#taking control of the interview and never losing it no matter how stupid or unwilling to engage with the issue the interviewer is

[hussyknee]

[Video description: Dated black and white video of an interview between a man off-screen who speaks in an upper-crust English accent and a handsome brown man in his thirties seated at a table. He is lean with short curly dark hair, a very sixties moustache, and wearing a casual shirt with an open collar. The camera is zoomed in on him, leaning forward on his elbows, head low and tilted towards the interviewer, brow furrowed, and an intense gaze that flicks down at the table after each question in careful contemplation. He speaks with an Arab accent. The timer of the video recording ticks away at the top left of the frame.

Transcript:

Interviewer: "Why won't your organisation engage in peace talks with the Israelis?"

Ghassan Kanafani: "You don't mean exactly peace talks. You mean capitulation. Surrendering."

Interviewer: "Why not just talk?"

Ghassan: "Talk to whom?"

Interviewer: "Talk to the Israeli leaders."

Ghassan: "That's the kind of conversation between the sword and the neck, you mean."

Interviewer: "Well, if there's no swords or guns in the room you could still talk."

Ghassan: "No. I have never seen any talk between a colonialist case and a national liberation movement."

Interviewer: "But despite this, why not talk?"

Ghassan: "Talk about what?"

Interviewer: "Talk about the possibility of not fighting."

Ghassan: "Not fighting for what?"

Interviewer: "Not fighting at all, no matter what for."

Ghassan: "People usually fight for something, and they stop fighting for something so you can't even tell me speak about what—"

Interviewer: "—Stop fighting—"

Ghassan: "—Talk about stop fighting why?"

Interviewer: "Talk to stop fighting to stop the death and the misery, the destruction, the pain."

Ghassan: "The misery and the pain and the destruction and the death for whom?"

Interviewer: "Of Palestinians, of Israelis, of Arabs."

Ghassan: "Of the Palestinian people who are uprooted, thrown in the camps, living in starvation, killed for twenty years and forbidden to use even the name Palestinian?"

Interviewer: "Better that way than dead though."

Ghassan: "Maybe to you, but to us, it's not. To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights is something as essential as life itself."

Ghassan Kanafani is one of the heroes of the Palestinian liberation and celebrated in the canon of modern Arab literature. Forced out of his home with his family during the Nakba in 1948 at the age of ten, the shame of their surrender to Zionists moved him to devote his life to Arab nationalism, Marxist movements and Palestinian liberation through his career as a newspaper editor, journalist, novellist and non-combatant member of the armed resistance group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He coined the term "resistance literature" for the genre of his writing, that came to be instrumental in shaping the Palestinian national identity and ideology of its resistance. In 1972, he and his 17 year old niece were murdered in a car bomb by Mossad.

His obituary read:

"He was a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages."

[politicaltheatre]

Personal Responsibility, pt.2

Where does the time go? It was just starting to feel like spring. Soon enough, it will be summer. September will come, then October and November, and we'll be talking about 2018 as though we meant January but early we mean next November.

We could be forgiven then for planning ahead, which is what so many did this just ended month of May.

There was Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, who released a book, "The Vanishing American Adult". His book release tour has all the hallmarks of setting the 45 year-old Republican up for a 2024 presidential run. The version of himself he's packaging is a much more sane right-of-center option for Republicans, less threatening than either the childish Trump or any strident Democrat who somehow unseats him in 2020.

Sasse's book and voting record, though, do not reveal a "Republican Obama" but rather a younger Mike Pence unwilling to defend the current president for anything. The book is all about the virtue of self-reliance, which Sasse seems to equate with "personal responsibility", something Trump wants nothing to do with. What Sasse really means by "self-reliance", however, is throwing us all in the proverbial deep end to learn how to swim. You know, like in the stories of Horatio Alger and the life of Andrew Carnegie.

It's the common right-wing, "small government" fantasy, one of taking us back to a simpler and grounded past, a time of higher risk that somehow imparted greater safety. Like those others, Sasse's idea of a perfect, moral world comes with a hefty moral price tag.

As a rugged individual, you would have to learn to filter your own polluted drinking water, and air, and, if you failed to learn those things, how to heal yourself or how to make enough money to pay someone else for it. The upside, if you can call it that, is that you have no obligation to your neighbors. If they can't take care of themselves, they fail, and that's okay. That's what a world without stifling government regulation is like: America, circa 1890.

Of course, if you've learned to take control of your reproductive rights and/or to embrace your "not normal" sexuality, you'll have to unlearn those, because Senator Sasse, like Vice-President Pence, doesn't care for those and has no problem with a federal government small enough to drown in a bathtub yet just big enough to take away those particular individual rights.

That, ultimately, is what makes Sasse just another right wing hypocrite. He wants us to stop coddling our children, but not our corporations. He wants us to keep government out of our pocketbooks but not our bedrooms. He'll attack Trump on Twitter with the glee of Merriam-Webster, but supports Trump's Steve Bannon-endorsed cabinet picks with gusto.

He seems to want us to change our culture without actually changing it, without accepting the lessons we've learned from mistakes we were allowed to make, and without shielding the weakest among us from harm, which should be fundamental to any culture. Self-reliance is a good skill to have and a good habit to instill in our children, but it is not personal responsibility, which is accountability to ourselves and others and which ultimately does greater good for any civilization.

Funny enough, as Sasse was setting himself up for future election and selling his brand of personal responsibility without accountability, another man in another field was doing much the same.

Baseball slugger David Ortiz is playing the last spring of a twenty-plus year professional career, and eyeing his probable election in six years' time to the Baseball Hall Of Fame. He certainly has the numbers for it, and for a ballplayer election to the Hall means everything. Well, next to everything.

Back in the day, the Hall was the best a ballplayer could hope for. He wasn't getting rich, that's for sure, unless he was an all-star, and even some all-stars had an offseason job. Or two. Time, though, does fly and things do change. With the top stars now collecting nine figure contracts, the guy at the end of the bench might now be a millionaire, or close to it. His contract might be for only half a million a year, but compare that to a minor league all-star living paycheck to paycheck.

That math has always been easy, which is why a lot of players in Ortiz' generation began taking performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). It's a cheating culture no different than professional cycling or Olympic track and field, or Wall Street for that matter. Everybody's doing it, they say, so why not me? If I play clean, I lose. For most, the choice isn't being a star, it's just staying near the top long enough to compete.

A lot of names were included in the Mitchell Report back in 2003, and most of those named, such as Ortiz, weren't stars. Ortiz himself was a rarity, someone who'd had an unremarkable career up to that point who would become a star. His name wasn't even revealed until years later, by which time he and one or two others on the list had led the Boston Red Sox to their first two championships since Woodrow Wilson was president, much to the delight of voting-eligible Boston sports writers. Another championship followed in 2013, the teams all led by Ortiz and his powerful swing.

If not for the stain PEDs have left on the players and championships of the past three decades, Ortiz would be in on the first ballot. Instead, he has to answer the same PED questions every interview he gives. His answers, especially that he hates chemicals and wouldn't put anything like steroids in his body, sound an awful lot like what Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens said, and disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong.

Many of the stars named in the Mitchell Report, including Bonds, Clemens, and PED poster boy Sammy Sosa, were close to retirement, close enough that they had little time to rehabilitate their image. Despite gaudy numbers none have been elected to the Hall, and they may never be. Manny Ramirez, who was named in the report and was on two of those Red Sox championship teams with Ortiz, failed multiple drug tests afterward and retired rather than try to come back off a lengthy drug-related suspension.

Ortiz' obvious fear of losing Hall of Fame votes explains his attempt to throw the rival New York Yankees under the bus. Rather than address why his name belongs on a list with Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, Ramirez, and other accused drug cheats, Ortiz instead chose to try to deflect attention in a way we've become a little too familiar with: he attacked others for leaking the information.

On a local Boston radio show, Ortiz accused the rival New York Yankees leaking his name because they feared him, and because, with Alex Rodriguez and one or two other drug cheats of their own, they wanted attention paid elsewhere. Oh, and it was the New York Times that released the list.

Yes, it's as stupid as it sounds.

To Ortiz, turning the story about his cheating into a story about a rival's jealousy  makes perfect sense. It absolves him of any personal responsibility while belittling the very idea of cheating as an alternative fact. Bonds and Clemens did it. Infamously, so did Armstrong.

Attacking "leakers", long a pejorative term for whistle-blowers, plays into our childhood dislike of tattle tales. The cheaters attack the leak because they hope we'll sympathize with them, because they want to believe we all have something to hide. That, too, is part of the cheating culture.

Senator Sasse, unfortunately, doesn't address this sort of bad example in his book, but he should have. Cheaters demonstrate an odd sort of self-reliant initiative. They don't ask that the rules make things easier for them; they simply ignore the rules they don't like until they're caught. By then, they've made their money. Having been caught, they shamelessly deny until they can't, at which point they shamelessly point the finger at others, hoping against hope that you'll give up and go away.

It's the behavior of immaturity, of children refusing to grow up. It is a toxic form of self-reliance that preys on weakness. That should enrage Senator Sasse. And yet, somehow it doesn't.

- Daniel Ward