The Cherry Orchard

I’m glad to hear I’ve got some faithful readers here at the Orchard. A few friends have asked me why I’ve posted so infrequently, and in fact there’s a good reason. I’m doing a special project on LitKicks, an inquiry into the question “Does Literary Fiction Suffer from Dysfunctional Pricing?“. It’s been a very lively debate, so lively that it’s really sapped my stamina for the kind of politically-minded or philosophical debates we often have here. I also haven’t been able to pay attention to some recent news developments and subjects I would usually cover.

For instance, I didn’t post anything about this year’s United Nations General Assembly, even though it had been one of my original intentions here to blog about the United Nations (well, hell, somebody’s got to). This doesn’t mean I have lost interest in that subject; it just means I couldn’t pay close enough attention this year to have anything useful to say.

If you’ve found the political inquiries and discussions we’ve had in the past here interesting, though, I’d suggest you pop over to LitKicks and check out the very intense discussion we’re having about book pricing, book industry habits and hardcover vs. paperback demographics. In a way, I’ve begun this project because I want to see how such an organized inquiry proceeds, and the mission of this literary project is very much aligned with the mission of the political inquiries we’ve conducted here.

Which is all meant to say: don’t worry that Levi Asher has abandoned the Cherry Orchard. I’m just busy in a different orchard for the moment, but I’ll be back soon, and there’s plenty to talk about.

I don’t usually read Harper’s Magazine (though I usually mean to) but I was attracted to the June cover, which asks the question “How to Repair Eight Years of Sabotage, Bungling and Neglect?” under a photo of a smiling George W. Bush.

Since I tend to walk down the street pondering the exact same question these days, I picked up this magazine and was pleased to find a broad and well-considered set of essays on this question, including the following topics by the following authors: The Constitution by David Cole, The Courts by Dahlia Lithwick, The Environment by Bill McKibben, The Marketplace of Ideas by Jack Hitt and The Military by Edward Luttwak. Being generally a foreign policy minded kind of guy, I was most interested in Anne Marie Slaughter’s suggestions on Diplomacy.

How are we going to handle diplomacy after the failure known as George W. Bush waves his last goodbye? It’s a question every 2008 presidential candidate should be able to answer, for one thing, and voters are going to demand something more than the candy-coated sugar language most of the candidates have been delivering on this topic. In her Harper’s article Slaughter wisely sticks to specific instructions: close Guantanamo, get serious about nuclear disarmament, join the International Criminal Court, get serious about the United Nations, and get serious about fighting global warming.

I think these are all important suggestions, though I’d add one more and put it at the very top of the list: renounce torture as an intelligence-gathering technique (that is to say, renounce torture).

I’m less impressed with Earl Shorris on The National Character. Where Slaughter’s prescriptions are based on the existence of concrete objects (Gitmo, the United Nations), Shorris puts too much faith into the meanings of terms like “virtue”, “evil”, “courage”, “fear”. He quotes Immanuel Kant, but he needs to be doused with a bucket of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who would have reminded him that all of these words are ultimately chimeral entities, and really aren’t likely to serve any useful purposes in any discussions, debates or exchanges of ideas, because they are too easily co-opted by alternative meanings or willful misinterpretations.

But Harper’s has put together a good essay series overall, and I’m glad it hammers home the point that those of us who really can’t stand the sight of George W. Bush anymore aren’t necessarily obsessive Bush-haters, and are really not motivated by emotion or anger when we talk about him incessantly. The problem is rather that we feel a desperate need to begin recovering from George W. Bush … and it doesn’t help that this walking disaster is still in office. In other words, it really isn’t about George W. Bush at all. It’s about how the hell we’re going to clean up the mess this moron made, and how we’re going to save our great country once he’s gone.

We don’t much care about the United Nations, do we?  The big news that the UN Security Council has selected the new Secretary-General was just announced, earning a slim column in the middle of today’s New York Times and hardly any coverage at all anywhere else.  Nobody was talking about it on the morning radio, and none of the top political blogs seem to care either. 

Ban Ki-moon is from South Korea, where he is currently serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs.  He has spent much of his political career within the United Nations bureaucracy.  I’m not sure what to think about the fact that he is apparently a member of the Unification Church founded by fellow South Korean Rev. Sun Myung Moon, an organization that is not well-regarded (but is also certainly not well-understood) here in the USA.

An incoming Secretary-General is expected to serve one or two five-year terms, which means we can expect Ban Ki-moon to be playing a dominant role in world affairs for the next ten years.  Given this fact, I wish there had been more public discussion about this selection (which will not be finalized until the General Assembly ratifies it, but all observers describe the appointment as a done deal). 

Here’s an article about Ki-moon from the Korea Times, which focuses on the coincidental timing of the latest news from North Korea on the day of Ki-moon’s selection. 

I’ve earnestly been trying to keep up with the United Nations General Assembly debates, checking in on day two, day three and day four so as to report on the quality and integrity of each speech by each national representative.  This was the first time I’ve tried to pay anywhere near this much attention to UN’s annual autumn bash, and four days in I am already over my head.  Discouraged by technical problems at the UN.org website and frustrating lapses in coverage (such as the failure to provide an English translation of Venezuelan President Huge Chavez’s speech, which made the biggest headlines of the event so far when he called George W. Bush “the devil”), I’m now aiming for coverage that will be more impressionistic than complete, and I’ll try to dig in harder next year (assuming the planet and the institution known as the United Nations are both intact by next year, and I hope both will be).

As I said above, Chavez stole the headlines.  I don’t think George W. Bush is quite the devil, but I’d probably rather spend a day at the beach with Chavez than with George Bush, and I am amused to learn that the Venezuelan President and I share a high regard for Noam Chomsky who, I agree, everybody should read.

 In contrast to Chavez, here are the surprising words of Jalal Talabani, President of Iraq, who seems to like George Bush more than either I or Hugo Chavez do:

“We here renew our gratitiude for these forces that took part in liberating our country from the worst dictatorship known in history.  We specifically thank George W. Bush for his leadership of the campaign to liberate Iraq from tyranny and opening the doors for a new, democratic, pluralistic and federal Iraq that is at peace with itself and the world.”

Maybe this goes to show that theoretical issues of war and aggression look rather different when you are inside the nation fighting the war then when you’re sitting in Venezuela reading Noam Chomsky or Queens, New York posting to a blog. However one spins it all, it’s clear that a few causes get all the mic time at this debate: Israel and Palestine are number one, America and Iraq a distant second, Darfur virtually nowhere at all.

But what are we to think when despicable royals like Prince Faisal al-Saud of Saudi Arabia say all the right things about the importance of compromise settlements between Israel and Palestine, while Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni of Israel fails to rise to the occasion at all?  I’d hoped Israel’s plucky young representative would throw a curve-ball or otherwise try to inject some sand into the vaseline of international hypocrisy on display here, but she instead delivers a cool-toned speech including some prayers in Hebrew and an invocation of Ariel Sharon as “a great leader” – something even a person who cares deeply about the fate of Israel (such as myself) cannot agree with.

Leave it to Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine to deliver the best speech I’ve read so far, in which he speaks passionately for a fair peace and wistfully recalls the still-surprising and, of course, infinitely difficult 1993 compromise agreement between Yasser Arafat of Palestine and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel.  We need more speeches like this one, and we need more moderate world leaders like Mahmoud Abbas.

The debate returns on Monday with speeches by representatives of several straggler nations that didn’t make the cut for the kickoff sessions, including Laos, Nepal, Vietnam, Gabon, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Gambia, and Uruguay.

I planned to review the second day of debate at the United Nations General Assembly this morning. Unfortunately, the UN.org website is still a technical mess, and I can’t get to the texts of most of the speeches. There is no excuse for this, and the volume of web traffic to UN.org can’t possibly justify the poor performance. If YouTube.com can serve millions of LonelyGirl15 webviews to the world with barely a glitch, certainly the United Nations web servers should be able to deliver the text of a few dozen speeches each day without crashing to their knees.

But my review of day two will have to wait, even as day three commences with speeches by Boris Tadic of Serbia, Uribe Velez of Colombia, Emile Lahoud of Lebanon, Emilio Guebuza of Mozambique, Branko Crvenkovski of Macedonia, Stephen Harper of Canada, Jose Socrates of Portugal, Valdas Adamkus of Lithuania, Miyegombo Enkhbold of Mongolia, Solomon Berewa of Sierra Leone, Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea (who is often mentioned as a possible successor to outgoing United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan), Sergey Lavrov of Russia, Alexander Downer of Australia, Ursula Plassnik of Austria, Miguel Angel Moratinos Cuyabe of Spain, Ahmed Aboul Gheit of Egypt, Aichatou Mindaoudou of Niger and Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine (who gets, like Israel yesterday, the terrible closer spot at the end of another long, long day of speeches).

I wish I could comment on Hugo Chavez’s speech, which made big news when the Venezuelan leader suggested that George W. Bush was the devil and that the UN’s podium still smelled like sulfur after his appearance the day before. But I haven’t been able to read the full text of his speech, so instead I’d like to follow up on Tuesday’s speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a dynamic and wily speaker who is leaving many moderate and reasonable people stunned and speechless with his inflammatory remarks about Jewish history and the Holocaust.

I hate being stunned and speechless, personally, but my natural emotional reaction to Ahmadinejad’s words leaves me grasping for words, and I’m not sure where to even begin refuting his points. Well, let’s leave some other avenues aside and start right here:

Mr. Ahmadinejad, you have every right to re-examine the myths of history, and you are certainly correct that the European genocide of the Jews that took place during World War II has been overly mythologized. No part of human history can be considered taboo; every stone must be turned over, and every “certainty” is fair game for re-examination. Nobody should stand against the honest pursuit of historical fact, even when one fears (as in this case) that political motivations are underlying the pursuit.

BUT, Mr. Ahmadinejad, you go too far when you suggest that the history of the Jewish holocaust stands as the justification for the current existence of the nation of Israel. As I’ve said here before and I will certainly say again: Israel’s right to exist is based only on the fact that there are human beings living there now. They were born there, they are citizens of no other country, and this is the only home they have.

A new study of the history of the Holocaust may turn up some surprising facts and conclusions (though it won’t find that the genocide was a fraud). But even if it turns out that all of World War II was staged with actors and filmed in a studio in Burbank, the fact remains that millions of Jews have been born in the nation of Israel, and that “the Zionist entity” is their home.

It’s about living human beings, Mr. Ahmadinejad. There are living human beings in Israel and living human beings in Palestine. History happened yesterday. What do you have to offer us for tomorrow?

The fact that the leaders of almost every nation on Earth meet each September for an intensive general “debate” sounds like a great thing, at least in theory. Maybe the opening session of the 61st United Nations General Assembly can work some tough problems out? It’s less encouraging to realize that the “debate” consists of no more than a series of self-contained speeches, with no rebuttal or cross-examination.

It’s even less encouraging to learn that participating world leaders have a tradition of only sitting to listen to those speeches that they expect to agree with. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not there in the morning of the first day to listen to George W. Bush, and George W. Bush was not there in the evening of the first day to listen to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So much for debate. Let’s see what our philosopher kings had to say on the first day.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan opened with a stern but hopeful opening statement. Annan’s ten year term as the UN lead ends this December, so this is the Ghanaian diplomat’s last General Assembly. Annan can’t possibly feel satisfied with the state of the world in 2006, and while his long hard work has not yielded peaceful results, it’s fair to say that this is through no lack of trying.

I’ve read through most of the speeches, most of them moderate and reasonable in tone. Luiz da Silva of Brazil, King Hussein of Jordan, Jacques Chirac of France and General Musharraf of Pakistan seemed intent on addressing and solving problems.  Not one of these leaders has clean hands, yet one can almost be lulled into a sense of hope by reading their pleas for compromise and mutual dialogue.

But their speeches were overshadowed by the shrill voices of two world leaders who don’t like compromise and don’t favor dialogue, both of whom used the UN General Assembly to present their stark, militaristic views of the world’s problems.  It is fascinating to read the words of George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad next to each other and ponder how much these “enemies” have in common.  They are both slick politicians whose reputations thrive in times of global hostility, and they are clearly both motivated to keep the stakes high.  George Bush uses the word “extremist” or “extremism” 16 times, neatly ignoring the fact that many smart people around the world (and in the USA) consider George Bush a dangerous extremist.  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pretends to care deeply about the suffering Palestinian people, ignoring the fact that the Palestinian people have already been used as a political symbol by ambitious Muslim leaders who have no intention of actually helping them for the past 60 years. 

The world is more than tired of war-mongers like Bush and Ahmadinejad, and I’d love a chance to challenge either of their pretensions to political wisdom in a real debate. 

The 61st Session continues today with presentations from Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Bachelet Jeria of Chile, Mahinda Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka, Hugo Chavez Frias of Venezuela, Romano Prodi of Italy, Esteban Lazo Hernandez of Cuba, Robert Gabriel Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Alfred Moisiu of Albania, Joseph Kabila Kabange of the Congo, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi of Malaysia, Adnan Terzic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ivo Sanader of Croatia, Sheikh Mohammad Al-Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah of Kuwait and Tzipi Livni of Israel.  Should be an interesting session.

The 61st session of the United Nations General Assembly has begun, and today will bring speeches from an awe-inspiring series of world leaders (I use the term “awe” mostly in its sense as the root of “awful”, not to mention “shock and awe”, a sensation many Earthlings are currently familiar with).

Here are some of the names that will be stepping up to that big open mic today: Kofi Annan and Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa of the United Nations, Luiz Da Silva of Brazil, George Bush of USA, Thabo Mkebi of South Africa, Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, Jacques Chirac of France, Denis Sassou Nguesso of the Congo, Vicente Fox of Mexico, King Hussein of Jordan, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Evo Morales Aima of Bolivia, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Kjell Magne Bondevik of Norway and Ivo Sanader or Croatia.

What will they all say? Supposedly this page at UN.org will have audio and video, and I hope to report more on the outcome as soon as the podcasts arrive. Will it all amount to no more than a choreographed assault of hypocrisy by an assemblage of professional liars? That’s how some would describe the UN’s general assembly, and they may have a point. Let’s actually watch this year, and find out for ourselves.

Despite a weekend of worldwide protests and the ongoing flow of weak, ambivalent press releases about the situation in Sudan, it’s very difficult to discern what’s going on at all from news sources around the world.

I have been trying for days to write an informative article about the Sudan situation, and after much reading I am still mystified. Why is the African Union peacekeeping force leaving on September 30, and why is the United Nations waiting for the Sudanese government — the force, apparently, that hundreds of thousands of refugees need protection from — to give them permission to take the African Union’s place? Wikipedia’s not much help, and neither is the New York Times, which regularly devotes only a moderate amount of space to this growing crisis.

Despite the famous ineffectiveness of the United Nations, their email press releases have been more enlightening than other sources, and one cannot fault Security General Kofi Annan for failing to yell loudly enough. One can, however, fault various governments, media outlets and organizations around the world for not picking up the call.

Those who remember the Nazi holocaust used to repeat the phrase “Never again”, and I remember a time in my life when I was naive enough to take comfort in that thought. The problem is, never again always seems to start after the holocaust is over. I read Philip Gourevitch’s history of Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and gained a crystal-clear understanding of how that disaster was allowed to happen in 1994. Similarly, it’s easy in retrospect to look back and comprehend the incredible massacres carried out by Pol Pot in Cambodia. But what do we do when the head of the United Nations tells the world “it’s happening again, right now” — and you look for a way to help and find none? It cannot be that we must wait for the atrocities to lapse into past tense before we can wrap our brains around them.

It’s happening again. Everybody knows it, and nobody knows how to help. Over in Iran, where the government pretends to care about humanitarian crises whenever Israel is to blame, a major conference is being planned to examine whether or not the Jewish Holocaust of the 20th Century was a fraud. The past is a comfortable place to dwell. Is anybody out there concerned with the present?

I’m not giving up on my wish to become knowledgable about the situation in Sudan, but I need to find better sources of information so I can hopefully say something better than “it’s bad” sometime soon.

Sorry I’ve been away! I’ve been doing some reading and thinking.

I put this site up in late July, and since then I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what I intend to do with it (no, I’m not much of a plan-ahead type, why do you ask?). I know I want to use this space to write about global issues — war, poverty, ecology — from an analytical and historical point of view, and I know I want to explore pacifist solutions to difficult problems. Okay, great, but how does that translate into running a blog? I’m not sure. I’ve found myself jumping from topic to topic, and I obviously haven’t managed to stick to one topic long enough to get many articles out. I’ve made some false starts, as well, and even though the site is brand new I think I’ve already got some deadwood to cut out.

I am doing some background work in preparation for the coming 61st session of the United Nations General Assembly, which I plan to cover in detail here. I’ve mentioned before that I plan to keep up a regular United Nations observation post here at The Cherry Orchard (hey, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it, and Daily Kos is too busy covering Lieberman vs. Lamont). I was kind of hard on the United Nations in a recent post, and in contrast to that I’d like to report that I’ve been paying attention to the tireless travels of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who’s been knocking himself out visiting militant politicans across the Middle East for the past two weeks. I say Annan’s doing admirable work (though I know Little Green Footballs doesn’t think so). I hope to write more about this soon as well.

Beyond that, I’m still scheming up my master plan here. Expect some design spruce-ups here. Most of all, expect some better articles, and a lot more. Soon.

The 61st General Assembly of the United Nations is going to convene in mid-September, and since I live in New York City I thought I’d pop on to UN.org, the official United Nations website to check out the session agenda and plan a possible visit.

I was about to be taken on a surreal trip. After spending two and a half hours reviewing various sections of this website, I am disgusted that such an important website is being run so shabbily. Does anyone in this organization realize that internet communication is an important, growing trend? I state above that Al-Qaeda has better websites than the United Nations. How do I know this? Well, I am a professional web designer, and I follow my field enough to know that there are numerous webmasters who support Al-Qaeda’s operations who have demonstrated basic competence in their field. Based on the evidence, that is more than can be said for the operators of UN.org.

I know that Al-Qaeda has a better website than UN.org because — no joke — my 15-year-old son’s MySpace page is a better website than UN.org.

Here’s what you’ll find if you dive into this mess. The most important documents are only available in PDF form — not secure documents, but simple press releases and agenda announcements. This indicates that the site does not have a working web content management system at all. This is bad, but it gets worse: many attempts to download these documents (over, say, my 99/9% reliable cable modem connection) don’t work at all, but instead spin forever, or else they deliver this familiar friend:

I tried many different paths through the multi-lingual, multi-platform and multi-broken website, and found myself looking at .jsp pages, .asp pages (Microsoft began phasing .asp out in favor of .aspx about four years ago), .shtml pages (totally archaic) and many, many custom extensions followed by frightening, endless strings of encoded parameters that clearly were not delivering the right codes.

The only common architectural principle behind most of the paths was that they all ended in sudden crashes. Oh yeah, webcasts are promised, except they often end up looking like this:

Even if the site were not broken in so many places (and maybe I caught it on a bad day), the lack of inspiration behind the technical architecture is staggering. Sure, this problem is an amusing metaphor for the UN’s general lack of effectiveness, but I don’t think we should laugh it off too easily. Digital communication is more than just a metaphor in 2006. It’s a key competency, and UN.org doesn’t have it.

I’m a professional web developer (my work has included PearlJam.com, WordsWithoutBorders.org, LitKicks.com, BobDylan.com and BruceSpringsteen.net) and I am willing to offer my services to the United Nations at a fair price, if they promise to first fire the bozos currently running these pizza boxes, as well as the pencil-pushers who determine the site’s layout and structure. I trust somebody in the organization understands email enough to contact me at levi.asher@gmail.com.