Sherry Chandler

Yesterday afternoon when I left the office, got into my car for the drive home, and turned the ignition key, all I got was a series of clicks. Rats! sez I and I gets out my handy-dandy cell phone and called Triple A.

Had to wait about 40 minutes, long enough to get hot under the collar in the July sun, for the nice young man to show up with his charger, But once he arrived, it took him about ten minutes to diagnose my problem and get me enough juice to start my engine, then I was on my way again.

My headlights were turned on, and though the car is supposed to and always has turned them off for me when I turn off the ignition, I suspect this time something didn’t quite work and the headlights drained my battery. My car is 11 years old. Soon it will hit puberty.

I wonder, though, don’t they have jumper cables for airplanes? According to The Daily Yonder:

Congressmen Ben Chandler (D-KY) and Norm Dicks (D-WA) were scheduled to tour the coalfields of Central Appalachia by air Saturday, to view the effects of mountain top removal coal mining. The two congressmen were to take a plane from outside Washington, D.C., to Hazard, Kentucky, where they would meet Saturday with local residents.

The trip never got in the air. Somebody left a switch on in the plane overnight, running down the aircraft’s battery. The plane wouldn’t crank up Saturday morning and Chandler and Dicks were left grounded in Washington.

Some at the rally were not surprised, and suspected that the federal Office of Surface Mining intentionally bolluxed the trip. Members of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, who helped organize a rally in Hazard that was to meet Chandler and Dicks, felt the trip could have been sabotaged. KFTC has long battled the Office of Surface Mining, the federal agency that organized the trip for the two congressmen and is charged with regulating coal mining.

“They must think we’re stupid,” said John Roark, a resident of Vicco, Kentucky.

Chandler’s Legislative Director, Jim Creevy, said that Rep. Chandler pledged to reschedule the trip, but offered no date for when this would happen.

Is there only one airplane in Washington, D.C.? Only one battery? Don’t they have chargers? No AAA for Congressmen??

Or is this excuse as lame as it seems?

From the BBC News:

A videotape of a detainee being questioned at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay has been released for the first time.

It shows 16-year-old Omar Khadr being asked by Canadian officials in 2003 about events leading up to his capture by US forces, Canadian media have said.

The Canadian citizen is accused of throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier in Afghanistan in 2002.

He is seen in a distressed state and complaining about the medical care.

The footage was made public by Mr Khadr’s lawyers following a Supreme Court ruling in May that the Canadian authorities had to hand over key evidence against him to allow a full defence of the charges he is facing.

Mr Khadr, the only Westerner still held at the jail, was 15 when he was captured by US forces during a gun battle at a suspected al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.

During the 10-minute video of his questioning in Guantanamo a year later, he can be seen crying, his face buried in his hands, and pulling at his hair. He can be heard repeatedly chanting: “Help me.”

You can view the video at the link.

Link from Jeralyn at TalkLeft.

Scanning the comments there gives some indication of what a controversial issue this is. For myself, I think the boy was a child when he was taken prisoner and should never have been kept for six years at Guantanamo Bay as though he were a major terrorist, without even the rights of the Geneva conventions. I don’t think we should have held any prisoners in that way but it’s particularly egregious in this boy’s case. I’m not so naïve as to think that 15-year-old boys can’t be dangerous. But we do not treat children that way.

For three decades or so now, I’ve been very concerned about the way children have been turned into warriors of hate for various guerrilla or resistance or rebel or terrorist groups. They are children and very maleable. To turn them into killers is possibly the worst crime I can think of. I am appalled that our government has exacerbated the crime against this child.

As for whether the events recorded on this tape amount to torture, that is not even a conversation we should be forced to engage in.

I have been wanting to see Persepolis since I saw a preview at Lexington’s Kentucky Theater earlier this year. Having finally got it through Netflix, however, I left it sitting on the table for several days, because I thought watching it would take concentration and mental energy. And I was right.

I am not a great appreciator of the graphic novel. I haven’t even read Maus, though it sits on our shelves and I appreciate Spiegelman’s New Yorker covers. I tend to think of graphic novels as sort of a guy thing, though I also know that that is rapidly becoming a dated attitude.

I was very taken by the graphic look and feel of Persepolis, however. The minimalist style, a look that might be characterized as the dark side of South Park (though, okay, South Park is not without its own dark side — maybe the tragic side), the use of silhouettes in black and white, was often very affecting. This is not the computer-animated cutesiness of Disney et al. The film is also a monument to the revolutionary power of pop culture. For one thing, it is the animated film of a graphic novel (comic book) so its very genesis is pop. But, as Frank Zappa was a force in solidarity-era Poland, so our heroine is inspired and consoled by black market tapes of Iron Maiden.

Because the story is a child’s story — I was amazed near the end of the movie when our heroine is about to get married to learn that she is only 21! she had already had experience enough for several lifetimes — the form allows Marjane Satrapi to convey the simplicity of the child’s vision while maximizing the terror that is a child’s experience of war, repression, prejudice.

Like Reading Lolita in Tehran, Persepolis gives one an idea what it’s like for a woman living under a repressive fundamentalist regime and also an idea why leaving the country isn’t all that satisfactory a solution. Nafisi’s vision is more analytical; Satrapi’s gives us raw emotion and some delightfully iconoclastic characters (the grandmother and uncle). There are moments of truly wicked humor in the film.

Satrapi also deals with the clumsiness or just plain evil Middle East involvement of the West, from the installation of the Shah to the arms dealing in the Iran/Iraq War. Her focus is not so strictly domestic. When one of the women says of the religious revolution, “It can’t be any worse than life under the Shah,” I couldn’t help but think of how much worse life is now for women in Iraq since we deposed Saddam Hussein and facilitated a fundamentalist takeover.

I was deeply moved and I think this is a movie that all of us should see, especially now when the Bush administration keeps beating the war drums and painting Iran as the greatest evil in the axis thereof. If you see the human face of your enemy, it is not so easy to hate her.

You will find a number of perceptive reviews and a plot synopsis at Rotten Tomatoes.

Persepolis, by the way, was the Greek name for the ancient capitol of the Persian empire.