Tomgram: Engelhardt, Placing Your Global Bets | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Placing Your Global Bets | TomDispatch

Too long to post this is Tom at his snarky wittiest -- and therefore most astute.

Ghoulish on the world sitution, just in time to be read before Halloween.

Tom Engelhardt on Cheney's Iranian Dream

Are Cheney's Iran Dreams Shattered?

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted July 11, 2008.

Just because there's a will doesn't mean there's a way.

It's been on the minds of antiwar activists and war critics since 2003. And little wonder. If you don't remember the pre-invasion of Iraq neocon quip, "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran..." -- then take notice. Even before American troops entered Iraq, knocking off Iran was already "Regime Change: The Sequel." It was always on the Bush agenda and, for a faction of the administration led by Vice President Cheney, it evidently still is.

Add to that a series of provocative statements by President Bush, the Vice President, and other top U.S. officials and former officials. Take Cheney's daughter Elizabeth, who recently sent this verbal message to the Iranians: "[D]espite what you may be hearing from Congress, despite what you may be hearing from others in the administration who might be saying force isn't on the table... we're serious." Asked about an Israeli strike on Iran, she said: "I certainly don't think that we should do anything but support them." Similarly, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton suggested that the Bush administration might launch an Iranian air assault in its last, post-election weeks in office.

Consider as well the evident relish with which the President and other top administration officials regularly refuse to take "all options" off that proverbial "table" (at which no one bothers to sit down to talk). Throw into the mix semi-official threats, warnings, and hair-raising leaks from Israeli officials and intelligence types about Iran's progress in producing a nuclear weapon and what Israel might do about it. Then there were those recent reports on a "major" Israeli "military exercise" in the Mediterranean that seemed to prefigure a future air assault on Iran. ("Several American officials said the Israeli exercise appeared to be an effort to develop the military's capacity to carry out long-range strikes and to demonstrate the seriousness with which Israel views Iran's nuclear program.")

From the other side of the American political aisle comes a language hardly less hair-raising, including Hillary Clinton's infamous comment about how the U.S. could "totally obliterate" Iran (in response to a hypothetical Iranian nuclear attack on Israel). Congressman Ron Paul recently reported that fellow representatives "have openly voiced support for a pre-emptive nuclear strike" on Iran, while the resolution soon to come before the House (H.J. Res. 362), supported by Democrats as well as Republicans, urges the imposition of the kind of sanctions and a naval blockade on Iran that would be tantamount to a declaration of war.

Stir in a string of new military bases the U.S. has been building within miles of the Iranian border, the repeated crescendos of U.S. military charges about Iranian-supplied weapons killing American soldiers in Iraq, and the revelation by Seymour Hersh, our premier investigative reporter, that, late last year, the Bush administration launched -- with the support of the Democratic leadership in Congress -- a $400 million covert program "designed to destabilize [Iran's] religious leadership," including cross-border activities by U.S. Special Operations Forces and a low-level war of terror through surrogates in regions where Baluchi and Ahwazi Arab minorities are strongest. (Precedents for this terror campaign include previous CIA-run campaigns in Afghanistan in the 1980s, using car bombs and even camel bombs against the Russians, and in Iraq in the 1990s, using car bombs and other explosives in an attempt to destabilize Saddam Hussein's regime.)

Add to this combustible mix the unwillingness of the Iranians to suspend their nuclear enrichment activities, even for a matter of weeks, while negotiating with the Europeans over their nuclear program. Throw in as well various threats from Iranian officials in response to the possibility of a U.S. or Israeli attack on their nuclear facilities, and any number of other alarums, semi-official predictions ("A senior defense official told ABC News there is an 'increasing likelihood' that Israel will carry out such an attack..."), reports, rumors, and warnings -- and it's hardly surprising that the political Internet has been filled with alarming (as well as alarmist) pieces claiming that an assault on Iran may be imminent.

The rest of the article is HERE.

The Little Administration That Couldn't

Rebuilding the American Economy, Bush-style
By Tom Engelhardt

No one was prepared for the storm when it hit. The levees meant to protect us had long since been breached and key officials had already left town. The well-to-do were assured of rescue, but for everyone else trapped inside the Superdome in a fast-flooding region, there was no evacuation plan in sight. The Bush administration, of course, claimed that it was in control and the President was already assuring his key officials that they were doing a heck of a job.

No, I'm not talking about post-Katrina New Orleans. That was so then. I'm talking about the housing and credit crunches, as well as the Bear Stearns bailout, that have given the term "bear market" new meaning.

Now, don't get me wrong -- when it comes to the arcane science of economics, like most Americans, I'd benefit from an "Economics for Dummies" course. What I do know something about, though, is history, a subject that hasn't been on the Bush administration's course curriculum since the President turned out not to be Winston Churchill and conquered Iraq refused to morph into occupied Germany ‘n Japan 1945.

History may not repeat itself, but the administration's repetitive acts these past seven years make an assessment of our economic situation possible, even if you are an economics dummy.

Just consider the record: Administration officials proved incapable of rebuilding two countries that their military occupied and damaged. In Afghanistan and Iraq, while talking up the President's "freedom agenda," they were the equivalent of a natural disaster, a whirlwind of destruction.

In the case of Iraq, in disbanding its military, its government, and even its economy, they were literal nation-wreckers. On taking Baghdad, their first act of omission was to let the capital be looted. ("Stuff happens," commented Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the time.) Soon after, the administration's new viceroy in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, promptly plunged the country into the equivalent of the Great Depression -- without a Bear Stearns bailout in sight.

In the case of Afghanistan, only a staggering boom in opiate growing -- the country now supplies an estimated 93% of the global market in illegal opiates, bringing about four billion dollars into the country -- has slightly offset the disaster of "liberation." By just about any other measure, Afghanistan is a wreck.

In the case of New Orleans, the Bush administration not only couldn't rebuild an American city that nature (and the Army Corps of Engineers) damaged, but turned a natural disaster into a man-made catastrophe that has yet to end.

Despite a reputation for being the most disciplined, tough, and focused administration in memory, Bush's men and women couldn't even secure their fondest inside-the-Beltway dream: constructing a generation-long Pax Republicana in Washington. In fact, it looks suspiciously as if Republicans in the House and Senate, fleeing Congress as if it were New Orleans -- it's politely called "retirement," not cutting and running -- could even be swept into minority status for a generation.

And now, with a mere ten "lame duck" months to go, comes the American economy…

You don't faintly need to understand economics to grasp the immediate danger. The people overseeing the handling of this crisis have done little these last years but hand money over to the rich, while running American power into the dirt.

Let me review our history lesson for a moment: No to nation-rebuilding, no to city-rebuilding, no to Congressional majority-building…

Who dares imagine that the people who brought you Iraq, the war, could begin the rebuilding of an economy, or even successfully caulk the cracks in the levees of a system that, in its complexity, puts Iraq's feeble economy to shame?

In some ways, an administration -- whatever its periodic changes of personnel -- can be compared to an individual. At a certain age, its urges become predictable, its habits set, its limits largely known. While change may be possible, you wouldn't want to bet your house on it.

So what exactly has the Bush administration proven itself good at? The twin skills of destruction and looting would stand at the top of any list. Perhaps that's because it chose to put its "eggs" in only two baskets -- those of the U.S. military and crony corporations.

Awed by the shock-and-awe force of forces that fell into their hands, administration officials moved to transfer as many powers of civil governance as possible to the Pentagon. From diplomacy to disaster relief, nation-building to intelligence gathering, an organization built only to destroy was designated as the go-to outfit for activities normally associated with those who have building in mind.

At the same time, the government was being staffed, top-to-bottom, with ill-prepared political pals, while a small set of crony corporations, of which Halliburton is certainly the best known, was given the nod in every rebuilding situation. It really didn't matter where you looked, they were the ones camped out, making money, on the landscape of destruction. With their no-bid, cost-plus contracts, these companies ran up the hours and then tended to jump ship when the going got bad. The same corporations that had essentially looted Iraq -- it was labeled "reconstruction" -- were the first ones called in when New Orleans went down. (Of the initial six contracts the Bush administration offered for the reconstruction of the city, five went to companies previously involved in Iraq's reconstruction program.)

Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration has proved serially incapable of building anything, even -- in the long run -- their own machine. And, from the Enron moment to the Bear Stearns one, whenever it looked like the Titanic might have hit an iceberg, it was a lock that those passengers assigned to the limited places in the lifeboats wouldn't be from steerage (or be weighed down with subprime mortgages).

So rebuilding. No. Saving people who aren't already friends. No. Doing a heck of a job in a crisis. No. Now, our latest and greatest crisis is upon us, the sort that, in a matter of weeks, has sent media commentators and pundits from reluctant discussions of whether we might be heading into a recession straight to references to the "d" word, "1929," and the Great Depression. And they're not alone. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll indicates that a startling 59% of Americans already believe we're heading for a long-term depression, not a recession (and 79% are worried about the possibility). Leave the definitional details to the experts. Most Americans have undoubtedly assessed the Bush administration's proven incapacity in perilous times and drawn the logical conclusions.

Ten months is a long, long time when only their hands are near the pilot's wheel of the ship of state and water's already seeping through the hull. It's an eon for an administration capable of sinking New Orleans in a matter of days, and Iraq in little more than months. Or, thought of another way, it's plenty of time if your expertise happens to lie in deconstruction. After all, barring a miracle, you're talking about the little administration that couldn't, no matter how hard Ben Bernanke may try.

So, even if you, like me, know next to nothing about economics, you already know enough to be afraid, very afraid.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt

The Tenacity of American Militarism

My comment - YES, BUT

There are OTHER FORMS of national service that can be undertaken. These are NOT ON THE TABLE!!

Instead, military service remains the "first option" for us poor unfortunates left without any choices.

It's about increasing CHOICES, not saying MAKE DO.

There is plenty, plenty to be done to secure America's future besides the perceived strategic ones. Sometimes I think TomDispatch slips into lalaland.

Please read James Kunster instead for a real strategic agenda. Why notr prepare for the worst case scenario and get at least a little up to speed? We cannot put off a vigorous stabilization plan reliant ONLY On the force of the US military .. and that's the trend today.

We must come up with better kinds of oversight of the Department of Defense, the CIA (Ugh), the alphabet soupers and the now overwhelming presence of outsourced professionals used by, gasp, the State Department.

Any wonder people with BRAINS would support democrats over neocons!! Fuck, not too hard to figure that out. Do I see a bit of intellectual snobbery hidden in the remarks??

That said, he does have a point; the US military ain't going away anytime soon and this is a question progressives must wrestle with urgently as new budget priorities are drawn up after the deluge and purge of the neocon regime.

And hey! Upon high school graduation I applied to the US Air Force. They didn't take me and the rest is history. I didn't want to be in the Navy like all my relatives had been.

Veeger

The Tenacity of American Militarism
What Progressives and Other Critics Don’t Get About the US Military

by William J. Astore

Recent polls suggest that Americans trust the military roughly three times as much as the president and five times as much as their elected representatives in Congress. The tenacity of this trust is both striking and disturbing. It’s striking because it comes despite widespread media coverage of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the friendly-fire cover-up in the case of Pat Tillman’s death, and alleged retribution killings by Marines at Haditha. It’s disturbing because our country is founded on civilian control of the military. It’s debatable whether our less-than-resolute civilian leaders can now exercise the necessary level of oversight of the military and the Pentagon when they are distrusted by so many Americans.

What explains the military’s enduring appeal in our society? Certainly, some of this appeal is obvious. Americans have generally been a patriotic bunch. “Supporting our troops” seems an obvious place to go. After all, many of them volunteered to put themselves in harm’s way to protect our liberties and to avenge the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. For this, they receive pay and benefits that might best be described as modest. Trusting them — granting them a measure of confidence — seems the least that could be offered.

Before addressing two other sources of the military’s appeal that are little understood, at least by left-leaning audiences, let’s consider for a second the traditional liberal/progressive critique. It often begins by citing the insidious influence of Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex,” throwing in for good measure terms like “atrocity,” “imperialist,” “reactionary,” and similar pejoratives. But what’s interesting here is that this is often where their critique also ends. The military and its influence are considered so tainted, so baneful that within progressive circles there’s a collective wringing of hands, even a reflexive turning of backs, as if our military were truly from Mars or perhaps drawn from the nether regions where Moorlocks shamble and grunt in barbarian darkness.

If you want to change anything — even our increasing propensity for militarism — you first have to make an effort to engage with it. And to engage with it, you have to know the wellsprings of its appeal, which transcend corporate profits or imperial power.

Our Military, Ourselves

Despite often compelling evidence to the contrary, Americans like to think of their societal institutions as being open, fair-minded, and democratic. If you look without prejudice at our all-volunteer military, you quickly realize that it truly is one of the least elitist, most diverse institutions of power in American society. Most progressive voices fail to recognize this. Yet it’s my belief most Americans do and it’s a big reason why they say they trust it.

Our military is demonstrably diverse — racially, by class, and even more politically than most critics imagine. As a retired military officer who now finds himself a liberal arts professor in academia, I’m struck by the relative conformity of the latter, at least when contrasted to the diversity I found in my former life. Racial minorities from the lower classes are well represented in our military. (Some critics have claimed that they are over-represented, at least in frontline infantry units.) I’ve seen more black or brown faces in positions of authority within our military than in academia. (In my last job in the Air Force, my boss was a black female colonel.) Indeed, until very recently in American society, our military was one of the few places where African Americans and Hispanics routinely bossed around whites. (Louis Gossett Jr.’s drill instructor in the 1982 movie An Officer and A Gentleman was not exceptional; many times I’ve witnessed real versions of him in action.)

Politically, our military tends, of course, to be conservative, though not necessarily monochromatically Republican. Again, the world of academia provides a stark contrast, especially in liberal arts departments in top-tier colleges and universities, which do tend to be overwhelmingly Democratic and left of center. To cite only one example, of 42 professors in the English, history, sociology, and political science departments at Brown University who registered to vote, all registered as Democrats.

Ordinary Americans trust the military, in part, because the “have-nots” have direct access to it — far more access than most will ever have to elite universities, elite law firms, mainstream media outlets, Washington lobbying outfits, or other institutions of influence and power. Indeed, our military remains deeply rooted in the broad middle-and working-class elements of society. Our Ivy League schools, our white-shoe law firms, Boston’s Beacon Hill, New York’s Upper West Side have little presence in it. Yet everywhere you go in small-town and rural America, you bump into ordinary people who know someone in the military: a nephew, a cousin, a close buddy from high school, even, these days, the girl next door.

If you were to place yourself among the rank-and-file of today’s military, you’d find yourself among young people (many of color, some of them recent immigrants) who more accurately mirror the composition of our old small towns and new inner city neighborhoods than nearly any other institution of power. In that sense, the military is a grandly successful social mélange, with, of course, a notable exception. Women. The all-volunteer military is predominately male and will remain so, at least for the foreseeable future. Military service remains largely a gendered activity, commonly associated within academia with retrograde notions of aggressive (and disreputable) masculinity and therefore dismissed as outmoded, even pathologically so.

Our Military, Our Young Men

Of course, supporting — and trusting — the military is hardly the same thing as joining it. Increasing numbers of Americans, not just academics or the obvious critics, no longer see joining its ranks as part of anyone’s citizenly duty. This is now well known in a society where the first urge of a commander-in-chief/president, when it comes to the public, is not to mobilize them for duty in what he’s termed “war time,” but to urge them to visit Disney World and keep on spending. Nonetheless, surprising numbers of young men do continue to join up, despite increasingly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This leads me to the second blind spot in the academic/progressive critique of our military — the failure to recognize the enduring attractiveness of military service to young men seeking to construct their own identities. To many of these potential recruits, American culture today appears feminized — or, at least demasculinized — a mommy-state, a risk-averse society with designer drugs and syndrome-of-the-day counselors to ease our pain. In response, what we’re seeing is a romantic yearning among young men for the very hardness, the brutality even, epitomized by military service and warfare.

In talking to young men in the rural, conservative area of Pennsylvania where I live, what strikes me is how many of them have seen all 10 episodes of the HBO World War II series, Band of Brothers, and how many admire the bravery, camaraderie, and sacrifice it depicts in portraying paratroopers of the 101st Airborne fighting their way across France and into Germany in 1944-45. Seasoned Marines, a colleague reports, confess that one thing working to sustain recruiting, despite the war in Iraq and regular news reports on an overstrained and exhausted military, is young men who, raised in self-esteem-touting, gender-bending environments (on TV, if nowhere else), sign up to experience “the other side.”

It’s easy to dismiss such yearnings as Neanderthal. The irony is that that very dismissal creates an inviting taboo for a whole segment of young American males to challenge. For academia and progressives, war is today what sex was to society in the Victorian age, involving as it does emotions nice people don’t feel and acts nice people don’t opt to commit. Yes, many volunteers join the military with educational or career possibilities in mind, but among young men who enlist, there is also a certain element, conscious or unconscious, of taboo-breaking — and of self-affirmation.

For women, gender identity is often shaped by biological rites of passage: menstruation, pregnancy, menopause. Male identity is arguably less secure and defined more by the gaze of other men — you’re a man when other men, men you respect, say you are. Men have gender too — and many seek to construct and assert their maleness within the military, a cultural setting they perceive as patriotic, meritocratic, and sanctioned by the trust and respect of friends, family, and community.

The challenge for progressives is to recognize this and then to work to create viable alternatives to military service in which masculinity and patriotism can be demonstrated in non-lethal settings. An example is my father’s service as a forest laborer and firefighter in the Civilian Conservation Corps in Oregon from 1935 to 1937. There could be many opportunities for our young men to assert their masculinity in non-military and nonviolent settings — fixing our nation’s roads and bridges, rebuilding our inner cities, rescuing places torn apart by disaster, natural or otherwise, like New Orleans; and from these, too, funded educational openings and future career possibilities could arise.

To Transform, We Must Engage

The point is this: It’s not enough simply to rail against the military or militarism, however enlightened it makes you feel. There are powerful reasons why Americans trust our military and continue to join its ranks. Unless these are grasped, efforts to redirect our nation along less militaristic lines will founder on the shores of incomprehension.

After all, isn’t the full media story not only that our all-volunteer military is having trouble meeting its recruiting goals — hardly surprising, given two major, exceedingly hard wars in which victory, however defined, remains frustratingly out of sight — but also that the military is nonetheless close to meeting those goals? Admittedly, recruiting standards have been relaxed, signing bonuses increased, and waivers and promotions liberally granted. Even so, our military is not just signing up the rural poor, urban dead-enders, or knuckle-dragging hayseeds (though some critics seem to think otherwise, judging by the unfortunate title of a recent piece in Slate, “Dumb and Dumber”). The comment by John Kerry in 2006, to the effect that students who can’t make it in college end up “stuck in Iraq,” struck many Americans as grossly unfair precisely because military service still remains a proud first-choice for many young Americans.

If the operating equation is military = bad, are we not effectively excusing ourselves or our children from any obligation to serve — even any obligation simply to engage with the military? Indeed, are we even patting ourselves on the back for the wisdom of our non-choice and our non-participation? Rarely has a failure to sacrifice or even to engage come at a more self-ennobling price — or a more self-destructive one for progressive agendas.

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He has taught cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy, officers at the Naval Postgraduate School, and currently teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He is the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism, among other books. He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.

Tomgram: How Bush Took Us to the Dark Side - not for the feint hearted

Journey to the Dark Side

The Bush Legacy (Take One)
By Tom Engelhardt

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

-- Emma Lazarus, 1883

If you don't mind thinking about the Bush legacy a year early, there are worse places to begin than with the case of Erla Ósk Arnardóttir Lilliendahl. Admittedly, she isn't an ideal "tempest-tost" candidate for Emma Lazarus' famous lines engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. After all, she flew to New York City with her girlfriends, first class, from her native Iceland, to partake of "the Christmas spirit." She was drinking white wine en route and, as she put it, "look[ing] forward to go shopping, eat good food, and enjoy life." On an earlier vacation trip, back in 1995, she had overstayed her visa by three weeks, a modest enough infraction, and had even returned the following year without incident.

This time -- with the President's Global War on Terror in full swing -- she was pulled aside at passport control at JFK Airport, questioned about those extra three weeks 12 years ago, and soon found herself, as she put it, "handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep… without food and drink and… confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned." It was "the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected."

By her account, she was photographed, fingerprinted, asked rude questions -- "by men anxious to demonstrate their power. Small kings with megalomania" -- confined to a tiny room for hours, then chained, marched through the airport, and driven to a jail in New Jersey where, for another nine hours, she found herself "in a small, dirty cell." On being prepared for the return trip to JFK and deportation, approximately 24 hours after first debarking, she was, despite her pleas, despite her tears, again handcuffed and put in leg chains, all, as she put it, "because I had taken a longer vacation than allowed under the law."

On returning to her country, she wrote a blog about her unnerving experience and the Icelandic Foreign Minister Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir met with U.S. Ambassador Carol van Voorst to demand an apology. Just as when egregious American acts in Iraq or Afghanistan won't go away, the Department of Homeland Security announced an "investigation," a "review of its work procedures" and expressed "regrets." But an admission of error or an actual apology? Uh, what era do you imagine we're living in?

Erla Ósk will undoubtedly think twice before taking another fun-filled holiday in the U.S., but her experience was no aberration among Icelanders visiting the U.S. In fact, it's a relatively humdrum one these days, especially if you appear to be of Middle Eastern background.

Take, for instance, 20-year veteran of the National Guard Zakariya Muhammad Reed (born Edward Eugene Reed, Jr.), who, for the last 11 years, has worked as a firefighter in Toledo, Ohio. Regularly crossing the Canadian border to visit his wife's family, he has been stopped so many times -- "I was put up against the wall and thoroughly frisked, any more thoroughly and I would have asked for flowers…" -- that he is a connoisseur of detention. He's been stopped five times in the last seven months and now chooses his crossing place based on the size of the detention waiting room he knows he'll end up in. It took several such incidents, during which no explanations were offered, before he discovered that he was being stopped in part because of his name and in part because of a letter he wrote to the Toledo Blade criticizing Bush administration policies on Israel and Iraq.

The first time, he was detained in a small room with two armed guards, while his wife and children were left in a larger common room. While he was grilled, she was denied permission to return to their car even to get a change of diapers for their youngest child. When finally released, Reed found his car had been "trashed." ("My son's portable DVD player was broken, and I have a decorative Koran on the dashboard that was thrown on the floor.") During another episode of detention, an interrogator evidently attempted to intimidate him by putting his pistol on the table at which they were seated. ("He takes the clip out of his weapon, looks at the ammunition, puts the clip back in, and puts it back in his holster.") His first four border-crossing detentions were well covered by Matthew Rothschild in a post at the Progressive Magazine's website. During his latest one, he was questioned about Rothschild's coverage of his case.

The essence of his experience is perhaps caught best in a comment by Customs and Border Protection agent made in his presence: "We should treat them like we do in the desert. We should put a bag over their heads and zip tie their hands together."

Or take Nabil Al Yousuf, not exactly a top-ten candidate for the "huddled masses" category; nor an obvious terror suspect (unless, of course, you believe yourself at war with Islam or the Arab world). According to the Washington Post's Ellen Knickmeyer, Yousuf, who is "a senior aide to the ruler of the Persian Gulf state of Dubai," always has the same "galling" experience on entering the country:

"A U.S. airport immigration official typically takes Yousuf's passport, places it in a yellow envelope and beckons. Yousuf tells his oldest son and other family members not to worry. And Yousuf -- who goes by 'Your Excellency' at home -- disappears inside a shabby back room. He waits alongside the likes of 'a man who had forged his visa and a woman who had drugs in her tummy'… He is questioned, fingerprinted and photographed."

Despite his own fond memories of attending universities in Arizona and Georgia, Yousuf has decided to send his son to college… in Australia. Knickmeyer adds:

"A generation of Arab men who once attended college in the United States, and returned home to become leaders in the Middle East, increasingly is sending the next generation to schools elsewhere. This year, Australia overtook the United States as the top choice of citizens of the United Arab Emirates heading abroad for college, according to government figures here."

This is what "homeland security" means in the United States today. It means putting your country in full lockdown mode. It means the snarl at the border, the nasty comment in the waiting room, the dirty cell, the handcuffs, even the chains. It means being humiliated. It means a thorough lack of modulation or moderation. Arriving here now always threatens to be a "tempest-tost" experience whether you are a citizen, a semi-official visitor, or a foreign tourist. (After all, even Sen. Ted Kennedy found himself repeatedly on a no-fly list without adequate explanation.) Think of these three cases as snapshots from the borders of a country in which the presumption of innocence is slowly being drained of all meaning.

News from Nowhere

So far, of course, we've only been talking about the lucky ones. After all, Erla Ósk, Zakariya Muhammad Reed, and Nabil Al Yousuf all made it home relatively quickly. In the final weeks of 2007, a little flood of press reports tracked more extreme versions of the global lockdown the Bush administration launched in late 2001, cases in which, after the snarl, the door clanged shut and home became the barest of hopes.

Take, for example, a December 1st Washington Post piece in which reporter Craig Whitlock revealed one more small part of the CIA's global network of secret imprisonment. We already knew, among other things, that the CIA had set up and run its own secret prisons in Eastern Europe and probably in Thailand; that it had a network of secret sites in Afghanistan like "the Salt Pit" near Kabul; that it may have used the "British" island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, as well as American ships, naval and possibly commercial, to hold prisoners beyond the purview of any authority or even the visits of the International Red Cross; that it ran an air fleet of leased executive jets (including some from Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of Boeing, which made it back into the news in December because of a lawsuit launched by the ACLU); that these were used to transport terror suspects it snatched up off city streets or battlefields anywhere on the planet to its own "black sites" or which it "rendered" in "extraordinary" manner to the jails and torture chambers of Syria, Egypt, Uzbekistan, and other lands whose agents had no qualms about torturing and abusing prisoners.

Whitlock, however, added a new piece to the CIA's incarceration puzzle: an "imposing building" on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan. This turns out to be the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department, Jordan's powerful spy and security agency (and the CIA's closest Arab ally in the Middle East). Known as a place where torture is freely applied, it has been a way-station for "CIA prisoners captured in other countries." The first terror suspects kidnapped by Agency operatives were, it seems, flown to Jordan and housed in that building before Guantanamo was up and running or the Agency had been able to set up its own secret prisons elsewhere. There, the prisoners were hidden, even from the International Red Cross. To cite but one case Whitlock mentions:

"Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni microbiology student, was captured in a U.S.-Pakistani operation in Karachi a few weeks after 9/11 on suspicion of helping to finance al-Qaeda operations. Witnesses reported seeing masked men take him aboard a Gulfstream V jet at the Karachi airport Oct. 24, 2001. Records show that the plane was chartered by a CIA front company and that it flew directly to Amman. Mohammed has not been seen since. Amnesty International said it has asked the Jordanian government for information on his whereabouts but has not received an answer."

Also in December, because of that lawsuit against Jeppesen, we got our first insider's account of the CIA "black sites" (and, thanks to Salon.com, even architectural plans for a few of the interrogation rooms and prison cells at those sites, all of which seem to have cameras in them). It was here that "high-value targets" were incarcerated, isolated, and subjected to various "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, a Yemeni, was picked up by the Jordanians in Amman in 2003 and tortured into signing a "full confession" (to acts he had not committed). He was then turned over to the CIA and flown to Kabul (and possibly Eastern Europe as well) where he was imprisoned. He has offered in-depth accounts that give a sense of what those "enhanced interrogation techniques" the Bush administration sponsors so enthusiastically are all about at a personal level. In the end, while in CIA custody, Bashmilah was driven to several suicide attempts, including one in which, using a bit of metal, he slashed his wrist and wrote, "I am innocent," on a cell wall in his own blood.

Here is just part of a description he offered Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! of being prepared for transport by CIA air taxi into black-site hell:

"And then they put… like little plugs inside the ears, plastic. And then they put gauze on that, on the ears. And then they taped that with very strong adhesive tape. And then they put a hood over my head. And then, on top of that, they put a headphone. This is as far as the top of my body was. And then they handcuffed me with a chain, and also they chained my ankles. Then they put a belt above the pants, and then they tied the hands and the ankles to that belt. This was after being slapped and kicked until I almost fainted."

In his cell in a secret prison in Afghanistan, "[i]n the beginning, it was totally dark. It was as if you were inside a tomb. Then, after that, they would turn a light on. Above the door, there was a camera. And there was constant loud music." From then on, neither the lights, nor the music went off. As Mark Benjamin of Salon.com wrote, "His leg shackles were chained to the wall. The guards would not let him sleep, forcing Bashmilah to raise his hand every half hour to prove he was still awake… Guards wore black pants with pockets, long-sleeved black shirts, rubber gloves or black gloves, and masks that covered the head and neck. The masks had tinted yellow plastic over the eyes. 'I never heard the guards speak to each other and they never spoke to me,' Bashmilah wrote in his declaration…

"After 19 months of imprisonment and torment at the hands of the CIA, the agency released him [in Yemen] with no explanation, just as he had been imprisoned in the first place. He faced no terrorism charges. He was given no lawyer. He saw no judge. He was simply released, his life shattered."

No charges, no lawyers, no judge. This is increasingly the norm of -- and a legacy of -- George Bush's world. In this way, the snarl at the borders melds with the screams of terror in cells worldwide.

Embedded Reports from the Dark Side

A new Pentagon term came into use in the Bush era. With the invasion of Iraq, reporters were said to be "embedded" in U.S. military units. That term -- so close in sound to "in bed with" -- should have wider uses. You could, for instance, say that Americans have, since September 2001, been "embedded," largely willingly, in a new lockdown universe defined by a general acceptance of widespread acts of torture and abuse, as well as of the right to kidnap (known as "extraordinary rendition"), and the creation and expansion of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, all based on the principle that a human being is guilty unless proven (sometimes even if proven) innocent. What might originally have seemed like emergency measures in a moment of crisis is now an institutionalized way of life. Whether we like it or not, these methods increasingly define what it means to be an American. In this manner, despite the "freedom" rhetoric of the Bush administration, the phrase "the price of freedom" has been superseded by the price of what passes for "safety" and "security."

Media coverage of such subjects reflects this. The cases above, all reported in December, barely scratch the surface of this universe. Just a glance at other December stories -- some barely attended to, or dealt with by minor outlets or in humdrum ways, but many well covered in major papers and still causing little consternation -- indicates just how normalized all this has become.

A legacy can often be framed in words. So here's a little rundown of just some areas in which, when it came to torture, kidnapping, and offshore imprisonment, 2007 ended in a deluge, not a trickle:

Destroyed Tapes: One issue connected to torture -- sorry, "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- did get major coverage last month, the revelation on the front page of the December 6th New York Times of the destruction, in 2005, of hundreds of hours of CIA videotapes of the first two major interrogations, including waterboardings, of al-Qaeda operatives -- in this case, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In the weeks that followed, responsibility for the decision to destroy those tapes has been creeping ever higher, with four key lawyers connected to the White House and the Vice President's office brought into the mix in mid-December, and reports that the chief of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, Jose A. Rodriguez, who ordered their destruction, may soon testify before Congress under immunity and implicate as yet unnamed higher-ups.

As with all such cover-up stories, this one can only get worse. It has already been reported in the Wall Street Journal that the faces of more senior CIA officials, not just low-level interrogators, may have been caught on those tapes from the administration's secret torture chambers. We are sure to learn that these were hardly the only interrogations taped by the Agency. As yet, by the way, almost all attention has gone to the destruction of the tapes, little to why they were made in the first place. As December ended, however, Scott Shane of the New York Times wrote a piece, "Tapes by CIA Lived and Died to Save Image," with this telling line from the CIA's then number three official, A. B. Krongard: "You want interrogators in training to watch the tapes." Think about that a moment. The Justice Department, which, along with the CIA's Inspector General, launched an investigation of the tape destruction under pressure, also attempted to shut down congressional investigations of the same -- unsuccessfully.

Kidnapping Is the Law: According to the British Sunday Times, "A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the U.S. Supreme Court has sanctioned it." According to that lawyer, the precedent "goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s." This applies, it seems, not just to terror suspects in extraordinary rendition cases, but to white businessmen wanted for, say, fraud. "The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington." International human rights lawyer Scott Horton writes at his No Comment blog:

"This is not U.S. law, it is a Bush Administration hallucination as to U.S. law… The sort of nightmare which refuses to recognize the sovereignty of foreign states or the solemn commitments of U.S. governments over the last two centuries in treaties and conventions. The sort of nightmare that refuses to recognize the 'law of nations' referred to by the Founding Fathers and incorporated into the Constitution."

Innocence at Guantanamo: New military and court documents were released in December, thanks to a suit by lawyers representing Murat Kurnaz, that further illuminated the case of the 19-year old German citizen who "chose a bad time to travel." Kurnaz was captured by the U.S. Army in Pakistan in 2002 and transported to Guantanamo. There, within months, according to the Washington Post's Carol D. Leonnig, "his American captors concluded that he was not a terrorist." This was the consensus of intelligence officials. He was nonetheless declared a "dangerous al-Qaeda ally" by successive military tribunals at the prison and was not released until August 2006 when he was flown to freedom in Germany "goggled, masked and bound, as he had been when he was flown to Guantanamo Bay."

Evidence from Waterboarding: According to Josh White of the Washington Post, Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, "[t]he top legal adviser for the military trials of Guantanamo Bay detainees told Congress… that he cannot rule out the use of evidence derived from the CIA's aggressive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding." He even refused to say that waterboarding would be illegal if used by the interrogators of another country on U.S. military personnel. In a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, like his boss Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Mark Filip, the administration's nominee for second-in-command at the Justice Department, also refused to take a stand on waterboarding, even though he called it "repugnant."

Torture Veto: In December, President Bush threatened to "veto a House [of Representatives] bill that would explicitly ban a variety of abhorrent practices. The bill would require U.S. intelligence agencies to follow interrogation rules adopted by the armed forces last year."

Torturers speak out: In December, two figures connected with U.S. torture practices spoke out. John Kiriakou, a CIA agent involved in capturing top al-Qaeda operatives, gave interviews to ABC and NBC News in which he called waterboarding "torture," regretted its use ("we Americans are better than that"), and also insisted that "[t]his was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and justice department." In the meantime, Damien Corsetti, a former private in the U.S. Army who served as an interrogator in Kabul, Afghanistan (and was nicknamed the "king of torture" and "the monster" by his colleagues at Bagram prison), gave an interview to the Spanish paper El Mundo, describing the beatings and torture techniques used there. ("They tell them they are going to kill their children, rape their wives. And you see on their faces, in their eyes, the terror that that causes them. Because, of course, we know all about those people. We know the names of their children, where they live -- we show them satellite photos of their houses. It is worse than any torture.") He also claimed that 98% of the prisoners, as far as he could tell, had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and observed, "In Abu-Ghurayb and Bagram they were tortured to make them suffer, not to get information out of them." Both men denied themselves torturing or mistreating anyone.

Justice Moves Fast: The Justice Department, which dragged its feet on those destroyed CIA videotapes (and then tried to submarine a congressional investigation of the same), nonetheless reacted strongly to the horrors of torture in another context. Its officials moved swiftly to investigate whether former agent John Kiriakou, in giving that interview about waterboarding to ABC News, had "illegally disclosed classified information in describing the capture and waterboarding of an al-Qaeda terrorism suspect." Consider that a message about priorities from the powers that be.

Iraqis in American Jails: Latest estimates are that up to 30,000 Iraqis are now held in American prisons in Iraq. While this figure falls 10,000 short of the number of Iraqis American commander Gen. David Petraeus believed might be arrested during the "surge" months in Baghdad and elsewhere, it does add up, as Juan Cole points out at his Informed Comment website, to 0.1% of what's left of the Iraqi population, or approximately one out of every 1,000 Iraqis.

Think of these eight stories as themselves only the tip of December's melting iceberg of news on such topics. You could no less easily write about lawyer Andrew Williams, a JAG officer with the Naval Reserves, who resigned his commission in response to the unwillingness of Gen. Hartmann "to call the hypothetical waterboarding of an American pilot by the Iranian military torture." In a letter to The Peninsula Gateway of Gig Harbor, Washington, Williams wrote in part:

"Thank you, General Hartmann, for finally admitting the United States is now part of a long tradition of torturers going back to the Inquisition…. Waterboarding was used by the Nazi Gestapo and the feared Japanese Kempeitai… Waterboarding was practiced by the Khmer Rouge at the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. Most recently, the U.S. Army court martialed a soldier for the practice in 1968 during the Vietnam conflict.

"General Hartmann, following orders was not an excuse for anyone put on trial in Nuremberg, and it will not be an excuse for you or your superiors, either. Despite the CIA and the administration attempting to cover up the practice by destroying interrogation tapes, in direct violation of a court order, and congressional requests, the truth about torture, illegal spying on Americans and secret renditions is coming out."

Or you could mention the news that the "Australian Taliban," David Hicks, the sole person actually convicted on terrorism charges at Guantanamo, was released after serving a nine-month sentence in Australia (and five years of non-sentence time in Cuba); or the first reports on the Internet of speculation in Washington that George Bush himself might have viewed parts of those CIA interrogation tapes, or the Washington Post report that, in 2002, four key Congressional figures, including Nancy Pelosi, had been given "a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk," including waterboarding, without objections being raised. Or… but the list is almost unending.

The Bush Legacy

As a people, we Americans have not faintly come to grips with how centrally the Bush administration has planted certain practices in our midst -- at the very heart of governmental practice, of the news, of everyday life. Many of these practices were not in themselves creations of this administration. For instance, the practice of kidnapping abroad -- "rendition" -- began at least in the Clinton era, if not earlier. Waterboarding, a medieval torture, was first practiced by American troops in the Philippine insurrection at the dawn of the previous century. (It was then known as "the water cure.")

Torture of various sorts was widely used in CIA interrogation centers in Vietnam in the 1960s. Back in that era, the CIA also ran its own airline, Air America, rather than just leasing planes from various corporate entities through front businesses. Abu Ghraib-style torture and abuse, pioneered by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, was taught and used by American military, CIA, and police officials in Latin America from the 1960s into the 1980s. If you doubt any of this, just check out Alfred McCoy's still shocking book, A Question of Torture. Even offshore secret CIA prisons aren't a unique creation of the Bush administration. According to Tim Weiner in his new history of the Central Intelligence Agency, Legacy of Ashes, in the 1950s the Agency had three of them -- in Japan, Germany, and the Panama Canal Zone -- where they brought double agents of questionable loyalty for "secret experiments" in harsh interrogation, "using techniques on the edge of torture, drug-induced mind control, and brainwashing."

And yet, don't for a second think that nothing has changed. Part of the Bush legacy lies in a new ethos in this country. In my childhood in the 1950s, for example, we knew just who the torturers were. We saw them in the movies. They were the sadistic Japanese in their prison camps, the Gestapo in their prisons, and the Soviet Secret police, the KGB, in their gulags (even if that name hadn't yet entered our world). As the President now says at every opportunity, and as we then knew, Americans did not torture.

Today, and it's a measure of our changing American world, a child turning on the TV serial "24" or heading for the nearest hot, new action flick at the local multiplex knows that Americans do torture and that torture, once the cultural province of our most evil enemies, is now a practice that is 100% all-American and perfectly justifiable (normally by the ticking-bomb scenario). And few even blink. In lockdown America, it computes. The snarl at the border fits well enough with what our Vice President has termed a "no-brainer," a "dunk in the water" in the torture chamber. There is no deniability left in the movies -- and little enough of it in real life.

American presidents of the Vietnam and Latin American war years operated in a realm of deniability when it came to torture and other such practices. No American could then have imagined a Vice President heading for Capitol Hill to lobby openly for a torture bill or a President publicly threatening to veto congressional legislation banning torture techniques. Call it the end of an era of American hypocrisy, if you will, but the Bush legacy will be, in part, simply the routinization of the practice of torture, abuse, kidnapping, and illegal imprisonment.

George W. Bush didn't invent the world he inhabits. He, his top officials, and all their lawyers who wrote those bizarre "torture memos" that will be hallmarks of his era chose from existing strains of thought, from urges and tendencies already in American culture. But their record on this has, nonetheless, been remarkable. In just about every case, they chose to bring out the worst in us; in just about every case, they took us on as direct a journey as possible to the dark side.

It's not necessary to romanticize the American past in any way to consider the legacy of these last years grim indeed. Let no one tell you that the institution of a global network of secret prisons and borrowed torture chambers, along with those "enhanced interrogation techniques," was primarily done for information or even security. The urge to resort to such tactics is invariably more primal than that.

Words matter more than one would think. In the Bush era, certain words have simply been sidelined. Sovereignty, for instance. If, in principle, you can kidnap anyone, anywhere, and transport that person into a ghost existence anywhere else, then national sovereignty essentially no longer has significance. This is one meaning of "globalization" in the twenty-first century. On Planet Bush, only one nation remains "sovereign," and that's the United States of America.

If you want to test this proposition, just take any case mentioned above, from Erla Ósk's landing in New York on, and try to reverse it. Make an American the central victim and another country of your choice the perpetrator and imagine the reaction of the Bush administration, no less the American media and the public (no matter what Gen. Hartmann may be unwilling to say about the waterboarding of an American serviceman).

Or consider another word that once had great resonance in American culture, not to speak of its legal system: innocence. Americans prided themselves on their "innocence" -- even when mocked as "innocents abroad" -- and took pride as well in a system based on the phrase, "innocent until proven guilty."

Despite their repeated, thoroughly worn denials about torture, the top officials of this administration remade themselves, in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, as a Torture, Inc. And their actions since then have gone a long way toward turning us, by association and tacit acquiescence, into a nation of torturers, willing to accept, in case after case, that a "war" against "terror" supposed to last for generations justifies just about any act imaginable, including the continued mistreatment and incarceration of people who remain somehow guilty even, in certain cases, after being proven innocent.

This is the American welcome wagon of the twenty-first century. If you really want to catch the spirit of the Bush legacy one year early, try to imagine the poem an Emma Lazarus of this moment might write, something appropriate for a gigantic statue in New York harbor of a guard from Mohamed Bashmilah's living nightmare -- dressed all in black, a black mask covering his head and neck, tinted yellow plastic over the eyes, a man, hands sheathed in rubber gloves, holding up not a torch but a video camera and dragging chains.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Note to Tomdispatch Readers: If you wish to read a translation of Erla Ósk‘s blog about her 24 hours "in" the U.S., click here and then scroll to entry 306. Expect the next Tomdispatch post, a new piece by Chalmers Johnson, on Sunday night January 6th.]

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt

Books that will change the world

By Rebecca Solnit, Tomdispatch. com. Posted January 2, 2008.

Twelve authors on war and peace, dissent, the environment and the empowerment of the poor provide inspiration to transform the world in 2008.

Hope is an orientation, a way of scanning the wall for cracks -- or building ladders -- rather than staring at its obdurate expanse. It's a world view, but one informed by experience and the knowledge that people have power; that the power people possess matters; that change has been made by populist movements and dedicated individuals in the past; and that it will be again.

Dissent in this country has become largely a culture of diagnosis rather than prescription, of describing what is wrong with them, rather than what is possible for us. But even in English, a robust minority tradition can be found. There are a handful of books that I think of as "the secret library of hope." None of them deny the awful things going on, but they approach them as if the future is still open to intervention rather than an inevitability. In describing how the world actually gets changed, they give us the tools to change it again.

Here, then, are some of the regulars in my secret political library of hope, along with some new candidates:

The Power from Beneath

When the monks of Burma/Myanmar led an insurrection in September simply by walking through the streets of their cities in their deep-red robes, accompanied by ever more members of civil society, the military junta which had run that country for more than four decades responded with violence. That's one measure of how powerful and threatening the insurrection was. (That totalitarian regimes tend to ban gatherings of more than a few people is the best confirmation of the strength that exists in unarmed numbers of us.)

After the crackdown, after the visually stunning, deeply inspiring walks came to a bloody end, quite a lot of mainstream politicians and pundits pronounced the insurrection dead, violence triumphant -- as though this play had just one act, as though its protagonists were naive and weak-willed. I knew they were wrong, but the argument I rested on wasn't my own: I went back to Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, by far the most original and ambitious of the many histories of nonviolence to appear in recent years.

When it came out as the current war began in the spring of 2003, the book was mocked for its dismissal of the effectiveness of violence, but Schell's explanation of how superior military power failed abysmally in Vietnam was a prophesy waiting to be fulfilled in Iraq. Schell himself is much taken with the philosopher Hannah Arendt, whom he quotes saying, in 1969:

To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power.

I hope that his equally trenchant explanation of the power of nonviolence is fulfilled in Burma. Schell has been a diligent historian and philosopher of nuclear weapons since his 1982 bestseller The Fate of the Earth, but this book traces the rise of nonviolence as the other half of the history of the violent twentieth century.

That's what books in a library of hope consist of -- not a denial of the horrors of recent history, but an exploration of the other tendencies, avenues, and achievements that are too often overlooked. After all, to return to Burma, much has already changed there since September: Burma's greatest supporter, China, has been forced to denounce the crackdown and may be vulnerable to more pre-Olympics pressure on the subject; India has declared a moratorium on selling arms to the country; a number of companies have withdrawn from doing business there; and the US Congress just unanimously passed a bill, HR 3890, to increase sanctions, freeze the junta's assets in US institutions, and close a loophole that allowed Chevron to profit spectacularly from its business in Burma.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi was elected as Burma's head of state in 1990 and has, ever since, been under house arrest or otherwise restricted. She nonetheless remains the leader of, as well as a wise, gentle, fearless voice for, that country's opposition. Since the uprising, her silencing has begun to dissolve amid meetings with a UN envoy and members of her own political party; some believe she may be on her way to being freed. The Burmese people were hit with hideous, pervasive violence, but they have not surrendered: small acts of resistance and large plans for liberation continue.

The best argument for hope is how easy it ought to be for the rest of us to raise its banner, when we look at who has carried it through unimaginably harsh conditions: Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom recounts his unflagging dedication to his country's liberation (imperfect though it may still be); Rigoberta Menchu dodged death squads to become a champion of indigenous rights, a Nobel laureate, and a recent presidential candidate in Guatemala; Oscar Oliveira proved that a bunch of poor people in Bolivia can beat Bechtel Corporation largely by nonviolent means, as he recounts in !Cochabamba! ; and Aung San Suu Kyi radiates -- even from the page -- an extraordinary calm and patience, perhaps the result of her decades of Buddhist practice. She remarks, toward the end of The Voice of Hope, a collection of conversations with her about Burma, Buddhism, politics, and her own situation,

"Yes I do have hope because I'm working. I'm doing my bit to try to make the world a better place, so I naturally have hope for it. But obviously, those who are doing nothing to improve the world have no hope for it."

For a book about those who did their bit beautifully long ago, don't miss Adam Hochschild's gripping Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves.

It begins with a handful of London Quakers who decided in the 1780s to abolish the institution of slavery in the British Empire and then, step by unpredictable step, did just that. It's an exhilarating book simply as the history of a movement from beginning to end, and so suggests how many other remarkable movements await their historian; others, from the women's movement to rights for queers to many environmental struggles, still await their completion. If only people carried, as part of their standard equipment, a sense of the often-incremental, unpredictable ways in which change is wrought and the powers that civil society actually possesses, they might go forward more confidently to wrestle with the wrongs of our time, seeing that we have already won many times before.

Indians, Environmentalists, and Utopians

One spectacular book along these lines already exists: Charles Wilkinson's Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations. For us non-native people, Native Americans became far more visible during the huge public debates around the meaning of the Quincentennial of 1992 -- the 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in this hemisphere. They reframed the history of the Americas as one of invasion and genocide, rather than discovery and development. But the story was not a defeatist one; simply in being able to tell their own stories and reshape their histories, native people of the Americas demonstrated that they were neither wholly conquered, nor eradicated; and, since then, the history of the two continents has been radically revised and indigenous peoples have won back important rights from Bolivia to Canada.

In the United States that reclaiming of power, pride, land, rights, and representation began far earlier, as Wilkinson's book relates. A law professor and lawyer who has worked on land and treaty-rights issues with many tribes, he begins his story of ascendancy with the 1953 decision by the US government to "terminate" the tribal identities, organizations, and rights of Native Americans and push them to melt into the general population. This represented an aggressive attempt at erasure of the many distinct peoples of this continent and their heritage. Told to disappear,

"Indian leaders responded and by the mid-1960s had set daunting goals... at once achieve economic progress and preserve ancient traditions in a technological age.... Against all odds, over the course of two generations, Indian leaders achieved their objectives to a stunning degree."

Wilkinson's monumental history of the past half-century concludes:

By the turn of this century Indian tribes had put in place much of the ambitious agenda that tribal leaders advanced in the 1950s and 1960s. They stopped termination and replaced it with self-determination. They ousted the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] as the reservation government and installed their own sovereign legislatures, courts, and administrative agencies. They enforced the treaties of old and, with them, the fishing, hunting and water rights. Nowhere have these changes been absolute and pure. In most cases the advances represent works in progress, but they have been deep and real.

Late this November, Canada set aside 25 million acres of boreal forest as a preserve to be managed, in part, by the Native peoples of the region, a huge environmental victory for the largest remaining forest on Earth -- and for all of us. How did it happen?

I am still looking for an environmental history with the strength and focus of Blood Struggle or Bury the Chains. An exhilarating 2006 article in Orion magazine by Ted Nace describes how a bunch of North Dakota farmers killed off Monsanto's plans to promote the growing of genetically altered wheat worldwide. The essay concludes:

"On May 10, 2004, Monsanto bowed to the prevailing political sentiment. It issued a curt press release announcing the withdrawal of all its pending regulatory applications for [its genetically altered] Roundup Ready wheat and the shifting of research priorities to other crops.

We need books on victories like this, books that tell us how this dam was defeated, this river brought back from being a sewer, that toxin banned, that species rebounded, that land preserved.

In fact, a broader history with some of those threads did appear this year, geographer Richard Walker's The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area. It describes generations of struggle to preserve something of the richness of this extraordinarily diverse region by defeating some of the most awful proposals most of us have never heard of -- to, for example, completely fill in the San Francisco Bay -- back in an era when water and wetlands were just real estate waiting to happen.

The book does justice to a whole unexpected category of unsung heroines -- the often-subversive affluent ladies who have done so much for the environment and the community -- then moves on to document the emerging environmental justice movement that took on toxins, polluters, and the overlooked question of what ecology really means for the inner city. It's a great, hopeful history of a region that has long created environmental templates and momentum for the rest of the nation -- and Walker makes it clear that this trend was not inevitable, but the result of hard work by stubborn visionaries and organizers.

A decade ago, Alan Weisman wrote a profile of a town in the inhospitable savannah of eastern Colombia, a miraculous community in which that unfortunate nation's turmoil and our age's environmental destruction was replaced by a green, utopian approach that involved reinventing the roles of both technology and community. It worked, though Weisman ended his 1997 book, Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, on a prophetic note of caution:

[The] fading of the Cold War has revealed clearly that a far more incandescent and protracted battle -- a potentially apocalyptic resource war -- has been stealthily gathering intensity throughout the latter part of the twentieth century.... Yet a place like Gaviotas bears witness to our ability to get it right, even under seemingly insurmountable circumstances.

Weisman's deservedly successful 2007 bestseller, The World Without Us, takes an extreme approach to getting it right, by showing how the planet might -- in part -- regenerate itself if we were to go away, all of us, for good. The chapters on nuclear waste and plastic are dauntingly grim, but the descriptions of New York City reverting to nature go two steps past Mike Davis's Dead Cities in praise of entropy, weeds, and the power of natural processes to take back much of the Earth as soon as we let go.

While Gaviotas stands out as a rare, realized utopia, our choices among the unrealized ones -- except as literature -- are legion. In 2007, I finally got around to reading what has already become my favorite utopian novel: William Morris' News from Nowhere. Best known during his life as a poet, Morris is, unfortunately, now mostly remembered for his wallpaper. He designed it as part of his lifelong endeavor to literally craft an alternative to the brutality and ugliness of the industrial revolution through the artisanal production of furniture, textiles, and books -- all as models of what work and its fruits could be.

That attempt had its political and literary faces, which is to say that Morris was also a prolific writer and an ardent revolutionary. He was more anarchist than socialist, as well as an antiquarian, a translator of Icelandic sagas, and so much more. News from Nowhere, published in 1890, portrays his ideal London in the far-distant future of 2102, a century and a half after "the revolution of 1952."

It's a bioregional and anarchic paradise: The economy is localized, work is voluntary, money is nonexistent and so is hunger, deprivation, and prison. The industrial filth of London has vanished, and the river and city are beautiful again. (They were far filthier in Morris' time, when every home burned coal, while sewage and industrial effluents flowed unfiltered into the Thames.)

Most utopias, of course, aren't places you'd actually want to live. Admittedly, Morris' is a little bland and mild, as life on earth without evil and struggle must be. But his utopia is prophetic, not dated, close to many modern visions of decentralized, localized power, culture, and everyday life. It is, in short, an old map for a new world being born in experiments around the globe.

Dreams on the Southern Horizon

Morris provided the name for the present-day News from Nowhere Collective, a group that has edited one of the more rambunctious handbooks for activists in recent times, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism. A visually delicious, horizontally formatted little chunk of a book, it features a lot of photographs, a running timeline of radical victories in our era, and short, punchy essays from people immersed in changing the world all over that world (from Quebec and Nigeria to Bolivia and Poland). Playful, subversive, and far-reaching, the book -- even four years after its publication -- demonstrates the scope of constructive change and activism around the planet.

There are other such handbooks, including my brother David's Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World, out from City Lights Books a few years ago. It was in the course of editing some of the essays in that book that I discovered the beautiful, hopeful voice of Marina Sitrin, a sociologist, human rights lawyer, and activist who has spent a great deal of time among the utopian social movements of Argentina. Her encounters become ours in her new book Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina.

That country's sudden economic collapse and political turmoil in December of 2001 was largely overlooked here, but the crisis begat an extraordinary grassroots response -- about as far from shock and paralysis as you can imagine. Neighborhoods gathered in popular assemblies to protest the political structure, and then stayed together to feed each other during the fiscal crisis; factory workers took over shuttered factories and ran them as cooperatives; the poor organized and mobilized; but more than these concrete actions, Argentinean society itself changed.

People began to talk across old divides and create new words for what mattered now -- none more valuable than horizontalidad, which Sitrin translates as "horizontalism, " a direct and radically egalitarian participatory democracy, and politica afectiva, the politics of affection, or love. The 2001 crisis was soon transformed into an opportunity to overcome the legacy of the terrifying years of the Argentinean military dictatorship, to step out of the isolation and disengagement that fear had produced, to reclaim power and reinvent social ties. With this, Argentina moved a little further away from hell and a little closer to utopia.

It's not a coincidence that Weisman's Gaviotas is in South America (though it is a surprise that it's in Colombia). After all, the most powerful voice coming from the Spanish-speaking majority of the Americas is that of the Zapatistas, and Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings of Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos, edited by Juana Ponce de Leon, is still the best English-language introduction to that indigenous movement's non-indigenous spokesman and raconteur Subcommandante Marcos. Via his poetic, playful, subversive, and ferociously hopeful manifestoes, tirades, allegories, and pranks, he has reinvented the language of politics, pushing off the drab shore of bureaucracy and cliche, sailing toward something rich and strange.

Ponce De Leon's book, however, only covers the first several years of Marcos's contributions. City Lights recently brought out his The Speed of Dreams: Selected Writings 2001-2007. On page 102, he advises an indigenous audience: "It is the hour of the word. So then, put the machete away, and continue to hone hope." By page 349, he's quoting a possibly fictional elderly couple in San Miguel Tzinacapan, who say,

"The world is the size of our effort to change it."

Not that all resistance, all hope, comes from the south. It can be found everywhere, or at least on many edges, margins, and in many overlooked zones -- and one of the most exhilarating histories of it is The Many Headed-Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Their book traces a plethora of acts of resistance to capitalism, exploitation, authoritarianism and the generally sorry lot meted out to the poor in the eighteenth century. That resistance was exuberant, inventive, and occasionally ferocious, and it found its own utopias. The book begins with a 1609 shipwreck in Bermuda, in which the shipwrecked sailors and passengers begin to form their own convivial utopia that the Virginia Company forcibly disbanded. The Many Headed Hydra covers some of the same ground -- and ocean routes -- as Hochschild's book, and they make good joint reading.

I wish Linebaugh's The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All was out in time for this list, but look for it in February. (I read it in manuscript for the University of California Press, loved it, and learned a lot from it.) Beginning with Bush's breach not just of the Constitution, but of Magna Carta's grant of habeas corpus, Linebaugh returns to that moment at Runnymede when King John was forced to concede rights to England's citizens. Linking that despot to the one in the White House, he ventures back and forth between the two times to explore the once evolving -- and now revolving or maybe even regressing -- territory of rights and liberties.

The Climate of Change

One thing becoming increasingly clear in this millennium: Human rights and the environment are all tangled up with each other -- and not only in environmental injustice hotspots like Louisiana's Cancer Alley or oily places like Nigeria. Democracy and an empowered citizenry are the best tools we have to make progress on climate change in this country. The issue of climate change may be global, but in the US a lot of the measures that matter are being enacted on the local level by cities, towns, regions, and states. Together, they have pushed far ahead of the recalcitrant federal government in trying to take concrete measures that could make a difference. Global measures matter, but so do local ones: The change here is likely to come as much from the bottom up as the top down.

One common response to climate change is to try to limit your own impact -- by consuming less. An issue, for instance, that's front and center in Britain but hardly on the table in the US, is taking fewer airplane trips. (The state of California, however, did recently start looking into ways to regulate and reduce airplane carbon emissions.) So there's personal virtue, which matters. Then there's agitating and organizing like crazy, which might matter more. Certainly, Bill McKibben makes a rousing case for it in his introduction to Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement. The book, edited by Jonathan Isham and Sissel Waage, covers a lot of ground when it comes to how policy gets made and how to make it yourself, as does McKibben's own Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community.

Maybe the best news of 2007 is that we're finally doing something about the worst news ever: that we've royally screwed up the climate of this planet. After all, the rest of that news is: We still have a chance to mitigate how haywire everything goes, even though no one is yet talking about what a world of low to zero carbon emissions would look like.

Maybe one thing we really need (just to be a little more visionary and less grim about the subject) is a modern version of News from Nowhere portraying what a good life involving only a small carbon footprint might mean -- most likely a more localized, less consuming life with some cool technological innovations, including many we already have (some of which are described in Weisman's Gaviotas).

In ceasing the scramble for things, there would be real gains; we'd gain back time for sitting around talking at leisure about politics and the neighbors, for wandering around on foot -- and for reading. But you don't have to wait for everything to change: change it yourself by seizing these pleasures now.

Rebecca Solnit is the author of Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.

Now here's a Christmas book list! Tom Englehardt's!!

a project of the Nation Institute

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Tom's Review of Books

Dear Tomdispatch Reader,

For 30 years, I've been a book editor in -- or at the edge of -- mainstream publishing. I still co-run and co-edit a series I helped launch back in 2003, The American Empire Project (out of Henry Holt's Metropolitan Books). I've often written back to readers who wanted me to check out their books (or favorite books of theirs) that the saddest response a long-time book editor is this: I have so desperately little time to read books these days. And it's true... it really is...

Nonetheless, in those wee hours after I've put Tomdispatch to bed, taken my bleary eyes off the next still-to-be-edited manuscript page, and turned off The Daily Show or those interminable late night reruns of Scrubs and Seinfeld, I still pick up a book and paw through a few pages. These days, I escape into fiction far less often (and miss that feeling of being swept into another universe); but, when it comes to nonfiction, I still have that urge to travel the world, peek into other cultures and universes, plunge into history, and, above all, look for new ways to frame our own puzzling, unnerving moment. More than anything, I'm still moved by the generosity of writers willing to travel where I wouldn't dare go (or couldn't even book passage), who have seen things I never will, who understand things I haven't grasped -- and want to take me along.

Anyway, like some old addiction I haven't kicked, it seems that I just can't keep away from the world of books. Next year, Tomdispatch will be spinning off books at -- for a tiny website -- a prodigious rate. New works that first began at the site will include: Nick Turse's The Complex, How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives and a book on America's Iraq by Michael Schwartz, based on his running commentaries at TD. (Both are due in the spring of 2008.) In May, The World According to Tomdispatch, an imperial reader, will be published by Verso Books!

With all that in mind, I thought I'd try my hand at a little Tomdispatch extra for subscribers -- a Tom's Review of Books newsletter that won't be posted at the main screen of the site. So, if I don't hear cries of pain, horror, or outrage from you, perhaps I'll do two to four of these little book letters a year, recommending works I've liked, some connected to Tomdispatch, some not. And, of course, the holidays seem like a reasonable time to begin -- that classic moment when, if you're like me, you enter a bookstore stocked with a staggering array of titles and only a faint idea of what in the world you should be picking up for gifts.

So here goes -- and please excuse the self-interested beginning. Think of it as dealer's choice.

In an era when an American culture of triumph returned to our world, only to crash and burn in Iraq, my own book, The End of Victory Culture, might be worth a pit stop. Written in the mid-1990s, it's just been reissued, updated to the present moment, and offering a perspective not found elsewhere. Of course, I've written about the book before at the site (and crib from it regularly for my own pieces). If you want to learn a little about its more serious side, just click here. In the meantime, let me suggest its charms as a secret cultural history of our times by offering the following five trivia questions - and answers - drawn from the book. (You'll be able to answer hundreds more after reading it!):

1. What was the great commercial triumph of cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy with his "spine-tingling episodes never before shown on TV!"? (Answer: Marketing his signature black shirt to one million children soon after World War II, at a time when black was still associated with mourning or Italian fascism.)

2. What did Desi Arnaz tell the studio audience of the top-rated TV comedy I Love Lucy in 1953, after Lucy was accused of being a communist by gossip columnist Walter Winchell? (Answer: "And now I want you to meet my favorite wife -- my favorite redhead -- in fact, that's the only thing red about her, and even that's not legitimate.")

3. When did the first interracial kiss make it onto television? (Answer: November 22, 1968, in outer space. Star Trek's Captain Kirk had to turn his back to the camera to simulate placing that kiss on Lieutenant Uhuru.)

4. From what movie did junior officers at the Army Command and General Staff at Fort Leavenworth, responsible for planning some of the ground campaign in the first Gulf War, choose a nickname -- and what was it? (Answer: Star Wars and it was "Jedi Knights.")

5. When, on May 1, 2003, George W. Bush made his carefully timed, late afternoon landing on, and strut across, the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, to announce that "major combat operations" had ended in Iraq against the backdrop of that infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner, what term did his advance men use for the photogenic moment chosen? (Answer: "Magic hour light.")

Now, on to those all those other books.

At the top of my 2007 list is the new paperback of Mike Davis' Planet of Slums. Talk about a single book taking you on a wild ride across a planet you hardly knew was there! It's not just a matter of wholesale global urbanization, which is stunning enough in itself. (After all, since the late 1970s, in China alone, more than 200 million people have moved from the countryside into cities, with another 250-300 million expected to follow in the coming decades.) Nor is it just the impoverishment of so many new city dwellers. It's also the de-linking of the city in whole regions of the globe from all industrial processes, meaningful jobs, or well-being of almost any kind. Not the city with slums, in other words, but the city as slum. And Davis, typically, was there first. "Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven," he writes, "much of the twenty-first century urban world squats in squalor... Indeed, the one billion city dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums might well look back with envy at the ruins of the sturdy mud homes of Catal Huyuk in Anatolia, erected at the very dawn of city life nine thousand years ago." To wield a phrase from the 1960s, this book is mind-blowing. Davis is one of a kind. If you haven't met him on the page, start here.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman hardly needs me to recommend it. It was, after all, a bestseller. But once you accept Weisman's premise -- that, by some unknown means, in a single historical moment (this one, to be exact), humans were removed wholesale from the planet, the book is anything but downbeat. It's a riveting exploration of how the traces of the heavy hand of humanity would slowly disappear and, everywhere, nature would return. As a dyed-in-the-wool city boy, I have to admit that there was something moving about that return of nature -- you can't help rooting for it -- and gripping about the way Weisman describes the dismantling of my home town, New York City, starting with those flooded subway tunnels almost the moment the power -- and so those 753 underground water pumps goes dead. Imagine! Sooner or later, Second Avenue, on which I took a bus to school so many mornings as a child, will be a river. This book is, in fact, an infernally clever way to grapple with climate change, without claiming to be about it at all.

Even here, by the way, put Mike Davis at the head of the class. In the final chapter of his 1999 book Dead Cities, he began dismantling a great city, London, in what would become the Weisman-ian manner. Of course, to my mind, the single greatest literary dismantling of a city (and a civilization) takes place violently in H. G. Wells' 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds. With gusto, Wells turned the task of taking London apart over to his "Martian" invaders. (I first read that book under the covers, after curfew by flashlight, at about age 12 or 13, and practically scared myself to death.). After hearing a heartless discussion about the British extermination of the Tasmanians, Wells reputedly decided to turn the tables, fictionally at least, on imperial Britain. In the process, he invented most of the tropes of the invader-from-outer-space sci-fi novel. Ever since then, we humans have been imagining scenarios in which implacable aliens with superweapons arrive to devastate our planet. What if, as Davis and Weisman might both agree, it turned out that the implacable aliens were us?

Speaking of that, I noticed that one of my favorite (tiny) "travel" books -- ostensibly by bus deep into Africa, but in fact by research deep into European colonial history -- was reissued this year by the New Press: Sven Lindqvist's "Exterminate All the Brutes." (The title, of course, is taken from Kurtz's mad scrawl in Conrad's Heart of Darkness). What a ride through the planetary past Lindqvist takes you on as "progress" and "extermination" leave Europe hopelessly intertwined, cut a swath across four continents, and arrive back home as the god of slaughter, machine gun in hand, in August 1914. In a sense, you could think of this book as the story of how the Jews of the Holocaust were essentially the Africans of Europe. Read it and weep, as they say. (Or check out my old Nation review of it by clicking here.)

And talking about cutting a swath of destruction across a country, don't miss Dahr Jamail's first book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq -- and, while you're reading it, think of us as the invading Martians. I hardly need to extol Jamail to Tomdispatch readers, but his book offers a remarkably fresh glimpse at what those "Martians" looked like and felt like through Iraqi eyes. This book should outlast the war it recorded (even given Washington's urge to remain in Iraq forever).

On more purely American ground, not to say Ground Zero, stands Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, which explores the full range of bizarre responses to the 9/11 attacks -- the set of fantasies that Americans, the media, and especially the right-wing and the Bush administration conjured up in about 30 seconds. It offers a genuinely original window into the American psyche, for those brave enough to peek. Where did all those fantasies of manly men and women-in-need-of-protection come from anyway in a nation that mainly watched 9/11 on TV? Faludi is convincing when she argues that they emerged from an American mythology whose origins are as old as the Puritans and which has been etched, almost like a genetic code, into our national consciousness. The Terror Dream has largely been reviewed as a 9/11 book, but, believe me, it's so much more fascinating and deeper than that.

Oh, not that I haven't recommended it before, but if you're in that classic, history-can't-repeat-itself-can-it mood, Juan Cole's Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East is the book to cure you. Yes, Virginia, it all happened before. The invasion bringing "liberation" and "democracy," behind which were the grandiose dreams of a "Greater Middle East." The miscalculations, the unexpected, bitter guerrilla war that followed, the full fiasco. The difference? Napoleon's disaster took a mercifully short three years to unfold and he, at least, brought along a corps of scientists, rather than private security cops and crony corporations, and some of them found the Rosetta Stone. Cole, who runs the Informed Comment website (my daily bread) is just a barrel of energy and so has set up a separate blog for his book, which is fascinating in its own right.

In Soldier's Heart, Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, Elizabeth Samet takes us into an otherwise no-admission world -- that of the officer-corps-in-the-making for our all-volunteer Army. As that force has become ever less a citizen's army, and so ever less connected to all of American society, it becomes ever more important for the rest of us to understand it. Samet offers what, on the face of it, might seem an unlikely vantage point for illuminating military culture. She teaches literature and poetry to West Point cadets, but she's canny and eagle-eyed -- and the ways the young almost-officers she deals with every day grapple with literature (especially war poetry) turn out to be telling. "Like their teacher," she points out -- like most of us, in fact -- "most of my students first encountered war and military life through the stories of their fathers and from the movies... The signal difference is that they have actually agreed to turn make-believe into real life." Not surprisingly, "owning war" -- wresting the right to write about and interpret it from civilians -- "is one of the things for which they will fight hardest." The book is peppered with insights into these young men (and women) and what drives (and confuses) them, while introducing the civilian reader to a culture that is the best and worst of small town life. Samet even takes time to consider that almost all-purpose military exclamation -- nobody really knows where it came from or exactly what it means -- "hooah" (which she finally bans from her classroom).

Near the top of the must-read stack of books by my bedside, along with Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine (my next stop actually) and an account of the great Arab conquests in the century after Mohammed's death, is Studs Terkel's new autobiography, Touch and Go. Our premier oral historian -- and all-around amazing character -- he is now 95 years old, but don't you dare say that this is his last book! He continues to defy the odds. Until I read this one, let me recommend two slightly older Terkel gems, both perfect paperback purchases: Hope Dies Last, Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times is his oral history of activists, from the 1930s into the twenty-first century. It's filled with stirring testimony and a reminder that, in bad times, to dispel the gloom, hoping is not enough. Only acting -- even taking the smallest step toward change -- engenders actual hope and a sense of optimism. I'd like to urge on you as well Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith, Stud's oral history of death. For those of us of a certain age, it is, I guarantee you, a strangely upbeat, genuinely uplifting book. I edited it once upon a time and I have to admit that some of the interviews moved me so that I found myself tearing up even as I marked the pages. I'm unlikely ever to forget the mother who forgave her son's killer (to his face) or the touching fantasy of the Chicago sanitation worker who donated part of his liver to a man he didn't know.

Okay, consider the book "review" part of this letter officially over. Whatever minimal authority or expertise I may have has now fled the premises. But that won't stop me -- not before I wax enthusiastic about two plays I've seen recently. If you're not already in New York or not coming soon, you can stop here and holiday good speed to you. If you are, or you will be, then rush for the phone (212-352-3101) or onto the Internet and order tickets to Howard Zinn's Rebel Voices at the Culture Project, which has just added shows through December 18th (and will soon be adding more for January). In it, six young actresses and actors (and the odd guest reader) work energetic magic with passages from the Zinn/Anthony Arnove book Voices of a People's History of the United States as well as stirring songs. I have to say that it's a distinctly feel-good event.

And, if that isn't enough for you, pick up that phone again (212-967-7555), you mad fool, or grab that credit card one last time for David Henry Hwang's fabulous new play, Yellow Face, at the Public Theater only until December 23rd (unless extended). It's a very personal, inventive, and superbly acted farce of mistaken racial casting and identity, of father, sons, and American dreams (as well as nightmares -- sometimes the two can't be told apart), of anti-Chinese hysterias and other strange phenomena of our American world.

And with that, to all a good night and -- let's hope -- a happier New Year of reading and everything else. Tom

Note: If you want your friends to read Tom's Review of Books and don't want to forward the letter, you can always send them to the Tomdispatch site, where it's posted on a separate page. The url is: http://www.tomdispatch.com/p/book_review_12_11_2007 or just click here.