The voting machine controversy continues. David Corn, an editor at The Nation, reported yesterday that in addition to the party snacks so thoughtfully provided by their sponsors, those trusted gatekeepers of the Election Center are eating their words.

The Code of Ethics on the group’s web site asserts:

“It is our sacred honor to protect and promote a public trust and confidence by our conduct of accurate and fair elections. As the public’s guardians of freedom within a democratic society, we are responsible for the integrity of the process.”

Corn questions whether their national conference should allow “the leading manufacturers of electronic voting machines [to] be wining and dining state and local officials responsible for conducting elections.”

The conference the Election Center is holding this week in Washington, D.C., provides training for election officials from across the nation.

The program for the conference notes that the welcoming reception on August 26 was sponsored by Diebold Election Systems. Likewise, the “Dinner Cruise on the Potomac and Monuments by Night Tour” to be held tonight will be cosponsored by Sequoia Voting Systems, while the “Graduation Luncheon and Awards Ceremony” to be held on the last day of the conference will be sponsored by Election Systems and Software.

Each of these companies has donated funding to the Election Center, reports Linda K. Harris in an article for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Each of these companies also manufactures electronic voting machines.

Diebold’s Chief Executive, Walden O’Dell, is publicly recognized as an active supporter of the Bush campaign. “To think that Diebold is somehow tainted because they have a couple folks on their board who support the president is just unfair,” Ohio GOP Spokesman Jason Mauk is quoted as protesting in Julie Carr Smyth’s piece for The Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Corn offers a variety of recent allegations against all three companies which include fraud, voter machine malfunctions, lying, and misconduct. What Corn considers most noteworthy is the fact that none of these companies will supply information about their systems, leaving critics wary of potential security problems. Corn laments:

“By accepting support from Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S, these elections officials do little to encourage confidence in their judgment and impartiality. A cynic would not be unjustified to ask, if they cannot be trusted to make this call, how can they be trusted to count the votes?”

It’s hardly surprising that after last election’s ballot fiasco in Florida, many Americans are wary of the potential for another miscount in the upcoming election, particularly when it’s still easier to get a receipt for anything we purchase than it is a paper trail for electronic voting machines.

The non-partisan People for the American Way web site provides plenty of opportunities to make sure this year’s election is decided by a correct count of votes.

I like to tell people that I’m at that age, the age when so many people I know are getting married that my vacations now revolve around weddings. (As a friend of mine would say: That’s a first-world problem.) For everyone getting married, thinking of getting married or thinking about when they might have the chance to get married, I recommend the recently released film, We Don’t Live Here Anymore.

Caveat: I guess I recommend it not for those who want the feelings induced by a movie like, say, Father of the Bride, but to those who want to see an honest, emotional look at the common problems of some marriages. Because it’s been called among other things “an anatomy of adultery,” you can surmise that it’s not exactly an advertisement for the happier aspects of marriage.

The rewards of enduring some discomfort, though, are great. Outside of some dated attitudes (woman as stay-at-home mom and housekeeper), the movie is a heart-breaking look at guilt, exhaustion, ambition, and love. The short summary is that two couples sleep with each other (men with women). Both marriages lean precipitously toward being dissolved. At turns, you end up hating both the male characters, one of whom is played by Mark Ruffalo of another indie triumph, You Can Count on Me. But it’s the nuanced, complicated feelings the movie extracts from you that really make it worth seeing.

If you’re at that age, it’s as good a time as any.

Vinnee Tong

“Bush is a tyrant that puts Hitler into the shade and his group of such tyrants is a typical gang of political gangsters,” asserted a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman.

The North Korean ministry spokesman was reacting to a speech that President Bush delivered last week in Wisconsin, during which he stated: “There’s now five countries saying to the tyrant in North Korea, disarm, disarm.”

North Korea reasserted that it now refuses to participate in the working-level talks that would serve as the prelude to the six-nation discussion — which would include delegates from the United States, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and North Korea — which is scheduled to occur at the end of next month. The six-party conference will focus on nuclear weapons programs and will be a continuation of the recent round of discussions that took place in June.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“The proclivity toward apologetics for enemies of the United States are problems that scholarship on the Middle East shares with other area-studies,” hissed Daniel Pipes in the winter of 1995-1996. Mr. Pipes, the proud winner of this year’s “Islamophobia” Award, issued by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, and who has been called, appropriately, an “anti-Arab propagandist,” is busily threatening academic freedom in American universities. And we should all care.  

Mr. Pipes is the director and founder of the Middle East Forum, a think tank that claims that it “works to define and promote American interests in the Middle East,” which, in turn, established a sinister program which it benignly calls “Campus Watch.” The Middle East Forum outlines the deeply troubling and menacing big-brother mission of the Campus Watch program:

The program, established in September of 2002, monitors the often erroneous and biased teachings and writings of U.S. professors specializing in the Middle East, with the goal of improving the scholarly study of the region. A Campus Speakers Bureau provides speakers who can provide accurate and balanced information to American students in the classroom.

The goal of the Campus Watch program is as evident as it is reprehensible: to promote Mr. Pipe’s virulently anti-Arab approach to Middle Eastern studies and to blacklist those professors who refuse to share his vision.

Dissatisfied with merely blacklisting professors through the Campus Watch program, Pipes seeks to cut funding, doled out by the Department of Education under the Title VI program, for Middle East studies programs housed in universities. In his academically misguided but characteristically pert tone, he recently wrote: Middle East Studies: Wasted Money. If Middle Eastern studies cannot be taught according to Mr. Pipes’ often-discredited academic and political inclinations, they should not, apparently, be taught at all.

Lest time be overly kind to Mr. Pipes and wipe our memories of the fact that he wrote, in 1990, that “Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene … All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most,” we should maintain our own watch on Mr. Pipes if we wish to safeguard the academic freedom and integrity of American universities and research institutions.  

Mimi Hanaoka

The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states: red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.

We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states…

These were the words of Illinois Senate Candidate Barack Obama as he addressed the Democratic National Convention. In the wake of the speech, he has been widely celebrated as one of the party’s rising stars. One of the reasons he’s been embraced I think is encapsulated by the above quote. In it he resists, at least rhetorically, the facile divisions that separate the country and which pundits love to embrace. With a simple red state/blue state mix-and-match, Obama turns these shorthand stereotypes on their head, reminding us that while a state may be red, it could still be more that 40 percent blue and vice versa. And beyond the political geography, he reminds us that neither god, nor gay, nor patriotism are the sole domain of either party.  

And now the “Red State/Blue State Mix Up Game” can be enjoyed by the whole family! Here’s how you play. Simply pick a stereotype associated with each colored state and then mix ‘em up. I’ll show you how:

“They listen to NPR in the red states and I know some people who TiVo The 700 Club in the blue states; they eat at Cracker Barrel in the blue states and some folks play frisbee golf in the red states; we donate to Save the Children in the blue states and they pay their dues to the Sierra Club in the red states.”

Ok, now you try.    

Benjamin Helphand

In the past, many expatriate Americans have worn their national identity beneath a chameleon exterior the way most of us wear socks with too many holes in them. As absentee voter registrations continue to soar in the months preceding this year’s presidential elections, evidence is surfacing that Americans abroad may be embracing a new, and visible, cultural identity.

But wasn’t the American identity visible already, when glimpsed outside its national boundaries?

Everyone’s seen the ugly American: the stereotype abounds. We’re too loud, we’re pushy, and we only eat McDonald’s. We don’t try to blend in; we refuse to embrace the cultures we visit. That provocative blend of rude, ignorant, and arrogant, good-hearted and harmless so astutely pegged by The Oregonian’s Susan Nielsen as the unfortunate reputation won by Americans everywhere has been overtaken by something new.

In an op-ed piece entitled “Enter the new kind of ugly American,” Nielsen argues that the new American image “reflects the worst parts of the United States” as did the previous version, except “…we’re no longer just big tourists with happy fistfuls of souvenirs. We’re prison guards with a mean streak.”

Jennifer Joan Lee’s article in the International Herald Tribune, “Online campaigns gather steam to get Americans to vote”, suggests that Americans living abroad are embracing a more positive image as the 2004 elections appear on the horizon.

She offers up several web sites promoting absentee voter registrations, the majority of which are democratic. Woven throughout the piece is the landmark role played by the Internet, which Lee credits with increasing absentee voter participation at an unprecedented rate:  

“‘The Internet has fundamentally changed the ability of U.S. citizens abroad to participate in U.S. politics,’” [says Bob Neer, founder of USAbroad.org]. “‘Before the Internet, it was difficult and expensive for people to participate. Now, millions and millions of people have a really new opportunity to organize.’”

Lee attributes the high numbers of registrations for absentee ballots to the fact that just over 500 votes made the difference in the election of our current President. Numbering somewhere between six and seven million in population, American expatriates wield a significant amount of voter power, “enough … to make up a 51st state” according to reporter Simon Payn.

The Internet has managed to serve as a means of including the world in the decision Americans will make in the upcoming election. The web site, www.tellanamericantovote.com, founded by Claire Taylor, an American living in Amsterdam, “allows non-U.S. citizens to encourage their expatriate American friends to register and to vote,” in addition to “giv[ing] Americans access to step-by-step absentee voting instructions.” Taylor explains,

“The bold opinion of our Dutch friends and neighbours inspired us. The U.S. President affects the whole world and we want to give the world a chance to have their say … After the election, a lot of people were saying, why does everyone in America want the war, why did they support Bush? … But you forget that half the U.S. didn’t vote for Bush. That’s always a discussion — I am having to defend the U.S. policies when I don’t necessarily support them myself.”

American expatriate and Paris resident Laurie Chamberlain broke a 25-year silence to reclaim her American identity as a political activist:

“While I was protesting against the war last spring, I could have just blended in with the French peace movement, but I love my country, and what it stands for … It breaks my heart to see what is happening to it these days. That’s why I carried a sign saying, ‘I am an American.’”

At long last, Americans seem to have been given the green light to take action on an issue which will affect the world over the next four years.

By voting, we can elect the next American President.

In an impassioned but garbled and confused rant, Sam Harris argues in the LA Times that religion lies at the core of what appears, in his view, to be an inevitable and apocalyptic clash of civilizations. It is a shame, then, that Mr. Harris’ conviction is as firm as his understanding of history is shaky.

At best, Mr. Harris has made the extraordinarily unique observation that religion, like anything else, can be manipulated. At worst, he belligerently ignores history (forgetting the violent traditions of Christian aggression and Buddhist sectarian division), unproductively and ethnocentrically demonizes Islam (asserting that “a social policy based on the Koran poses even greater dangers” than one based on Christianity), and demands what is definitionally impossible (demanding that we accept faith only if it passes the litmus test of some vague sense of what constitutes “reason”).

Mr. Harris asks if it is not “time we subjected our religious beliefs to the same standards of evidence we require in every other sphere of our lives,” and in doing so he misses the point; by demanding “proof” of the validity of a particular religion, Mr. Harris only mires himself further in the morass of dogmatic mudslinging. To judge a religious adherent’s actions as proof or disproof of the validity of his faith is preposterous; if this were our standard of judging the validity of a religion, there would likely be no faith unscarred by the shameful acts of its believers.  

Furthermore, such an understanding of religion also blinds Mr. Harris to the political and social contingencies of our lives. Mr. Harris writes

“Why did 19 well-educated, middle-class men trade their lives for the privilege of killing thousands of our neighbors? Because they believed, on the authority of the Koran, that they would go straight to paradise for doing so.”

While religious belief may have motivated the Al-Qaeda suicide bombers, many other crucial factors contributed to their anti-American sentiment and the resurgence of politically Islamist movements that ultimately led to the tragedy of 9/11 — the Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; the failure of “modern secular nationalism;” the Egyptian-Israeli war and Arab oil embargo in 1973; the Iranian Revolution in 1979; the Wahhabi-oil connection; and the concrete consequences of modernization in the Muslim world, such as rapid population growth, an increase in urban population, mass literacy, a large young segment of the population, and high poverty and unemployment rates. It is incorrect and unproductive to characterize an essentially political movement, such as Al-Qaeda, as a religious abnormality.

In calling for an undefined rationalistic scrutiny of religion, Mr. Harris merely digs himself deeper into a dogmatic quarrel. If we are to understand the rise in radically violent and politically Islamist movements, we should not focus our energies on close readings of religious texts; rather, we must come to a more complete understanding of the historical, social, and political contingencies that coincide with religious belief.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Fifty-nine years after Japan surrendered in World War II, several Japanese ministers took the anniversary of the defeat to visit Yasukuni shrine and pay their respects to, among other people, wartime prime minister and convicted war criminal General Hideki Tojo.

China was livid as it usually is when a Japanese politician visits the controversial shrine. Yasukuni Shrine, founded in 1869, is dedicated to the souls of the approximately 2.5 million Japanese war dead, and the souls of innocent children and war criminals alike are venerated in the shrine. Hundreds of thousands of visitors flock to Yasukuni every year, and the shrine functions as a symbol of both respectful patriotism and militaristic nationalism.  

Politicians visiting Yasukuni are certainly not unusual; several Japanese prime ministers have visited the shrine — the current prime minister Junichiro Koizumi has visited Yasukuni four times since he took office in 2001 — and cabinet ministers pay their respects to the souls of the dead at the Shinto shrine. The subtle nuance, which has never quite been resolved, is whether these visits can ever be completely personal and private. Prime Minister Koizumi has dismissed this nuance as rubbish, and stated “I’m both a public and private person.”

Prime Minister Koizumi has defended his controversial visits as personal trips during which he prays for peace and expresses his desire that Japan should never again go to war again since Yasukuni does, after all, translate as “peaceful country.” Given Japan’s recent and usually eager participation in the war and occupation in Iraq, let’s hope that the ministers’ purported desire for peace has not been complicated or compromised.

Mimi Hanaoka

Paralleling the ground broken in New York City at Ground Zero little more than a month ago, this election year brings with it the chance to turn an inescapably grim date into a world-recognized opportunity for comment and change.

Around the world on Saturday, September 11, people will meet in public places to share ideas about what democracy, citizenship, and patriotism are today. The September Project, funded by the University of Washington and the Washington Medical Librarians Association, hosts a web site promoting libraries as the ideal setting for this event. The site proposes several activities to stimulate ideas, including shared readings, talks, children’s programs, roundtables, open forums, displays, and last but not least, voter registration. Santa Cruz County Library System in California, for example, will host a forum via 10 of its branches, where people will explore the questions: “What works well in America?,” “What needs fixing?,” and “What can we do to fix it?” Hosting libraries are encouraged to share their ideas, many of which are already available online.

A list and map of participating venues around the world are available on the web site, which I visited immediately, anticipating a plethora of hosting libraries in Los Angeles County which would mirror the activist awareness of my undergrad home, Santa Cruz. Imagine my surprise when the page opened to show that in a county large enough to eclipse Santa Cruz county many times over, only three libraries have signed on as host, all of which require more than an hour’s drive, round-trip, from where I live in Venice.

There’s still time to “take back” September 11 by signing up on the September Project web site. It’s one of the more entertaining ways we can change history.

A story in The New York Times today puts into focus an interesting divide in the world of ambitious, young, would-be professionals. Jennifer 8. Lee writes about the growing divide between young people who can afford to take unpaid internships and those who can not.

As anyone who has actually applied for an internship can tell you, the ability to take an unpaid internship not only means there are a greater number of options but also that the options are more selective, prestigious ones. This is a story that should not be forgotten. As internships grow in importance for young people starting their careers, the impact of this internship disparity could be to make even wider any class divisions already created through elementary, secondary, and higher education.

Those of us rooting for meritocracy as an ideal can only hope that the persistence and endurance of the young, ambitious, and financially challenged can prevail over the exhaustion of long work weeks and the stress of making ends meet.

Vinnee Tong

The Indian censorship board’s final solution is, it seems, total censorship.

The national film board has banned screenings of Final Solution, a film that documents the riots that ensued in the western Indian state of Gujarat in 2002 when 59 Hindus died in an arson attack. Hindu mobs blamed Muslim mobs for the attack, the city was plagued by rioting, chaos, and vigilante justice, and over 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, were left dead.  

The arson attack polarized the community primarily because it occurred on a train carrying Hindu activists who were returning from the temple at Ayodhya, a highly contested religious site. In 1989, Hindus began a campaign to build a Hindu temple on the grounds of a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya. Three years later, Hindu extremists demolished the ancient Babri mosque. Gujarat was ripe for inter-religious violence, and the attack in 2002 set the powder keg aflame.  

Final Solution, then, should be welcomed as a documentary that both sheds light on the situation and calls critical attention to the strife and suffering that has been escalating in Gujarat. The Indian censorship board, citing the possibility that the film may incite yet more violence, has banned the film, which won both the Wolfgang Staudte award and the Special Jury Award at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, in addition to the Best Documentary and Critic’s Choice awards at the Hong Kong International Film Festival.  

Director  Rakesh Sharma appropriately stated that the “people who make hate speeches should be banned and not the film-maker who records it.

Mimi Hanaoka

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful — and so are we … They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people — and neither do we,” President Bush announced to Pentagon officials during a recent signing ceremony for the $417 billion defense bill.  

While the assertion that the American government is hard at work trying to harm its citizens was a little surprising, perhaps we should be accustomed to President Bush’s blunders by now; the president has confidently claimed that “it’s the executive branch’s job to interpret law,” and he has also made the astute observation that “the illiteracy level of our children are appalling.”  

Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate magazine, has delighted in collecting President Bush’s malapropisms and verbal blunders, and has written The Deluxe Election-Edition Bushisms: The First Term, in His Own Special Words, chronicling the president’s attempts to navigate the complex terrain of the English language. In his hilarious and vitriolic article about the president, Weisberg quotes Paul O’Neill, a former treasury secretary, as saying that “the President is like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection.”

In Weisberg’s estimation, Bush’s inarticulacy — and many argue downright stupidity — is actually a selling point because it makes him a man of the people: “I think his inarticulacy is part of it, people identify with his problem. You know, it’s hard to speak in public — one makes mistakes, it can be embarrassing. And this bonds him to people.”

While Mr. Bush’s perpetual struggle with language has provided Americans hours of mean-spirited entertainment, let’s hope we’re not treated to another four years of such fun.

Mimi Hanaoka