and he has the hands of a proletarian, I see a small boat of illegal immigrants off the Spanish coast near Alicante, I see a mother in Mali, her name is Aya which means Born on Friday, swaying her baby to sleep.

Democracy is a proposal (rarely realised) about decision making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be confused with the “freedom” of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretense.

Today the fundamental decisions, which effect the unnecessary pain increasingly suffered across the planet, have been and are taken unilaterally without any open consultation or participation.

The new tyranny, like other recent ones, depends, to a large degree, on a systematic abuse of language. Together we have to reclaim our hijacked words and reject the tyranny’s nefarious euphemisms; if we do not, we will be left with only the word shame.

This is written in the night. In war the dark is on nobody’s side, in love the dark confirms that we are together.

©John Berger 2003. His most recent book of essays is THE SHAPE OF A POCKET (Bloomsbury, London and Pantheon, New York)

Just now I made the mistake of turning on the television for the first time in months. I wanted to see if there were millions, shivering, standing in support of reason outside the United Nations Security Council, and I was properly feeling very guilty for not being there myself

I didn't really find out anything, because all I saw and heard on each network were the usual, now iconic, talking shirts (and blouses), describing a world and representing a logic totally alien to me.

The world is the one created by this White House and the media which represents it, to the exclusion of any alternative. The logic, I believe, at the moment goes something like this: Ok, we just may give Iraq a tiny bit more time, but if then the inspectors still don't find weapons of mass destruction, it will mean Hussein is hiding them. At that point the Europeans and any others who oppose a war won't have a leg to stand on, and we can go in and nuke the people responsible for September 11, making us all feel both virtuous and safe.

I don't have to comment any further right now. I'm just going to sign off and weep--for reason, logic, sanity, history, the present, for any future, but above all for the millions of people who will be caught up in this evil.

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Not In Our Name has two full pages in today's NYTimes. The statement is excellent, and it properly references more than just this war. Sign it.

For a visible image of resistance to this war and the new foreign and domestic order, see the Blue Button Project.

James Wentzy's film documentary, "Fight Back, Fight AIDS – 15 Years of ACT UP," has been accepted for screening next month by the 53rd Berlin International Film Festival.

Fight Back, Fight AIDS – 15 Years of ACT UP von James Wentzy (USA)

From the Festival site [my translation from the German]:

Absent for years from the Berlinale, AIDS appears again as a topic of feature films in the Festival's Competition and Panorama theaters. Two documentary films examine socio-political issues [the second, also an American film, is Louise Hogarth's The Gift]: As gays began to die like flies in the 80's, the world looked away. ACT UP became, for the media, the voice of AIDS: And the world was shocked that this the most easy-going of minorities was able to apply itself to deal with the crisis, to ACT UP, to shout back. This film shows how the media-savy actions of this loose organization came about and how AIDS politicized the gay world and moved it to assume real responsibility: Ashes are thrown onto the lawn of the White House of an ignorant President Bush senior, corpses are laid out in front of the two-faced Clinton--and the film historian Vito Russo (who was at the Panorama theatre in 1983 with his lecture, "The Celluloid Closet") is shown delivering his last great speech.

In November I announced the screening of the film here in New York, and after seeing it, wrote:

The ACT UP documentary was beautiful, but for all the evidence of the success of the activism it records, the reminders of how little has changed in the world in fifteen years is a horrible concomitance. Bush, war in the middle east, health care, drug company profiteering, oil, greed and stupidity. There were also the images of so many activists whose lives were destroyed at the height of their beauty and their powers. I would not have missed this screening for anything, but it was a melancholy, if not terrifying, experience, and one which an intelligent and generous world could have prevented.

So. I guess if we think it was cold in January, the globe really is warming.

As of late last week, January 2003 was only the 36th coldest January on record for New York City. Averaging 29 degrees, this January has been downright balmy compared with, say, January 1918, when the average was 21.7 degrees.

Not a single low temperature has set a record. The lowest temperature so far this month was an un-record-shattering 7 degrees on Jan. 18 in Central Park. That would not be a record for any day in Januaries past.

I hate to take the narrow view, to personalize the big issues, but as someone who lives in New York, and is absolutely mad about its people and its beauty, I see this news first as the death knell for the vulnerable, very open city I love. Still with my initial reaction, no, I don't give a fuck for what happens to anyone elsewhere in the country who hasn't been screaming at the top of their lungs all along about the insane regime which has highjacked the nation.

WASHINGTON -- One year after President Bush labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea the "axis of evil," the United States is thinking about the unthinkable: It is preparing for the possible use of nuclear weapons against Iraq.

At the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) in Omaha and inside planning cells of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, target lists are being scrutinized, options are being pondered and procedures are being tested to give nuclear armaments a role in the new U.S. doctrine of "preemption."

Louis Lapham, the editor of Harper's, has come up with the phrase, "radical nationalists," as a description of the party interests which currently control Washington, and thus the nation and already much of the world. Don't call them "conservative."

"Conservative" is hardly an accurate description of Bush, the Republicans, the corporatists and the religious fundamentalists whose agenda for change, well underway already, will clearly destroy the republic, and perhaps much more.

I don't for a moment doubt the eager commitment to the great and noble project of "regime change," but on the evidence ot the last eighteen months they've been doing their most effective work in the United States, not in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, or Iraq. Better understood as radical nationalists than as principled conservatives, they deploy the logic endorsed by the American military commanders in Vietnam (who found it necessary to destroy a village in order to save it), and they offer the American people a choice similar to the one presented by the officers of the Spanish Inquisition to independent-minded heretics--give up your liberty, and we will set you free. [online text not available]

The image is very sad at first, especially if you know there were actually two "Bridal Keepsake" boxes in the windows of the Salvation Army store today. I prefer to think of these boxes as images of liberation, and I wish only the very best for the brides (I do hope there were two) who once wore them.

[But first, a warning, home ain't what it used to be.]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The State Department is sending a cable to embassies around the world telling Americans abroad to be ready to leave their resident country quickly if for any reason they have to, a U.S. official said on Friday.

Well, yes, the sky is almost certainly going to fall, but remember, they don't hate us. Like us, they hate this government and lots of the things we do. Our best bet to begin turning things around: Impeach the miscreants--now! The administration is pretty free with the word "treason,"* but the charge could and should be directed toward themselves.
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*How's this?

"The President considers this nation to be at war," a White House source says," and, as such, considers any opposition to his policies to be no less than an act of treason."