Let Freedom Ring

The US has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world:


See full report here; the report says that rates of imprisonment throughout the so-called developing Third World are much lower.

Someone in Duluth, MN Had Somethin' to Say

Someone had somethin' to say in Duluth, a town of approx. 87,000 on the North Shore of Lake Superior in northern Minnesota.

This marquee is right on the main drag downtown.








Went up there on a little vacation with my little one, who's playing below in the snow.















Though I try not to use the term "fascism" so loosely, I like the feisty marquee quite a bit. I appreciate it as a real sign of the (finally!) growing degree of disgust with the Bush administration in the US.

Books on Complicity and Duplicity in the Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Anyone wanting to understand Western complicity and duplicity about its role in the making of the modern Middle East and the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism (in large part the effect of the West's free-market-for-multinational-coporations and access-to-energy-reserves fundamentalism), should read the following two books:

Tariq Ali's The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity and Robert Fisk's more recently published, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East.

Ali's book is shorter, while Fisk's is a monumental tome written by a veteran foreign correspondent and anti-war activist. Both men are veteran authors and activists, while Fisk has been and continues to be present in many of the hot spots around the world in which the West and its Other confront each other.

If you have time for only one book, then read Ali's book. If you are really pressed for time, then skip the first section (all of its chapters) and jump straight into the second, though the first section--mostly a personal narrative of Ali's life that is meant to orient your reading of his perspective on the rise of Western and Islamic fundamentalisms as a writer who is an insider and outsider to both Western and Muslim society--is interesting.

Both books are written with vivid and evocative prose full of witty turns of phrases, and are full of anecdotes or story-telling moments that illustrate the reality behind the facts of Western complicity and duplicity about its role in the making of the contemporary Middle East and Muslim world. They often do so from the most grassroots of perspectives, illustrating everyday life and experience on the ground in world wide hot spots--both joys and despairs--along the way. Most importantly, both authors eloquently illustrate how the current War on Terror is the story of two evil genies who keep trying to force each other back into the bottle from which they sprang, while at the same time they continue to rub the bottle's side. Trapped in the middle are those who have tried to make a (secular) solution in opposition to both of each of the genie's faiths in (market and Islamic) fundamentalism.

The current War on Terror is nothing more than a dead end or a formula for endless war from which profits are made and ideoligical capital gained at the expense of the victims of collatoral damage who, now and then, rise from the rubble to make their voices heard. These two books are a register of what many of those collatorally-dieing-and/or-suffering voices are trying to say: No to Islamic fundamentalism and NO to Western, market-fundamentalism as well.

See the post just below this one for more on Fisk's and Ali's books.