ERITREAN EXCURSION

I was in Washington, D.C. this past weekend, and on Friday night I ventured out to Lindy's Red Lion, a bar & grill on the edge of the George Washington University campus. While I was there, I sat at the bar and happened to strike up a conversation with a mocha-colored guy from Eritrea with a polysyllabic name that sounded like "mellifluous." His English was not spectacular, but because I didn't even know what language Eritreans speak (primarily Arabic and Tigrinya it turns out), we did our best to communicate in English.

As the map below indicates, Eritrea is an African nation that is east of Sudan, north of Ethiopia and Djibouti, and has a fair amount of coastline on the Red Sea.

He explained politely that he was working as a part-time bartender in D.C. (not at the Red Lion) while trying to figure out what to do with his life. He had fled Eritrea in early 2000 during the Eritrea-Ethiopian war (1988-2000) when an Ethiopian offensive into Eritrea resulted in the destruction of his home as well as the homes of nearly all his relatives and their livestock, crops, and farming implements. They had all come to this country pre-9/11 when no one was very concerned about Arabic-speaking peoples moving here for the purpose of taking flying lessons.

The war finally concluded in December 2000 when both countries signed a peace agreement in Algiers. Most accounts indicate that the war spent the lives of nearly 100,000 people with more than half a million people displaced. At present, some conflict continues between the countries, primarily because Ethiopia is sore that Eritrea gets all the Red Sea coastline, which, when you think about it, isn't really fair.

He smoked Camel cigarettes as we talked, and I think he couldn't have smoked them any faster if he had someone there lighting them for him and getting them ready to go. We drank more than a few pitchers of the house beer (the name escapes me for some reason), and during this time we attracted a crowd of semi-drunk George Washington U. students who became interested in our conversation.

As the night wore on, I began to call our Eritrean friend "Memsahib," which wasn't really close to his actual name but which sounded cool and African to the inebriated college students, and he responded this name favorably, apparently unaware that memsahib is a name that originated in colonial India as a form of respectful address for a European woman and which was often used for the same purpose in British east Africa for many years (as anyone who had read Beryl Markham's West With the Night should well know).

It was not surprising that almost no one knew anything about Eritrea or its recent history, but it was a bit stupefying that Memsahib knew more about current events in this country than any of the patrons at the bar that took part in our discussion, with the possible exception being yours truly, of course. (Insert your favorite winking emoticon here.)

We discussed eavesdropping (his mail from Eritrea had been opened on more than one occasion - or so he believed), the war in Iraq, and America's complete and utter failure to understand the tenets of Islam, the Muslim mentality, and disease in Africa. We had to disabuse one student of the belief that Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Having read Guns, Germs and Steel, I know that there is no racial or genetic basis for believing that someone from Eritrea is smarter than your average American. So I guess it is just that Americans just aren't smart enough to give a shit whether they are informed anymore.

Because if they were, Bush and the whole lot of neocons would be on the stone-pile by now (figuratively speaking, of course).

For example, just this week:

• A draft report prepared at the direction of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights concludes that treatment of some Guantanamo Bay detainees by the United States "violates their rights to physical and mental health and, in some cases, constitutes torture." That's right: a reasonably objective account of our treatment of prisoners says that we are torturing them. Hmmm. To me, this brings the whole Pledge of Allegiance debate into a new light. Read all about it in the LA Times.
  

• A former CIA official, Paul R. Pillar, who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last October has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence in order to "justify a decision it had already reached to go to war ..." Pillar stated: "It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misued publicly to justify decisions already made ..." So reports the Washington Post.

• Despite Bush's public statements that he does not recall ever meeting Jack Abramoff (a former top Bush fundraiser), an e-mail from Abramoff to a reporter last month suggests Bush met Abramoff nearly 12 times in the last five years and invited Abramoff to Crawford, Texas in 2003. Abramoff was a member of a group of top fundraisers known as Pioneers, each of whom raised $100,000 or more for Bush. I can't speak for everyone, but if I raised that kind of money for a political candidate, not only would I fully expect to meet the candidate, I'd also be looking a hand job at a minimum. Also, Abramoff was apparently chummy with Rove and often threw Rove's name around when he was peddling political influence. Again, the Washington Post.
  

• It now appears that Scooter Libby was directed by his superiors (read Dick Cheney) to leak classified information to reporters contemporaneously with the outing of Valerie Plame. There is no indication yet that Cheney or any other Bush administration official ordered the outing of Valerie Plame, but special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald thinks the disclosure of the classified information (a report about Iraq's nuclear-weapons capability) and the Valerie Plame leak are related. Read about this story in the New York Times. Usually, the disclosure of classified information is a crime.
  

Meanwhile, the Bush administration continues to try to act like the domestic eavesdropping program has some basis in the law when it plainly does not. In fact, it acts in contravention of existing law. That is another way of saying that it is illegal. Yesterday, the American Bar Association, an organization that actually does understand the Constitution, released a statement saying that Bush's spying program was not constitutionally or statutorily valid.

And to make matters worse, Republicans, following the lead of the Bush administration, are insinuating that Democrats are "soft on terror" or "soft on American security" because Democrats are expressing concern that the eavesdropping program is illegal. It must just be that Republicans want to catch Al Qaeda terrorists worse than Democrats. It must be that Republicans are more interested in protecting Americans than Democrats. What a load of shit. Unfortunately, what most people fail to realize is that their inability to afford health insurance and proper medical care poses a much greater danger than bin Laden or any other terrorist who ever strapped on the C4.

It seems almost beyond question that the Bush administration thinks it can get away with anything and everything, because thus far they really have. Why? Because Americans, by and large, are intellectually incurious imbeciles. And why not? They have Incurious George as their president. I've said it before: we only have ourselves to blame.