How to give el Oso an orgasm:

Don’t let me have any coffee in the morning. Worse, force me to drink two cups of water. Make me go for a long run. Make me shower (this is for my own good and the good of all humanity). Then, once it is well into the afternoon, sit me down in a comfortable cafe. You know, with good feng shui and relaxing music. Billie Holliday would be nice. Buy me a double americano, but in a 10 ounce mug. Has to be in a mug. Just a little room for cream and yes please, one sugar … the brown stuff. Then, buy me the latest issue of the Believer and let me sip and read.

I’m … I’m … sorry, let me clean that up.

Obviously I’ve ended my sado-masochistic march of coffee prohibition. And like they said of prohibition in the 20’s, ‘it was an interesting little experiment.’ I actually started drinking coffee again a couple days ago, but just one mug a day, never more, and I think the break was really good for me. I feel refreshed. The purple stuff under my eyes is gone and I wake up feeling energetic, ready to start the day.

I don’t know if I have written this already of if I had intended to write it, but … well, I was listening to NPR a few weeks ago and they were talking about the trial against Saddam Hussein. How the prosecutors were having to select only the most horrific and varied cases against Saddam to give a “general sampling” of what he was guilty of. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Couldn’t believe the interviews with prison victims - mainly political prisoners - who were visiciously tortured. It sounded straight out of the Gulags of Stalinist USSR or the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. It was the first time that my staunch anti-war sentiment was challenged. Listening to these people I heard myself say: “Saddam, what a fucking prick. What is it with dictators with moustaches? Thank god we got that dickhead out of there.”

Thank god we got that dickhead out of there? Isn’t that exactly what the Neocons were/are saying? Isn’t that what preoccupied the entire administration before 9/11 even happened, possibly even enough to distract preventive measures that could have been taken by the CIA? Aren’t I supposed to be out there marching with the “End the War” protestors?

If El Moreno has been feeling anti-antibush lately, that I was feeling anti-antiwar.

For the first time my thoughts toward the invasion (and you really must call it an invasion), became, as Tom Bissell says, “incredibly confused.” Opening up April’s issue of the Believer, I was somewhat comforted to see that Tom Bissell - a writer I respect very much - felt a discomforting ambivalance. He shares his thoughts about the war with Iraq after reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a book that will probably remain on my really-one-day-some-time-somewhere-with-lots-of-free-time-I-should-read-this-book list for a long long time.

Here are excerpts:

For what it is worth, and it is obviously worth very little, I was opposed to the war in Iraq. Like many of us, but not nearly enough of us, I loathe and distrust the Bush administration, and wait in vain for some beam of real leadership or vision to escape teh moral black hole that rests, immovably, at its center. I was opposed to the war because I believed it was wrong to attack a country that had not attacked us and that was not immediately involved in an act of concentrated genocide. (Genocide seems resistant to suggestions that it is subject to any statute of limitations - until one realizes that, if it were not, every white person in North America would be guilty of it.) I was opposed to the war because of my own experiences in nations still hamstrung by the legacy of totalitarianism. Most of us, as Americans, simply cannot understand teh psychic damage that living in a totalitarian society, when one delinquent whisper can shuttle you and your family to a dungeon, wreaks upon a culture. By design, totalitarianism creates a sick, fearful, insane citizenry. One does not ‘free’ such people by declaring democracy any more than one cures mental illness by throwing open the doors to an asylum. (But what, then, does one do for such people? That is a very good question. I certainly have no answer.) Germany, Japan: these are the exceptions to the grave rule of totalitarianism …

I was, to put it basically, incredibly confused. Confused about Iraq, about George W. Bush, about the gauntlet Samantha Power’s book [A Problem from Hell, the 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner which dealt with genocide in the 20th century] had thrown down within me, and above all I was confused about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose moral clarity had paradoxically made a prism of my own moral feelings. I found myself less antiwar than anti-antiwar, which did not make me prowar but left me much less antiwar than I wanted to be. For the The Gulag Archipelago had told me this: one must fight totalitarianism and never apologize for doing so. The sick brilliance of totalitarian regimes is that they are beyond diplomacy. They are removable only by war - provided that they do not crack from within, but patience seems a pathetic virtue when it could mean that millions of people will suffer for unknown decades to come.

The article goes on to talk about Bissell’s once sympathy for the Taliban which later turned to dissillusionment and then the radicalist (Bissell wants you to read “Stalinist”) ties of ANSWER: Act Now to Stop War and Racism.

I had a few problems with the article. First, and most importantly, Bissell does nothing to explicitly compare Iraq under Suddam with the U.S.S.R. under Stalin. Second, he stays away from questioning why some totalitarian regimes are overthrown from within (Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cuba, and arguably Iran, though in the latter two it was one totalitarian regime for the next). Why Japan and Germany became successful democracies. Why some totalitarian regimes just kinda melted away without and actual movment (Spain, Chile, and Argentina) And finally why some are simply allowed to exist both domestically and by the international community (most of the “stans”). Perhaps those are other questions that Bissell also “certainly [doesn't] have an answer to.”

But they seem like important ones to address before boldly making the argument that totalitarian regimes are “beyond diplomacy, removable only by war” and that “patience seems a pathetic virtue.”