Global

AUSTIN, Texas -- Ecuador recently moved to the dollar standard for its economy in an effort to bail itself out of one of those credit-flight crises that seems to afflict countries like a case of flu going around the globe. The dollarization of that economy has touched off a flurry of commentary among economists, who are on-the-one-handing with even more vigor than usual.

The alternative to the Ecuadorean move is something like what Singapore tried to do, a little late, during the collapse of most of the Asian economy two years ago. Basically, what Singapore did was to freeze foreign capital and say, "Sorry, buddy, but you can't take your money out of here for a while." This naturally upset all those geniuses at the International Monetary Fund, who are wedded to the "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" school of economic repair.

There's a wonderful word, "iatrogenic," describing an illness that you get from going to the hospital to have another illness treated. I always think of the IMF as a dispenser of iatrogenic ills.

"We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented,disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so." - Oscar Wilde

When I was thirteen I spent a wonderful summer with cousins living and working on a large dairy farm in northern Indiana just outside the small town where my father was raised. I am thankful for that summer, but one momentary experience of that visit still causes me difficulty around Thanksgiving Day.

My cousins (first cousins/once removed [the adults] and second cousins [the kids]) were wonderful, god-fearin', country folks, and at some point the elders shared a bit of their homey religious philosophy.

A.N.S.W.E.R. FACT SHEET ? The Media and the Government

ALL PROPAGANDA, ALL THE TIME!

In the past weeks, images have been seen around the world of bombings of villages, hospitals, mosques, Red Cross facilities and more. What has been the response of those dropping the bombs? The U.S. and England are opening what they call ?Coalition Information Centers? ? a plan for 24-hour-a-day domination of the news to manipulate and refute these images.

In the last weeks, the Bush administration, the Pentagon and the CIA have been battening down all of the hatches to deprive the people of the United States of any independent source of information. Why is the government so afraid that people in the United States will have the opportunity to receive uncensored news and information? It is because the Bush administration, having learned a crucial lesson in Vietnam, knows that if the people actually learn the truth about the war, they may become its most vocal and effective opponents.

Christmas morning found me walking with Jasper the Wonderdog up a street called Slalom, approximately 6,500 feet above sea level in the Sierra, on the outskirts of the town of Truckee, which lies athwart Interstate 80, not far from Lake Tahoe, Calif. Jasper and I walked past some 30 houses, each of them selling for around a million dollars. All but three were vacant, their owners either preferring their third homes in Hawaii or discussing the beauties of Chapter 11 in some bankruptcy court. If the Donner party had staggered out of their graves and into those stately homes on Slalom, they probably would have found as little provender as they did on the snowbound shores of Mountain Lake in the winter of 1846-1847.

Later that day we all had Christmas lunch overlooking that same Mountain Lake, renamed Donner Lake in honor of the mostly doomed party of midwesterners who tried to survive one of the worst winters in the history of the Sierra on its eastern shore.

The last pages of a calendar remind us that life is fleeting. All we have at any moment is the present, filtered with memory.

Meanwhile, music -- capable of powerfully evoking what's past but not quite gone -- can be a catalyst for transcending what has been. "Music is a higher revelation than philosophy," Ludwig van Beethoven asserted. Later in the 19th century, some writers praised music as the ultimate creative medium. "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music," Walter Pater contended. Joseph Conrad referred to music as "the art of arts."

Musicians open doors to realms of perception that might otherwise remain ineffable. And music can be a dynamic force for resistance when dominant institutions discount the experiences of people suffering from imbalances of power.

AUSTIN, Texas --- Until a few days ago, it seemed there were only two ways we could possibly lose the war in Afghanistan at this late date. The first was if great numbers of Afghans starve to death this winter, thus canceling out the good we have done by getting rid of the Taliban and inciting a new wave of terrorists. The second would be an Islamist uprising in Pakistan, the overthrow of President Pervez Musharraf and war between India and Pakistan, thus rather more than canceling out any good we have done.

True, Al Qaeda seems to have leaked away at the end, like water dribbling out of cupped hands. First they were all holed up in Tora Bora and we were pounding the stuffing out of them and then ... they weren't there. Since we suspected the Pakistanis would let them through, it can't have come as much surprise. We have learned a great deal about how deeply implicated the ISI, the Pakistani CIA, was in the Taliban government.

AAUSTIN, Texas -- Fellow procrastinators of the world, unite! Now is the time to begin thinking about Christmas shopping. We still have a few days left, so there's no rush for those who have been known to do it all on Christmas morning at the Jiffy Mart (everyone appreciates a nice can of WD-40).

For those who consider it wussy to begin shopping before the 24th, here's the annual Christmas book list -- the best one-stop shopping in town, items to suit all ages and personalities.

We prefer, of course, to shop at independent bookstores, but if a chain store is all that's available, it will do. Though there are no guarantees on the quality of the Christmas help: I once heard a woman ask for "The Odyssey" by Homer, to which the high-school honey hired for the holidays replied, "Uh, Homer Who?"

A fun book for almost anyone on you list is "Seabiscuit, An American Legend" by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House, $24.95). Unless you're a horse person, you probably think you don't want to read the biography of a racehorse, but you do want to read this one. It's a love of a book about a love of a horse.

The autumn started with a huge national jolt of shock, fear, grief and anger. Winter has begun with many worries here at home and grim satisfaction about warfare abroad. A line from "King Lear," early in Act 4, is hauntingly appropriate:

"'Tis the time's plague when madmen lead the blind."

Shakespeare's observation fits the current era, and not only with reference to the murderous qualities of Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network. Few media outlets -- and certainly none of the major national brands -- are willing to scrutinize the unhinged aspects of the adulated leadership in the White House.

Deep introspection for any society is difficult. Precious little danger of that, in the here and now. After more than 100 days of big-type rhetorical questions, the media answers are largely self-satisfied. "Why do they hate us?" Because we're great, though sometimes clumsy on the world stage. "How can the violence in the Middle East be stopped?" By continuing to back Israel, no matter what.

The fall of Enron sounds the death knell for one of the great rackets of the last decade: Green Seals of Approval, whereby some outfit like the Natural Resources Defense Council or the Environmental Defense Fund would issue testimonials to the enviro-conscience and selfless devotion to the public weal of corporations like Enron. These green seals of approval were part and parcel of the neoliberal pitch, that fuddy-duddy regulation should yield to modern, "market-oriented" inducements to environmental problems, to which indeed NRDC and EDF were always the prime salesfolk of neoliberal remedies for environmental problems.

In fact, NRDC was socked deep into the Enron lobby machine. Here 's what happened:

AUSTIN -- Since we have declared war on a noun, we are now by definition in the definition business. The shortest version of our definitional problem, as we see in attacks from India to Israel, is that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's, writes in a scathing essay, "We might as well be sending the 101st Airborne Division to conquer lust, annihilate greed, capture the sin of pride." Since President Bush has given us his own somewhat exuberant definition -- "We go forth to defend freedom, and all that is good and just in the world" -- we can only hope there will be no further mission creep.