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by Hugh Cook |
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Section 108 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 May 06 Thursday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) A working day. The early afternoon found me sitting in a cream-gray room with a view of a gray stretch of harbor water calm beneath a gray sky. The view beyond the water: gray Tokyo office blocks and construction cranes. In the course of the day, remote from the world of babies, life stabilized by a timetable, I found time to write a Tokyo micro-poem:- |
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Is dressed for stability. |
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A gray flat day of routine tasks and toy challenges. ("I'm sending it as an atachment, it's Acrobat - can you open Acrobat?" "Yes, no problem.")
And, finding myself with time on my hands, the kind of big city time that you find in transit on the subway, or taking a coffee break in the interval between two geographically discontinuous assignments, I took the opportunity to do a little more emotional processing of recent events, producing a poem:- Birth on Planet Gravity Lifestyle hint for anyone planning on getting reincarnated: whatever you do, don't make the mistake of getting yourself born in an understaffed Japanese hospital over the weekend. (The one bright point of this particular birth experience was that nobody died.) Section 108 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 May 07 Friday (at 06:32 Japan time). (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Switched on the TV this morning and was surprised to see George W. Bush apologizing. Two things surprised me about the apology. The first was that he made it at all. The second was that the George W. Bush apology has to be one of the most grudging, graceless apologies in the history of the human race, a kind of "Goddamit I hate to do this but they've got a gun to my head" apology. A day or two back we saw an exemplary apology from one of George's military commanders in Iraq, direct, without reservation, serious, and communicating sincerity. And the apology in no way diminished the man. But what does George himself do? He ambles out into the camera someplace and tells us about how he spoke with King Abdullah II of Jordan and told him about how sorry he was. apology details I mean, that's not how you do it. "I heard my brother ran over your dog with his motorbike and I'd like you to know that I've told my teddy bear how sorry I am about it." That's not an acceptable way to handle things. And George messes up further by adding a bit about how he told the king that he, George, is sorry about how ... forget the exact words, but it's something like how George is sorry that people have gotten the wrong idea of the American people as a consequence of this. "I also told teddy that I'm sorry that this motorbike incident gives people the wrong idea of our family." The president has great speech writers and I'm sure that if he'd said to them "Go write me a wholehearted apology" then they'd have done exactly that, and, with a little last-minute coaching from his voice therapy people, George could have gone in front of the cameras and given one of history's best-ever apologies. But he evidently didn't want to do that. His "Gee, but I just hate going to the dentist" reluctance is all too obvious. In terms of fixing things up with the Iraqi people, the Arab world and anyone else on the planet who might be interested, this apology just doesn't do it. Later:- In the above, no disrespect is intended to Jordan's king, who, as far as I know from the little I've read about him (and I'll confess to an advanced degree of ignorance here) is a competent ruler who is doing his best to deliver responsible leadership to his nation. I certainly don't believe that the king is in anyway to be considered to be George Bush's pawn or plaything. The point being made is that you can't really apologize to X, Y and Z by saying "Oh, I just went and apologized to Mr K." I'm sure George Bush is fully aware of this, so his graceless performance presumably flows from the fact that he quite simply doesn't want to apologize. And I suspect that he somehow finds it easier to apologize to a king ("I'm a president and I apologize to kings") rather than to all the other people he should be apologizing to. Like a certain Iraqi lady, for example. The following showed up in today's morning paper and really made my eyes bug (and I thought I was beyond astonishment):- |
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Just when you thought things couldn't get worse, the Associated Press reports from London that "U.S. soldiers who detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey." - Maureen Dowd, from an opinion piece published in the International Herald Tribune 2004 May 07 on page 7 of the (English-language) Japanese edition under the headline "So many parties, it's just torture". |
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Looking on the Internet, I find that apparently the source for the "ridden like a donkey" story is British Prime Minister Tony Blair's personal human rights envoy to Iraq, a woman by the name of Ann Clwyd. And guess what? The woman who was ridden like a donkey has relatives in Britain. The fallout just spreads and spreads.
And much later:- After thinking about the above, I decided that what the world needs right now is at least one fictional Abu Ghraib prison story However, I don't have time to write it. So today's experiment in literary form is a do-it-yourself prison story (This gives a whole new meaning to the term "economy of effort.) Update 2004 May 08: found the Bush "apology" online at:- www.cbc.ca/stories/2004/05/06/rumsfeld040506 as follows:- |
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Standing in the White House Rose Garden alongside Jordan's King Abdullah II, Bush said he told the King "I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families."
"I told him I was as equally sorry that people seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America," Bush said. |
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