Nominal presidents

am listening now to an interview that Charlie Rose is conducting with the historian Garry Wills.

The interviewee is reviewing the history of executive secrecy that developed in the States after WWII that came out of the invention and use of the atomic bomb. With that secrecy, came huge potential for presidential power. In fact, after armistice in the middle 1940's, Congress never again exercised its constitution right to declare war (or to deny the President’s request to wage one); since then it has always been a personal, presidential decision.

The United States are very close to having a consecutive succession of temporarily elected monarchs. Remember that old TV program “Queen for a day”? Well there are now nominal, four-year kings.

Mr. Wills remembers how Congress didn’t even know that the States was bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam conflict. Present-day members of Congress deny knowing about the Bush-era “extraordinary renditions” and the astonishing violation of human rights that happened in Guantanamo.

But the President’s power is, as mentioned, largely nominal, sort of like that Queen Elizabeth II. He is a front-man for a huge and controlling apparatus of hidden decision-makers. The President may come to power with a reform agenda, as in fact Obama did. But once in his four year term he has to face unelected career-men like military and intelligence personnel who are very hard to contradict. Presidents come and go; the generals and agency heads often stay on for the next term.

So election promises fade away and the professionals keep a tight hold on the ship of state. As Mr. Wills commented in his interview, if Obama pulls the soldiers of fortune out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and if he puts limits on agencies like the CIA, they might start to open closets where they keep their skeletons. And since the States depends on them now, what if he needs them later, before he can reassemble a proper citizen army? (And imagine the uproar if he would ask more Americans to die in these undeclared wars for just a soldier’s wages!)Not even the Roman emperors dared to do that.

References:
Ornate letters: http://retrokat.com/medieval/leil.htm

A praying mantis visits me....

There once was a lady from Mantis
Who used computational tactics
She climbed to the screen
Deep meanings to glean
And to gain additional practice.

St George and the dragon

Fuente of Paolo Uccello’s Saint George and the Dragon

I just saw a wonderful movie on Film and Arts that was new to me: The Ebony Tower with Laurence Olivier, Roger Ress, Greta Scacchi and Toya Willcox.

Olivier is an aging painter, Breasley. I must admit I sympathized more with his character than I did with Ress’, in which he assumes the personage of a younger artist and art critic called David. The young man visits the old one at his country house somewhere in France. I won’t go into the inevitable romance because the interesting part of the film was the encounter and contrast between Breasley, a figurative artist and the much younger and abstract painter David.

Breasley is totally non-intellectual, and his work seems to flow from the French-Celtic woods he chooses to live in with his two young nymph-muses. The movie representations of his work were in fact interesting. I didn’t recognize them, but they may have really been pieces taken from someone’s work. (It didn’t occur to me to check for that in the final credits.) David cannot understand Breasley; he even prudishly disapproves of his rakish fantasy life.

I had the feeling I should have sided with David, but I couldn’t. I rather understood Breasley’s sarcastic comparison of his house guest with Uccello’s St George where the knight seems to charge courageously at the princess’ over-large house-pet that she holds on a leash. His attempts at “liberating” her become ridiculous. The dragon is, of course, Breasley and the supposedly enslaved princess is Diana, one of the girls who accompanies the old man.

Helen Thomas, again

Helen Thomas, my heroine, has again published an important article: Obama, The War President (Published on Monday, February 8, 2010 by The Albany Times-Union, New York). View this link: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/08-10

How much of love

I found an old file full of things I wrote years ago, back in the days when one used a typewriter and paper. Here is one of them:



How much of love
Can be grown in a field
Of sun-warmed, red tomatoes?
Living, liquid life
Transformed
Into abstractions, rational relations,
Love of men,
Mankind,
Mathematics,
A washed dinner plate.

External things which are only
Phenomenologically true, perhaps, but nonetheless are
Hardly the crystallized works of a dead
Artist’s thought. Or the insubstantial
Hallucination
Of an amazed psychotic.

And then, too, remember that
Undefined warmth that puts sway in the hips,
As real as a tomato patch
And as insistent as the need to sing,
Ripened red by the same sunshine.

In the beginning was hardly the word.
In the beginning
(as always is)
Was the multitude of precious things.

Curious George

I found this very curious video of Werner Herzog reading his own existential/ pessimistic version of "Curious George". Enjoy.

Source: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/

The price of ignorance

This video was taken from this address;

The problem is that it is almost indistinguishable from real news. On CNN and FOX one sees crying women demanding the return of "their country", a place that is never defined but seems to refer to where social exclusion continues to be practiced.

This is the price for not having educated a large part of the population.



Referencias:

Video: http://www.commondreams.org/video/2009/09/08
Letras ornatas: http://retrokat.com/medieval/leil.htm