Here’s Brian Eno (yeah, that Brian Eno) in an essay in The Guardian called “Lessons in how to lie about Iraq”:

How exactly did it come about that, in a world of Aids, global warming, 30-plus active wars, several famines, cloning, genetic engineering, and two billion people in poverty, practically the only thing we all talked about for a year was Iraq and Saddam Hussein? Was it really that big a problem?

(This month, by the way, is the 30th anniversary of Eno’s album Here Come The Warm Jets; read M. Ace’s blog entry on “a Jackson Pollock painting rendered as a sculpture in motion.” And in a couple of years it’ll be Another Green World‘s turn!)

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Sometimes “tyrannical dictators” speak the truth:

KCNA, North Korea’s official news agency, said… that Rumsfeld’s “outbursts … can not be construed (other) than a desperate shrill cry of a psychopath on his death bed.”

KCNA accused Rumsfeld and other “neo-conservatives”… of “wantonly harassing peace and security in different parts of the world and igniting wars.”

“He is cursed and hated worldwide for this,” KCNA said in North Korea’s harshest personal attack on a U.S. official since it called Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton “human scum” in August for calling North Korean leader Kim Jong Il a “tyrannical dictator.”

“Rumsfeld, whose political faith is to establish the U.S.-style world order by strength, is known to be a typical stupid man for professing ‘neo-conservatism’ censured and mocked at worldwide,” the KCNA’s official English translation said.

I certainly can’t disagree. My favorite part, though, is the AP reporter’s sentence the quotation above:

North Korea, whose media regularly churn out anti-American vituperations, is especially thin-skinned when outsiders attack its political leadership.

How about: “The United States, whose media regularly churn out anti-North Korean vituperations, is especially thin-skinned when outsiders attack its political leadership?” (Substitute “Iraqi,” “Libyan,” “Palestinian,” “Chinese,” “Afghani,” “Cuban,” etc. for “North Korean” as needed.)

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“Poor sad Dad. What a bad day Dad had” — or something to that effect, from Dr. Seuss’s Hop On Pop.

Or more precisely, a bad week: to add to my general state of anxiety, a pile of ungraded ethnographic description papers, unprepared assignments and quizzes, an unwritten speech, a looming deadline for a grant proposal that will never be funded, another impending deadline for a paper proposal for a conference I’m almost 99% sure I’m not attending, a bout with a cough and a cold, and having to tend to a sick child (Izzy obviously got sick too), my poor clunker of a car failed its smog test for the first time. Right after I already spent good money on a new muffler too. (The adventure isn’t over: I still have to get it tested next week — and I’m already accruing late fees on my registration renewal — after getting a new catalytic converter and thermostat.) Most of my non-teaching days this week were then spent either sitting on a bus or waiting in a coffee shop.

On the bright side, my Califone (see below) arrived this week, and so did a little slew of records, including a 45 by the Dynasouls (or the Pinoy Beatles), with Tagalog versions of “Ticket to Ride” and “She Loves You.” Rock!

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Forget the snide comments — sorry, Happy, but I had to use you as an example — forget her ultra-privileged background, forget the kikayness, forget the fact that we don’t have all the information yet. The salient fact, at least to me, is this: that Kris Aquino walked away from an abusive relationship.

Here’s the transcript from the infamous interview with Korina Sanchez, as well as her own comments on her blog.

As she said in her interview:

Ako handa akong panagutan ang mga pangyayari. Ako handang tumayo, handa akong humarap, handa akong sabihin ang katotohanan kahit na mawala na sa akin ang lahat. You keep saying you are prepared to lose everything Joey, but you don’t have the balls to say the truth.

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The other day I received, via the Flips list, a mass e-mail message from E.R. Escober, author of Not My Bowl of Rice, a book I still have yet to read. Included in the thank you note (which I’m posting here without permission) — it was for a reading at the SF Public Library, which I didn’t get to attend — was this:

Special thanks to Pres. and Mrs. Bush who requestedfor a copy of the book (& sent mea nice,personalized thank you note for it) . Perhaps they requested copies of all exisiting Filipino/ Fil-Am books to acquaint themselve with our culture, etc for their forthcoming visit to the Philippines.

We-hell.

Mr. Bush, may I suggest, as first on your list, The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance, edited by Daniel Schirmer and Stephen Shalom? The title will put you off, I know, but it has short pieces in it — perfect for bedtime reading just before you nod off to sleep. And perfect for people with short attention spans like you! (I’d bet, though, that you’ll probably read Stanley Karnow’s In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines instead — it’s a lot more reassuring of America’s “good motives” regarding its colonial empire.)

But there’s always Raymond Bonner’s Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy, or maybe James Hamilton-Paterson’s America’s Boy: A Century of Colonialism in the Philippines, just to bring you up to speed on the feller your dad praised for his “adherence to democratic principles.”

And these are just books you can get pretty easily in the U.S. via Amazon.com — no need to send your flunkies on a hunt for Filipino bookstores in the U.S. (though it’s probably a lot easier than, say, finding WMDs in Iraq).

And if non-fiction isn’t your thing — it might be a little too heavy, and too close to, um, reality — then maybe some poetry instead? Here’s the last stanza from the late Alfrredo Navarro Salanga’s “War, Like Fever,” found in Luis Francia and Eric Gamalinda’s Flippin’: Filipinos on America:

So must you clinic the world
and make us patients of your peace,
a strange love that breeds sanitation
but without sanity, the last physic
gulped by the physician, the majesty
of his cure more fearful
   than the pox itself.

Anyone else have any recommendations for George Bush? (And make the readings simple, folks — we’re talking a C-average here!) (No offense to E.R. Escober, by the way.)

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