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Consider:

"It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape."

- I. Compton-Burnett, letter to Francis King (1969)

"Cynical realism – it is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation."

- Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop"







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Tuesday, 20 April 2004

Topic: Election Notes

Playing dumb - C'est affreux of course - but necessary.

The necessary caveat: Language is something I've been curious about since the sixties.

And one thing that interests me is each specific language and how it shapes thought. As I've mentioned, my graduate work was on Swift, or more specifically on his ironic language. How can you say one thing and your readers know you actually mean something else entirely, but not exactly the opposite? There are seven or ten levels of other things you mean but you're not saying. They're clear anyway. Most everyone gets them just fine. They laugh.

But how did that happen? This calls for careful examination of the workings of language itself. So in high school I was reading the "New Critics" - Brooks and Warren - and then later it was off into the madness of semiotics and the deconstructionists - Derrida and that crew. And don't get me started on Chomsky - or even Benjamin Lee Whorf and the harmless Otto Jesperson.

Anyway, I got hooked on the idea that if thought only occurs through the use of language, then what does any single syntax and grammar allow you to think? What does it let you think? What does it keep you from thinking?

French is cool, for example. Joseph, an expatriate American living in France, brought up the political implications of this in something he posted in January to a bunch of folks with whom I correspond.
A topic that I have been intending to bring up, but have not had the time to develop, concerns a peculiarity of the French language. Now all but dead in English, the "subjunctive" mode is still going strong in French. For those unfamiliar, one could reasonably say that the French have an entire tense dedicated to doubt. I can't help but see a connection between this and issues of national character and the impact that this has on political life.

Does not the requirement that one use this mode after all kinds of expressions, which in English do not appear to contain any doubt, have an impact on discourse, forcing both speaker and listener to recognize the presence of doubt?
Good question, and my friends kicked that about for a bit.

I think now John Kerry worried about this. Joshua Kurlantzick in the current New Yorker points out that in private settings Kerry has chatted in excellent French with Alain de Chalvron, Washington bureau chief for the French radio service France 2. So? It seems also that now, when asked a question in French at an open press conference, Kerry pretends not to be able to understand it, and doesn't give an answer at all. Curious.

The Kurlantzick item is here:

THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
PARDON?
Joshua Kurlantzick, The New Yorker Issue of 2004-04-19 and 26 - Posted 2004-04-12

Here's some detail:
Alain de Chalvron, the Washington bureau chief for France 2, the French equivalent of the BBC, hasn't had an easy time since he came to America, last fall. He has had to endure a predictable barrage of remarks regarding freedom fries, Old Europe, and the "Axis of Weasel," along with a reticent White House, which has made it hard for foreign journalists to get briefings. So when John Kerry became the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination de Chalvron and other French journalists in Washington were understandably excited. They knew about Kerry: he went to a Swiss boarding school, he has a cousin who ran for the French Presidency, and he supposedly wooed Teresa Heinz by impressing her with his fluent French.

For a time, Kerry seemed equally enthusiastic about the French reporters covering his campaign. "He was quite accessible in Iowa and New Hampshire," de Chalvron said the other day, in his office in Washington. "He understands French very well. His words are correct and sometimes even sophisticated. I asked him, `How can you have this life? It must be terrible, crisscrossing the country.' Kerry answered, `C'est affreux'--`It's awful.'" De Chalvron's voice rose with admiration. "Affreux, it's not a very usual word. It's something a French person can use easily, but Kerry could have said, `Yes, it's terrible,' instead of going to pick a more difficult word."
Well, that's no more than amusing language trivial.

Except for the months that followed. Kurlantzick notes that Republicans have long suggested Kerry is too... continental? And I have mentioned that in his daily Wall Street Journal column James Taranto always refers to Kerry as the "haughty French-looking senator, who, by the way, served in Vietnam." This did all start when Commerce Secretary Donald Evans told reporters that Kerry "looks French." That stuck. And Kurlantzick reminds us that conservatives complained about Kerry talking about endorsements of him from foreign leaders, and how right-wing talk-show hosts now refer to Kerry as "Monsieur Kerry" and "Jean Cheri."

Kurlantzick adds there was a final straw, and a sudden shift:
A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that G. Clotaire Rapaille, a French anthropologist known for identifying the subconscious associations that people from various cultures make in the "reptilian" part of their brains, had offered to become the Senator's Gallic Naomi Wolf, devising ways for him to rid his speaking style of French influences.

Suddenly, Kerry appeared to develop linguistic amnesia. "During a press conference, I asked Kerry a question, on Iraq," de Chalvron recalled. "He didn't answer. In front of the American journalists, he didn't want to take a question that was not in English." Lo?ck Berrou, the United States bureau chief for de Chalvron's competitor, TF1, has been having similar problems. Berrou chatted in French with Kerry on a commercial flight last year; the Senator reminisced about his family's country house in Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, a village in Brittany, where Kerry's cousin is the mayor. "We've pushed hard to get an interview with him, and no answer," Berrou says.

Family members have apparently been put on a leash as well. Kerry's wife, Berrou says, "speaks with us in French with no problem, and her press attach? has to pull her by the shirt to get her away from us."
Ah well.

Kurlantzick lets us know this English-only rule doesn't seem to hold when Kerry is speaking off the record. In fact, he says on his campaign plane recently, Kerry carried on a lively conversation with de Chalvron in French.
The other day, in his office, de Chalvron showed footage of Kerry bringing hot towels to foreign journalists in the back of the plane and bantering with Parisian reporters about his chances. De Chalvron was perplexed. "For us, to speak any other language and have an open view of the world, for a President, should be a plus," he said.
Mais, non! Kerry knows better.

And this:
As for an on-the-record interview, de Chalvron is still trying, but Kerry's campaign has not responded. He did, however, recently land an interview with Pat Robertson, who told him, "Jean Fran?ois Kerry will never be elected."
You don't mess with Pat Robertson. Pat tells many people how to vote, and they do. That has something to do with jesus but I'm not sure what.

Geoffrey K. Pullum over at the site Language Log (University of Pennsylvania) has a few comments on all this -
... The last thing you want in American politics, apparently, is to be captured on camera understanding French, let alone speaking it. Rush Limbaugh would start portraying you as hardly American at all (he already does this with Kerry, in fact, having heard about these suspicious francophone abilities on the grapevine).

Geoff Nunberg pointed out to me that in Nebraska they once passed a law making it illegal to teach foreign languages in the schools, period. Foreign language learning is now, like sodomy, legal in all states; but these are not freedoms that a politician should brag about taking advantage of. Such is the determined linguistic isolationism of the USA. I would have thought that to have a US president (for once) who could argue fluently and convincingly in the native language of some other head of state would be a fantastic asset. But instead it is perceived as a kind of disloyalty, evidence of being an untrustworthy egghead, and you would lose millions of votes over it. It's both depressing and amazing.
Yes, but I think it circles back to the comment from Joseph I cited up top.

Learning another language can be dangerous. I can have you thinking is ways that could be disturbing. As I said, if thought only occurs through the use of language, then what does any single syntax and grammar allow you to think? What does it let you think? What does it keep you from thinking?

I suspect someone knows if you learn French you might find yourself slipping into the subjunctive mode, as it were. You might think new thoughts. You might start doubting things. And we cannot have that, can we? Doubting is so very... French.

The word nuance is French, and as Bush says, he doesn't do nuance. Most Americans don't. The language we use doesn't as easily allow it. Tant pis.

Posted by Alan at 21:50 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: World View

On delusion, mercenaries, Steubenville, Ohio and DeKalb, Georgia. Two friends from France comment on privatization.

My American friend in France, Joseph, glanced through my weekly "magazine" site Just Above Sunset and noted the discussion of why "Lawrence of Arabia" is an appropriate film to consider these days (here) - and the item on George Bush's odd sense of reality (here). He was particularly amused by William Saletan's take on Bush I cited -

See Trust, Don't Verify
Bush's incredible definition of credibility.
William Saletan - SLATE.COM - Posted Wednesday, April 14, 2004, at 3:27 AM PT

Joseph said he was struck with a question - "If we tend to view history through the prism of popular movies, does that make Bush the 'Momento' president?"

Ah yes, the movie we need to pay attention to is "Lawrence of Arabia" -- but the move we actually get is "Memento." I dozed off on the sofa this afternoon and woke up to some political talk show on the television - or was it Abbott and Costello doing that "Who's On First?" routine? Heck, if we're going to be stuck in some movie I was hoping for something better - Peter Sellers in "A Shot in the Dark" or something.

Joseph further commented -
By the way, now that this thing has turned into the fiasco that most of us said it would, I wonder what your "unnamed friend" is saying these days... Hey, the mistake is understandable. We're a nation that admires CEOs, we wanted a CEO president. Now that the nation and the armed services are being run efficiently, like a proper corporation (just forget how far we're in the red) I hope that we're all happy with the result.
I told Joseph I shall see my "unnamed friend" in a week or two - my conservative buddy is off at a trade show in Vegas this week and one somewhere else after that. I suspect he will be silent on these matters. Bush said he'd run the country as a CEO would, and Bush does have an MBA of course - but every company he was involved with went under. There are CEO's - then there are CEO's.

What I find curious, and something I find troubling, is that in addition to our 130,000 troops in Iraq, we also have more than 20,000 "private contract" troops we pay quite handsomely. They've just this week been "tasked" with providing protection for the "Green Zone" - the only safe place in Baghdad, with all the palaces and fancy hotels and former government edifices, where Viceroy Bremer works. This is to free up our "public" troops to go out and fix the larger country in whatever way they can. This is a one hundred million dollar contract.

These "private contract troops" do pretty much what our soldiers do - but get paid much more and operate under no Geneva Convention crap at all. And, in a CEO kind of way, you see the future. The war is becoming "privatized" - we're paying companies like Blackwater Security (it was their guys who got strung from the bridge in Fallujah) to do the dirty work - and that would be the wet work (targeted assassinations) and collective punishment (snipers taking out ambulances and children for maximum psychological effect). We can say "our forces" don't do such things, and that is perfectly true. Pretty clever. The mistake France made in Algeria in the late fifties is that they used the regular army for torture and such things. The truth finally came out and there was no deniability. We've learned a few things since then.

Who are these guys? Some are former members of the South African Defense Force and South African Police. Hired guns. Guy who took out politicians who didn't much like apartheid. Try this regarding one of the four killed in Fallujah:
Gray Branfield, 55, admitted to being part of a death squad which gunned down Joe Gqabi, the ANC's chief representative and Umkhonto weSizwe operational head in Zimbabwe on July 31 1981. Gqabi was shot 19 times when three assassins ambushed him as he reversed down the driveway of his Harare home.
Nice guy! Well, he had marketable skills.

As another fiend in Paris, Ric Erickson, commented,
In normal, not CEO, English - these 'private contract troops' are mercenaries.

MERCENARIES.

The Romans used them effectively for longer than the USA has existed; and the Nazis used them - forced them - but when the steam or money ran out, the mercenaries couldn't save the ballgame. They saved they own asses.
Maybe so.

But we have used them before. They helped us become what we are. Remember the Hessians we paid to help us win the war against England, our own revolution? We paid Germans - von Steuben and de Kalb and their troops - to fight the redcoats for us. And we honored Baron von Steuben by naming one of our cities after him - Steubenville, Ohio. Not much of an honor, for those of you who have been there - Dean Martin's hometown, rusting and dead on the river west of Pittsburgh. But it was a nice gesture. And then there is DeKalb, Georgia. Well, maybe we didn't like these guys.

Anyway, for more background on our current pseudo-Hessian assassins, the New York Times gives enormous detail here and you will find a comment at American Prospect here.

These guys represent the second largest force in Iraq right now. There are more of them than there are Brits in Basra.

We've privatized the war a bit. I'm not sure where that will take us.

Regarding privatization, I see the government over there is France is working hard at privatizing all these large industries - more efficient and all that. Ric and Joseph will have holy hell to pay for that this year with demonstrations and strikes.

But have Chirac's ministers considered privatizing the army? We're working on that over here. Remember your Bonaparte - L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace !

Ric Erickson gives details:
It's pretty neat. On the state-owned radio, state-owned EDF (electricity supplier) is advertising itself in preparation for being sold via the stock market. France wants to sell a less than controlling interest in EDF - to conform to EU regulations that state enterprises allow competition. Who, besides EDF, owns and operates the electricity generators and the transmission lines in France? How will it be possible for a home owner to buy electrictity from 'Electros de Espana' for example? Does the state intend to reimburse the current stockholders - the taxpayers?
Well, out here in California we dealt with this when we deregulated the electric markets two years ago. Anyone anywhere - from as far away as Texas and Canada - could feed the grid and get paid for it. So they all got together and withheld power to force up the prices - and we had blackouts and the price of electricity went up three and four hundred percent for a bit. The state was forced into long-term contracts at fixed high prices and went billions into debt just to keep the lights on. Thus the free market works - many people made quite a lot of money. France is next.

But Ric points out the privatization business in France is getting folks worked up.
Former law-and-order interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, now head of finance at Bercy, has just frozen 7 billion euros of planned state expenditure. Unemployment figures have been revised upward. Meanwhile, 650,000 unemployed cut from benefits on January 1st have won a court case, reinstating their benefits.

The 'new' government that resulted from the recent massive slap in the face from voters seems to be more hapless than the one it replaced. The government, now facing coming EU elections, is worried but seems incapable of veering from its course to total disaster. Yesterday, Chirac's recycled prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, had the disagreeable task of meeting with all of the recently elected regional presidents - some 20 out of 21 who are members of parties other than the government's. C'est ? dire - Socialists, Greens, Communists and other lefties.

I don't sense that there is a huge swell of support for the parties of the left. Rather, it seems like a total rejection of the last right-wing government's policies, and of the recycled new right-wing government's policies. All so-called 'reforms' have either been abandoned or are on hold. The emperor has no new clothes.

Not only has Chirac seemed to have lost his political 'touch,' but the so-called new UMP party created to keep him in office is losing its cools -- blowing them. Popularity polls show only 30-40 percent approval for Chirac and Raffarin, with the latter getting worse notes than his boss. The percentage of 'don't-knows' polled is very small.

The mayor of Paris is not waiting patiently until Chirac is out of office and loses his immunity from prosecution, to charge him with embezzling city funds. Maybe not so grave; maybe only a court order forcing restitution... But it gives Chirac a strong incentive to re-run for President. He only needs a miracle.

These days, 'l'audace' is nowhere in evidence.
Indeed. Privatizing everything in France to make it look more like America seems to be meeting resistance. There's little resistance here, but we're not French, and proud of it.

Is Chirac as detached from reality as Bush (see above)? Ric comments on Bush - "At least he is consistently deluded, instead of only randomly."

Cold comfort.

Posted by Alan at 15:14 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Tuesday, 20 April 2004 15:31 PDT home


Topic: The Media

What gets reported: CNN slams Al Jazeera for being narrowly accurate but not responsible because they do not exclude certain facts and images...

First of all, the CNN news anchor Daryn Kagan is a stunning woman - you will find biographical notes and a picture here if you want to check that out. But last week CNN had her interview Al Jazeera editor-in-chief Ahmed Al-Sheik regarding how Al Jazeera covers things in Iraq that CNN covers quite differently. So the gorgeous Kagan woman faced off against the scruffy Al Jazeera fellow - for a discussion of press ethics. It was amusing.

On the site Electronic Iraq you will find a discussion of the dialog.

See CNN to Al Jazeera: Why Report Civilian Deaths?
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 19 April 2004

This antiwar site thinks Daryn Kagan has her head up her ass - as does CNN. They cover her interview on the 12th where she commented to this Al Jazeera guy that Al Jazeera only makes things worse by doing stories on civilian causalities - when that hurts everything the world thinks is good and all that. Don't show that stuff? It's not the "real" story? This particular form of accuracy is bad news reporting? I guess.

Well, she may be right. But she's not terribly coherent. I did watch this when it was broadcast.

Except (whole thing is pretty detailed) --
Acting as the substitute anchor on CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports, Kagan began the interview by asking Al-Sheik to respond to those accusations, citing U.S. officials "saying the pictures and the reporting that Al Jazeera put on the air only adds to the sense of frustration and anger and adds to the problems in Iraq, rather than helping to solve them." After Al-Sheik defended Al Jazeera's work as "accurate" and the images as representative of "what takes place on the ground," Kagan pressed on: "Isn't the story, though, bigger than just the simple numbers, with all due respect to the Iraqi civilians who have lost their lives-- the story bigger than just the numbers of people who were killed or the fact that they might have been killed by the U.S. military, that the insurgents, the people trying to cause problems within Fallujah, are mixing in among the civilians, making it actually possibly that even more civilians would be killed, that the story is what the Iraqi insurgents are doing, in addition to what is the response from the U.S. military?"

CNN's argument that a bigger story than civilian deaths is "what the Iraqi insurgents are doing" to provoke a U.S. "response" is startling. Especially in light of official U.S. denials of civilian deaths, video footage of women and children killed by the U.S. military is evidence that needs to be seen.

And Al Jazeera is not alone in reporting a reality very different from the one U.S. officials describe. ... But independent journalists reporting from Fallujah have described a scene consistent with the one broadcast by Al Jazeera.
You see the problem here. CNN is covering the story of how these insurgents are using civilians as human shields to provoke American forces into killing civilians, which we do, and are forced to do - so CNN won't show images of these dead civilians because folks might get the wrong story. The real story actually is these insurgents killed these people, making the American forces seem to be the bad guys, because they were the ones who pulled the trigger or dropped the cluster bomb. They made us do it. Al Jazeera is reporting that civilians are getting killed, and will show the images, because it is actually happening. They don't report the "back story" CNN contends is the real truth.

Or another way to see it, CNN proposes the view of our government on civilian deaths is might be the right view.

But either way, do you show the pictures? CNN could show them too, and argue that this is what the insurgents - these dusky devils with the odd religion - are forcing our troops to do.

The larger issue is, I suppose, either way, do you show the pictures to give a visceral sense of what is happening to actual people? Or do you assume people really do know what is happening and don't need gruesome reminders of what the bad guys - you choose which side represents the bad guys - are causing to happen to women and children.

No answer here.

Posted by Alan at 13:51 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Monday, 19 April 2004

Topic: The Culture

The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You
Be afraid, be very afraid...


I don't get religion. I'm just your basic born-and-raised-a-Congregationalist, married once to a lapsed Baptist, then to an odd woman who dragged me off to a High Episcopal church kind of guy - and now an atheist. Probably always was. No, certain I always was. I don't get it.

But I like having religion explained to me. And George Monbiot does that here, and explains how religion drives our actions as a nation. It's quite curious.

See Their beliefs are bonkers, but they are at the heart of power
US Christian fundamentalists are driving Bush's Middle East policy
George Monbiot, The Guardian (UK), Tuesday April 20, 2004

Actually this is an account of last month's Texas Republican Party conventions, particularly the one in Harris County - and that would be Houston, Texas.

Monbiot ticks off the expected - homosexuality is contrary to the truths ordained by God; "any mechanism to process, license, record, register or monitor the ownership of guns" should be repealed; income tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax and corporation tax should be abolished; and immigrants should be deterred by electric fences.

Yep. Not much news here. Then they got to the matter of Israel.

After much compromise, keeping the radical stuff out, they came down to this: the motion they adopted stated that Israel has an undivided claim to Jerusalem and the West Bank, that Arab states should be "pressured" to absorb refugees from Palestine, and that Israel should do whatever it wishes in seeking to eliminate terrorism.

Not quite where Bush put us last week, but close.

The question Monbiot asks is why these folks in one small part of Texas think they need a position on Israel in their party position papers - why is this a local "party plank" at all?

Here's his take:
In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's occupation of the rest of its "biblical lands" (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth.
Ah, I see. They simply want good things to happen. Jesus returns. And I hear he was a good guy - full of love and peace and understanding and all that.

But there is the darker side:
What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that before the big battle begins, all "true believers" (i.e. those who believe what they believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation which follow.
Yep, some folks win, some folks lose.

I guess the question is whether this is harmless fantasy. This fellow explains to his British readers perhaps this all is not so harmless:
The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000, three US Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there), sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/ European Union/France or whoever the legions of the antichrist turn out to be.
Let's get this straight. Texas Christians traveling to Jerusalem to blow up mosques, to make sure Jesus will return as predicted? Well, that doesn't seem harmless, unless you believe in the greater good, in Jesus returning. Then it might be okay, one supposes. And Texas Christians sponsoring Jewish settlements in the middle of Palestinian lands? What, just to tick them off? No, again, for the greater good. This is part of what must happen if Jesus is to return, so one does it. But it does seem odd. The idea, of course, is to bring about the final battle that clears everything up. It seems that is a desirable goal. Heck, everyone believes "closure" is important.

Yes, these folks convinced that they will "soon" be rewarded for their efforts. Keep an eye out for the antichrist, of course, as he/she/it returning signals these are the hoped for end days. Monbiot reports these folks cannot decide just who the antichrist is, precisely - Kofi Annan, Javier Solana, Yasser Arafat "or, more plausibly, Silvio Berlusconi."

Yeah, right.

Monbiot does mention the Rapture of course - and provides a link to www.raptureready.com where you can get some idea how close we are to the end of everything: the "Rapture Index" is at 144 today and you can go see that this is pretty close to the apocalypse threshold. Getting close...

So is this just a silly fringe - just a few folks with odd beliefs? No, fully one third of Republicans believe this stuff. Monbiot runs the numbers, then cheers us up with a mention of the key people who believe this stuff.
And among them are some of the most powerful men in America. John Ashcroft, the attorney general, is a true believer, so are several prominent senators and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. Mr DeLay (who is also the co-author of the marvellously named DeLay-Doolittle Amendment, postponing campaign finance reforms) travelled to Israel last year to tell the Knesset that "there is no middle ground, no moderate position worth taking".
This does seem to be, as Monbiot suggests, a major political constituency - representing much of the current president's core vote - in the most powerful nation on Earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war.

And he points out these people see the invasion of Iraq "as a warm-up act," as Revelation (9:14-15) maintains that four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates" will be released "to slay the third part of men".

And there is the matter of our support of Israel in this whole construct - when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received one hundred thousand angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again. He knows.

Here's how this plays out in the next election.
The electoral calculation, crazy as it appears, works like this. Governments stand or fall on domestic issues. For 85% of the US electorate, the Middle East is a foreign issue, and therefore of secondary interest when they enter the polling booth. For 15% of the electorate, the Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it's a personal one: if the president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don't get to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in other words, stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it. He would be mad to listen to these people. He would also be mad not to.
I don't like the math. But I have not accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior. So I don't get it, and I guess I can't get it. My problem. And for all the times I've been to Texas, I don't like the place.

But Bush has accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior. He gets it -- and if not as wrapped up in apocalyptic thought as the folks are, perhaps, he knows these folks vote. And they want a new world war, a last war, "a war to end all wars," even if Woodrow Wilson had something else in mind when he used those particular words.

Well, we're working in this final war, reading events one way, or, to be a bit more optimistic, Bush is just humoring these people to win some critical votes. I wonder which it is. And I really don't know.

Posted by Alan at 21:21 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Sunday, 18 April 2004

Topic: The Economy

Marketing: Be Careful of Labels in French

Yeah, you buy your kid a backpack and suddenly you're part of the Democratic left that hates America and doesn't support our troops and thinks all the tax cuts are unfair and wants to take away everyone's gun and thinks Mel Gibson may be a bit unhinged.

How so? You purchased the backpack from this company.

See The Insider: Label this a clever attention-getter
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER, Monday, April 12, 2004
FAUX FAUX PAS?:

The bilingual labels sewn into backpacks and briefcases by Tom Bihn, a Port Angeles manufacturer, earlier this week carried more than care instructions. Appended to the French version of those instructions were the words, "Nous sommes d?sol?s que notre president soit un idiot. Nous n'avons pas vot? pour lui." In English, that means, "We are sorry our president is an idiot. We didn't vote for him."

Bihn, 43, who's president of the privately held company he started 13 years ago, said he thinks the labels were meant to refer to him.

"But if someone else wants to take it as being about some other president, they're free to do that," he said.

He doesn't know who made the unauthorized amendment and doesn't much care. No one was reprimanded or fired.

"There are bigger fish to fry," he said.

About 1,000 of the doctored labels were sewn into products this week, and the remaining supply of about 700 will be used next week.

Partly because of nationwide publicity over the label, sales of the company's products last week were double those of any prior week, Bihn said.
Maybe it was just a marketing thing.

Here's the tag.


Posted by Alan at 09:41 PDT | Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink
Updated: Sunday, 18 April 2004 09:54 PDT home

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