I walked past a national electronics retailer and saw this gianormous line running around and around and around the block complete with barricades and cops and sleeping bags and some pot smoking and some girls who looked like they really really loved their boyfriends at least enough to hold their place in line while the boyfriend was at work at the local CD store or bookstore or guitar store or in class studying Neetchee and all that dark philosophy stuff you know man like it’s fucked up and I thought hey! must be something really important so I asked hey! what's so important and the guy in the front of the line said for the one millionth time today man its like the new playstation you know like from sony and all like we're waiting for it you know so I said word and he said yeah it's cool though dude cause I am going to like sell it for like ten times what's worth to some dude from japan or something like on ebay or something you know and the guy behind him looked homeless which he was and so were a couple other guys and they had either been paid by someone to stand in line for someone or had seen an opportunity and had gotten up and gotten into line at some point earlier in the day and were waiting for 11:55PM 5 minutes before the doors opened and the whole deal happened like lightning hitting a speeding boat whereupon they were going to sell their place in line to the highest bidder and then go get ripped and sleep it off and then go get ripped again and then when I got home I read that today Milton Friedman died at 94 years old and I thought no he's not he's living on the streets of NYC standing in line getting ready to take advantage of someone who wants something just a little bit more than he does and will pay for it.
Daniel Ellsberg article from 10/22/06 in Harpers
The irritating part is that Ellsberg's article relates past events. That the build up to Iraq WAS exactly like the build up to Vietnam. He did not write this article during the build up to Iraq. If my friends and I, sitting at a table in Prague with three newspapers spread out in front of us in early 2002, could predict the outcome of the Bush Adventure in Iraq and forecast all the things that would go badly - and we did, nearly to the letter (this is not bragging - this is depression) - as well as show how weak the President's case was for going to war, how far down river Colin Powell had sold himself and the country along with it, and how little Iraq had to do with OBL & how much it had to do with oil, ANYONE could have done it. It was not hard. But America was psychotic, and the press & most of the left were either asleep or suffering from a national Stockholm syndrome, captured and mollified as they were by the threat of appearing unpatriotic (if you are fighting for what you believe to be the democratic ideal, how can you be unpatriotic in a country which holds democracy as its ideal?) at the gunpoint pointed at them from the right through the cross-hairs of the Patriot Act.
In a backa$$ward way, I think what will actually save America is its failure to win in Iraq. If, on the heels of the success of the Patriot Act I, the military, at the behest of this administration, had won a decisive victory in Iraq (though impossible for any western government to do ever) then the power that the administration would have felt its right to take and keep would have been immense. And I think our democracy would then become one where life and the pursuit of happiness would be guaranteed, but not necessarily liberty. That would become a conditional given at the pleasure of the government.
I think I like the whacko conservatives in the west more than the whacko liberals of the east. The western conservatives never forget that the greatest threat to this country will always be our own government. The liberals think that government can be made into your buddy.
Ellsberg said once that the thing in government that most truly corrupts is not money and power, it is the secret information, like the dossiers on the Johnson administration's goals for their involvement in Vietnam, that a select group of people in government get to see. Once you have read that information, he said, the arguments of people who do not have access appear stupid and irrational, not based on facts and merely jousting at windmills. And that breeds contempt among those people who have access to top secret documents for all the people who don't have access - which, as Ellsberg notes, is nearly everyone else in the country.
Which of course makes the final part of Ellsberg's essay (excerpted as it is from his book) scarier. The efforts of the Bush administration to develop plans for a war against Iran must be seen through the lens of Ellsberg's caution about the corrupting influence of top secret information. What may be farthest from the consciences of those with security clearance in Washington is that possession of top secret information merely makes them informed, but it does not - especially in a democracy - make them right. They may be arrogant enough to feel their information charges them to pursue their mission outside the will of the people, as Reagan did in Iran-Contra (note the irony of Iran's position in both operations - this is naught but a war of princes!) We hope that our system checks the arrogance of the few who might seek to work in opposition to the will of the many. Should the left win control of one or both houses in Congress, we will see whether our hope will be met satisfactorily.
So I am in Tbilisi, Georgia right now, typing away on a wifi connection in our hotel room with a view of Tbilisi's city hall just outside my window. A few days ago, the first hundred or so of several thousand soldiers were practicing their marching skills for the celebration of Georgian Independence Day, May 26th. Like the Czechs, the Georgians have a couple days that could be considered independence days. This one represents the day in 1918 when the Georgians declared their independence from Russia who had governed them for 117 years previously, an independence that only lasted two years. The most recent moment of Georgian history that most people outside of Georgia remember is the Rose Revolution when Eduard Shevardnadze was excused from power and the democratic government of 36 year old Mikheil Saakashvili took over after storming the Parliament armed only with roses in 2003. Before that, tanks rolled down Rustaveli street, the street where my hotel sits, and fired directly into many of the buildings, lighting them on fire and either gutting or destroying quite a few. And that is only the twentieth century - the history of Georgia is immense.
Most of you know that currently Georgia is strategically important to the United States as it has allowed US warplanes to operate in Georgian airspace during the various campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan (not too far away - Georgia is due north of eastern Turkey.) And Georgia, through Shevardnadze's wily marketing of Georgia as a thoroughfare, is the bed upon which several very important oil pipelines run, carrying energy supplies from Baku, Azerbaijan to the Black Sea directly and to the Mediterranean Sea through Turkey. This is why my wife is here. Her firm is helping Georgia settle a dispute that grew out of the building of the pipeline.
Still, even with the oil transport money coming into the country, there just is not enough money here. As a result of the devastating earthquake of 2002, which registered a 6 on the Richter scale and caused approximately $45million in damage while displacing 15,000 people, the historic old town in Tbilisi is on the verge of falling to the ground, a architectural loss akin I think to what is happening in Havana or Tirana, Albania or other places that continue to suffer after the fall of the Iron Curtain (unlike Prague, for which there seems to be no end to foreign investment.) Unemployment is high, worse in the countryside, and the optimism of the Rose Revolution is constantly bruised by the day to day realities of being torn between Georgia's love-hate relationship with Russia and a growing trade relationship with Western Europe and the United States, symbolized by the country's geographic location in neither Europe nor Asia.
The army is an achievement of sorts. Georgia must maintain an army, partly because several of the Georgian states have declared themselves independent from Georgian control and threaten retaliation if Georgia tries to reestablish sovereignty, and partly because Russia is the 3000 pound giant waiting at the door who would think nothing of (and has in the past) sending in troops as it sees fit. As it has historically for centuries, Georgia has to defend itself from the constant threat of invasion. In the end though, a fit Georgian army is simultaneously reassuring and depressing. Reassuring because small armies have frequently shown their ability to hold off even the largest and strongest countries in the world. Depressing because this effort has often resulted in the near annihilation of that country, as it has in Chechnya.
Over the weekend, we headed out into the area surrounding Tbilisi to see some of the buildings and sites associated with early Christianity in Georgia, as well as Stalin's hometown of Gori and a cave town whose habitation began in the first century B.C. Quite astounding. Georgia is just ancient. I suppose one gets the same impression from visiting Greece or Italy, but frequently here, we were the only tourists at the site. Everyone else was going to church or farming or shepherding a flock of sheep somewhere. So the impression feels much less packaged and contained. And the sites are incredible, located as they are in strategic positions to defend against a seemingly endless wave after wave of attackers who repeatedly wrecked things over the centuries. When we found ourselves among tourists, they were Georgian, mostly school children who are delightfully brave and quickly say "hello" and "isn't it beautiful" in English. If the energy of the youngsters is any indication, this country has a bright future.
We did see some Japanese tourists while visiting Stalin's birthplace, however. Gori is a very strange place. The only indication that we got of any of Stalin's faults was that perhaps collectivization of farming was not such a good idea. Obviously Gori is an important part of Georgian history, but it would be a shame if it gets tourist dollars to the exclusion of other places in Georgia, i.e. tour buses zoom past something from the 4th century to look at a statue made in the 1950's of someone who was responsible for the deaths of millions, including Georgians.
Most of the churches we saw had at one time been entirely white-washed by the Soviets - that is to say, all the frescos and decorated surfaces were coated with white paint or white plaster and either left derelict, converted to historic monuments or used as theatres or other secular functions. Renovations are recent and ongoing, but the amazing thing is that Georgia has been trashed by the Persians, Tamerlane, the Russians, earthquakes, etc. and still these older sites are standing. The masonry skill is tremendous, and the supposition is that the chemical properties of the mortar, which included eggs in the mix, made the buildings flexible but stable.
On Sunday we headed north out of Tbilisi on the Georgian Military Highway that leads to the Russian - Georgian border. The road runs along the Aragvi river until the river's valley gets too steep, whereupon the roads begins to climb to the Dzhrvi pass, elevation 7858 feet, then down the other side to Kobi, a flat spot at 6339 feet where four mountain valleys meet, and on to Kazbegi at the foot of the huge Mt. Kazbek (16,500 feet) where a small church sits perched on a cliff above the town. A little bit further down the road beyond Kazbegi is the Darial gorge, the end of the known world for the Romans and the site of the Russian - Georgian border. Just shy of a hundred kilometers north of the border (if that) is the town of Beslan, unfortunately famous for the school massacre that took place a while ago. The whole area is contentious, with the Russian at the border, the Chechens to the northwest, and the South Ossetians, one of the rebel regions in Georgia that claims autonomy, just over the mountains on the east bank of the Aragvi river. The Russians accuse the Georgians of aiding the Chechens, and the Georgians accuse the Russians of arbitrarily shutting off the natural gas pipeline that keeps everyone warm in the winter & of meddling in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The scenery is primeval. Most of the rock formations are the result of volcano, earthquake or both. Huge uplifts of rock jut out with angular striations, striated volcanic plugs flake into geometric tailings, and large expanses show evidence of lava flow from the once active volcanoes in the region. Much of the rock color is gray, but there are also areas that are colored an intense red, or in the case of sulfurous outflow, bright yellow, white and green. The mountains are sharp edged and pointed. Rocks are everywhere. Landslides seem to happen frequently, and at several locations, we could see buildings up to their second floors in scree, though it was difficult to tell whether the slide had occurred yesterday or several years ago.
People live throughout the area and have for centuries. The mountains, if you are tough enough to withstand the horrendous winters (6 meter snowfall at times) and the vertical territory, allow you to stay one step ahead of your enemies who may not be so hardy or prepared. Towers are sprinkled liberally throughout the valley and functioned as an early warning system when invaders approached. If you have seen the movie, The Lord of the Rings and watched the scene when the towers are lit to signal far off kingdoms of the coming invasion, you will have a sense of how some of the Georgian towers functioned and what it felt like standing beneath them.
Shepherding is a common vocation, and the shepherds spend their springs driving the herds up out of their pens in the valleys towards the alpine meadows in the heights. When you see a flock of sheep up on a highland meadow, the first question is how did they get up there? Then the second question is how will they get back down. The routes are often not easily seen from a distance, and I am sure that too is purposeful. A sheep meadow with only a few ways to enter or exit makes the work of the shepherds and their sheep dogs (large white dogs with brown and black splotches and bobbed tails) easier when it comes to watching for wolves.
Pretty spectacular but hard life. If you want a really good read for some Georgian history & culture, as well as a ripping yarn, try to find Tony Anderson's excellent book, Bread & Ashes. I don't think it is distributed in the U.S., but you can follow the link and get it through Amazon in the U.K. Highly recommended.
You can see my photos from the trip at the links below or by just going to my site on Flickr. Before you start wondering, I have gotten a small Canon Digital Elph camera to carry along and shoot snaps so I can post on the road, so to speak. This is an experiment. So far the quality seems pretty good, but I haven't given up on film by any stretch, as evidenced by the last link below. Rather I have been shooting film and digital both, which makes for a heavier bag but not by too much.
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Film Shots
Thanks for looking. Hope everyone is well.