[than opposing smoking in a cocktail culture] is closing down every night disgusted with the odor of cigarettes wafting from my clothes and hair, even my skin, and trying to stanch my dread about whether this is, in fact, killing me."

The guy knows what he's talking about. He works in a bar of which he is part owner eight blocks below us in Chelsea.

When at last the crowd subsides around 3:30 a.m., I duck around the bar to pull down the shutters on the window and the fire door. The freshness of the air outside is shocking, bracing. It frightens me to consider that if the air on an industrial block of Manhattan's meatpacking district in August seems utopian compared with what I've been breathing all night, what on earth have I been breathing all night?

The New York smoking law is almost certainly about to be changed, and it may soon be safe to go to a bar--even a small restaurant, goldarnit! And no, they won't disappear if smoking is prohibited.

This town is built around connecting with people, and New Yorkers use their myriad nocturnal playgrounds as the living rooms they can't afford. Smokers can raise all the fuss they like about the ban, but show me one who will actually stop going to bars and restaurants if it is impossible to light up.

Can no one pick up a phone and call friends in California, where a similar ban has been in effect since 1994? A musician I know in San Francisco said: "It's not like anyone even thinks about it anymore. Clubs are still hopping, bars are still jammed."

Now, maybe we could get the City fathers to let us dance legally in New York bars. Is that too much to ask, especially since we can argue that it too would contribute to a healthier lifestyle?

And let us buy wine on sundays, as long as we're not christian, and....

Um . . . where do we stand with this right now? Is it so wrong to ask the questions? Instead, isn't it very wrong not to ask the questions?

Back in June, the columnist Bob Herbert predicted that there will be an investigation.

Eventually, almost certainly, a distinguished bipartisan commission will be convened to examine the conditions that led to the catastrophe of Sept. 11.

The Bush administration doesn't want this. And Republicans in Congress are fighting to prevent it. But it will happen.

Regardless of its length, the interval between September 11, 2001, and whatever day the investigation begins is simply a political move at best and criminal negligence, even a major crime, at worst. What is most important, more than blame or justice, worthy as those purposes are, is the avoidance of additional catastophe now and in the future. There's no excuse for further delay.

The NYTimes yesterday illustrated Frank Rich's disection of Dubya's domestic and foreign obsessions with a line drawing and its graphic text, "Big Hat--No Cattle," but I'm told by my reliable source that the customary usage in Texas is my own caption above. In any event, there is definitely no humor to be found in Rich's piece itself, except perhaps for the pun-ish dedicated headline, "The Waco Road to Baghdad."

The White House keeps saying that no decision has been made about Iraq, but of course a decision has been made. Richard Perle, an administration Iraq hawk, gave away the game in yesterday's Times: "The failure to take on Saddam after what the president said" would lead to "a collapse of confidence." Translation: If Mr. Bush doesn't get rid of Saddam after all this saber rattling, he will look like the biggest wimp since — well, his father. Democrats, as timid in challenging Mr. Bush on Iraq as they were in letting his tax cut through Congress, keep calling for a "debate." What world are they living in? Mr. Bush is no sooner going to abandon his pursuit of Saddam than his crusade to eliminate the estate tax. These are his only core beliefs.

This is serious.

The only mystery is when D-Day will be. Given the administration's history, I'd guess that it will put on the big show as soon as its political self-preservation is at stake. Certainly the White House's priorities are clear enough. It has guarded the records of Dick Cheney's energy task force and the S.E.C. investigation of Harken far more zealously than war plans that might endanger the lives of the so-called real Americans who will have to fight Saddam.

[somebody else is not taking this Putsch-ring thing very well! This is from Mark Morford's email list]

To All My Friends Who Bought Me The Election

They are Republican "Pioneers," the raisers of the early cash that made the machinery of presidential politics purr for George W. Bush as he sought and won the 2000 GOP nomination. Eighteen months after he entered the White House, President Bush is putting on a party [this past friday, just after his programmed Waco economic forum] for the hundreds of deeply corrupt and snickering, oil-drunk, pro-corporate money slugs whose efforts helped raise a record $100 million as he hurtled through the 2000 primary season like some sort of dense hunk of rock caught in a wind tunnel. More than 200 Bush Pioneers, most of whom snort powdered shredded accounting records for breakfast and directly equate that numbing and dead feeling inside their shriveled hearts with true success, pledged to raise at least $100,000 each for the Bush 2000 campaign, and never in your life have you see such a blisteringly odious array of corporate toe suckers, all assembled in one place like some sort of mutated WASP Godfather gang-leader summit, except without the sex and cool clothes and nice cinematography but with enormous amounts of body fat and trophy-wife swapping and inbreeding.

We did it for oil then*.

We're doing it for oil now.

Almost all Americans cheered our depredations then.

Almost all Americans are cheering the planned war now.

This is a democracy, we tell the world, so all Americans become responsible for the government's policy whatever its moral value.

If our policy does evil, or is even perceived to be doing evil, we are not truly innocent, and we definitely cannot expect to be perceived as innocent. In a democracy, we can't escape responsibility by accepting our individual (hugely various) amounts of freedom and prosperity, but rejecting "politics" altogether, and just voting once every year or so doesn't get us off the hook either; it's a messier business than that, but nobody said it would be easy or pretty. I notice we also show absolutely no inclination to give up our decades-long orgy of cheap oil and the militarily-enforced worldwide economic hegemony needed to support it. Think SUV.

Iraq is not a democracy, we (correctly) tell the world, so Iraqis are not reponsible for their government's policy.

There are therefore, strictly speaking, no American civilians, but on the other hand, there may, strictly speaking, be almost nothing but civilians in Iraq, even including its army, made up of men otherwise without hope or any livelihood.

The U.S. is in a very awkward position, but one largely of its own making. We have succeeded in making American civilians real and potential targets for the anger and resentment of people of other cultures, but we are unable to justify making the civilians of those cultures into our own targets, whether in Mesopotamia, Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world.

A state unable to access its military power and unsuccessful in employing its moral authority, could easily find itself disintegrating, especially if it is not able to address, or to even recognize, the needs of peoples outside. We don't seem to be doing well right now. If there is a war going on, we're not winning it.

Americans have to start operating with our minds and our hearts instead of our phalluses and our fears.

____________________

* "During the Iran-Iraq war, the United States decided it was imperative that Iran be thwarted, so it could not overrun the important oil-producing states in the Persian Gulf." [NYTimes]

I'm not a fan of marriage in any form, but queers have a right to be as conventionally careless and silly as anyone else. Still, let's not make it a requirement.

The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle, among major U.S. newspapers, have been publishing gay and lesbian unions for some time already.

So what the hell took the Times so long?

[message from Steve in Palestine as relayed through Donald here in New York]

Sunday 8/18. I spoke with Steve at 9 AM New York Time (4PM Palestine
Time)

Still not much action to report, but lots of travelling. Steve says
his affinity group are all staying in the Balata refugee camp at
Nablus, where many homes are slated for demolition by
Israeli "security". Steve was on the road there when I spoke with
him.

Yesterday Steve went with his friend Said to the West Bank. They
visited the family of Said's cousin, who was murdered by Israeli
soldiers. They spent the night there, and had lots of opportunity to
watch Israeli tanks drive around the streets of the village.

Today Steve got into Ramallah through a special route through a
cement factory, by-passing roadblocks. He met with one of the
leading organizers of ISM, and they talked about publicizing and
recruiting for an ISM action during the West Bank olive harvest:
Internationals are needed to help minimize shooting of farmers by
settlers during the harvest. The occupation and the settlers have
devastated the Palestinian economy, and
reserving/defending/supporting the olive harvest is crucial to
Palestinians.

Steve was surprised at how bustling and animated Ramallah in contrast
with the curfew times.

Travel News: (this part is conversational notes)
When I spoke with Steve he was in transit from Ramallah to Nablus.
He had passed through the first check point. The check points are
typically humiliating, requiring Palestinians to line up and wait
huge amounts of time just to get from one part of their country to
another.

After passing through the first check point, he got a cab. The
driver knew how to gain access to some settler roads, which meant
they could circumvent road blocks. It also meant some really
circuitous paths taken to get on and off the settler road. When I
spoke to him he was on his way to the check point for getting into
Nablus.

Steve comments that the countryside is very beautiful. But it's also
very strange to look out and see little Palestinian communities in
some places and fortified settler communities in others. The
settlements are in violation of a section of the 4th Geneva
convention, which forbids transfer of invading population to invaded
territory. Ironically, this section of the convention was instituted
in response to the [historical German geopolitical concept, Lebensraum especially as modified and implemented by the Nazi regime.]

That's all for now.

dsg

[not much today, but this is a short update of Steve's activity, relayed through a friend]

Just got of the phone with Steve. It's around 8 on Saturday morning.

He was at a checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, on his way
back to Jerusalem.

He is meeting a Palestinian American friend who is arriving at Ben
Gurion, and they will spend the night in the friends village. Then
they will go to Ramallah tomorrow, and finally to Nablus.

There is serious need for internationals in Nablus, where there are a
lot of home demolitions going on.

Steve says the training in Bethlehem was very good, and that folks
heard shelling last night from the hotel in Bethlehem.

That's all for now. Things are mostly still just logistics at the
moment.

--and studly as well!

Jonathan Rosen actually does the kind of activism that the rest of us must do no less than support fully, if we can't expect to equal his own dedication and energy.

"We live among so much poverty in this city, and everyone should be uncomfortable," he says, smacking a jean-clad leg (he does this a lot) as he perches on a bright purple swivel chair in the [New York Unemployment Project's] scruffy office near Canal Street. "It's economic apartheid and politicians should be uncomfortable, and so should regular people. Any policymaker of any party who doesn't support the unemployed we are going to target."

The organization is his own creation. He's 23 now. Astoundingly, he already has ten years of social justice crusading behind him.

It's a great story, and I'm sure it's only beginning.

[The text of the caption is from an Israeli bumper sticker which is deliberately intended to reflect current Israeli confusion. The words suggest both that all of the West Bank and Gaza be given back to the Palestinians and that Israel should really "give it to them!"]

Ira Glass' "This American Life" went to Israel and the West Bank recently to see, after "two years in which each side has done terrible things to the other side .... what that's done to people living in Israel and the West Bank, and to see if anyone is feeling hope."

It was a great piece of radio journalism, and I link the complete program episode here, in case you missed it on air. Just click onto the "RealAudio" file icon below the program logo.