In the northeastern town of Bunia (northeastern DRCongo, that is) 400 or so people have been killed because of the terrible crime of being in the wrong tribe. (Yes, “tribe”, not “ethnic group.” I’ll try not to get sidetracked.) Meanwhile, 1000 UN troops, under the somewhat absurd name of “peacekeepers”, are there. Apparently they are watching. This is the bit that’s unclear to me. They are peacekeepers, but they are not authorized to intervene. Exactly how does one keep the peace without intervening?

Meanwhile, in the hallowed halls of the UN, France is recommending that we send more peacekeepers, who will presumably keep the peace just as effectively as the ones that are there. They think that it will take these additional troops more than 2 months to get to Bunia. Yes, it is difficult to get to Bunia, I’ll gladly grant that. But 2 months? Are they planning to drive from Paris?

I’m becoming increasingly unclear why I used to think that the UN is a good idea. I suppose it could be, if the veto was not quite so frequently used, and if the UN actually did the things that it said it was going to do, rather than standing around meekly hoping that their presence is enough. Seems that the US spends billions of dollars each year to support an organization that is ineffective, and, to a large extent, works against our interests.

The cause of keeping global peace is a noble one, and I’m all for that. But if keeping the peace means that 1000 well armed men (with shiny white tanks even!) stand around while 400+ civilians are brutally raped and hacked to pieces, then I’m not real sure that we have the same notions of what peace looks like.

CNN.com – U.S. rejects Amnesty charge – May. 29, 2003

The U.S. has rejected an accusation from Amnesty International that the U.S.-led war against terror is sowing fear and danger in the name of global security.

OK, so I haven’t read the 311-page document, but, yes, it is clear to me that the US is sowing fear and danger in the name of national security. Oh, did they mean in other countries? I must have misunderstood. I thought they meant here in the good old USA.

Apparently some other folks think so too. I’m glad I’m not the only one.

Of course, I’m being flippant – the abuses going on in the USA are paltry in comparison to the sorts of things that go on in other countries. But, in a nation that was founded on the notion of freedom from tyrany, it is a profoundly troubling trend. Stuff like the Alien and Sedition … um … I mean the Patriot Act really makes me wonder if certain people have paid any attention at all to the lessons that history is supposed to be teaching us.

Well, as The Brain said, when Pinky asked why Brain had hit him on the head, “Time will tell, Pinky, Time will tell.”

Our nation suffers from a great deal of amnesia, with regard to its history. This has been made abundantly clear over the last two years, as we have repeated many of the mistakes of our past, as though we have no recollection of all of this happening before.

However, much of the amnesia results from denial. This generation’s denial is next generation’s amnesia. Rather than avoiding repeating the mistakes of history, we choose to deny that they happened, and thus, when the same situation comes up again, we don’t remember that it happened before, so we do the same thing over again.

Please recall: In 1798, John Adams signed into law The Alien and Sedition Acts. These are widely regarded (by those who have not forgotten history) as some of the worst pieces of legislation to come out of our legislature, ever. To summarize, and grossly oversimplify, they said that foreigners, and other suspicious types, could be treated however we saw fit, arrested and/or deported without cause or trial, and whatever seemed reasonable, in the name of National Security.

So very many of the laws of the last 2 years have reminded me of these acts.

Here’s one. Foreign students must register their presence (ok, I can deal with that) and must report to the federal government all their movements, even if they go on a weekend trip. Failure to do so may cause them to be deported, and may cause the school that they are attending to lose its right to have any foreign students. Yeah. That makes sense. Everyone’s a criminal.

Please recall that one of the big complaints that our Founding Fathers had about the colonial powers was the inability to travel freely without being hassled for their identification papers and travel permits. Free people should have the freedom to travel freely, without being hassled. Been in an airport lately? Everyone’s a criminal, and shall be treated as such. Preferably by folks that look like they’re on the work release program, or, if such are not avaialble, kids that look like they’re out on a hall pass.

Please recall that in the final years of the 1930s, we chose to pretend that the atrocities being reported from certain portions of Europe were not really true. And that in 1993 we chose to believe that the reports of atrocities coming out of Rwanda were not really true. And that last week we chose to believe that the reports of atrocities coming out of the Democratic Republic of Congo were not true. I’ll not take this one too far, because I’ve no wish to invoke the Godwin Law, nor do I wish to suggest that there’s any chance that the UN, the USA, or most anyone else would be able to do much about it. I merely wish to point out that, although I don’t claim to know what the right response is, pretending that it’s not happening is a good solid step in the wrong direction.

Please recall that a mere 45 years ago, schools were segregated in this nation, and men and women and children of African descent were still being lynched for no other crime than the color of their skin, and that these things were viewed, at worst, as embarassing events, or ignored entirely, by the “decent” white folks.

I’m not real sure where I’m going with all of this, other than the fact that I am apalled at the ignorance of *recent* history, let alone somewhat less recent history, that I encounter on a nearly daily basis: Folks that have never heard the abbreviation “USSR”; People who can’t imagine that the US government would “draft” young men into the armed forces; Folks who had no idea who Archduke Ferdinand was, and what connection I was making to the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic earlier this year.

But more than the ignorance of world history and events, the ignorance that our own government seems to have about our history is deeply alarming. Someone needs to get John Ashcroft to sit in on a grade school US History class. Or at least read John Adam’s memoirs. Clearly he does not place the same value on freedom that were cornerstones of our nation from the first days – that much is obvious to anyone that’s paying attention. He’s so caught up in his passionate paranoia that he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s giving away all the best parts of what it means to be an American, in the name of protecting the American way of life. And he can’t see the contradiction inherent to this.

Anyways, I’m rambling, and I need to go to bed. I encourage every US citizen to read David McCullough’s book John Adams. You’ll understand so much more about what our nation is supposed to be about.

Moose, Bourbon, Tim, Ken, and I talked late into the night about various things. It’s really hard to summarize, or even remember, most of these things now. But major topics included political correctness, and the denial of truth that our culture seems to be burying its collective head in.

So, the general idea is that Policital Correctness is built around the idea that nobody should offend anybody else. The fact that this is impossible does not seem to bother the Powers That Be, since denial of reality is a major portion of how this all works.

The surest way to offend someone, it seems is to claim that you know the Truth, and that someone else, whose opinion is out of sync with this Reality, is therefore wrong. Telling someone that they are wrong is a big no-no. Claiming that you know the truth on any matter is therefore also wrong. Accepting multiple mutually-exclusive truths, on the other hand, is perfectly acceptable. This is called “tolerance” rather than the more correct “self delusion” or “logical fallacy”, because either of those would be judgemental, and therefore intolerant.

While it seems that any intelligent person you speak to will deplore this intellectual dishonesty, Moose made the interesting observation that they will only deplore it when it refers to issues on which they don’t have a firm unbending opinion … I mean, know the Truth. So it is very possible that I am practicing exactly the same kind if dishonesty that I am deploring.

The other thing that came up in this context was the idea of authority. Because we cannot know everything, we need to accept the idea that someone is an authority on a particular topic. On #apache yesterday, I told someone that they were wrong about something, and he called me politically incorrect – which, in part, started this train of thought. In this technical matter, which has a clear and indisputable right answer, I was supposed to accept his wrong answer, in tolerance, and not make him feel marginalized for holding a different opinion. This is hogwash. He was wrong, and I was right. But political correctness, which rejects the ideas of wrong and right, also rejects the idea that I could be an authority on the matter, and that he has to accept what I say on the matter, because of my authority.

I was going to write about the idea of denial and amnesia, also, but I’ll have to get back to that when I have more time to collect my thoughts.

At the jeep dealer at 7 this morning for some service. Oil change. Headlight. Rubber bumper on the hood mysteriously missing. And the tach and speedometer occasionally drop out for no apparent reason.

I waited until 8, then walked the half mile or so over to the Idle Hour Barber Shop, only to find it still closed. What is it with this city? Nothing opens until 9 or 10 (except coffee shops and jeep dealers, apparently) and everything is closed by 8 or 9 pm. This is particularly frustrating on Saturdays, when time is so precious, but nothing opens until 10. Of course this encourages creativity.

I suppose I should not write about this, but it steams me quite a bit, and has done for a number of years now. And yesterday I got email (from a list that I have REPEATEDLY asked to get off of, I should note) that just irritated me to the point of having to do something about it.

In the song “Resist”, Rush says: “I can learn to close my eyes To anything but injustice.” I, on the other hand, am less tolerant. Stupidity and bogus logic go on my list as well.

So, here it is.

For a long time (too long) I worked for an organization called NumbersUSA. I should note that when I say “worked for” I don’t mean I was an employee, but that I did contract programming jobs for them through another company. While I was doing it, I had a real problem with the message that they were peddling, and which I, with my programming skills, was promoting. The message, in a nutshell, is that all the problems that we face in the USA are because of immigrants, and that we should not allow any more immigration, or, at the very least, push immigration levels much lower.

This message is patently hogwash. However, even if it had a shred of supporting evidence, they managed to completely alienate me by couching almost all of their messages in racist terms. Of course, they don’t admit that they are being racist, but most racists don’t.

So, anyways, here is the note that I received yesterday. I don’t recommend that you read the whole thing. It is long, rambling, and daft. But I’ll summarize one point.

A border guard was murdered, and it is presumed that it was done by illegal aliens in an attempt to get across the border. This proves conclusively that our immigration policies are too lax, and we should crack down even more on immigration.

Um. Yeah.

The logic in here completely escapes me, and alternate interpretations suggest themselves.

The guard was killed specifically because we have stupid immigration policies, and his death would have been averted if we had an open-border policy like most other modern, civilized nations have with their friendly neighbors.

Or, perhaps …

If our immigration policies are in fact moral, and it is in fact correct that we should keep immigrants on their side of the border, with lethal force if necessary, then surely the people working in these positions should understand that they are combat soldiers, and that casualties happen in that situation.

Or, perhaps …

If we crack down on immigration further, we should certainly expect to see an increase in this type of occurrence, since we will be increasing the tensions, and creating more of a war-like scenario.

Finally, my dear friend Roy Beck claims, in a wild passion, that our own borders (with friendly nations, he fails to mention) have less of a military presence than we have in some foreign nations (with whom we are on somewhat less friendly terms, and are, in some cases, in a state of near-war with) and that this should not be.

Clearly, Roy is living in a different world than I am. The USA has a lower immigration rate than most other developed nations. Nations like Switzerland, understanding that their nation is best served by bringing in the adventurous people around the world with enough chutzpah to leave their home and move somewhere else, actually offer incentives for immigrants. But Roy, under the strange impression that all of the whiteys that he does business with, and who give him large cash donations to keep the [insert favorite racial slur here] at bay, are in fact native residents of this soil and not, in fact (gasp!) immigrants themselves.

When we lost the NumbersUSA contract, I felt an enormous surge of relief — I no longer had to devote my days to supporting something that I felt was grossly immoral. I can tell you numerous stories of things that this organization accomplished, but you might have better luck just reading their web site. I won’t directly link to them, just in case they have the technical know-how to reverse-track to my web site and sue me for slander or something.

I made a comment on IRC today that struck me, after the fact, as being rather profound. Here ’tis:

<Bacchus> Majority rule, except when the minority objects.
<Bacchus> That’s American democracy in a nutshell.

And there you have it.

I’m listening (books on tape) to Mikiwa, by Peter Godwin. It’s an account of growing up in Rhodesia, during the transition from being a british colony, to being an independent, but still british, nation, to being an independent nation ruled by the africans.

This book is making me miss Africa like nothing has done for a long time. This seems strange to me, because not only is Rhodesia/Zimbabwe a radically different place from Kenya, but he’s writing about a period that was at least 15 years before my memories of Kenya – a time when Africa was very different. But, in many ways, his experience was very similar.

I remember the day that President Jomo Kenyatta died. August 22, 1978. So I would have been almost 7. We were having a cookout in the back yard of our house in Kericho. I guess folks knew that he was sick, but I don’t know if he was expected to die right away. He was at his home in Mombasa, and died in his sleep. The VoK (Voice of Kenya) broke into whatever stellar program was going on, and announced that Mzee was dead, and that Daniel arap Moi had assumed the presidency as was his constitutional duty.

The choice of Daniel Moi was always considered – at that time – to be a brilliant political move. Kenyatta was a Kikuyu, the largest tribe in Kenya, and so was wide open to claims of tribal favortism if he had put Kikuyus in key positions. Moi, on the other hand, was Kalenjin – one of the smaller tribes. And he was from the smallest tribe within the Kalenjin. Clearly, this act said, Kenyatta was no respecter of tribe, and was being unbiased in his selections.

I also remember, in those early years of Moi’s rule, how the christian community in Kenya supported him. This was largely because the Africa Gospel Church was based in Moi’s home district, and so got a lot of preferential treatment in land deals, regulations, taxes, etc. Moi was always spoken of as being a good christian man, God-fearing, reliable,trustworthy. However, it seems that after the coup attempt, he realized that he was not universally loved, and decided that he might need to switch to more of an iron-fisted ruling technique in order to keep things in line.

I remember also that when Amnesty International issued statements against the way that Kenya treated political prisoners, and prisoners in general, I was outraged. How dare they make claims like that against my country? Kenya was the model of an African nation, and did everything right, and these claims were absurd. It was not until years later that I realized that not only were their claims true, but they were wildly understated. This was a real blow to my credulity.

Anyways, back to Mukiwa – the thing that rings the truest in this book, so far, is his discription of boarding school. It’s hard to put these sort of things into words, for me. I remember boarding school as a series of brilliant images, but much of it is foggy. He spoke, however, of the Italian POWs, that did so much of the wonderful construction in british colonies in the WWII years. The Italian POWs that were building his school were, at the same time, building, and, more importantly, painting, my school. They drew and painted pictures on the walls of the dormitories. Halfway through one mural in the Little Girls’ dorm, the war ended, and they went home. It has remained in this state of incompletion ever since as a tribute to them.

When Peter leaves the house that he has lived in his whole life, to move to a safer part of the country during the war, he goes on one last trip into the hills. I was reminded so vividly of my last hike up in the Ngnong hills. I remember hiking up to the summit, and that the wind across the crest of the hill was so strong that I leaned out over the edge of the sheer drop and the wind supported me. Suddenly, the wind dropped, and I had to throw myself back to avoid falling. On one side of the hills is the new world – Nairobi and numerous farms – and on the other is the old world – the plains, the Maasai bomas, and savannah to the mountains on the horizon. The hills create a rain shadow that has contributed to this division.

I know that Kenya is very different now, and I don’t know when I will ever get back, but I have these memories, and they are a huge part of who I am,and how I see the world. Books like Mukiwa show mejust how important these memories and attitudes are to me, and how integral they are to my entire self. It is hard, at times, having nobody that really understands these things to talk to, and I’m really looking forward to my brother and sister being here this summer. I’m on a mailing list of alumni from my school in Kenya, but most of them are the next generation, and Kenya was already so different by then that I might as well be on the wrong mailing list.

This book is *highly* recommended for anyone that wants to get a glimpse of the “third culture kid” experience, and how it shapes one’s world view. It is heavily shaded by the british colonial superiority complex, in which the africans are viewed as an inferior people, and, to be honest, this was a large part of my experience too. Like Peter, I both did not understand the attitutde towards these people who were clearly very intelligent, but also accepted the attitude as one of some truth. It is a weird sort of inherited racism that many people are suffused with, and don’t even realize it.

I’m sure I’ll write about this some more, but this is getting rather long, and I need to finish the laundry …

Long ago, I read a book in which the main character’s father worked on the railroad, and had developed a pace where every step was the exact distance between two ties. This mental image always irritates me because that distance is *not* constant, and as soon as you pick up a rythm, you hit a tie that is off by just enough to make you have to reset your pace. And yet, EVERY time I walk on a railroad, that image comes to mind. Even though I have long since forgotten what book it was, which is a large part of the annoyance, come to think of it.

I was wondering if anyone had ever done a parody of Don Quixote, a la Bored Of The Rings, and called it Don Quick Oats. However “Quixote” and “quick oats” give a Googlewhack.