David Brooks has got to go. In yesterday’s New York Times, he wrote that Americans need to be prepared for the atrocities that are likely to happen in Iraq if we’re going to really win.

It’s not that we can’t accept casualties. History shows that Americans are willing to make sacrifices. The real doubts come when we see ourselves inflicting them. What will happen to the national mood when the news programs start broadcasting images of the brutal measures our own troops will have to adopt? Inevitably, there will be atrocities that will cause many good-hearted people to defect from the cause. They will be tempted to have us retreat into the paradise of our own innocence.

Somehow, over the next six months, until the Iraqis are capable of their own defense, the Bush administration is going to have to remind us again and again that Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the war on terror, the crucial turning point where either we will crush the terrorists’ spirit or they will crush ours.

The president will have to remind us that we live in a fallen world, that we have to take morally hazardous action if we are to defeat the killers who confront us. It is our responsibility to not walk away. It is our responsibility to recognize the dark realities of human nature, while still preserving our idealistic faith in a better Middle East.

So the Times is now printing columnists who say we’re going to have to live with these “morally hazardous” actions. I think that’s an outrage, and make a mockery of what Americans (and the Times) supposedly stand for. There is no history of terrorizing civilians as an effective long-term tactic, as even the Israeli military is now saying.

The letter to the editor page is here, for those who want to contact the Times.

For a much better write-up than mine on the topic, check out slacktivist.

That’s my image that made it into a new book on the global demonstrations against war in Iraq called 2/15: The Day the World Said No to War. I went to a reception tonight at the Goethe Institute to celebrate the release of the book. The web site for the project is here.

OK. Who thinks we’re going to have a real election in 2004 if major networks aren’t allowed to do a mini-series about Reagan unless it is hagiographic?

We don’t have a real media at this point except for out of the mainstream magazines like The Nation that cannot compete with the big networks and newspapers. If they didn’t bother to question Bush during the first election about anything — his Viet Nam record, his corrupt business practices, etc. — do you think his Democratic opponent will have a chance when the GOP will argue that questioning the President during a war is unpatriotic?

As I heard Mark Crispin-Miller say last night, if Ralph Nader had never been born George W. Bush would still be our President. The kicked thousands of people off the voter rolls illegally in Florida (see Greg Palast), and the Supreme Court had his father’s appointees make sure the election went to the person with fewer popular votes.

The idea that people are offended when Reagan is portrayed as indifferent to people with AIDS is laughable. The first time he said the word was 1987, and by that point at least 25,000 Americans had died of AIDS.

In a portion of the script published in The New York Times last month, Reagan was depicted as uncaring and judgmental toward people with AIDS. “They that live in sin shall die in sin,” Reagan’s character tells his wife as she begs him to help AIDS victims.

Here is a quote via 365Gay.com

In “Dutch,” Reagan’s authorized biography, the author, Edmund Morris, writes that Reagan once said of AIDS, “Maybe the Lord brought down this plague,” because “illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments.”

Reagan, you will remember, divorced his first wife to marry Nancy. Illicit sex, indeed.

New ones are on the web site. A sample:

Please see Mr. Ashcroft for permission to exercise your First Amendment rights.

Anticipating this, groups are meeting every day to plan the great demonstration against Bush and the war at the Republican convention next summer.

…

Back here in the city, he works on plans for what he and everybody thinks will be the biggest of political demonstrations.

“People hate this war,” he says. “I don’t know how Bloomberg got in there with them, but now he is going to get driven out, too.”

Dobbs was involved in the peace demonstration last February when the police and a federal court judge, Barbara Jones, who committed a thoroughly suspicious act, collaborated on treating nearly a million New Yorkers as potential criminals. That day, Bloomberg tried to act as if he didn’t even know a march was on.

This time it is totally different. Dobbs reports that the police told him that applications should be made to the Secret Service. That puts Ashcroft in charge of thwarting the demonstration. The same Ashcroft who will be inside Madison Square Garden being welcomed by the Mayor of the City of New York, Mike Bloomberg. That is more than enough to blow Bloomberg and all his color pamphlets out of the job.

Two U.S. Army soldiers, of Charlie company, 1-22 Infantry regiment, 4th Infantry Division, look inside the pockets of an unidentified Iraqi boy while patroling a street in Tikrit, 193 km (120 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2003. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev)

To quote our glorious leader:

I will repeat myself, that the more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become, because they can’t stand the thought of a free society. They hate freedom. They love terror. They love to try to create fear and chaos.

The press release with the list of artists is out. Am I too connected, or is the Whitney being insufficiently daring? Should there really only be a couple of names I don’t know on the list? This isn’t even my line of work.

One more thought. I was amused when the Times article said this.

Two years ago, while Ms. Iles was in charge of its film and video and Debra Singer, the Whitney’s associate curator of contemporary art, selected the performance and sound art, the biennial was primarily put together with one pair of eyes, those of Lawrence R. Rinder, the Whitney’s curator of contemporary art. Critics felt it tried too hard to look for little-known artists whose work turned out to be unremarkable.

I thought that show had too many people I had heard of already, rather than too many “obscure” ones.

Marie Coco has a nice summary in today’s Newsday of answers for Rumsfeld’s memo — all from Senator Bob Graham’s Oct. 10, 2002 speech on why he opposed the Iraq attack.

The religious right, including the president and his brother in Florida, believe that gay adoptions are a threat to the sanctity of good Christian American families. I think these nice church-going people are doing enough damage without any help from us homos. These people were getting money from their church, which they drove 30 miles each way to attend to help pay their rent.

Come Alive New Testament Church
The Jackson family. Bruce, middle row, second from right; Keith, bottom left; Michael, bottom center; Tyronne, behind Keith.

Bruce Jackson was found rooting through his neighbors’ garbage, so weak from starvation that he could not open the Tastykake that the shocked couple had given him out of pity.

Two weeks later, investigators and neighbors are still trying to make sense of two sharply contrasting realities: four adopted youngsters starving in plain sight and a family that was widely seen as loving and deeply religious.

…

The Jacksons are in jail in Camden County, charged with starving and neglecting the 4-foot, 19-year-old Bruce and three other boys adopted from the New Jersey foster care system — Michael, 9, Tyronne, 10, and Keith, 14 — so seriously that none of them weighed more than 50 pounds when they were found by the police.

…

Bruce, who was adopted eight years ago, when he was 11, was taken from his biological family because they were also starving him, according to case files at the Division of Youth and Family Services. At the time, he suffered from medical ailments caused by the lack of food.

…

Still, though the children were homeschooled, they were not hidden away. The parents drove the 30 miles from their home here to the Come Alive New Testament Church in Medford every Sunday.

…

To Pastor Thomas and the congregation, the abuse allegations are impossible to fit with the image of the struggling family that always had a small donation for the collection plate when it came around but needed help from the church to pay for its electricity and rent.

…

“I have told many people that I have never seen that many kids together be so good. I never saw them fighting, and I never saw them arguing, and I said, ‘Wow, every family should be like that.’ "

…

Ed Cotton, the director of the Division of Youth and Family Services, met with Bruce Jackson on Sunday at the hospital where he is being treated and was given a very different picture of his life than the pastor did.

Mr. Cotton said that it did not appear that Bruce Jackson had any friends. “I asked him whether he went to church or not. He said that he was not allowed to go because he was bad — because he liked TV earlier in life, one of his big punishments was that he was made to sit in front of the TV for hours with it off. Stuff that doesn’t make sense.”

Mr. Cotton said the children may not have understood that they were being mistreated.

“I think these kids were convinced by the foster parents that they had eating disorders,” he said.

Mr. Cotton continued, “These are bright kids, they read well, they’re smart, they’re polite, and I think they’re realizing what happened was not anywhere near the norm.”

…

Chief Thomas J. Garrity Jr. of the Collingswood Police Department said Monday that Bruce emptied a box of cereal after he arrived at the station.

He was photographed holding the empty box, and clutching a stuffed tiger that is kept on hand to comfort young abused children.

Bruce, the one mentioned at the end of the article, is 19.

—

UPDATED: Here is a good article on the GOP’s plans to use gay marriage as a major issue in the 2004 elections.

That’s an odd bit of casting. Worth Street Theatre is going to present Lea DeLaria as Winnie in Beckett’s “Happy Days.”

For other Beckett, I highly recommend seeing Beckett/Albee with Marian Seldes and Brian Murray. For discount tickets, use this link, or call 212-947-8844 and mention code: BATMC79.

Also, the BBC did a very interesting set of films of Beckett works, including the three monologues in Beckett/Albee.