Friday, January 28, 2005

I read an article today about Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where some 1.1 to 1.3 million Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Soviet POWs and others were murdered. The article had had a part that I thought very insightful:

At the height of the Nazi implementation of assembly line killing, 381,661 Hungarian Jews arrived over the two months to the end of June 1944, with another 18,000 from other countries. The number murdered is beyond comprehension, for in appraisal of human life the greatest number with meaning is one, then one, then one again.

It’s the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and the numbers of dead keep rolling across the headlines. Some hundred thousands killed by the tsunami, another hundred thousand by the American military, still more by preventable starvation and disease. But the number with greatest meaning, as the author quoted above reminds us, is one…then one…then one again.

Originally written Friday, January 21, 2005

A close friend and relation, Denise R., recently forwarded an email to me called “The Stella Awards for 2003”, subtitled “Annual Stella Awards for the Best Frivolous Law Suits of the Year”. These “awards” are named after Stella Liebeck, described in the email as an 81-year-old who “spilled coffee on herself & successfully sued McDonalds.” You might remember this famous lawsuit, which created a storm of controversy and spurred calls for litigation reform.

The email goes on to list lawsuits the writer deems frivolous, for example:

Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware, sued the owner of a night club in a neighbouring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor & knocked out two of her front teeth. This occurred whilst Ms. Walton was trying to crawl through the window in the ladies room to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000 & dental expenses.

And the winner:

This year’s runaway winner was Mr. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Mr. Grazinski purchased a brand new Winnebago Motor Home. On his trip home from an OU football game, having driven onto the freeway, he set the cruise control at 70 mph & calmly left the drivers seat to go into the back & make himself a cup of coffee.Not surprisingly, the RV left the freeway, crashed & then overturned. Mr. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him, by reading the owner’s manual, that he actually could not do this. The jury awarded him $1,750,000 plus a new Winnebago Motor Home.

The “lawsuits” are certainly an entertaining read, although their validity is in question – I researched the “winner” to find that this story is just another version of an urban legend that began in the late 1970s when cruise control was first available for RVs. But that’s beside the point – the point is Stella Liebeck, whose story Denise would not have known about when she sent me the email.

Liebeck’s successful lawsuit against McDonald’s for spilling coffee on herself is often used as an example of how litigation is out of control. I didn’t question this until I came across the facts about her lawsuit in a book called “The Good Fight” by Ralph Nader. Here’s what you should know about the “frivolous” lawsuit that she brought against McDonald’s:

– The coffee at McDonald’s was far hotter than ordinary coffee.
– McDonald’s had already received 700 complaints of burns, but hadn’t lowered the temperature or placed a warning on the cups.
– Stella Liebeck, who was 79 at the time, suffered third-degree burns to her thighs, buttocks and genitals which required a week in the hospital and skin grafts!
– After the incident she wrote McDonald’s saying that she didn’t want to sue them, but only wanted them to cover her medical costs and examine their coffee procedures to avoid more burns.
– McDonald’s declined to change anything and offered her just $800.
– Out of the $2.9 million verdict only $160,000 went to Liebeck – $200,000 was arrived at as compensation for her but 20% was knocked off the total because of her negligence in spilling it. The remainder of the damages was punitive, designed to make McDonald’s cool their coffee (which they did).
– The trial judge reduced the punitive damages by 82% to $480,000.

So the lawsuit was not frivolous at all, and to the extent that the verdict was unfair, mechanisms after the trial ensured the verdict was reduced. In the end, an elderly woman was compensated for pain and suffering and a giant corporation was punished for ignoring the safety of consumers. This is a far cry from being an example of why the civil justice system needs to be reformed!

This made me think about how much influence corporations have over what we think. Why is it that so many people, myself included until recently, believe that we really do need to overhaul the litigation system? Could it be because that’s what corporations want us to think? In the same book, Nader points out that many of the companies calling for reform (including limits on the amount of compensation you can receive as a result of a lawsuit) make huge profits each year. According to Ernst & Young and the Insurance Risk Management Society, in the US in 1999 liability costs amounted to just $5.20 for every $1,000 in revenue. And only a tiny percentage of the people injured by companies bring lawsuits, and an even tinier percentage of them receive large verdicts.

I think the common perception that lawsuits against companies “just trying to make an honest living” are out of control is one created and fostered by those same companies. I think that is the same reason many people are anti-union, something I hope to write about later. When it comes common perceptions like these, I think it’s worth wondering: who benefits?

Originally written Thursday, January 27, 2005

It makes me sick, it really does. I watched the coronation of Bush a few days ago. I saw parts of his appalling speech, the speech so focused on “freedom” and “liberty” it never mentioned “war” or “Iraq”. I got to see the nauseating Laura Bush, all dressed up right down to the white gloves, making the University of Texas hand sign (the same sign you would make if you were in the habit of yelling “Rock on, dude!” – you know the one I mean) as though the ceremony was just another giant frat party and Laura was looking forward to pleasuring the rest of the football team. I heard about the millions of dollars spent on inaugural balls and celebrations, while Iraqis and Americans kept dying in Iraq and hundreds of thousands died in South-East Asia.

I could have puked.

I got to see the media fall over themselves in a self-congratulatory slop of grinning, joyous cheerleading as they “covered” the coronation. I had the displeasure of noticing the utter lack of coverage of the numerous protests taking place in DC that day. Democracy Now reported the next day on the usual disgusting habits of those whose profession we dishonour by calling them “journalists” – Fox News who reported that only a few dozen people showed up at a protest organized by ANSWER, with the New York Times reporting the next day that thousands had shown up; CNN’s relentlessly superficial Wolf Blitzer who described the protestors as “angry, angry people” and deliberately tried to downplay their significance, saying “We don’t want to make too much of the protesters, because we don’t know how many there were. Certainly, the nature of this business, the nature of television, we could over-exaggerate based on the images, and they might just be a tiny, tiny overall number.”

Hand me my friggin Gravol.

The Plague is back everybody, but this time it isn’t Black, it’s White, Corporate and Military. It’s a spreading sickness of violence, greed, a total disregard for truth and justice and an endless stream of propaganda. It’s a sickness spread as effectively as if America were stuffing the germ-ridden corpses of the Bush family into catapults and launching them across the globe like filthy squishy ICBMs. Put your SARS masks back on people, because America the Model Society of Freedom and Liberty is spreading like an avian flu that jumped from chickenhawk to Condoleeza Rice. Get the shovels out too, because we’re going to need to bury all the voters who will soon enjoy Bush’s promised era of freedom and liberty.

It makes me sick, it really does.

Originally written Monday, January 17, 2005

A few days ago, I finally finished Pity the Nation, an absolutely superb book by one of my favourite journalists, Robert Fisk. This book is a huge chronicle of 26 years in Lebanon, where Fisk witnessed and reported the horrific events there, including Israeli invasion and occupation, the car-bombing of the US Marines in Beirut and the vicious and deadly civil wars that gripped the country.

At 689 pages of densely-packed type, this book would seem hard to get through. And in parts, it is – but not because it is boring or tedious. Instead, because of the first-hand accounts of bloodshed so appalling the images have stuck with me for days.

One of the most gruesome accounts is when Fisk arrives at the refugee camp of Chatila after the massacre of Palestinian refugees there. Chatila and Sabra were two major refugee camps for Palestinians who fled when the state of Israel was created from their homeland Palestine. Hundreds of Palestinians were murdered in the camps starting September 16, 1982 by a militia known as the Phalange.

The Phalange were supplied and controlled by the Israeli military. The Israelis circled the camps, blocking all of the exits. They had observation posts on the roofs of nearby tall buildings. The Israelis then sent in the Phalange, who entered the camps and murdered the inhabitants.

Fisk’s story of entering the camp after the massacre is horrifying. At one point, he is climbing a soft earth embankment recently created by bulldozers when he slips. He grabs a reddish rock that is protruding from the embankment to catch his balance. It comes away in his hand and he sees to his horror that it is not a rock at all, it is a human elbow. He then realizes that the entire embankment is full of bodies:

… Each time I took a step, the earth moved up towards me. The whole embankment of muck shifted and vibrated with my weight in a dreadful, springy way and, when I looked down again, I saw that the sand was only a light covering over more limbs and faces. A large stone turned out to be a stomach. I could see a man’s head, a woman’s naked breast, the feet of a child. I was walking on dozens of corpses which were moving beneath my feet.

His history of a war now some years over still has great relevance for today. For example, the leader of the Israeli army units who surrounded the refugee camps and sent in the Phalange to murder the “terrorists” therein was Ariel Sharon, the current prime minister of Israel. Ariel Sharon was later found by a (deeply flawed) Israeli commission to be “indirectly responsible” for the massacres, and he was dismissed from his post as Defense Minister, which didn’t stop him from capturing the highest office in the country years later.

*** Terrorists

Fisk talks a lot about the use of the term “terrorists” to describe one’s enemies:

Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. The word was ubiquitous, obsessive, cancerous in its own special way. Terrorists were animals. Animals had to be put down. The PLO was a terrorist organization. Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. Israel radio used the word in every broadcast, almost every sentence.

He examines how the word is used by Israel and by the Western powers and media to describe groups who are opposed to Israeli or Western interests, but not applied to groups who just as easily qualify for the word who are working for Israeli or Western interests. For example, PLO gunmen were called terrorists but gunmen from the same right-wing Christian militias that murdered Palestinians in Sabra and Chatila were not. He tells the story of getting shelled by an Israeli gunboat as he drove up a highway in Lebanon (the book has many harrowing accounts of great personal risk and danger) and then reading the paper the next day to see a report filed by a colleague of his in Tel Aviv that the Israeli navy had shelled “terrorist targets” on the road in Lebanon, presumably referring to him!

He calls the increasing use of the word terrorism “so all-pervasive, so ominous and dangerous”:

In one sense, it was the most frightening aspect of the war. For who were the terrorists in Beirut? The Palestinian guerilla fighters who had slaughtered their Christian opponents in the civil war? The Phalangist gunmen who had slaughtered so many Palestinian civilians and who were now allied to the Israelis? The Israeli soldiers and pilots who killed thousands of innocent people while pursuing the ghost of ‘international terrorism’?

*** The Israeli Invasion

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon forms the centerpiece of the book, I think. Here is an excerpt:

Then, just after four-thirty in the afternoon, a series of jets which we had seen twisting around the sky above west Beirut suddenly power-dived across the city, sweeping in a crescendo of sound over the rooftops of apartment blocks, scattering phosphorus balloons to protect themselves from heat-seeking missiles. From Fakhani, there now rose an even larger tower of smoke than we had seen from the hillside on our way back from the Bekaa. A pink flickering passed across the underside of this smoke, followed by five tremendous explosions so powerful that streets and buildings three miles away literally shook with the blast. For one extraordinary moment, the sky was filled with sharply outlined, bright green fire as the PLO’s anti-aircraft shells burst vainly behind the retreating planes. The Israelis were no demolishing whole apartment blocks in their raids, their bombs exploding deep inside the buildings around Fakhani and pancaking thousands of tons of concrete floors, balconies and stairways onto their inhabitants.

Fisk talks about the tactics of the PLO as well. He recounts how the PLO would place artillery and anti-aircraft weapons next to hospitals and schools, or even on their roofs, putting civilians in great jeopardy. This invasion was extremely hard on the Lebanese. Israel invaded Lebanon to get the Palestinians, and the Palestinians fought back. Little concern was shown to the Lebanese by either side.

Fisk recounts finding over 100 bodies in the basement of a school in Beirut. As it turns out, a Palestinian guerilla had parked an anti-aircraft gun next to the school:

… a PLO guerilla had driven that anti-aircraft gun here and fired at the Israeli planes that were roaming the dark skies above the city. He may have been unaware that the school contained more than 100 refugees, although this is highly unlikely. His disregard was criminal, like that of the Israeli who killed him. For an Israeli pilot had presumably seen the gun flashes and decided to bomb the artillery. The Israeli could not have seen what he was aiming at; he could have had no idea how many civilians were in the area. Nor could he have cared. For if the Israelis were really worried about civilian casualties, they would never have dropped ordnance at night into a densely populated city. But the pilot was fighting ‘terrorists’.

He also interviews Yasser Arafat, in an interview that must be about 25 years old now. Once again, it retains its relevance. He presses Arafat on the deaths of Israeli civilians as a result of Palestinian attacks in Israel:

Arafat started muttering about “rumours”. He wanted to say lies but the word kept coming out as “rumours”.

“It doesn’t! They don’t! Definite!” Arafat’s eyes were running round the room…

*** The Qana Massacre

Fisk sticks to the truth in his accounts, and that is what I think is most important. He writes passionately but he does not let his passion influence his account of events. So though he writes the truth about Palestinians in Lebanon, he also writes the truth about the Israelis. And it turns out that what the Israelis committed there is far worse.

He writes of arriving at the UN base in Qana shortly after it was shelled by the Israeli military. As it turns out, he was very close to the base when the shells started falling and arrived only moments after the attack:

They were the gates of hell. Blood poured through them, in streams, in torrents. I could smell it. It washed over our shoes and stuck to them like glue, a viscous mass that turned from crimson to brown to black. The tarmac of the UN compound was slippery with blood, with pieces of flesh and entrails. There were legs and arms, babies without heads, old men’s heads without bodies, lying in the smouldering wreckage of a canteen. On the top of a burning tree hung two parts of a man’s body. They were on fire. In front of me, on the steps of the barracks, a girl sat holding a man with grey hair, her arm round his shoulder, rocking the corpse back and forth in her arms. His eyes were staring at her. She was keening and weeping and crying, over and over: ‘My father, my father.’

This is the beginning of Fisk’s chapter on the Qana Massacre, where Israeli troops shelled a United Nations compound in Lebanon that was full of refugees, a horrifying chapter whose information I have confirmed with online sources. He writes a damning account of the incident, recounting how the Israelis had used helicopter reconnaissance before the shelling as well as a pilotless reconnaissance aircraft called an MK. He tells the first-hand witness accounts of the people who saw the aircraft surveying the area before and during the shelling. Witnesses also claimed that the weight of fire, which was not directly on the compound, shifted halfway through the bombardment to more directly target the UN compound.

Of course, the Israelis denied that they had done this on purpose. They said it was an accident, and they denied that they had a reconnaissance aircraft in the area before or during the incident, a crucial point when deciding culpability. But Fisk is resourceful. He had heard that a UN soldier had videotape of the incident that had been sealed by the United Nations, and he sought to get his hands on it. A courageous soldier then contacts him and arranges to meet, giving him a copy of the tape that he had made before it was sealed.

The tape clearly shows the reconnaissance aircraft flying over the compound during the bombardment. In other words, the Israelis knew full well what they were doing. But, of course, they changed their story. After the pictures were splashed over newspaper pages, they claimed that yes, they had a plane their, but it was on “another mission”.

*** Summary

Pity the Nation is not all gruesome. There are moments of beauty, from descriptions of the mountains to the sea to the great cedars of Lebanon. There are many moments of suspense and tension as well, as Fisk recounts his narrow escapes from Israeli shellfire, an incredible kidnap attempt in the streets of Beirut that had him driving like a madman to avoid the clutches of a shadowy group not unlike Zarqawi’s group of beheaders in Iraq, and other moments of courage and great fear.

He also talks about his profession and his, and other journalists’, responsibility to tell the truth and to inform the readers. He criticizes the journalists in Beirut who only reported from the hotels they stayed in for fear of getting kidnapped or killed, getting their information from outside sources and the Lebanese who worked in the hotel, yet never letting on to their readers that they were not actually roaming the country. (He criticizes reporters in Iraq today for the same thing). He talks about bias in the media and about the charge of anti-Semitism so often leveled at people who criticize the state of Israel.

There’s no doubt that reading this book is a bit of a project, but I can whole-heartedly recommend it. It’s interesting, passionate, disturbing, informative, horrifying, exciting and tragic. Most of all, it’s a heartfelt account of the pain and suffering so many people went through there, a terrible cost that we are so unacquainted with. We ought to remember what happened in Lebanon, because it teaches us about what is happening today, and what will continue to happen if we keep on letting it.

Friday, December 17, 2004

SIR TOBY BELCH: Here’s an overweening rogue!
FABIAN: O, peace! Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him; how he jets under his advanced plumes!– Twelfth Night by Shakespeare

Turkey has been in the news recently, as it negotiates for entry into the European Union. There are a number of controversies and outstanding questions about whether or not it will be able to join the EU. But there’s an important question that has yet to be answered by the major news media: why is turkey called “turkey”? And why is it so delicious?

Although the turkey is far older as a species than Turkey is as a country, Turkey proudly bore its name well before the turkey arrived on the dinner plates of English-speakers, assuming they used plates in 1530’s England. The bird was brought to England by merchants from an area of the eastern Mediterranean called the Levant, which was then part of the Turkish Empire. The English creatively called these people Turkey merchants, a term that was to become increasingly affectionate as they started hauling in a remarkably tasty bird, a bird that became known as the “Turkey bird”.

The English were the only people who thought the bird came from Turkey. Everybody else, including the Turks, thought it came from India, or at least what they thought was India, but which was actually Mexico. People were pretty confused at this point about where the New World was, but as long as they were getting fat, juicy, tasty birds from there, they didn’t much care.

When people from Britain decided to settle in America in tightly-packed ships, they were faced with a stark choice about what to bring with them: their prized possessions and their children, or as many turkeys as they could carry. The result was the re-introduction of the turkey to North America. The settlers were surprised to find that the turkey already lived in the wild where they landed. I theorize that this is the true origin of Thanksgiving: “Wow, look at all those turkeys! We don’t need to save the ones we got. Let’s eat!”

So why is the turkey so tasty? First of all, there’s something just plain excellent about the meat. It’s firm, it’s juicy, it has a special flavour that makes it different from the plainer taste of chicken. You get dark meat and white meat all in one package. And best of all, you can stuff it! Turkeys are specially designed for maximum stuffing potential. Whether it’s bread and spices, sausage, or another bird, turkeys are all about the chest cavity. And if you’re feeling adventurous (and incredibly ambitious), there’s the turducken, a truly remarkable feat of culinary ingenuity: a deboned chicken, stuffed inside a deboned duck, stuffed inside a deboned turkey, all packed with layers of stuffing.

Turkey is enjoyed all over the world. In India, the turkey is called “gall dindi”, which literally translates to “Indian cock”. Mmmmmmm! If that doesn’t make your mouth water, go to Greece, where it’s called “gallapoula”, which means “French girl”. Opaaaaa!