Peter Krupa

So imagine you were just arrested by a foreign government for something you didn’t do. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time - these things happen. You get arrested and put in prison and your family is not notified and you think, “Hey, I didn’t do this!” and so you want to appeal to a judge. But when you express this desire to your jailer he just laughs at you. “Appeal to a judge,” he chuckles, “that’s a good one,” and he slams the door.

Four years later, you’re still in prison, and you still didn’t do it.

As an American, you should be shocked and appalled. One of the greatest traditions of Western law has just been violated: habeas corpus, the right prisoners have had, since the Magna Carta, to appeal an unjust imprisonment. This is the part of the blog where I normally start ripping into Cuba, but unfortunately, depending on a Senate vote on the so-called “compromise” bill to deal with terrorists, it is US law that could be amended with the following text:

`(e)(1) No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.

`(2) Except as provided in paragraphs (2) and (3) of section 1005(e) of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (10 U.S.C. 801 note), no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien who is or was detained by the United States and has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.’.

(b) Effective Date- The amendment made by subsection (a) shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act, and shall apply to all cases, without exception, pending on or after the date of the enactment of this Act which relate to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of detention of an alien detained by the United States since September 11, 2001.

Basically, it says if we’ve gotcha, sorry, you’re fucked. Not only that, but this is retroactive, so if we got you before and fucked you, you’re still fucked, and we’re not even sorry for shipping you off to Syria where you were tortured, or holding you without trial for several years of your life.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is part of the so-called “compromise” between the Bush People and the Other People (full text). It is indeed a compromise: It compromises our international standing as a decent country, and compromises our troops’ safety should they fall into enemy hands.

As an American, I’m not really happy with this. Unfortunately, most of the House of Representatives was (including 34 Democrats) so they merrily voted to make it law. Today, we await the Senate’s decision.

This is bad. Very, very, very bad…

UPDATE: The Senate has rejected a change to the bill that would have taken out the suspension of habeas corpus part. This is very, very bad.

“Picture show,” is the headline on Garrison Keiller’s latest column in Salon.com. The sub-head reads: “The camera can turn callow teens into celebrities and make Bush look like a pilot. Are photo ops ruining America?”

The answer is “no,” so I won’t bother reading the article. Why be so presumptuous? Because it’s just another in the long line of “Is X ruining America?” stories, and “X,” whatever it turns out to be, is almost never ruining America (or Western society, or the Youth, or whatever other cherished group/institution you can dream up).

Nevertheless, according to our punditocracy humanity is always perched on the brink of some precipice or other of cultural annihilation. These days it’s usually illegal drugs or gay marriage or MySpace, and in the past it’s been anything from video games to ultimate fighting to booze. No matter the dire predictions, we’re generally all still here once the dust clears, and life, as it has a way of doing, goes on.

As for why social critics are drawn to this kind of “the-end-is-near” journalism, my guess is that our approach to the future has something to do with our perception of the past. The modern mind is trained to think of history as punctuated by dramatic moments and urged along by small ripples that become a tsunami.

Thus we have the assassination of Prince Ferdinand, Black Tuesday, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 9/11 to punctuate history, while we think of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Romantic poets, Elvis, and the invention of the assembly line as ripples that ended up causing a global flood.

What journalist wouldn’t want to be the one credited with having put a finger on the Next Big Thing? Of course, like any good seer, the journalist’s strategy is to predict a whole bunch of Next Big Things, then only remember the predictions that were right. Thus we have a glut of “X is destroying America” stories, in the hope that “X” turns out to be the next crack epidemic, or the next acid rain.

Most likely, however, no one ever does manage to predict the Next Big Thing. That’s part of why it’s the Next Big Thing. If the thing that will destroy society is so obvious that a columnist for Salon.com can pick it out, it’s doubtful it will make it very far. No, the thing that destroys our society will be a total surprise.

So when you die with your helper robot’s spindly fingers wrapped around your throat, don’t blame Garrison Keiller. Likely he’s just as surprised as you are.

I’m tired, that kind of mental tiredness where you can’t rest at the end of the day, even though you want to. My mind is operating at a low hum, constantly. Good food slows it down to a more comfortable rate, but all the political books and articles and Lexis-Nexis full-bore crazy-assed research brawl I’m stewing around in probably isn’t healthy all at once. I need to read something … nice. Something with a long, lyrical description of of a country drive, in June, through corn fields at night. With the window down all the way, and fireflies. And lots and lots of stars.

Last Monday night at 8:30 p.m., while standing on a subway platform below 34th Street and waiting for the D-train to take me home, I stumbled upon the Meaning of Life. It’s kind of a letdown, so I wouldn’t pass it on if I didn’t know that, the nature of the Meaning of Life being what it is, no one will listen to me anyway.

I was on my way home from a question-and-answer session with Sydney Blumenthal, who was presenting his new book, How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime. Typically, the crowd was overwhelmingly lefty, and as Blumenthal lamented the tyranny of the Bush Regime – the torture, the intimidation of the media, the disrespect for the separation of powers, the “Stalinist purges” of government professionals – the people in the audience bobbed their heads along with him and shouted “Amen!” from the back.

Certainly I agreed with Blumenthal, but inwardly I was scowling, because I knew these very same lefty people are the ones who try to explain away or ignore these very same injustices as they take place in present-day Cuba and Venezuela. Indeed, some of these people had likely tried to explain away Stalinist purges as perpetrated by Stalin himself.

The hypocrisy had descended into my stomach long ago, but now it was curdling itself into an uncomfortable, writhing cheese. The question had been nagging at me for years, tickling at the back of my mind and screaming from the pages of history and political magazines: Why don’t people make sense?

And suddenly, standing there on the subway platform beneath 34th Street, waiting for the D-train, an epiphany burst upon me, and I had a glorious vision of half-naked men dressed in red-white-and-blue, wearing elaborate masks and dancing around an enormous statue of an elephant, while nearby a similar group clustered around a shimmering donkey, hooting and chanting mendacious accusations at the elephant-worshipers.

Life is not about ideas. Life is about tribes.

A veil had lifted – like when one finally fills in a key number in a sudoku puzzle – and the world rapidly began to click into a neat pattern. Tribalism explains everything – politics, religion, neighborhoods, cross-town rivalries, Packer fans, Bears fans, soccer hooligans, punk rock, emo, Goths, genocide, Castro Street, Williamsburg, protestants, Friendster, Facebook, Myspace, racism, Marxism, unions, fraternities, sororities, brand loyalty, gun clubs, and Michael Moore.

The most overpowering instinct of humanity is not reason or emotion or love or hate or white guilt: The most overpowering instinct is the desire to belong to a group. Once one joins a group, the ideas that formed the group are less important than the group itself, and the fierce and primal desire to defend the group, no matter what, becomes preeminent.

Thus man uses reason not to find the truth, but to explain why his tribe is right.

This theory explains an unbelievable number of things about life (not the least of which being the Suma Theologica), which is why I’ve been so arrogant as to call my revelation the Meaning of Life.

For example, it explains why Evangelical Christianity in America insists that the world did not evolve, finding it more believable that God created it 6,000 years ago, and that the world’s entire scientific community is maliciously pulling our leg. It explains why the leftwing decries the tyranny of Bush, yet discretely ignores that of Castro, and why the rightwing declares moral truth to be absolute, except when it comes to torture, which these days is a gray area. It explains why a Detroit Tigers fan will come up with a million reasons why “this is the year,” and why Costa Ricans had themselves convinced they had a shot at the 2006 World Cup. It explains why the Jews always form themselves into an exclusive group, and why the rest of us always try to kill them off.

As I said before, the Meaning of Life is kind of a letdown. Imagine an ant who suddenly realizes that she’s spent her entire existence just walking back and forth. Her life’s primary determining factor, she finds, was bred into her thousands of years ago. Free will was an illusion all along.

Thus learns the ant, and thus learns the human when faced with his essential tribalness.

Neither I, nor the ant, are worried this revelation will have an undue affect on our peers. Our peers will never listen to us because they will be too busy – in the case of the ant, busy walking back and forth, and in the case of myself, busy defending their tribes. My peers will deny the Meaning of Life as a matter of course, an instinctive reaction intended to protect the tribe, whose legitimacy is newly threatened by the revelation (those few who agree with me will just form another tribe).

The Meaning of Life, it turns out, proves itself through our very reaction to it. It is a perfect theory: Simple, elegant, and unfalsifiable, just as the Meaning of Life should be.

Later on, after catching my subway and riding home in a state of shock and miraculously getting off at the right stop, I had a more soothing epiphany, which is that someone cynical enough to arrive at the Meaning of Life and believe it to be true would surely hold the ultimate tool for understanding and manipulating mankind in all its tribalness.

Thus we have Napoleon Bonaparte, Hugo Chávez, Huey P. Long, Josef Stalin, Simon Bolívar, Karl Rove, and the list continues off into the distance

Oh, and there’s me. I think I get it now too.

Simon Bolivar died alone, betrayed, and bitter. After dashing his armies back and forth across the mountains and plains of South America and spending his fortune and his life to liberate an entire continent from Spanish colonial rule and replace it with liberal republicanism, he wrote the following bitter note to one of the many warlords whose petty infighting collapsed Bolivar’s vision only five years after its fulfillment:

I have arrived at only a few sure conclusions: 1. For us, [South] America is ungovernable. 2. He who serves a revolution ploughs the sea. 3. The only thing we can do in [South] America is emigrate. 4. This country will eventually fall into the hands of the unbridled mob, and will proceed to almost imperceptible petty tyrannies of all complexions and races. 5. Devoured as we are by every kind of crime and annihilated by ferocity, Europeans will not go to the trouble of conquering us. 6. If it were possible for any part of the world to revert to primordial chaos, that would be [South] America’s final state.

Today, 200 years after Bolivar, Latin America doesn’t matter. It produces almost nothing of note, and the rest of the world almost completely ignores it. Since the end of the Cold War, not even the United States has bothered much with it, except when forced to by drug lords and high rates of illegal immigration.

High crime, inequality, racism, poverty, etc., are still common, and though many thinkers today like to blame these problems on imperialism, the IMF, the World Bank, and capitalism, the more likely cause is the same one that led Bolivar to make his bitter and prophetic analysis 200 years ago: terrible, selfish leadership.

It’s sad but appropriate that the last words of Latin America’s greatest and most selfless leader had to be, “Let’s go, Let’s go, these people do not want us here.”

Dengue fever is not a nice disease. Newspapers in the Midwest are always trying to terrify people about West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne illness which kills approximately no one. Forget about that. Dengue is also a mosquito-borne disease, but it’s an actually scary one that kills all sorts of people.

The first time you get it, it sucks, but you will most likely survive. Most likely. The second time you get it, however, it turns ugly - the second time, it usually changes into dengue haemorrhagic fever, a condition with all sorts of nasty complications including liver and circulatory failure.

Worldwide, some 500,000 people are hospitalized with dengue annually, and without proper treatment, 20 percent of dengue victims die.

The absolute only way to combat dengue fever is prevention. This is why when I lived in Costa Rica, every time I went to a movie there was a cheery little 1950s-style public service announcement encouraging me to get rid of flower pots, tin cans, open garbage, and anything else that might hold stagnent water where mosquitoes could breed.

Once they’ve bred, it’s much too late.

All of the above is common knowledge, available for anyone who wants to look for it. Using a publicity campaign, neighborhood clean-ups, and other prevention strategies, Costa Rica has decreased drastically its instances of dengue. The best way to prevent dengue is not a secret: You have to prevent mosquitoes from breeding.

Which is why an AP story today seemed so wrong. The headline: Cuba intensifies campaign against dengue fever; number of victims unknown.

Cuban authorities have intensified their campaign against dengue fever, sending military planes to fumigate streets, buildings and rooftops in the capital and going door-to-door to spray against mosquitoes potentially carrying the disease.

They have remained silent, however, on the number of victims of the disease. Community watch groups are telling Cubans there is an epidemic and the number of people infected is growing.

I get really impatient when people get paid to know more than me, and don’t. How hard would it be to do 15 minutes of background research and put in a blurb about the way the rest of the world has learned to fight dengue? No one uses military planes - the only way to stop a dengue epidemic is through prevention.

And yet we have the AP blindly reporting the crap fed to them by the Cuban government. Maybe they have their reasons, maybe they’re making compromises so they can stay in the country, but if they have to compromise this much I don’t see the point of journalism.

The only way to stop dengue is to get rid of the trash, the stagnant water, the open sewage, the shit that’s found all over that poor, collapsing island. That takes a public information campaign, and everyone working together.

But communist governments have never been good at either - which is why they always opt for the military planes.

Why is it that whenever someone interviews a celebrity, we are always told what everyone is eating?

“While she mulled over an arugula-raspberry salad” or “While he sipped at a double-mocha-whatsit” or “As she diddled the spoon in her steaming cup of miso.”

It’s a cliche. Stop it. This is now officially on my journalism shit list.

Or at least the New York Times‘ A.O. Scott agrees with me:

Nothing in [All the King’s Men] works. It is both overwrought and tedious, its complicated narrative bogging down in lyrical voiceover, long flashbacks and endless expository conversations between people speaking radically incompatible accents. Only Ms. Clarkson, who really is from Louisiana, and Jackie Earle Haley, who utters few words, manage to acquit themselves credibly.

Mr. Penn is, fundamentally, an antitheatrical, naturalistic actor, whose great gift is his ability to convey inwardness. His narrow face, with its close-set eyes and thin mouth, seems closed in on itself. Expansiveness does not come easily to him, but Willie is the kind of populist leader who grows larger in public, where he feeds on the anger and adoration of the people.

Mr. Penn rants and shouts and waves his fist in the air — “Your need is my justice,” he bellows — but you never feel the galvanizing force of that essential connection, or the ebullient showboating that is its authentic form of expression. Mr. Penn is in some ways too fine an actor to play a country ham like Willie Stark. 

If I could see the movie was miscast without even watching it, one has to wonder what the director was thinking.

From the New York Times.

The Washington Post has rushed up an AP story on its Web site with the breathless headline:

AT UN, CHAVEZ CALLS BUSH ‘THE DEVIL’

In other words, dog bites man. OK, the dog bit the man in front of a whole bunch of UN dignitaries, but it is still a dog biting a man. Chavez has been calling Bush ‘The Devil’ on a weekly basis for years. The ambassador of the US to Venezuela actually carries around a note card with a list of all the crazy schemes of which Chavez has accused the US, one of those being “Operation Balboa,” the US government’s supposed plan to invade Venezuela.

On the other hand, I suppose it is news that Chavez is starting to look crazed in very public settings, and that major US newspapers are finally putting his looney rhetoric up top.

In other news, there is an uncharacteristically frank article in the LA Times about the brokenness of Cuba:

The lack of available or affordable parts, tools and building materials has had a cancerous effect on the alreadydegraded infrastructure. Doorknobs disappear from public buildings, screws from wall-mounted shelves and dispensers. Along the Malecon, not a single storm-drain cover survives to prevent rubbish from clogging the sewers, the square metal grates apparently useful to screen windows.

Rampant theft has engendered more bureaucracy, with office workers having to lock their doors when they go for coffee out of fear someone will snatch the wastebasket, stapler, lightbulbs, pens and paper. Inventory lists are posted in government offices, a hedge against the contents disappearing.

But it is the buildings themselves, as well as vehicles and farm equipment, that are at risk of collapse from the pilfering. A tow-truck driver describes how the vehicles he pulls tend to lose their spark plugs, air filters, lug nuts and rear-view mirrors from the point of collection to delivery. Because most cars and trucks are state property, they are seen as fair game by Cubans hoping to make a few dollars by selling the purloined parts.

It’s all true, I’ve seen it in the flesh, with my own eyes. You, however, will have to settle for pictures.