Selenia y Marie

As I mentioned in a recent Zorro post, The most intriguing new character in the telenovela is a witch named Selenia, apparently modeled on Marie Laveau, who appears in Isabel Allende's Zorro novel. It's not an exact match. Selenia comes from Europe and markets her magic to the wealthy. But her communion with the spirits reminds me of the character of Marie Laveau in the novel.

In her story, Diego winds up on the island controlled by the pirate Jean Lafitte off the Lousisiana coast. One of the characters there, Madame Odilia, takes her ill daughter Catherine to see the legendary Louisiana witch:

... Marie Laveau, suma sacerdotisa del vudú. Se internaron en los bosques más tupidos, lejos de las plantaciones de azucar de los blancos, entre islotes y pantanos, donde los tambores conjuraban a los espíritus. A la luz de hogueras y antorchas, los oficiantes danzaban con máscaras de animales y demonios, los cuerpos pintados con sangre de gallos. Los poderosos tambores vibraban, remeciendo el bosque y calentando la sangre de los esclavos. Una prodigiosa energía conectaba a los seres humanos con los dioses y la naturaleza, los participantes se fundían en un solo ser, nadie se sustraía al embrujo. Al centro del círculo, sobre una caja que contenia una serpiente sagrada, danzaba Marie Laveau, soberbia, hermosa, cubierta de sudor, casi desnuda y preñada de nueve meses, a punto de dar a luz. Al caer en trance sus miembros se agitaban sin control, se retorcía, se le bamboleaba el vientre de lado a lado, y soltaba una retahíla de palabras en lenguas que nadie recordaba. El cántico subía y bajaba, como grandes olas, mientras el recipiente con sangre de los sacrificios pasaba de mano en mano, para que todos bebieran. Los tambores se aceleraban, hombres y mujeres, convulsionados, caían al suelo, se transformaban en animales, comían pasto, mordían y arañaban, algunos perdían el conocimiento, otros partían en parejas hacia el bosque. Madame Odilia le explicó que en la religión vudú, llegada al Nuevo Mundo en el corazón de los esclavos de Dahomey y Yoruba, existían tres zonas conectadas: la de los vivos, la de los muertos y la de los que aún no han nacido. En las ceremonias honraban a los antepasados, llamaban a los dioses, clamaban por la libertad. Las sacerdotisas, como Marie Laveau, efectuaban encantamientos, ensar-taban alfileres en muñecas para provocar enfermedades y usaban gris-gris y polvos mágicos para curar diversos males...

My translation:

[... Marie Laveau, high priestess of voodoo. They went deep into the densest forests, far from the whites' sugar plantations, among little islands and marshes, where the drums conjure the spirits. By the light of bonfires and torches, the celebrants danced with masks of animals and demons, their bodies painted with the blood of roosters. The powerful drums vibrated, swinging the forest and heating the blood of the slaves. A prodigious energy connected the human beings with the gods and nature, the participants merged into a single self, no one got away from the witchcraft. At the center of the circle, on a box that contained a sacred serpent, danced Marie Laveau, proud, beautiful, covered with sweat, almost naked and nine months pregnant, on the point of giving birth. Falling into a trance, her limbs shook out of control, writhing, her belly swaying from side to side, letting out a stream of words in languages no one remembered. The song rose and fell like big waves while the vessel with the blood of the sacrifices passed from hand to hand so that all could drink. The drums accelerated, men and women convulsing fell on the ground, tranformed into animals, ate grass, bit and scraped, some them lost consciousness, others left in pairs for the forest. Madame Odilia explained that in the voodoo religion, brought to the New World in the hearts of slaves from Dahomey and Yoruba, there exist three zones connected to one another; that of the living, that of the dead and that of those who have not yet been born. In the ceremonies, they honored their ancestors, called on the gods, clamored for freedom. The priestesses like Marie Laveau cast spells, inserted pins into dolls to cause sicnesses and used gris-gris and magic powders to cure various ills...

Unfortunately, even Marie Laveau's powers weren't enough to help the ailing Catherine.

Marie is not a major character in the Zorro novel. Her presence is largely atmospherics which reinforce the native wisdom that Diego and Bernardo learned from Toypurnia and her tribe. In the novel, Diego does a spirit quest as a young man and his totem animal turns out to be a fox (un zorro). She uses touches like that throughout to give the Zorro character a more mystical and mysterious character. Meeting your personal zorro on a native spirit quest just has a different feel about it than picking the name Zorro for your masked bandit persona because foxes are sneaky.

Tags: marie laveau, zorro, zorro telenovela

The Six Day War

We're now in the 40th anniversary week of the Six Day War of 1967. That war's effects are still very much with us. And for Americans, now that we're involved in an ongoing war in Iraq that has no end in sight, the US is part of the neighborhood in a way that we haven't been before. Increasinly, people in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East are reportedly identifying the United States with Israel more and more closely. And, in fact, the Cheney-Bush administration has uncritically supported current Israeli policies to an extent no other administration, Republican or Democrat, has done.

The Los Angeles Times had this analysis today, Israel's lost 40 years by Meir Shalev 06/05/07:

Forty years have passed, and Israel has indeed choked. The country is busy dealing with one matter: the occupation — the territories, the Palestinians, terror, holy sites, the establishment and evacuation of settlements. Forty years have passed, and Israel has neglected everything that the Israel of 1948 wished to occupy itself with: education, research, welfare, health.

"Forty years" is not just some round number. It is a period with traditional meaning, a number through which God tends to emphasize his will. The flood continued for 40 days and 40 nights; Moses remained on Mt. Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights; the Jewish people wandered the desert for 40 years; Jesus sequestered himself there for 40 days. It seems to me that God is sick of religious figures and generals and politicians who claim to speak in his voice. He is taking advantage of this mathematical moment and letting everyone know that now is the time to settle up.

Tags: israel, six day war

Scooter Libby and neoconservatism

Since today is Scooter's sentencing day, I thought I would celebrate by posting a link to this article about him in the current (June 2007) American Prospect, The Apprentice by Anthony David 05/20/07. (As of this writing, the article is behind subscription but the Prospect makes all its articles available two or three weeks or so after the current issue is published.)

David looks specifically at how Scooter received the neoconservatism wisdom from one of its godfathers, Albert Wohlstetter. It's important in showing how the Bush Doctrine of preventive war grew directly out of the nuclear first-strike doctrine advocated by hardliners like Wohlstetter. Along the way, he touches on how Wohlsttetter influenced Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle (the "Prince of Darkness", as his admirers nicknamed him), Ahmad Chalabi, Zalmay Khalilzad, Douglas Feith, Francis Fukuyama and David Wurmser. David writes of Wohlstetter's justification for a first-strike nuclear doctrine:

Wohlstetter singled out the doctrine of "mutual assured destruction" (MAD) as proof of the national-security elite's dangerous anachronism. The "realists" believed that nuclear weapons had made war obsolete. Only an "insane adventurer" would launch an attack, and professional diplomats assumed that the totalitarian beast in Moscow would probably behave rationally. But, argued Wohlstetter, the Soviet Union was not necessarily a rational actor: The Russians had lost 20 million people during World War II; there was no reason to assume they wouldn't risk losing many more to become the premier global power.

Wohlstetter argued that scientific progress in the hands of such a tyrannical regime would pose an impossible threat to both American security and the cause of human liberty. In the thermonuclear age, the possibility, however remote, that a tyrant could risk a nuclear strike required that tyranny abroad be contained and eventually defeated. (my emphasis)

Since nuclear weapons are particularly fear-inducing, that "however remote" sets a very low bar for initiating nuclear war. The US never adopted such a policy of nuclear preventive war.

So the terms of this particular dispute remained relatively obscure in public discussion.

I need to digress at this point for a couple of definitional points. The US during the Cold War would never make a blanket promise that we would never make "first use" of nuclear weapons. That was largely because the NATO defensive strategy in Europe assumed that an initial Soviet conventional attack on western Europe would be countered by US use of "tactical" battlefield nuclear weapons. That's a very different matter than planning for a preventive strike.

Also, I wish people writing articles like David's would be more careful about the terms "preventive war" and "preemptive war"; David's use of "preemptive" in the sentence referring to the Peace of Westphalia is incorrect. The terms are separately defined in international law, the difference being that "preventive" war is equivalent to illegal aggressive war, while "preemptive" war specifically refers to an attack meant to avert an immiment threat. The Six Day War of which today is the 40th anniversary is a classic example of a "preemptive" war, in this case launched by Israel in the face of strong evidence that Arab armies were about to attack them.

David goes on to describe a further development in Wohlstetter's strategic thinking:

But the most compelling aspect of Wohlstetter's mixture of apocalyptic and utopian thinking, and the reason he won over a devoted band of talented followers, was his radical moral message of the need for a new band of leaders to battle tyranny using policies that would spread liberal democratic values. The logic behind MAD precluded any attempt to defeat evil. The true liberal, Wohlstetter taught, must not be resigned to the enslavement of half the planet; he must desire, and plan for, the triumph of freedom, if need be through the use of tactical nuclear bombs. And the leaders capable of such a daring expansion of American military power, he firmly believed, were not Establishment men trained in the old tradition of diplomacy and foreign policy, speaking the obsolete language of détente; they were a new breed of activist intellectuals who would give Western democracies "a new image of ourselves in a world of persistent danger." (my emphasis)

This is also an interesting factual tidbit about Paul Wolfowitz and his mentor, Wohlstetter:

After the Israeli-Arab War, in 1967, just as his young protégé was casting about for a dissertation topic, Wohlstetter added a new ingredient to his theoretical mix: the danger of nuclear proliferation in dangerously unstable corners of the globe, in particular the Middle East. One key cause for the heightened tension between Egypt and Israel leading up to the Six Day War was the Israeli nuclear facility at Dimona, in the Negev Desert. After the war, the Johnson administration -- assuming that the recurrent wars in the region were rational fights over water and land -- proposed building three nuclear plants, one each for Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, to desalinate water and bring agriculture to millions of acres of desert. The scheme was called "A Proposal for Our Time."

Wohlstetter saw in the proposal the same old delusions: The bureaucrats were blind to the dangers of nuclear technology and the irrationality of authoritarian regimes. He argued that there would be little to stop these nations from diverting some of the materials from their civilian reactors toward the development of nuclear weapons. Then he traveled to Israel, where he got his hands on a raft of top-secret documents showing how the Egyptians were planning to use the American peace initiative to construct a nuclear device. He returned to the University of Chicago and handed the documents over to Wolfowitz, who used them as the basis for his dissertation. (my emphasis)

David doesn't go into some of the other major influences on the body of thought that came to be known as "neoconservatism". From Trotskyism, they took the notion of the value of wars of liberation and the supposedly redeeming power of violence. From the philospher Leo Strauss they took the notion that deceit on a grand scale is a necessary part of sound statesmanship.

But the link of neocon and Cheney-Bush administration preventive-war doctrine to nuclear-first-strike thinking is a important link, and one that under-appreciated. And that's the focus of David's article on Scooter.

Tags: neoconservatives, scooter libby

Terrorism, the old-fashioned kind

There's a good slideshow (with German captions) summarizing the history of the Rote-Armee-Fraktion (RAF), aka, the "Baader-Meinhof gang", Germany's best-known domestic terrorist group from 1970-1998, in Die Opfer, die Täter, der Terror Süddeutsche Zeitung 01.06.07.   The RAF is a good reminder that "terrorism" is a technique of violence and warfare, not a movement or an ideology in itself.

The RAF is getting retrospective stories in the German press for several reasons: the 40th anniversary of the death of Benno Ohnesorg, killed by police in a demonstration in (West) Berlin against the visiting Shah of Iran on 06/03/67, a key event in the growth of radical protest in Germany; the 30th anniversary of 1977's "German Autumn" series of RAF attacks, which were hyped hysterically by the outlets of the rightwing Springer press; the release from prison of Brigitte Mohnhaupt in March of this year after more than two decades; and, the public discussion of the possible release from pirson of Christian Klar, about whose conviction new questions have recently become public in Der Spiegel about possible prosecutorial misconduct.

Klar, along with Birgit Hogefeld and Eva Haule-Frimpong, are the only three remaining RAF prisoners in Germany.

The group formally dissolved itself in 1998.

For more on Benno Ohnesorg's death and the political significance it had at the time, see Polizeipräsident legt Kranz für Ohnesorg nieder von Oliver Das Gupta Süddeutsche Zeitung 02.06.07, and especially Der Tag, der die Republik veränderte von Volker Ullrich (a leading German historian) Die Zeit 17.05.07.

The closest American equivalent of the RAF was probably the Weather Underground, who saw themselves as a similar organization. The RAF, though, carried out kidnappings and assassinations. The Weather Underground didn't do those kinds of actions, though they did plant bombs in buildings considered to be sympathetic targets. So far as I'm aware, only one bombing possibly related to that group killed someone in a building. Three of the group's members blew themselves upaccidentally while building bombs in a townhouse in 1970. One of their most daring and famous actions was springing LSD guru Timothy Leary from prison that same year.

The FBI Web site has articles on the latter group. Obviously, the FBI is not an entirely disintered group when it comes to that subject. The articles include:

1975 Terrorism Flashback: State Department Bombing 01/29/04 (The paragraph called "The Chase" is pretty garbled.)

Weather Underground Organization (Weatherman), a 1976 official FBI Chicago Field Office report of 420 pages. Page 3 of this report (in the Part 1a) link show some of the FBI obsessions of the time. Though the Weather Underground, like its European counterparts, held the orthodox Communist Parties of the time as hopelessly "revisionist" and ineffective or worse, just on that first introductory page, we get citations about the American Communist Party ("CPUSA", in FBI jargon) and even Whittaker Chambers' book Witness, one of the favorite conservative books of the 1950s and, I suppose, even to this day.

Here are some reviews of the well-regarded documentary about the group, titled "The Weather Underground".

The Weather Underground by Rob Nelson Mother Jones Mar/Apr 2003

Notes From the Underground by David Greenberg Slate 06/06/03

For 11 years, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers were on the run from the FBI. In the film 'The Weather Underground,' the anti-war activists explain why they fought the law - and why they have no regrets by Edward Guthmann San Francisco Chronicle 07/21/03

When terrorism was cool by Andrew O'Hehir Salon 06/07/03. O'Hehir writes:

As misguided and counterproductive as the Weather Underground's activities may have been, after the townhouse bombing [1970] the group never again planned attacks against human beings. Their post-1970 bombings were symbolic in nature and happened at night when the buildings were empty. For all the vitriol heaped on the Weather Underground by other leftists - and especially by ex-leftist neocons like David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh - it never killed or injured anyone except its own members. (In this regard, it's striking that right-wingers routinely employ the excesses of Weatherman to paint the entire left as anti-American terrorist sympathizers, while the left is either too civil or too cowardly to use the hateful acts of Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and James Kopp to attack conservatives in general.)

Tags: raf, rote-armee-fraktion, terrorism, weather underground

Mexican President Calderón: the drug problem is the demand in the United States

Mexican President Felipe Calderón says that main reason there has to be a "war on drugs" in Mexico is the demand for drugs in the US market (En EU, la causa de guerra contra narco: Calderón El Universal 04.06.07):

La causa fundamental de la guerra que libra el gobierno contra el narcotráfico "no está en México, sino en Estados Unidos", aseguró el presidente Felipe Calderón, quien consideró que el problema en nuestro país es la demanda de drogas en el mercado estadounidense.

En entrevista concedida a la agencia de noticias DPA, Calderón reclamó de Washington "una colaboración más clara y un compromiso mucho más palpable en el tema". ...

"Es evidente que mientras haya mercado, mientras haya consumo de drogas en Estados Unidos, va a subsistir este problema en México", aseveró el mandatario.

"Nuestro problema es la demanda de narcóticos que tiene el mercado americano (estadounidense)", dijo.

He says a more clear collaboration with more flexibility on the US side in the drug war. The article doesn't provide specifics of what he meant by that.

He blamed the drug traffic with the US for bolstering the strength of organized crime in Mexico, which he says is spreading its reach:

Indicó que el crimen organizado está diversificando sus actividades: "Controla en la plaza el secuestro, los centros de juego, los centros nocturnos, incluso cobra ya cuotas a empresarios y productores locales".

En la entrevista comentó que a partir del final de la guerra fría "ahora estamos enfrentando otro tipo de guerras (en el mundo), que no son contra ejércitos localmente definidos, uniformados, sino que son guerras de violencia urbana".

Tags: felipe calderón, war on drugs

Democrats and the Iraq War

Look for continuing Democratic Congressional pressure on the war, in part aimed at forcing the Republicans to vote again and again and again for Bush's War. Tom Hayden writes in Democrats Likely To Harden Anti-War Stance As "Surge" Fails and Election Year Approaches Huffington Post 06/02/07:

Seeking to keep pace with public opinion, key Democratic leaders will soon be considering a peace initiative including full withdrawal from Iraq, revision of the United Nations authorization, and a diplomatic offensive to engage other countries in assisting Iraq.

The proposal represents a sharp difference with the Iraq Study Group -- and current Democratic -- suggestion that combat troops be withdrawn by next spring while leaving tens of thousands of American troops to train the Iraqi armed forces. The notion of "training" a largely-dysfunctional and sectarian Iraqi army, in the absence of a sweeping overhaul of the Baghdad government, is viewed increasingly as unrealistic. The pressure of the anti-war movement and restless public opinion is also propelling these strategists to recommend a stronger withdrawal position than the Congressional majority and presidential candidates currently are taking.

The position of the Bush White House is unpredictable but Pentagon generals in Iraq are calling for a much lengthier counter-insurgency campaign and the brokering of a South Korean-style outcome in Iraq.

For more, see also Marathon, Not A Sprint by Christy Hardin Smith FireDogLake 06/04/07.

At the end of his piece, Hayden writes, "The persistent pressure of the peace movement is having an effect, though more slowly than the morality and patience of many can bear".

Tags: iraq war, tom hayden

Zorro: Capítulos 74-78 (May 28-June 1)

This week, we didn't see enough of Selenia, though Fernando did have a long consultation with her about María Pía. I think Selenia should have a couple of scenes in every episode from here on out. Speaking of Selenia, the Zorro series Web site just added several of the newer characters to their Personajes page - but Selenia isn't included! What were they thinking?

Not only that: they left off my man Aaron the Exorcist, too! People, who do you have putting those Web pages together?

I know that the general idea of the telenovela is that the story ends and you go on to another one. And I'm down with that, for the most part. Stories need to have an end. Otherwise, they can stay around until they die a slow and sad death. Think X-Files.

Aaron the Exorcist is currently off searching for God - but I'm sure he'll be back

Still, it would be great if they would do a novela where Selenia the Megawitch and Aaron the Exorcist were the main protagonists. I think that would be awesome. Of course, I think Twin Peaks is still the high point in the history of television, so maybe I'm not quite mainstream on this.

Anyway, this week, Zorro got to again humiliate el Comandante Montero by breaking into the prison yet again and escaping even after Montero locked him in a cell in the hidden dungeon where he'd been holding Esmeralda. One of the attractive features about this Zorro is that for his ability and cunning, he screws up a lot. In the very first episode, in the concluding scene where he first got tangled up (literally) with Esmeralda, he was there to help Miguel the Gitano escape from El Callao prison. But he only made it there after el Comandante's Montero's men shot the poor guy once.

How could Zorro just walk into a cell and not notice that Montero and his boys were hidden all around him? Anyway, he pulled off an escape in a cloud of smoke. Still, the escape was pretty impressive and gave Montero yet another thing to steam about.

The pressure is starting to get to el Comandante. This week he was showing some real signs of paranoia, taking Capitán Pizarro to his private bedroom and telling him to whisper because Zorro might be anywhere. Of course, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. And it didn't calm el Comandante when he discovered that Zorro had carved a Z onto his sheets. Although, the way he acts with his men, it could have just as well have been one of them. Or maybe Capitán Pizarro.

Mariángel/"Mangle" had quite a week. Olmos the hunchback has to get some of Mangle's tears for the potion or spell that Selenia promised to do for him to make Mangle attracted to him. Olmos managed to move into the De la Vega mansion and Mangle insisted he have the room next to hers. It turns out that Mangle has a little wooden box that she pulls out in her room and cries over.

What's in the box is a letter from a guy named Santiago Michelena, a former boyfriend of Mangle's back in the Old Country. Mangle shows signs of having the remnants of a heart over Santiago. But she later confronts Esmeralda in the basement of the house out in the woods where Montero is now holding her, and she rants at Esmeralda about how she stole the one guy she ever loved and so on. Esmeralda tries to tell Mangle that what she had seen was actually Santiago trying to force himself on her. But Mangle didn't want to listen.

I'm thinking this scene was a notice that Mangle is now officially crazy. Almudena mentioned at one point that Mangle's mother had been insane and she was worried Mangle might be following her down that path. Seeing how angry she was over Santiago and Esmeralda, especially since she's generally about as cold-hearted as it gets when it comes to men, and seeing that she was willing to leave her pregnant half-sister (she still thinks Esmeralda is Fernando's biological daughter) to rot in a basement in the woods, well, I think she's now officially a loon.

Which reminds me, we still have to get an accounting of who Esmeralda's father really is. And is Mangle's mother really dead? They could both show up still.

Tobías saw Catalina doing the Wild Thang with Capitán Pizarro. So now he's out for revenge. His "shadow Zorro" gig is still mostly comic relief. But he showed some spine for about the first time this week. He even snuck up on Pizarro and threatened him to stay away from Catalina. Which could be a heavy clue that it was really Tobías behind the mask that time, though Pizarro didn't seem to pick up on that. The fact that Agapito is convinced that Tobías is Zorro after treating his wound in the butt is pretty entertaining, too.

Almudena is moving closer to the grave. Yumalai was sure that Almudena's dream we the previous week where Regina/Toypurnia appears to her is a sure sign that Almudena is on the Grim Reaper's short list. She goes off to consult with Búfala Blanca and asks her to put her in touch with Toypurnia's spirit. Búfala Blanca gives her a peace pipe packed with some killer weed so powerful that one puff and Yumalai is communicating with the spirit. Or, in this case, with Toypurnia's spirit, who for some reason appears to her in Regina mode, i.e., with Spanish clothing. We don't get to hear the conversation. But afterward, Yumalai tells Búfala Blanca that Toypurnia told her Almudena had to go. Búfala Blanca warns Yumalai from trying to interfere with destiny. But I'm guessing she plans to, anyway.

In the last scene of the week, Almudena and Mangle are kneeling at Esmeralda's grave, and Almudena passes out at the end. Mangle was dressed all in black with a black headpiece, looking as creepy as I've seen her so far. It's particularly morbid since we know that Mangle is aware that Esmeralda is really alive. Her main purpose for being there seems to be to convince Diego that she has a human soul. But without major drugs to help her, that's going to be a tough sell. In fact, her love potion from the native witch-woman made Diego black out. But even that couldn't get him to fall for her seductions. Mangle and Olmos deserve each other. The only thing new she has going for her is that Diego is almost convinced that Esmeralda is really dead, although he knows the body in the grave isn't hers.

Renzo the Useless, Ana Camila (Sor Suplicios) and Kamba (with his demon in tow) are hiding out with the Gitano tribe. Renzo fortunately shares the same remarkable recuperative powers of most everyone else on the show, and his near-fatal gunshot wound in the chest was pretty much healed by the end of the week. Now he can go get himself in trouble somewhere else. Right now, he's sitting around mooning over Camila, while Laisha stands around and steams, probably plotting the best way to land Camila in el Comandante's torture chamber.

Anabolena Meza as Sara Kalí/Mercedes Mayorga de Aragón (Photo: Telemundo)

And, in political developments this week, Padre Tomás Villarte makes plans with his secret pro-democracy league, the Cofradía (Brotherhood), for the arrival of the Queen and the evil Duque Jacobo. They apparently trust the current Queen to do the right thing about Sara Kalí. So they plan to get her to talk to them aware from el Duque to tell her about Sara Kalí and el Duque's plot against the crown.

María Pía tried to escape to distant parts to get away from el Gobernador Fernando. But he caught up to her and kidnapped her. She finally persuaded him to take her back to town. Then Alejandro catches them and has a sword-fight with Fernando and gets him on the ground and is ready to put him out of his misery. Then María Pía intercedes, declaring her love for Fernando. Too bad. Because Fernando is too much of a villain to get rehabilitated in the end, it seems to me.

To conclude, here's Zorro in one of his earlier incarnations:

Tags: zorro, zorro telenovela