Saturday, 20Jan07

Highlights: Barack Obama, trip reports, Tom Delay & War Profiteers

Lisa & Lydia are both sick. Taking medication to put the dysenteri down for good is keeping poor Lisa in a state of semi-exhaustion, and Lydia is battling a cyclical fever.

The energy may be low, but the spirits were high to read about Barack Obama’s background after his announcement this week to seek the Democratic nomination in U.S. Presidential elections which are 2 years away. (= It’s funny to see how many people are charged up about a man they know little about. That’s the definition of “buzz”,,, isn’t it?

Lisa ran out & scoured Jakarta bookstores until she found his book.
One thing I like about Obama is that he has life experience living outside of America. Reading about other countries is great, and makes a lot of people feel like they know something about other places in the world. Changing your home base for a while, and seeing your own country from the outside in is a very different experience. My best analogy for it is driving a car for the first time.

A 16 year old has been in and out of the passenger seat for years, to the point where a car feels like a natural environment. The first day anyone straps themselves in behind the steering wheel,,, that once familiar environment suddenly feels quite foreign, and sometimes scary. It’s a shift of a few feet, but the perspective is completely different.

So… I like that Obama has the perspective of having seen America from the outside in. To my knowledge, few of the other candidates have that experience. I hope it would make a future President more capable of relating to others well in an increasingly international community.
I also like that talk of an Obama ticket seems much more focused on his talents & grace than on his minority status and skin color.

After conversation break, it was right back to the laptop & notes section for me. I moved my base of operations to the dining room table to spread out a little more. I’ve got my note pads out, 3 books open, scribblings from websites all over the place,,, ugh. Trying to come up with a professional product here. I’m on page 15, and I’ve got 3 cities left to describe in my report!

By night time we were all ready for a break, and popped in two documentary DVDs that Lydia picked up.
The Big Buy traced the controversy surrounding former Congressman Tom Delay, from Sugarland, Texas. I had followed some of the controversy in the news over the last 2 years, but it was interesting to see it all put together. I think the beauty of corporate & political scandal is that the bulk of the American people don’t understand it. How are we supposed to draw connections from $190,000 checks bouncing from DC to Austin with Texas redistricting, and the House Majority Leaders office? I had to explain where the crime was to Lydia as we were watching the video. Texas law doesn’t allow corporate money in state elections. The ugliest side came out with the partisan and personal attacks on the integrity of the Attorney General, Ronnie Earl, I thought. That’s business as usual these days. Politics doesn’t leave room for average guys in the middle. You’re either a hero or a bastard. All left or all right. With us or against us. I think a long time of basking in the rays of power has made some of our political figures pretty arrogant. I’ll be an equal opportunity finger pointer on that accusation. (= All the same… watching what people do with their political power is interesting and entertaining.

The War Profiteers was a brutal look at the nature of commerce and national security, as we are practicing it today. I had already seen some of the main arguments in another thought provoking documentary I liked (Why We Fight: based on President Eisenhower’s farewell speech in 1960, where he coined the phrase “industrial military complex”). Anyways- this documentary veered in a slightly different direction, exposing an ugly element of big business jostling for big money contracts from the U.S. government and DoD, often uncontested, and placing profit above the care for human life or efficient management of wartime efforts in Iraq, or even the efficient use of federal money. The complexity of contracts and the opaque ways our government dishes out money makes this process difficult to understand as well.

I don’t want to be the naïve pawn of anyone’s propaganda, but I will say that both documentaries were interesting. I can imagine my ultra republican USINDO friend, Christian Waugh, rolling his eyes at me now (= sorry bud! just callin' em as i see them.

maybe you can balance me out with some Republican propaganda, which i would assume you might entitle "the truth" or something like that (= just kidding!