WhirledView

Immigrants

By PLS

These elms, Siberian elms, hail from steppes
also rain-starved, and some world traveler
introduced them here, back when planting
a species good for one thing wasn’t weighed
against its bully boy effect on well-loved natives.
Too bad for languid cottonwoods, these elms
have flourished way beyond the wildest
expectation. Cut them back
to bare ugly stumps
and new shoots
will firm
into leaf-heavy branches before a summer’s out.
Come spring every limb’s a lei strung thick
and tight with little florets that turn to seeds.
Straw-colored, half dime-sized, they detach
and flutter down like pre-dirtied snow
that sticks and refuses to melt. They love
fissures, crevices, cracks, where seedlings root
unobserved by fastidious weeders. Their rate
of germination—my guess—comes close
a hundred percent and nothing knocks them out
that hasn’t been concocted in a modern lab,
great good luck for these pushy graceless trees,
these landscape crashers no one chic in Santa Fe
would dream now of inviting to a garden party.
Still
they thrive,
in vacant lots,
in neglected yards,
in the free-for-all strip along country roads,
and I, driving or on foot, appreciate the shade
and mountain cool air that collects and waits quite
democratically for anyone who happens by.

Patricia L. Sharpe
Copyright May 2006

At least read the letter and explore the possibilities. . .

By PHK

If you haven’t yet read Ahmadinejad’s letter to W, take ten or fifteen minutes of your time to do so. Michael Slackman’s May 10 summary in the New York Times is accurate, but nevertheless it’s worth reading the letter in its entirety. It’s only eight pages in PDF format. Not even the best Clift Notes account provides the flavor or the tone contained in the original.

The letter is certainly a religious sermon – from one religious man to another. It is also, of course, a devastating critique of the disastrous foreign policy of this administration – which is not only going to sink George W. Bush’s place in history, but also take down the Republican Congress, demolish Tony Blair and bring the Tories out of their long exile as parliamentary opposition ready or not.

This letter is also the first direct public communication from the Iranian government to the US since the hostage crisis ended in 1979. And, it seems to me, the letter’s contents are above all an attempt to level the playing field between two asymmetrical adversaries.

Information Management

by CKR

Daniel Schulman has a good article in CJR about the Pentagon's information management in the Iraq war (via nadezhda).

But it's not just the Pentagon and the Iraq war.

Social Security will never support you, so we must turn it over to the markets.

No Wonder Commander in Chief Flopped

By PLS

There was nothing radical about ABC’s defunct Commander in Chief. It was condescending and self-destructively apologetic about its core inspiration: let’s imagine a female President of these United States. The writing didn’t sparkle either. Not, I believe, because no script writer was available, at any price, who might have matched the brilliant dialogue and exciting pace of The West Wing, but because any writers that were called in were given a flawed concept. Judging from the scripts that actually aired, their hands were tied by timid producers worried about negative reactions to a hard-driving workaholic wife and mom.

But give me a break! Presidents have to be single-minded, even if they have kids in school, even if they are decent people, even if they don’t belong to the shoot-first-ask-questions-later school of international relations.

The fact that anyone could say that C of C “dared [my itals] to imagine a woman as president,” as Lawrence Van Gelder put it in the "Arts, Briefly" compilation for the May 4th NYT, is precisely the problem in American political and media circles.

Because: what’s so daring? Where have these idiots been hiding? Have they never heard of Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir? Successfully running the domestic and foreign affairs of India, Israel or the UK isn’t exactly a role for guts-impaired wimps. More recently, a woman has been elected to the presidency of conservative Chile; a woman fought like hell to become chancellor of Germany; Liberians elected a woman president to clean up the man-made mess in that ravaged country.

Even Indonesia and Pakistan have had woman leaders, the former a president, the latter a prime minister. In Bangladesh the rivals alternating in the premiership for what seems like eternity have been women. All three are Muslim countries. Is the US really so insular that it’s untouched by the increasing irrelevancy of gender to political leadership aspirations—and achievements?

Who out there in the twenty first century really doubts that a woman can run a country?

Some Flowers for Your Monday Morning

by CKR

I'm getting a lot of flower and plant photos, so I thought I'd share a few. I went for a walk this morning. Some of the photos are from that walk, and I haven't been able to identify all of them. I think that these are marsh marigolds. They were growing right next to a stream.

Brazil Follows Iran Into Enrichment

by CKR

I have an anonymous admirer who sends me links to news stories, presumably so that I'll comment on them. The latest was to a BBC story on Brazil's enrichment plant.

This was the subject of one of my first posts on WhirledView. The links seem to have disappeared, and I apologize for the formatting. I was still learning how to use TypePad.

But I stand by what I said then. An enrichment plant is a nice insurance policy for any country in uncertain times.

The BBC article loaded extremely slowly, so here's a Boston Globe article that I thought made the right points. It's sort of roundabout in its discussion of whether being able to enrich to 5% means being able to produce weapons-grade material. My earlier post is clearer.

So I guess the Bushies are getting out their war plans for Brazil. Or maybe Brazil is on their list of good guys.

Who’s next in America's intelligence battle? Rumsfeld, Negroponte or . . .?

By PHK

The abrupt dismissal of CIA director Porter Goss is probably one of those inside the beltway Friday headline grabbing events that had been on the White House’s not-so-secret agenda for months. Someone who – if I remember the story correctly – hid behind his desk as a Congressman when a group of 9/11 families came to talk with him about their plight. Friday’s Goss dismissal story is, for the most part, being played in much of the U.S. media as a victory for John Negroponte, the director of National Intelligence, who just a couple of weeks ago was himself being criticized for inertia or weakness – or some such thing.

Goss – by all accounts that I have read – was the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time. But then, in my view, his rank ineptitude at attempting to shake-up the secretive bureaucracy is symptomatic of this administration’s inability to do much except make even good situations – for instance, a once-functioning FEMA – worse.

Personally, I don’t think bigger bureaucracy makes for better bureaucracy – and I blame the Democrats for their role in insisting upon the creation of the gigantic Homeland Security department in the first place. But the fault for appointing so many inept agency heads, deputy heads, and lots more politicals down the line falls directly on George W. After all W also appointed Brownie, Rummy, and Karen Hughes. Strategic planning and implementation are – shall we say - not this administration's strong points.

Saturday Tallinn Blogging

by CKR

I've been having some trouble with my laptop, but I've got a temporary fix anyway and hope to be able to continue posting.

It’s always impressed me that nature keeps hanging in there in the cities. Coyotes in Washington, DC and Central Park, New York.