Section 19 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 February 25 Tuesday.
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Salam, in Baghdad, has got some recent photographs of Iraq on his website - the Iraq he lives in. These photos were posted in the last twenty-four hours or so, together with a commentary which includes the following statement made about a particular shrine:-

It is a beautiful shrine, if I were ever asked to name 5 most interesting public spaces in the world I'm putting the inner courtyard of the Khadim shrine in that list. You don't have to be in there to pray or anything, there are huge niches within the wall and you can sit there for hours Raed, I and G. (who is a Christian) go there very often and when we have nothing to talk about we go into the main shrine building, take our shoes off and sit by the wall watching people pray, read the Koran

... and it makes me remember (at a time like this, every single fact about planet Earth relates to every other fact) the words that Ezra Pound wrote about those who died in the First World War, this monument in a fragment:-

Bright eyes under the earth's lid

.... and the person I heard quoting Ezra Pound, some years ago now, this person broke down and wept ... the war deaths pass their suffering down through the generations ....

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Section 19 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 February 26 Wednesday.
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Today, at the English class I taught this morning in Tokyo, I did something which, every time I do it, always strikes me as being a little bit bizarre. Even though I don't question the necessity of doing it.

Question: how many feet are there in a yard? Question: one thousand seven hundred and sixty yards make one what? Question: how many millimeters are there in an inch? Question: if you're driving at fifty miles an hour, how many kilometers an hour is that, roughly?

It's important to know this stuff. If you're flying into America and the pilot tells you that the temperature in Washington is a hundred degrees, you need to know whether that's hot enough for things to start catching fire. A temperature of thirty-two degrees (Centigrade) would be a reasonably hot day in Japan but "Thirty two degrees," if it's degrees Fahrenheit, means precisely at freezing point.

The importance of getting a grip on this stuff really came home to me after a NASA spacecraft made an embarrassing crash landing on Mars. The reason? Engineers in two different countries (one of which was America) made different assumptions about whether they were dealing with metric measurements or old-fashioned measurements like inches, feet, yards and miles. (As far as I know, in that case all the engineers involved were native speakers of English.)

So, believing this subject to be important, I teach transcultural measurements (my term for the topic, invented just now) and teach them enthusiastically. (I could always sidestep the subject if I really didn't want to teach it.) Even so, the fact that it's necessary to teach this stuff in today's world always seems a bit weird.

When I was a kid growing up in New Zealand, we still used this old-fashioned "one mile equals 1,760 yards" stuff. In addition, we still used pounds, shillings and pence. (A system in which twelve pennies make one shilling, twenty shillings make a pound, and twenty-one shillings make a guinea.)

But then New Zealand went metric. While I was growing up, the currency switched to dollars and cents, the temperature changed from Fahrenheit to Centigrade, the speed limits changed from miles per hour to kilometers per hour, and things started getting weighed in grams and kilograms rather than pounds and ounces.

And that's how it is pretty much all over the world. As far as I know, just about the whole planet has embraced the metric system, the French Revolution's gift to humanity at large. The sole significant exception is America, a huge anomaly on the global scene ....

(Actually, I think I read somewhere that officials in the United States are planning, at least theoretically, to make the switch to the metric system. But the date for doing this keeps getting deferred into the future, and the nice thing about the future, if you're in the mood for deferring, is that it's pretty much infinite.)

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Today's useful facts: there are 640 acres in one square mile and one hectare is 2.471 acres.)

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Section 19 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 February 27 Thursday.
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While our attention has been distracted by the war, the Bush administration has been continuing to pursue other matters on its agenda, with consequences which may lead to more deaths than the war itself. Cheap drugs for the poor? Market access for poor farmers? Hell, no. Neither.

On Wednesday, the US took a decisive step towards the destruction of the World Trade Organization. The WTO's current trade round collapsed in Seattle in 1999 because the poor nations perceived that it offered them nothing, while granting new rights to the rich world's corporations. It was relaunched in Qatar in 2001 only because those nations were promised two concessions: they could override the patents on expensive drugs and import cheaper copies when public health was threatened, and they could expect a major reduction in the rich world's agricultural subsidies. At the WTO meeting in Geneva last week, the US flatly reneged on both promises.

The above is from an article by George Monbiot apparently published in The Guardian (in the UK) on 2003 February 25 Tuesday, meaning that "On Wednesday" refers to Wednesday 20th.

Today 2003 February 27 (Japan time) this article is available on the site www.commondreams.org under the heading "George Monbiot: By Tearing Up the Global Rulebook, the US is in Fact Undermining Its Own Imperial Rule..."

The same news is covered from a different angle by Michael Tomasky, a political columnist for New York magazine, who touches on the promise-breaking at the WTO in an article available on the www.prospect.org site, site of TAP, or The American Prospect. The link to Tomasky's article is here. Writing about "Former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.)", who seems to be a presidential candidate, Tomasky says, in part:-

WHILE NO ONE WAS WATCHING. On the President's Day holiday, Dean delivered an excellent foreign-policy speech -- specific, full of purpose and logical intention -- that can be dismissed as dovish only if you believe that desiring some measure of multilateral support before going to war makes one the moral equivalent of Neville Chamberlain. (You can read the speech here.) Multilateral, in Bush's Washington, has become a dirty word, despite the fact that most Americans consistently support multilateralism. I wonder how these same Americans would regard the news that last week, during a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, the Bush administration unilaterally shot down a long-sought agreement to allow poor nations to buy pharmaceuticals at cut-rate prices. (In December, TAP Online published this piece about how the United States continues to prevent poor countries from buying generic AIDS drugs, privileging the interests of pharmaceutical companies over the lives of Third World patients.)

The WTO's 144 member nations had agreed in Qatar in 2001 to loosen patent laws so that poor countries could buy cheap versions of pharmaceuticals capable of treating a broad range of diseases. Last December the Bush administration backed out. Guess which industry donated $60 million to the Republican Party in the last elections? After a stink was raised by member nations, Bush trade rep Robert Zoellick offered a "compromise" that was, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "essentially a unilateral implementation of the American negotiating position." And the reason I quote the Journal? It was the only major American newspaper to cover the story.

I think that's as far as I'm going to go today. It's the small hours of the morning here in Japan, and time for me to sleep. In closing, I'd like to warmly recommend the www.prospect.org site.

It's very, very easy to research the latest WTO news just by going to Google news and punching "wto geneva" into the search box.

.... it's now morning in America, about 11:30 A.M. in fact, meaning that George Bush will be awake while I am sleeping, so god knows what will have happened to the planet by the time I wake up again.

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Section 19 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 February 27 Thursday.
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This morning, CNN had a little segment on the wit and wisdom of protest signs, for example "How many lives per gallon?" and "Read between the pipelines". The best jokes come out of the worst situations, and this one really cracked me up: "Who would Jesus bomb?"

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"It cracked me up" - in idiomatic New Zealand English, this means "It made me laugh." And we're talking about major laughter here. If you asked me to make a judgment call, I would say that this was a uniquely New Zealand expression. But it's not ... or is it?

Checking, I find "crack up" in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language with the example "really cracked up when I heard that joke" and I find "crack up" also in The New Oxford Dictionary of English glossed as "informal" and defined as "burst into laughter".

So, in both British and American English, you can say (informally) "I cracked up" to mean "I laughed out loud, heartily." But can you say (in either UK or USA English) "It cracked me up" to mean "It made me laugh heartily"? Even after checking with my two largest dictionaries, I still don't know.

The simple solution is to check with a native speaker of American English and with a speaker of British English who grew up in Britain, something I can reasonably expect to be able to do some time during the next seven days.

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Update later in February 2003: I now have a Canadian informant who informs me that "as a Canadian, I am familiar with" the phrase "it cracked me up" ... thanks, Ellen ... so it's obviously not a uniquely New Zealand expression, though if you'd asked me last year then I would have sworn that it was.

Update to the update, March 2003: I found an American informant who was very positive that, yes, "it cracked me up" is normative American English ... to tell the truth, I'm never particularly happy to find that what I'd assumed to be a unique New Zealand idiom turns out to be everyone's English ....

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Section 19 Entry 0005. Date: 2003 February 27 Thursday.
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Right now I'm watching George W. Bush on CNN. He's speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, and I have to say, that, as an English teacher, I'm impressed with his steady progress toward native speaker competence.

(I always get confused by the business of the International dateline, but I think this speech is being made in America on the evening of 2003 February 26 Wednesday, at which point it's already broad daylight on Thursday 27th here in Japan.)

Considered from a technical point of view, this is actually a pretty good piece of public speaking. From the point of view of logic, however, the speech is a bit weak, heavily relying on the power of "could" when it talks about the dangers of "this direct and growing threat" - Saddam Hussein.

Bush speaks about the people of Iraq and "the nightmare world that Saddam Hussein has chosen for them". I have no doubt that Saddam Hussein is a creature of nightmare and that he has blood on his hands, but I do not think that he is the only one.

Yesterday I was reading some of the latest postings on the site of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq, and one that I chose to download was "Take the War-on-Iraq IQ Test". This really seized my attention:-

32. Q: How many Iraqis are estimated to have died by October 1999 as a result of UN sanctions?

A: 1.5 million

33. Q: How many Iraqi children are estimated to have died due to sanctions since 1997?

A: 750,000

I know for a fact that United Nations sanctions - your sanctions, my sanctions, our sanctions - have killed people. I know this because Britain's Prime Minister Blair, in a recent speech, highlighted the horrors of sanctions as he tried to make the case for war.

(Looking at the phrase, "the horrors of sanctions," I find it looks a bit strong to me. But why is that? By an act of democratic will, the civilized world has chosen to starve to death a large number of civilians who have been held prisoner by a dictator whom they, the starving, lack the power to overthrow ... why does that somehow seem, even to me, even now, to be in some way normative rather than horrific? What kind of culture is it that has created me?)

.... now Bush has just said of Saddam Hussein that "he's capable of anything," and I find myself automatically thinking, "Yeah, and he's not the only one!" ....

Also amongst the postings on the site of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq there is a piece with the title "Rana's Story," which is a speech made at Tufts University by Rana Abdul-Aziz, an Iraqi-American student.

The speech, which is well worth reading in full, ends like this:-

Now many people claim that this war will be fought to liberate the Iraqis and democracy will come and this terrible man will be gone. While we, as Iraqis and Iraqis who are in the diaspora, have all been yearning for Saddam's demise (since we are the ones who have tasted the fear and terror of Saddam Hussein), most of us are aware that our liberty and a democratic future are not at the top of the U.S. wish list in Iraq, if there at all. We have seen and heard too much to fall for this line. If a war is waged, let's be honest and say that it will be for oil and American dominion in the Middle East, and not to liberate us Iraqis. The list of the potential men who will be Iraq's leaders are criminals. They make Saddam Hussein look good! We see the gap between words and deeds among those who proclaim to be our champions and potential liberators.

George W. Bush has made really great strides as a public speaker. He's obviously put a lot of effort into upgrading his speaking skills. Furthermore, he has top level speech writers. The problem is, however, that Bush has the slogans but he doesn't have the solutions.

The problems for which no solution has been advanced are the following:-

• After Bush has bombed Iraq, how does he propose to feed the twenty-two million people of Iraq? Roughly half these people are children, and many are already seriously malnourished. I am confident that I personally could survive a couple of weeks without food, but someone who is already on the edge of starvation may not be able to do that. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Bush spoke of "three million emergency rations". He did not define his terms, so it is not clear whether this means "three million meals" or "three million one-day ration packs". But, unless my calculator has just gone and joined the highly popular Liars of the World Club, "three million rations" divided by twenty-two million Iraqis divided by fourteen days works out as 0.009740259 rations per Iraqi per day over two weeks. In effect, Bush has confessed on TV that America cannot feed Iraq.

• What, if anything, is going to stop a war between Turkey and between the self-governing Kurds who have formed their own de facto state in the north of Iraq?

• Who, if anyone, is going to establish a democracy which will satisfy Iraq's Shi'a Muslims and Iraq's Sunni Muslims? At the moment, the Sunni minority dominates the Shi'a majority. Does George Bush have any plan to change this? (Complicating factor: neighboring Iran has a Shi'a majority, and Iran is not exactly America's friend.)

• Who gets the oil?

Well, to sum up - good speech, George, but color me unpersuaded.

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Link to full text of George W. Bush's speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday 26 February 2003 (American time) - text is on the Capitol Hill Blue site which exists, apparently, "Because nobody's life, liberty or property is safe while Congress is in session," and the link to the speech (complete with the "three million rations" statement) is here.

(To find the "three million rations" statement search for "3 million" not "three million".)

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