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Sunday, April 13, 2003 |
Jack Kerouac's Haiku. Jack Kerouac, the poet of inordinate prose, was also a master of haiku, and a master, as always, at deformalizing the formalities of any genre. [New York Times: Opinion]
Spring is coming/Yep, all that equipment/for sighs.
10:16:25 AM 
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Ha'aretz, via Doc Searls, on The war's implications for Israel:
The United States will make do with bad solutions, based on the long-standing American principle of forging poor settlements the consequences of which will be paid by others in the future....
What conclusion should Israel draw from the war? That it should hurry on its own to achieve a good settlement that will make it possible to rehabilitate the economy and start rehabilitating the society and the state of democracy in the country. In the new world, Israel's major asset is not military might but genuine membership in the club of the advanced countries.
9:57:58 AM
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It seems strange, in the face of the human carnage of war, to be so concerned with the looting of 7,000 years of art and artifacts from the National Museum of Iraq. But this was not Saddam's treasure, or even Iraq's. This was humanity's treasure, and it may be lost forever.
Is this the result of the ingorance of the US war planners? Probably not, since they consulted intensively with archaeology experts to ensure the bombers spared valuable antiquities sites. Their callousness? (Rumsfeld's comment about post-war "untidyness.") Their ineptitude? You decide. But it is tragic, a tragedy that does not yield well to measure.
(I remember my earliest reaction to the war drums last fall: Saddam has got to go, but I sure doubt the competence of this US government to do the job well.)
8:55:57 AM
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The Sand Wall. There are still two other walls holding back the explosion of freedom in the Arab East. By Thomas L. Friedman. [New York Times: Opinion]
America was not just at war with Saddam, but with Saddamism: an entrenched Arab mind-set, born of years of colonialism and humiliation, that insists that upholding Arab dignity and nationalism by defying the West is more important than freedom, democracy and modernization.
Bingo.
Cultures are like people. We can focus on the life we choose or the one we don't have; on what we do to create our life or on what others do to keep us from it. (Or, in this case, on the defeats at the hands of 19th & 20th century colonialism or the cultural and intellectual splendor of Islam's golden age.)
8:45:03 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Gil Friend.
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