Opinion-Columns.com

A Little Song, a Little Dance (a little high-test down your pants)

You gotta hand it to Chevron-Texaco and “trust the man who wears the star” to jump right in there when times are tough, the country is at war and a quick profit can be turned. War-profiteering is probably a little strong and pointing at Chevron-Texaco before their competitors post quarterly results a tad misleading, but it’s fun sometimes to mislead about those oil giants. Counterbalances those two-page spreads they buy to convince us they’re actually eco-friendly.

Seems with the airlines going broke one-after-the-other and small independent truckers having a hard time making the mortgage (not to mention the truck) payments, oil companies would be hurting just a bit. Not so. Chevron-Texaco’s profits doubled in the 4th quarter. And this, in spite of production falling nearly 9% because of hurricane damage at their southern refineries. Like my old daddy said, “the rich get rich and the poor get children.”

Stock analysts said the quarterly results showed “a good set of numbers.” Well, I guess. Probably, in the likelihood of W going to war with Iran, a smart fella would load up on Chevron-Texaco stock. The more this administration does to screw up OPEC producers, the higher those quarterly profits are likely to go.

In more rational times, we paid taxes to support the costs of the wars we fought and excessive profits that stemmed from those wars were looked down upon as not exactly patriotic. But these are different times, when Wall Street calls a refiner’s quarterly $3.44 billion jump in profits a good set of numbers. 

Refiners take that nasty, sticky old “crude” oil that comes from various wells around the globe and refine it into various grades of usable stuff, from kerosene to fuel oil for your house to gasoline and diesel fuel. That’s why they call them refiners (it isn’t because of their season tickets to the opera).

So, let me ask you if this makes sense . . . any kind of sense, economic or moral?  Residual fuel oil went up (about) 15% in the last year, motor gasoline and diesel 24% and jet fuel 63%. But crude oil was up 54% as a cost at refineries.  Yet Chevron-Texaco made an extra three thousand, four hundred forty million dollars in three months.  How do they do that?  Is David Copperfield involved?

Meanwhile, the airlines’ are going broke, kicking their unions in the butts, trashing their pension funds and blaming the whole mess on fuel costs. It’s the Wizard, behind that curtain again and the Tin Man has no heart.

Phillip Johnson

Phillip Johnson is dead and for the most part the public will glance at the page-one notice, acknowledge that 96 years is a long life and turn to the sports section. Such is the minor fame of major architects in a fame-glutted society.

Johnson, it seems to me, had several attributes that allowed him to move easily and powerfully through the world of architecture . . . and a dizzying, spiteful, jealous and egotistical world it is: he was independently wealthy, intellectually curious, smart, enormously enthusiastic and willing. A good many contemporaries shared the first qualities but were lacking in the last . . . willingness is not the same as self-promotional, it shrugs off the consequence of being wrong and there’s great strength in that.

Johnson was famously politically wrong and it says a good deal about his charm and intellect that, being so wrong about Hitler, he was able to move on to collaborate and learn from Mies van der Rohe and then move on again. Architects are famous for not moving on. Like pros on the PGA tour, most cling to their swing long after it’s failed them. Phillip moved on and in doing that he left some great, some not-so-great and some truly awful buildings behind him.

Even so, Johnson never succumbed to telling (to build is to tell in this instance) the architectural joke that’s been so in vogue for the past couple of decades. The AT&T building came close, with its chippendale top, but that was more smile than guffaw. The currently hot Frank Ghereyesque crowd tell each other architectural jokes and see how far they can push public acceptance of the outrageous-as-serious. But like a joke that’s funny the first time, these buildings are retold each time they’re seen and the joke soon becomes old, then tiresome, finally petty and degrading.  Johnson’s ego, which was large enough, had plenty of room for the celebration of others and while he reveled in the gossip of his profession, wit was important to him.  But it was delivered from a scalpel rather than a cleaver.

Whether any of this is important in the day-to-day business of getting buildings built is not debatable . . . it most assuredly is important.  Someone designs the spaces within which we live and work. That design has to solve the problems of proposed use, budget, space, zoning laws, traffic pattern and ‘liveability,” whatever the hell that is.

It’s the whatever-the-hell-that-is that Phillip Johnson was good at and he went after it with the zeal of a horseman after a foxhound. Men like that shape the daily experience of walking in and out of buildings and when they’re gone, we miss them.  Even if we were not personally aware of them, we miss them.

Part Two, Another Toy for the Donald

Well, John McCain was listening and claimed to be not all that happy about reading things that pertained to his Senate committee in the Washington Post. That was followed by much backpedaling, bowing and scraping on the part of some poor Pentagon spokesman. Would you sleep well at night if your day-job were to clean up after Rummy’s dirty laundry?

Gosh, maybe it’s all just a misunderstanding.

George Waldroup, a reserve colonel runs this particular clandestine show and when you Google his name you pretty much come away with zip. Navy Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, expresses "utmost confidence in Colonel Waldroup's capabilities" and said in an interview that Waldroup's unit has scored "a whole series of successes" that he could not reveal in public. Well, that would be refreshing, after the CIA scored a whole series of fuckups that the administration would not reveal in public.

Chock full of code-names and special units, the “Rumsfeld Cloaks and Daggers” are bound to impress and, as the Post notes, “add missing capabilities, such as the skill to establish local spy networks and the technology for direct access to national intelligence databases.”  So, that’s what’s been wrong with the CIA! They were unable to establish local spy networks. No wonder Rummy’s disgusted and to think that George Tenet got a Presidential Medal of Whatever without being able to spy on the people Rummy wanted spied on. It just boggles the mind.  However are we stumbling through day after day? The CIA must have been Googling al Queda.

Over at Langley, the CIA has been battening down whatever hatches it has left and refuses to grant interviews for the Washington Post article. Things must be a bit touchy over there.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is absolutely going to remain accountable to congress, while insisting that defense intelligence missions in their bailiwick are less subject to legal constraints than Rummy’s predecessors believed. Apparently they’re gonna stub that same sore toe again while arguing legalities. Don’t lose me folks, it has to do with new interpretations of articles 10 and 50 of the U.S.Code. I looked into these titles and, like the tax code, they are so arcane in language that multiple definitions cry out for attention. Rummy’s gonna run with this ball and see if anyone blows a whistle.

And maybe he’s right. But putting together a spy network isn’t all that great an idea within an organization that can’t do its primary job correctly, which is to win the wars that congress asks and requires them to win. We already have an organization that doesn’t know how to spy and hardly need another. Peter Sellers isn’t supposed to be running clandestine operations in the United States . . . he’s supposed to be dead. Donald Rumsfeld isn’t supposed to be running clandestine operations either . . . he’s supposed to be running a military that knows how to win an armed conflict.

Get the first part right, Donald.  Then we’ll see if you deserve your own spy operation and if you do, we’ll let you designate yourself Agent 001. Until then, don’t buy the hat.

Another Toy for the Donald

Not that Donald, although congratulations are in order for his wedding. No, it’s Rummy we’re talking about and his new sleuthing machine, something conjured up to set those CIA rascals back on their heels.

They call it the “Strategic Support Branch” and its focus is on emerging target countries like Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia. Indonesia? Soemadi Brotodiningrat, the Indonesian ambassador to the United States may just have choked over his morning coffee at that revelation. Emerging target country indeed. Condoleezza Rice may find the weather a bit chilly next time she visits steaming Jakarta.

One can almost hear Mikhail Saakashvili, the freely elected, Columbia Law School educated thirty-six-year-old president of Georgia . . . “we need investment, we need assistance, we need cooperation, we need to be an emerging target country.” But one must listen carefully, this Georgia is a long way from Atlanta.

The Philippines has endured a long love-hate relationship with the United States and President Gloria Arroyo, number 9 on Forbes’s list of world’s most powerful women, recently pulled her country’s troops out of Iraq . . . hence, no doubt, her nation’s listing on a smaller and more troublesome list than Forbes’s . . . Rummy’s short-list of emerging targeted countries. Call Imelda Marcos for advice, Gloria. We supported her scumbag husband for decades.

According to Barton Gellman’s Washington Post article, Rummy will deploy “small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces.” And here I thought we’d just recently had our tit in a wringer over the old empowered special operations forces. Interrogation of prisoners is on the list of responsibilities . . . bad thinking, Donald . . . been there, done that! A not-to-be-missed Pentagon memo mentions that certain recruited agents may include “notorious figures” whose links to our government would be embarrassing if disclosed.

What can they possibly mean? Is our link to Pervaiz Musharraf of Pakistan not already embarrassing enough? This administration (like all its predecessors) supports despots all over the globe to enhance its current political agenda and that of course puts the lie to any real change other than the narrow focus of the five. And what of a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who names such targeted countries in a document subject to freedom of information? Not very diplomatic, but then General Myers is not a diplomat as was his predecessor and how much good did it do him?

This little shop of horrors was financed with what is euphemistically called reprogrammed funds. That neatly ducks congressional oversight on the funding, but the Senate might want to check into what Rummy’s doing with his newfound toy for identifying emerging target countries. Wars and targets and despots seem these days to be warlike and targeted and despotic pretty much in the eye of the beholder.  The beholder for the next four years doesn’t have much of a track record for accepting the advice and consent of the Senate. Or even asking.

Senator McCain, are you listening?

Gonzales Policy Doesn’t Bind, Unless it Does

That is it would have, if it had, but it didn’t, depending upon who and when it was supposed to, if it did at all, which probably isn’t likely whenever that question was appropriate to ask.

Is that clear, Senator?

Umm, well, let’s see if this makes it easier. In the 2002 directive, signed by President Bush---the one that pledged the humane treatment of prisoners in American custody---officers of the CIA and other non-military personnel fell outside the bounds of the directive. Okay, I guess that means all those CIA case officers and all the “consultants” the Pentagon hired to fight their war could torture whoever the hell they wanted. Umm, yes Senator.

But of course the president is clearly opposed to torture, clearly opposed by policy and the CIA and other nonmilitary personnel are fully bound by that policy. That’s what Gonzales said. So, the directive says outside the bounds and the policy says bound, is that it, Mr. Gonzales?

Umm, yes.

Mr. Gonzales, would you define torture for us, as you understand it?

Umm, no Senator.

Well folks, Senator Edward Kennedy got a few days reprieve in confirming this latest embarrassment to the office of Attorney General but it looks like it’s going to happen on the 24th and that’s Monday. Whether that’s a step up or down from the Ashcroft tenure is anybody’s guess . . .

. . . but, if it waddles like a duck . . .

Eternities ago on the Tigris and Euphrates

It will be interesting to see what the feelings of ordinary Iraqi citizens will be by the time Saddam finally reaches trial in Iraq.

He was hated, he was feared, his was a regime of those same knockings on doors in the night that marked the Hitler regime in Nazi Germany. But, like Hitler, he kept the trains running and if the train metaphor ran somewhat slowly, if the country’s middle class was increasingly impoverished, there was stability in expected shortages. The streets and markets and cafes were safe and men smoked and joked without fear of car bombs. Children played, women hung wash and dinner might have been simple, but it was served on time and the light in the dining room went on when the switch was pushed.

Iraq today is chaos. Water doesn’t run, power outages are constant and unexpected, sewers overflow, lines for five-cent-a-gallon gasoline are three miles long and most days there is none in a country floating on oil. Neighborhood explosions bring that heart-stopping omigod of which friend or who’s child has been injured or killed. We humans are creatures of habit and the habit we love and cherish most deeply is constancy. Where I live in the Czech Republic, there is a weird nostalgia building for the old days of communism---not that the country would go back, but that people were reliably, equally  and somewhat comfortably impoverished.

Saddam, when there finally is a regime (legitimate or not) capable of trying him, will be tried in a country where the leaves on the trees no longer flutter in safe breezes. The man whose portrait dominated serene public spaces will be put before a tribunal in a smoking, partially ruined city whose inhabitants scurry in fear rather than stroll in safety. He will be freshly shaved, well-fed, insistent that he is still the legitimate president of his country and look amazingly like the self-composed subject of those portraits.

When the disheveled, confused Saddam was hauled out of his hole in the ground (how long ago? it seems an eternity) there was a national sigh of a breath held some thirty years. But that was twice an eternity ago, when it looked like the American invasion might actually right some wrongs and do some good. An eternity ago before the insurgent back-alley, rooftop, roadside terror killed Iraqis at a four to five time ratio of coalition forces. An eternity ago in the mindset of the average Iraqi.

I suspect, if and when they think it safe to try Saddam, somber Iraqi faces will watch the proceedings at storefront televisions between power outages and the mood will be reflective rather than passionate. There will be mutterings in the damaged cafes about the old days, the better days, the reliable days, because our human memories are short. The high value we put upon constancy doesn’t include the constancy of chaos.

Here's a Hundred Bucks, Go to College!

Is it irony, George? Some sort of perverted sense of humor, or are you serious, standing up there behind the lectern at Florida Community College, promising to increase the maximum federal grant for low-income college students by $100 a year for five years.

A hundred bucks a year!

A change he said would make higher education more accessible to thousands of Americans. What kind of change?  Pocket change?  Chump change? 

Last month, the president allowed a ‘new formula’ for calculating eligibility for Pell Grants that eliminates 80,000 to 90,000 low-income students from the system. This month he’s got a hundred bucks in his pocket. Frank Sinatra used to walk through the kitchens of restaurants where he’d had dinner, handing out $100 bills to cooks, waiters, busboys and dishwashers. But so far as I know, he never said “here’s a hundred bucks, have a good year.”

An example of extraordinarily good manners on the part of students in that “packed gymnasium” where Bush gave his talk, that they didn’t laugh him off the stage. But then Bush has always done well in Florida.

Talk is as cheap as this proposal and the track record shows that No Child Left Behind left nearly all of them and the Bush rhetoric has seldom matched the Bush record.

If you're like me, you won't remember everything you did here. That can be a good thing.
   W Address at Yale University, May 21, 2001

Yeah, I guess.

Conservative Republicans?

That just cracks me up, that conservative label that Republicans like to wear in the collar of their jackets like a hex sign on an old barn to ward off any hint of liberalism.

Phew!

What in the hell is conservative about

• blowing their children’s financial futures with unparalleled debt (trillions under both Reagan and George W)   
• pulling the teeth of the EPA and substantially devolving its responsibilities to the industries it was meant to oversee
• giving to the rich by taking from the poor
• keeping an ‘enemies list’ second not even to Richard Nixon
• running (one can hardly call it fighting) an unfunded war

   

To conserve and to believe in conserving and to encourage conservation would all seem to be requirements for wearing the label ‘conservative.’ Or am I wrong? Has the word been so bastardized as to no longer bear that connective tissue? 

Well, of course conservative Republicans are no longer doing any of that and I used to be among them. I was, for more decades than I like to count, fiercely protective of the right to keep government the hell out of my business and an ardent admirer of those up-by-the-bootstraps Horatio Alger success stories.

Then, things governmental began to go in odd directions. Reagan confused me with his privatizing of public utilities and public transportation and both of them quickly went to hell in a hand basket, but he was so endearing in his humility and folksiness that I voted for him a second time. I watched in a fair degree of horror, a national debt that had taken the entire history of the country to reach a trillion dollars, multiply to three and a half trillion. I was told that Reagan was one of the great conservatives. All of the liberals the nation has ever known, laid end-to-end and stacked on top of one another three times over couldn’t come close to the fiscal wreckage of the Reagan administration.

But, I voted for Bush, Sr. because I didn’t much think Mike Dukakis could do the job and I was reluctant to kiss off a lifetime of being a Republican. Little old small-businessman me still believed in conserving things and, like someone in the throes of mid-life crisis, I fell in love with Bill Clinton the moment he went down to the edge of the stage in that debate and knelt down and actually talked to a questioning member of the audience. Bill did a lot of personal things unwisely, but so had I by that time in my life. Yet he balanced the budget for the first time in my memory and paid down a big hunk of the national debt and had a workable plan for paying the rest. And I thought, what the hell, this man is supposed to be a liberal! Bill was conserving education, conserving the economy, conserving the environment and, perhaps most importantly, conserving the nation’s reputation in the world for being an innovator and partner.

It was a test of confidence in the things I had spent a lifetime believing.

And now we have a president who wants to privatize Social Security and is just plain outright lying about the facts in order to stampede an already jittery congress. And I can see Social Security going the way of United Airlines and Commonwealth Edison while conservative Republicans congratulate themselves at finally having reversed Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

That kind of conservation will unstring the bow of American reliance on its conservative values. The word itself will carry the message of its own destruction. Hard work, faith in ourselves, charity toward the less fortunate, a willingness to sacrifice, belief in a better future for our children and a basic trust in fairness will all lay in tatters. The mindless greed of these times and these leaders, subverting the language to undercut the legacy of their own party is a disgrace to witness. And I’m witnessing. I’m not liking it, but damned if I’m not witnessing!

If down this shabby and self-serving road lies conservatism, I guess I must take up the cause of the liberal.

Time For the Landscape Architects

And I am one, first off I have to own up to that. For thirty-five years I had my own private landscape architectural practice in the Chicago area.

Disclaimers aside, it’s past time for my profession to be invited in to ameliorate the  “bunkerization” of Washington, as well as our embassies and corporate entities around the world. For one thing, there’s no need to be ugly to be safe and for the second and more important reason, we can ill afford to showcase democracy behind barbed-wire and concrete crash barriers. The problem lies in the frantic call for quick solutions, exacerbated by a mind-set that sees the need as temporary when it is not. The problem is long-term and quite probably permanent, a fact requiring re-thinking of the mindless road-barrier mindset that currently shapes our response to threat.

There are indeed better ways . . . even the old castle-moat was an aesthetically pleasant place to rain arrows upon an attacker. For the most part, security is terrain driven . . . keep the bad guys away from the target and terrain is for the most part manageable. In close-up circumstances such as inner city locations the solution is more difficult and may consist of blast-shielding inside the ground and first floors of buildings as well as beefing up interior structural support, none of which need visually interfere with an exterior façade. In more concentrated venues (and historic Philadelphia is certainly one) our founding architecture and its ancillary modern structures might well be made into pedestrian zones, as is common in historic European city centers. That will hardly stop a backpacker bomb, but  backpacker bombs are unstoppable, as Israel has come to know.

Where there is additional space (and certainly monumental Washington falls into this category), lakes, streams, retaining walls, berms and clusters of trees will serve admirably to screen a more serious purpose. Consider stopping vehicles by use of beautiful cast-iron bollards sprinkled among  clusters of shade trees, underpaved with flagstone or brick. Meandering moats serve a similar purpose . . . they need not even be pedestrian unfriendly, easily grillworked over in such as way as to support people but not vehicles. If gun or rocket fire is the threat, groupings of trees can screen bulletproof glass shields within their groves.

There is almost no terrorist threat that can’t be as effectively disarmed by attractive solution as by the heavy-handed techniques presently being used. As always, the most creative solutions are within the purview of private enterprise rather than bureaucracies. One can hardly imagine a worse idea than giving over such responsibility to the Corps of Engineers or Parks Department.

And finally, we must accept as a nation the reality that no target can be made entirely safe from attack and barricading our democracy is too high a price to pay, both in dollars and in terms of comfortable enjoyment. The annual spring parade of the nation’s schoolchildren to witness the cherry blossoms in our capitol must not become another lesson in how fearful we have become. Thomas L. Friedman, the NYT columnist is correct when he says “We have to find a way of defending ourselves from others' weapons of mass destruction without losing our own weapon of mass attraction.” 

The American Society of Landscape Architects (headquartered of course in Washington) stands ready to recommend firms with international reputations, as well as highly talented small offices to consult with the anti-terror specialist of your choice.

. . . they’re in the book.

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“Those who failed to oppose me, who readily agreed with me, accepted all my views, and yielded easily to my opinions, were those who did me the most injury, and were my worst enemies, because, by surrendering to me so easily, they encouraged me to go too far... I was then too powerful for any man, except myself, to injure me.”
-Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France 1769-1821)