A Connecticut Yankee in Bellingham

Haggard and Dreawn (and Quartered) Hyp! Hyp! Hypocrisy!

2012-01-01T03:48:00.000-08:00

[Another old post from the soon to disappear Lion and Pen web site is this originally posted November 3, 2006]

I now offer for your delectation one Pastor Ted Haggard. Kind, smiling, Pastor Ted of the New Life Church adjacent to the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Pastor Ted who is a graduate of (where else?) Oral Roberts University founded by a man who made his fortune as a televangelist and tent show huckster pulling chicken livers from suffering rubes and claiming that god had just allowed him to draw out their cancers. Pastor Ted who believes, "The Holy Bible, and only the Bible, is the authoritative Word of God. It alone is the final authority for determining all doctrinal truths. In its original writing, the Bible is inspired, infallible and inerrant." He also believes that, "we don't have to debate about what we should think about homosexual activity, it's written in the Bible." Pastor Ted who was, until today, President of the National Association of Evangelicals and claims to have an identity of views with our Fearless Leader, Dubya, as well as having a long association with that pillar of traditional values, James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Yes, kind, smiling Pastor Ted, quick to condemn same-sex marriage and homosexuality seems to have been living in a world with a slight disconnect from our own...I mean apart from the half-assed fundamentalist world (forgive the tautology).

You see that one of the things that kept Pastor Ted smiling was his 3-year affair with a male prostitute from whom he also bought crystal meth. Now, we have to allow that Pastor Ted claims not to have used the crystal meth (only his teeth and brain cells know for sure!) but then he surely must still have it, mustn't he? Isn't that a lot like not inhaling? Or was he just doing an errand for his buddy, Dubya?

I do want to be clear here. If kind, smiling Pastor Ted is gay, I wish him well. It may have some ill effects on his wife and 5 children, but accepting his own sexual identity is generally a good thing. But pardon me while I roll on the floor and hold my sides that are about to split with laughter. Kind, smiling Pastor Ted hasn't much to dispute with his fellow fundamentalist hatemonger, Fred Phelps, when it comes to homosexuality. That he's been getting "massages" from a male "masseur" for the past 3 years just goes off the scale on the hypocrisy meter. This one is even more fun that watching Fox News make Mark Foley a Democrat! And, I'm sure that the fun is only starting as there are bound to be rousing statements from other icons of the cynical exploitation of religion and its unquestioning followers like Dobson, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, Chuck Colson and the rest of the "Jesus is a Nazi too" crowd.

The gag may be waving the flag
That began with a mystical hand
Hip hooray!
The American way
The world is a stage,
The stage is a world of entertainment - Howard Dietz (Arthur Schwartz - composer)

Oh, how I love it!

Unbidden Memories

2012-01-01T03:37:00.000-08:00

[Another venue in which I have posted some other writing is about to disappear if anything on the Internet can truly be said to disappear. i found a few pieces that seemed worth saving by reposting here.

The following I originally posted on June 1, 2005.]

Memory is a strange and wonderful thing, a thing that has been central for me for most of my life. I always had a great capacity for memory of facts, of texts, of poetry of lines for a play but of places and their sights and sounds and smells. Memory can play tricks on us, but one of its most delightful and yet most cruel tricks is recalling in perfect, exquisite detail places, things and people lost along the way.

On Sunday, March 13, 2005, Anna and I and our friend Rick Gager, went to the Mt. Baker Theatre here in Bellingham, Washington to see some movies. Mt. Baker is a movie palace decorated in the Moorish style popular in the early 1920's. It has just undergone a full restoration and is much as it would have been if I'd been alive and going to the movies to see Erich von Stroheim's The Merry Widow or Chaplain's The Tramp as new releases. So the theatre itself is something of a time capsule. One walks off a street in February, 2005 and into a lobby that actually once hosted Clark Gable, Loretta Young and Jack Oakie while they were filming The Call of the Wild nearby.

We had come to see a program of silent movies that were to be accompanied by members of the Theatre Organ Society on the Mighty Wurlitzer Organ which is on an hydraulic lift beneath a trap in the stage floor, downstage centre.

When we arrived we found that we were going to get an opening act that we hadn't counted on. The Bellingham High School Showstoppers mixed choral group was going to perform. We were a bit wary, but decided to stay. Anna and I were glad we did.

The kids in the Showstoppers were disciplined and excellent singers. Their teacher clearly selected most of the music. Her selections were far more problematic than the students' singing.

There was a delightful bit of Renaissance harmony. All Ye Who Music Love by Baldassare Donato, executed flawlessly and a fine rendition of the lovely ballad, My Funny Valentine (I think that Richard Rodgers mostly went down hill after Lorenz Hart died). But they opened with Happy Together, a 1960's song that you can't forget no matter how desperately you try. Rather than building on the beautiful success of the Donato piece, we got a rendition of One Tin Soldier, the title song from the gawdawful movie Billy Jack. My Funny Valentine which, with Bewitched (Bothered and Bewildered), is one of the greatest love songs not written by Cole Porter or the Gershwins, we got an credible version of You Are the Song followed by a minor key, bluesy version of If I Only Had a Brain that didn't work and was never going to no matter who sang it.

The girls left the stage as I whispered to Anna that we know that their music teacher is certainly our age. The guys did a song called The Handsome Butcher that I'd never heard before and wouldn't care if I never heard again and then launched into The Auctioneer. Suddenly, I was no longer in the Mt. Baker Theatre. I was sitting in front of an oval TV screen in a living room that hasn't existed for over forty years watching the Tennessee Ernie Ford Show. This was a bit of Time Travel that I hadn't counted on. I literally hadn't heard that song in forty-five years.

That, of course, made me realize that music teachers, particularly, carry a part of the past, their musical taste fixed when they were the age of their students, forward into the future. How else can I explain why my Elementary School graduating class in 1963, under the direction of a music teacher old enough to have studied with Pythagoras, did a medley of Victor Herbert songs. I still have unpleasant flashbacks to...

Slumber on, my Little Gypsy Sweetheart,
Dream of the fields and the groves.
Can you hear me, hear me in that Dreamland,
Where your fancies rove?

Despite the fact that Victor Herbert would have had to have been composing operettas when dinosaurs roamed the earth to have been popular in our music teacher's girlhood, that's obviously what happened, just as it had happened with this music teacher in Bellingham, Washington in 2005. My elementary music teacher grew up when Victor Herbert was the hot composer of "proper" music as opposed to that bawdy jazz that Negros and Jews were composing and playing. She (I have forgotten her name) wanted to pass down to me and my classmates an appreciation for Herbert's "proper" music.

She was too late. Cartoons from the late 1920's and early 1930's with soundtracks by Cab Calloway and others had already insinuated themselves as happy, bouncy music by the time I was in first grade let alone graduating from eighth. Singers on Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town and other variety shows had already put Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart and Harry Warren tunes in my head.

So there I was remembering the elementary music teacher whose name was long gone from my memory inspired by memories of Tennessee Ernie Ford singing The Auctioneer and surveying a living room - clock, pictures, wallpaper, bric-a-brac on the mantlepiece - gone before my eleventh birthday. That song sent me off into Memories of a Lost Time just as surely as that madelaine dipped in tea had sent Marcel Proust ambling down the corridors of memory.

Layered in there too was being in a movie palace from a lost time and the original purpose of the afternoon outing, to see some silent movies.

The guys next did a somewhat overwrought version of the Neil Sedaka chestnut, Calendar Girl, and we were ready for the girls to return. After a finish with the whole choral group that included I Believe, a song that always makes me feel that I need an insulin shot to get excess sugar out of my system, the Showstoppers stopped the show. They were wonderful kids who gave a wonderful performance. Their performance resonated with me in more ways, on more levels than most of them will ever realize.

We saw Laurel and Hardy's Soup to Nuts, Harold Lloyd in The City Slicker and a Little Rascals two-reeler called Hide and Shriek with an absolutely brilliant organ accompaniment that put all three of us, indeed the whole audience, into a time that none but a few of us ever knew. Still it was a time at which all of us could laugh.

In the end, still laughing over Stan and Ollie's slapstick, we walked out into the late afternoon light of 2005. But I can still see my Aunt Helen's living room before the fire in 1960, the lamps with their crystal pendants on each end of that mantlepiece, the other bric-a-brac reflected in the huge mirror over the fireplace and a Dickensian scene of a coach pulling into an inn yard on the wallpaper. I still wonder at my own time capsules of days and places and people gone. I wonder at those many rooms off the corridors of memory, at the few that will not open because I no longer have the key and the many doors that spring open unbidden and the few forgotten ones accidentally unlocked by the accident of a sight or smell or taste or a song like The Auctioneer.

The Shame of College Sports...The Real Story

2011-11-15T13:37:00.000-08:00

Oh! Poor Penn State! Poor Joe Paterno! What a blot on the game! Bullshit! Big-time sports constitute a disease that thrives on cheating, dishonesty and abuse of children. It has been that for more than a century. It really doesn’t matter whether it’s football, hockey, baseball, basketball, soccer, cricket or cycling. The fans pretend that they support a pure contest of athletics in which the most extraordinary win. Bullshit! The winners are the crooks who don’t get caught. In fact, about the only sport that has a modest amount of honesty to it is professional wrestling because we all know it’s a theatrical fraud.

The latest in a long string of scandals that stretch back to the immemorial past comes to us from Penn State where the football program hauls in huge amounts of money for the school and coaches whose salaries beggar those of anyone in the academic departments. So let us consider the time line here courtesy of the Huffington Post and whatever the source from which they stole it.

In 1969 – that is 42 years ago – Jerry Sandusky, the central figure in this matter, was hired by Penn State to assist head coach, Joe Paterno.

In 1977 – 34 years ago – Mr. Sandusky founded a youth program called The Second Mile. It was initially a group home for “troubled” boys. It eventually grew to become a charity for children with absent and dysfunctional families and, apparently, Sandusky’s personal, perverse flesh market and candy store.

In 1994 – 17 years ago – Mr. Sandusky begins sexually abusing a 10-year old boy from The Second Mile Program, the earliest child abused who has so far come forward.

In 1998 – 13 years ago – the Penn State Campus Police receive the first report of Sandusky showering with a boy who was then 11-years old. After some crocodile tears and promises from Sandusky, the Campus Police, local police and county prosecutor deep-six the issue. Interestingly and possibly irrelevantly the prosecutor at that time was declared dead this past summer after being missing for more than 7 years. I am not a conspiracy theorist but coincidences make me very uneasy.

In 1999 – 12 years ago – Sandusky retires as assistant coach emeritus retaining his privileges to use Penn State facilities.

In the autumn of 2000 – 11 years ago – a Penn State janitor came upon Sandusky in the showers at Penn State fellating a boy who was somewhere between 11 and 13-years old at the time. The janitor reported the incident to his supervisor but didn’t not carry it further because he was only a temporary employee and feared for his job should he accuse a coach under the protection of Joe Paterno.

On March 1, 2002 – 9 and a half years ago - a graduate student finds Sandusky sodomizing a 10-year old boy in the showers at Penn State’s football centre. This student told his father of the incident and the next day personally went to Head Coach Joe Paterno’s home to report it to Paterno.

On March 3, 2002, the day following his meeting with the graduate student, Joe Paterno calls his nominal superior, Penn State Athletic Director, Tim Curley, to his home and reports the graduate student’s story to Curley. The report to Curley leads to a meeting between Curley and, please note this official’s title, Senior Vice-President for Finance and Business, Gary Schultz, with the graduate student who reported to Paterno. The two senior officials of Penn State assure the graduate student that they will look into the matter.

On or about March 27, 2002 Curley contacts the graduate student and assures him that Sandusky’s keys to the Lasch Football Building have been taken away and that they have reported the incident to The Second Mile, the charity that owes its existence to Jerry Sandusky. At or about this same time The General Counsel for Penn State who knew about the abuse allegations and who’d heard Sandusky confess to the abuse during a telephone conversation became General Counsel to The Second Mile Charity. This is significant given the alleged referral to The Second Mile. No further reports are made and no further investigation takes place until December, 2009. Oh, and by the way, this attorney retained his position with The Second Mile until the story broke in the newspapers.

Over the next 7 years following the incident the graduate student reported Sandusky remains involved with The Second Mile and continues to abuse at least two boys who, when the abuse began, were 11-years old or younger.

The first actual action against Sandusky occurs in the spring of 2008 when the mother of one of the boys, now in a Clinton County high school, reports Sandusky’s sexual abuse of her son and the school system forbids Sandusky from engaging with its students. It takes the Pennsylvania Attorney General nearly another year to mount an investigation of Sandusky and a further year to begin action against him and the people who protected him at Penn State.

So here we are more than 3 and a half years after someone finally credited a report of abuse and more than 13 years after the first report that was should have been investigated. The matter is finally in the public view. Head Football Coach, Joe Paterno, and the University President have been summarily fired and what happens? A great outpouring of outrage and sympathy for…wait for it!...Joe Paterno. Why? Not because the allegations against Sandusky are untrue. Not because he bore no responsibility for reporting the abuse when he learned of it 7 years ago. And not because the students and fans wanted to express their support for the child victims. No. The outrage and sympathy comes because he has the all-time record for wins as a football coach.

Nine years after we can confirm that Paterno knew of Sandusky’s abuse and failed to stop it a bunch of jocks and fans are still singing his praises as if he were not part of the problem. Let’s stick to the facts but is it truly credible that Paterno hadn’t any knowledge of Sandusky’s behavior at any time during the 33 years they were working together before the graduate student’s report in 2002? Clearly the Penn State Trustees didn’t think so. It’s also clear that the Trustees, in an effort to evade their own responsibilities in this mess, were clear that the University’s President was more interested in protecting the school’s income from the football program than a potentially unlimited number of young children. However, thousands of Penn State students and fans turned out on the night on November 9^th to protest Paterno’s firing rather than the cover up by the University.

Penn State has formed a committee to investigate and suggest a system that will insure that such things will never, ever, not-in-a-million-years, not-on-our-watch, you-should-live-so-long happen again. In short, a committee to paper over the whole stinking cesspool until it gets out of the news and they can go back to protecting what’s important to Penn State, its football program.

The media is describing this as a scandal, which it is in one view but more properly it’s an eruption. The disease has been there all along but this is just the latest eruption of the disease that is sports. The eruptions usually relate to individuals O. J. Simpson, Rae Carruth, Michael Vick come to mind. In these cases they are talented athletes who have been coddled, feted, showered with praise and money often since they were teenagers. At every turn they have been protected by individuals who valued their athletic performance above honesty, decency, social norms or law. Because we have nominal academic standards for our sports figures the also had the benefit of a culture of cheating that allowed them to continue their sports careers long after they should have been dropped from their programs. Similar corruption pertains in athletic programs across the nation where well-heeled boosters, coaches, athletic directors and college officials conspire to cheat while raking in the dollars from alumni and, in many cases, television contracts.

In the midst of this fetid and pervasive swamp there are advocates for paying college athletes, most notably, Historian Taylor Branch. Mr. Branch makes the case that schools are raking in huge piles of cash while treating their players, notably minority players, like plantation field hands. While I understand his point of view, Mr. Branch’s argument is utterly specious. First, the players he claims are treated like slaves are getting scholarships, tutors, cooperative professors, gifts from boosters and frequently people who complete their course work for them lest the school lose a game for want of a key player. The players and sports programs generally are hardly treated like slaves. In fact, Mr. Branch would be hard put to find a campus where the jocks of all colors do not rule. The actual “Shame of College Sports” is the corruption of the winning-is-everything attitude that pervades campuses big and small regardless of rating.

If colleges and universities actually had a scintilla of honesty about them the NCAA or whatever governing body would institute some actual sanctions. For example, players should have to maintain a full academic course load and pass an examination in each course. The examinations should be monitored by outside people qualified in that discipline and who have no connection to any sports program to insure that they genuinely meet the academic standards for continued participation in their sport. If the athlete does not pass, he can’t play, period, until he actually passes without assistance. If a college has boosters who illegally support the sports program, those boosters should be banned from games and even campuses for a period of time and required to contribute equal amounts of cash or the value of gifts to non-sports academic programs before the bans are lifted. If a college or university violates the rules for conduct set down by its own organization, then the coaching staff involved should be fired summarily and the participating coaches, the school administrators who suborned the cheating and the school itself banned from participation in that sport for a minimum of 5 years, no exceptions.

Unfortunately money, the corrupter of everything around it, is involved and corrupts the players, coaches and educational institutions alike. The cry is that the school will lose funding, prestige, funding, the loyalty of key alumni and funding. The answer is that for the first 1, 2 or 3 schools those consequences will, in fact, accrue. And suffering the consequences will entail those problems for the the first 1, 2 or 3 schools after which players, schools and coaches will understand that the days of the We-have-rules-(wink, wink, nudge, nudge!) will end and seriousness has set in. Student athletes who can’t meet academic standards will be gone. Corrupt coaches will be unemployed and unemployable. Corrupt boosters will understand that they need to make legal contributions to their schools rather than illegal contributions to players and the schools themselves will understand that corrupt practices in sports are finished. And one more thing. State schools that have excellent sports teams that bring in television revenues…the television money needs to go to a general higher education state fund to be distributed based on some criteria such as student enrollment to all publicly funded higher education institutions in the state from the lowliest community college to the most prestigious state school. The incentive to excel remains but the incentive for corruption is largely gone. We could similarly require private institutions to implement a similar system by declaring television revenues by definition, a for profit activity and taxing those revenues at all levels of government up through the Federal level unless those revenues are distributed amongst academic as well as sports programs. In fact, the solution to much of the corruption in college sports may be to declare sports programs above the intramural level as for profit industries not subject to any tax exemptions. Then exemptions could be given to that share or revenues distributed to the actual academic programs of the school as charitable contributions so long as those contributions did not provide covert or collateral assistance to the sports program.

Some, perhaps among them Taylor Branch, will suggest that strict academic requirements will disproportionately affect minority students. I would suggest that strict academic standards should disproportionately affect minorities. We are not helping minority students by using up their athletic talents and then spitting them out when their sports careers end with no other skills on which to rely. Colleges and universities need to know that they must actually educate the gifted athlete, that they must protect him or her from injuries that affect both the athletes mental as well as physical abilities. If that means that the most gifted football player of his generation plays for the East Overshoe Community College rather than Penn State so be it.

However, I’m getting away from my point a bit. Jerry Sandusky clearly should have been fired from his coaching job some 17 years ago. He should not have been allowed to quietly retire as coach emeritus 12 years ago to evade prosecution. Penn State Administrators should have had both the clout and will to fire Joe Paterno in 2004 rather than allow him to protect Sandusky further. The fact that at least 2 decades of Sandusky’s known abuse went not only unpunished but rewarded is not just a “Penn State scandal”. That scandal is just the most recent eruption of the corruption that pervades sports programs in and out of academic circles. The scandal is another example of the corruption in our society that stems from the winning-is-everything mentality at colleges, universities, particularly at business schools and in our financial institutions. I have no doubt that this mess at Penn State will drop from the headlines, from the memories of all but a few and that the corruption in and of sports programs will continue apace. I also have no doubt that other scandals will erupt and similarly fade away until someone with the intelligence and the courage to stand up to the fools who demonstrated against Paterno’s firing appear and institute real reforms with real consequences.

And one last thought, if the crop of con artists who call themselves “Libertarians” insist that the free market always yields the correct solution without regulation and government interference, may I suggest the almost completely unregulated market we see here in college sports is the primary refutation of that bald-faced lie.

Anonymous Idiocy

2011-10-27T19:55:00.000-07:00

We are to be treated to a movie about the latest nonsense in the “Who wrote Shakespeare?” lunacy that has been percolating particularly in the fevered brains of academics who haven’t any original thoughts to offer but do have a consuming desire to be thought of as geniuses. These Elizabethan Literature doctoral candidates in search of a thesis but without the originality one finds in elevator musac trumpet a discovery now and again and sometimes even convert some who should know better.

I first encountered the Oxfordian theory of “Who wrote Shakespeare?” when I played Prospero as a guest actor in a college production of The Tempest some years ago. The director taught Shakespeare at the college and did so badly and from little knowledge and less learning. Her primary function was to accumulate a group of young women acolytes to feed her ego. To this end she manipulated some of the least secure and most wounded women who crossed her path only to cast them aside without conscience should they have the temerity to question her authority. She had a veneer of education without any depth and thus was the perfect promoter of the Oxfordian literary quackery. I was clear that if Annie believed the theory it was probably dishonest but I did my own investigation in case I was judging her and not the theory.

In Shakespeare’s lifetime there seems to have been no doubt in any minds that William Shakespeare, formerly of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, wrote the plays attributed to him. There were, as any of us have, alliances and rivalries in the London theatre of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods one of which was between Shakespeare and his acting company and his nearest rival, Ben Jonson, and the troupe for which he wrote.

The Elizabethan stage had a great plenty of writers who could pen a line in iambic pentameter though none quite as memorable as those from Shakespeare. The giants of the era were Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson. Occupying a near second tier were Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont, John Webster, John Ford, Philip Massinger, William Rowley, George Chapman, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood among others. The reason for this list of Elizabethan playwrights will become clear a bit later. None of these writers had any apparent issue with the idea that William Shakespeare was one of their contemporaries and the height of success in their profession. In fact, in the 1590s playwright Robert Greene wrote at some angry length about Shakespeare attacking him for being what we would now call a play doctor, one who improved others’ plays. Greene had no doubt that there was a William Shakespeare whom he despised. I will let the great actor, Sir Henry Irving, say more of Greene later.

One reason that Shakespeare reached the heights in his time was his sensibility. Ultimately in Shakespeare’s plays the great theme is forgiveness and reconciliation. The comedies end in reconciliation of the characters and, often, in a wedding. The tragedies end in a death or a funeral but the deaths result from a failure of reconciliation and forgiveness. To take the most prominent example, Hamlet, the prince whom Laurence Olivier incorrectly thought could not make up his mind, returns from his aborted voyage to England a man, still contemplative, but comfortable in his own skin. I’ll pass on a more detailed analysis of the play as irrelevant to this discussion. Upon his return from the interrupted voyage to England Hamlet would readily be reconciled to Laertes and even to Claudius. The tragedy reaches its bloody end because Claudius in his greed and guilt cannot allow any reconciliation.

One of the reasons that Jonson has not fared quite so well as Shakespeare is that he is unremittingly jealous, angry and unforgiving of human foibles. Jonson was a tough guy who’d been in the military. He had little use for and was often quarrelsome with his contemporaries. He was also famously and vocally proud of his learning. In plays like Volpone, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair the fools and villains get their comeuppance but no Jonson character ever reaches the insight that forgiveness and reconciliation is the real answer. No Jonson character ever arrives at the understanding that Prospero achieves in The Tempest when he sees that even the meticulously planned revenge in which Prospero is currently engaged, is fleeting and, ultimately, an illusion, "like this insubstantial pageant faded".

No one has suggested that Jonson wrote Shakespeare but this contrast is relevant in the context of the comment that has been the root cause of all the “Who wrote Shakespeare?” speculation.

When William Shakespeare died in 1616 a selection of his plays existed in print, often in corrupted quarto copies. In 1623 a group of people, probably lovers of the plays, actor-colleagues and the leaders of Shakespeare’s former acting company undertook to publish an “authoritative” version of the plays in a folio. We now call this The First Folio. For the verse introduction to the folio Isaac and William Jaggard acquired the services of the dean of the playwriting community, Shakespeare’s old rival, Ben Jonson. Jonson produced the laudatory poem that the Jaggards and their syndicate paid for but, as was his nature, could no more resist slipping in a few barbs than he could resist breathing. The most obvious of these being the line,

And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,….

This comment is more an expression of Jonson’s ego and pride in his own learning than it is a knock on Shakespeare. Their contemporaries seem to have understood as much. William Shakespeare had a solid classical education for the Elizabethan period which included being able to read and write both Latin and Greek. He may not have been as fluent as Jonson but we know from internal evidence in, as examples, A Winter’s Tale and Antony and Cleopatra, that Shakespeare could manage a reading of classical languages. His preference for the premiere translations of his day is not evidence of a lack of learning. Rather it is evidence that Shakespeare was sensitive to the popular knowledge of his time. Even so, most of the mad speculation about other authors can trace its heritage back to Jonson’s insult to a dead contemporary.

The jumping off point for most of the “scholars” who advance the various fancies of alternate authorship is Jonson’s barb. The reasoning runs much as follows:

Shakespeare didn’t have much of an education. Therefore, he was a dunce. He wasn’t even petty nobility. He was the son of a provincial glover. Therefore, he could not have written the greatest poetry in the English language. Someone else wrote using Shakespeare’s name and/or a front man who was a hack actor.

To call that reasoning logic is nonsense. Let me explain why.

We actually don’t know how much education William Shakespeare had or, indeed, didn’t have. Still we have no reason whatever to take Ben Jonson at his word. In fact, we have plenty of evidence of Jonson’s nasty disposition and holding of grudges to discount Jonson’s remark in the introduction to the First Folio entirely.

Even if Shakespeare were not a dedicated and diligent student characterizing him as incapable of writing the works attributed to him for over 400 years is an unwarranted leap of illogic. That argument is the equivalent of saying that Bill Gates could not have created Microsoft because he never finished his degree at Harvard. I should also point out at this juncture that Thomas Alva Edison had three months of formal schooling and was considered “addled”, a 19^th Century shorthand for stupid and unteachable with a hint of insanity, by his teacher. The point I’m making is not a defense of a dunce being capable of writing great poetry but rather that average people often mistake genius for something inferior largely because that estimation is more soothing to their egos than any alternative.

William Shakespeare’s father, John, was, indeed a glover in provincial Stratford-upon-Avon. He was also and alderman and successful in a number of businesses. John Shakespeare clearly had both the position and means to provide a solid education for his oldest surviving son.

I am making the ultimate point that the Shakespeare we know from his plays was a genius who largely established the English language that we know today and that denying the existence of extraordinary geniuses who appear from time to time in our midst is nonsense. To insist that William Shakespeare must have been an upper class or noble scholar flies in the face of the irrefutable existence of, to name but a few, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Paine, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Edison as already noted, Samuel Clemens, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

With the scurrilous and patently false arguments of humble origins and inadequate learning out of the way let me now turn to the outrageously false arguments for two of the prime candidates. But first a bit of literary and stage history.

William Shakespeare wrote for the popular entertainment of his time, the stage. Like television today, shows appear. They remain popular for a time. Eventually they become “old hat”, lose their audience and fade from the medium. No one, probably not even Shakespeare himself, thought that his plays would get more than a limited run and an occasional revival. Certainly no one contemplated that they would still be in production more than four hundred years later. We have ample evidence that many early scripts, including those in print, came from, either actors who’d imperfectly memorized their own and others’ lines or, perhaps, pirate scribes, like the people who sneak camcorders into theatres running new movies today, who were paid to transcribe plays during performances. Those bastardizations were one of the problems that the syndicate creating the First Folio sought to correct.

But, though there was a growing sense that these plays contained sublime and extraordinary writing, they still hadn’t the air of holy writ that they have for us today. Many poets, both fine and hack, in later ages put their pens to “improving” the plays. Indeed Laurence Olivier’s famous film of Richard III from 1955 uses Colley Cibber’s 1699 revision. Perhaps most famously King Lear suffered exceptionally. During the Restoration Nahum Tate gutted the play, removed the character of the Fool entirely and cobbled up a happy ending in which both Lear and Cordelia leave the stage looking toward a bright future. It wasn’t until 1823 that Edmund Kean revived the tragic ending and even then he had to revert to Tate’s emasculated version after three performances because of audience objections. Finally, in 1838, George Macready restored the tragedy to the original text which ending has held the stage since.

Kean’s and Macready’s restorations of original text are particularly relevant here because genuine Shakespeare scholarship began in the last half of the 18^th Century and began to seep into the popular performances in the second quarter of the 19^th. At the same point that restoring Shakespeare’s original texts becomes a popular fashion we get the influx of quack academics and foolish sophistry that becomes the “Who wrote Shakespeare?” farrago.

Also, lest I seem too harsh on Ben Jonson, he did have great respect for William Shakespeare even as he chafed at being only second to him. Jonson tells us that Shakespeare wrote without blotting out a line, high praise even if it may be as hyperbolic as the attack on Shakespeare’s learning. Jonson had an unmitigated mean streak but he also had to acknowledge superior writing when he saw it.

The first choice for most of the Shakespeare deniers was Sir Francis Bacon on the slim evidence that Bacon and Shakespeare shared some verbiage and because of Bacon’s great learning. On its face the primary reason for even looking at Bacon as a possible alternate author is that he wasn’t the glover’s son who had “small Latin and less Greek.” Bacon remained the primary candidate at the turn of the 19^th Century when Sir Henry Irving was the premiere Shakespearean actor. I am lucky enough to have a volume of the collected plays that my grandfather owned. The introduction contains Irving’s essay, Shakespeare and Bacon. Let me quote a bit here.

Has any attempt been made to give even the semblance of reason to the assumption that Bacon induced the whole world of players and playwrights, and all his contemporaries who had relations with the theatre – men like Southampton and Herbert, and officials of the Court, who were brought into constant and close contact with the players – to bolster up the fiction that Shakespeare wrote the masterpieces for which he had the credit and the profit, and the keep the secret so close that nobody breathed a word of it, nobody kept any memorandum of it, and everybody carried it to the grave? Shakespeare was a man whose rapid advancement excited bitter jealousies. He was stigmatized by Robert Greene as the “Johannes Factotum” who was monopolizing the playwright’s business. He was “the upstart crow, beautified with our feathers;” that is to say, the jealous Greene saw him handling, rewriting, and vastly improving plays which, according to the theatrical custom of the time, were wholly at the disposal of the manager who had bought them. Young Shakespeare was called in to revise these works, and Greene cried aloud to all the supplanted that such presumption could not be borne; and why was it not proclaimed then, that Shakespeare could not write, that he was virtually illiterate, and that the plays that he presumed to turn from commonplace to genius were conveyed to him by Bacon, who laid the magic spell on them?

It doesn’t matter much which alternate one chooses, Bacon, Oxford or some other, Irving’s point that the promoters of this farrago have to peddle the improbable nonsense that all the playwrights I’ve mentioned earlier conspired together to promote a fiction that Shakespeare wrote what they knew he could not write. The Bacon/Oxford/somebody/anybody but Shakespeare crowd must maintain that fiction in the face of the ample evidence that some worked with Shakespeare, others competed with him and a few hated him though none had any reason to participate in such a fraud. In short, there needs to be a conspiracy so seamless and thorough that even those with a clear interest in exposing the fraud perpetuate it unto their dying breaths. Not only is that improbable, it utterly beggars belief.

Some object that there’s no or little record of William Shakespeare outside of his plays. We do have a few scant documents but nothing like the broad complex of data that we expect for notables. This argument seems to have given one of my heroes, Samuel Clemens, pause and moved him in his day toward the Bacon camp. I have to point out that, as much as I admire Mark Twain, Mr. Clemens was forever getting conned into schemes that impoverished him even late in life. Here I think he got conned once again.

I will admit that there is not a huge record of William Shakespeare but there is some. Legal documents exist as well as the birth and death records we expect. The Shakespeare deniers object that there isn’t more but that objection shows their ignorance of history. Here followeth the history lesson.

Shakespeare lived in a period of religious strife that would not end in England for another 150 years. Elizabeth I’s assent to the throne was not the final victory of Protestantism in England as Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot in 1604-05 illustrates. Still the primary religious conflict in England had shifted from Roman Catholic versus Protestant to Protestant versus Protestant. The Protestant fundamentalists were on a crusade to “purify” the English church of all “papist” influences. The English Civil Wars were aborning in this period which, to coin a redundant phrase, lead to dunderheaded censorship and the closing of the theatres in 1643. When the theatres were closed there was a significant loss of documentation covering the preceding 50 years.

But there was an older and more violent force working to destroy records that reared its ugly head higher and more often than even religious fundamentalism: fire. The Globe Theatre, Shakespeare’s own burned to the ground in 1613. There were other more localized fires that engulfed theatres, churches and other repositories of public records leading up to the Great Fire of London in 1666 which destroyed a large part of the city along with masses of books and records.

The fact is that we are extremely lucky that the thin record we have has survived at all. We don’t know that great reams of documentation of Shakespeare’s adult life disappeared in various fires but it is hardly unreasonable to assume that some documents disappeared in flames.

In addition there were visitations of plague in London during the 17^th Century. In a society that hadn’t yet figured out the relationship between rats, fleas and plague, one way of dealing with infection was leaving an “infected” house and burning it down. Again we don’t know that any such thing happened to places that housed records of William Shakespeare’s life but I offer it as a possible explanation for why so few records survived. The short of it is that because we have a scant record now does not mean that there never was more than a scant record. Plenty of events intervened that may have destroyed a richer record. Again, the Shakespeare deniers offer an argument that takes no account of the facts except when they appear to reinforce their harebrained theory.

In any case, Sir Francis Bacon, worthy of respect in his own right, fell away as a favorite in the 1920s and the Shakespeare deniers flailed about. There was a brief attempt to develop theories that gave authorship to Christopher Marlowe though many topical references in the plays required Marlowe to have known them well after he was dead. Finally the dolts, conspiracy theorists and their dupes hit on Edward deVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford as their candidate for the wholly wrong and superfluous position of the actual writer of Shakespeare’s plays.

Again the Oxford Con starts with the premise that if there ever was a William Shakespeare, he was incapable of writing the great poetry of the plays and sonnets. Next they make the leap that only one of superior education and breeding could have written such works. But they have to start positing a number of things for which there is no or scant evidence. They posit a world in which it is impossible for a nobleman of deVere’s rank to be engaged with the theatre. That is, on its face, nonsense. The Elizabethan and Jacobean Courts were closely allied to the theatres. As but one example we have the unquestioned tradition that Queen Elizabeth herself so loved the character of Sir John Falstaff that she insisted on a new play that included him resulting in The Merry Wives of Windsor. The fact is that the Elizabethan theatres were popular entertainment but always considered high poetry and writing poetry was a noble pastime. It certainly did not adversely affect the careers of Sir Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sydney, or John Donne who became canon of St. Paul’s. In short, the argument that the nobility could not engage with the theatre ignores plentiful historical fact.

The Oxfordians also pull out of their…er…”bag of tricks”, a pretense that Shakespeare “knew” Italy well. DeVere traveled to Italy and did know it from personal experience. Both sides are clear that William Shakespeare never traveled widely and certainly not to Italy. The pretense that Shakespeare knew Italy rests largely on specifics of late medieval and Renaissance towns which were very similar between England and Italy. That he gets the neighborhood of Verona correct comes from his source material but when Shakespeare is inventing from whole cloth he makes Milan a seaport not to mention giving Bohemia a coastline. William Shakespeare knew Italy less well than I, who have never been there, do.

They also note that, at the end of the same embassy that brought Edmund deVere to Italy, an incident occurred that echoes in Hamlet. DeVere was embarked on a ship for England when it was taken by pirates. He was later released, without his shirt in England. DeVere’s capture by pirates is historical fact. That the only way a story of a nobleman captured by pirates and later released unharmed might find its way into a popular play is if deVere wrote it himself is prima facie nonsense.

DeVere actually tried his hand at poetry some of which has survived. He received some heady praise from contemporaries who would have been only too happy to receive his patronage. However, the actual deVere poetry is not “deathless” at all. In fact, it’s rather plodding. The praise for it amounts to no more than sucking up to an important noble.

But the hardest problem for the Oxfordians is the historical fact that their deVere died in 1604, some twelve years before William Shakespeare and well before existing records show that William Shakespeare bought property and gave evidence in a law suit. To cover these apparent inconsistencies Oxfordians claim that there was a William Shakespeare but that he was just the front man for deVere. All well and good, you may say. Except that deVere, as I’ve already pointed out, didn’t really need a front man. Yet there is a still more important bit of evidence that excludes deVere as the purported who “Who wrote Shakespeare?”

Audiences have always enjoyed topical references in their plays. The references are usually oblique citations of famous scandals or events that have seized the popular mind. They are, above all, current and "topical". Read the notes to any good academic edition of Shakespeare and you'll find lengthy notes explaining to us today those long-age obscured references. Because “everyone” knows them “everyone” in the audience is in on the joke and, by extension, the players are bonding directly with the audience. Several references in several plays, unfortunately for the Oxfordians, took place years after deVere was dead. That’s a pretty good trick and one that ought to mean that deVere could see the future making him was legendary in gambling circles for never losing a bet. He was not clairvoyant. He does not appear to have been known as a man who never lost a bet and, in fact, obviously didn’t know the pirates were going to capture his ship.

Committed Oxfordians have combed the literature and worked mightily to find incidents on record before 1604 that might fit the topical references. They have done so regardless of how obscure or old those incidents may have been and even regardless of whether Shakespeare or deVere might have known of them but in this they miss the whole point.

Yes, there may be incidents from earlier in the 16^th Century recorded in books and that Shakespeare or deVere might have encountered them but they were clearly not topical. References to the Gabor sisters just puzzle an current audience that knows the Kardashians. The topical reference must be current for it to work with the audience. Thus, once more the Oxfordian remedy for Shakespeare’s ill turns out to be snake oil that, to people with reason intact and unblinded by the hawkers, is inevitably explosive at one end or another.

So on thin, mostly fictional evidence some credulous people with imperfect or no knowledge of the period want to take a scurrilous insult to Shakespeare and the fact that he left a scant surviving record and torture it into alternate authorship. Just the number of contortions into which Oxfordians must twist themselves should indicate that the whole deVere theory is a worthless lie. I respect Derek Jacobi for his wonderful work on stage and screen. I’ve adored him as an actor ever since I saw him as Prince Mishkin in a dramatization of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot at the Old Vic 40 years ago. I also love Vanessa Redgrave’s work and respect her politics even in those few areas where we don’t fully agree. Still, wonderful as they are, neither the adherence of Jacobi nor Redgrave and still less the film from Roland Emmerich, can magically transmute the Oxfordian theory into gold from the stinking pile of crap it is.

Let me bring another Englishman into this argument and suggest, in the spirit of William of Occam, that the simplest explanation is the best. William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote at least thirty-seven plays, 154 Sonnets. Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and other poetry that, more than four centuries later are still the greatest in the English language. Let’s call this movie the high water mark of the “Who wrote Shakespeare?” silliness and end the idiocy here.

Domestic Terrorism in America

2011-08-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

We won’t see Rep. Peter King (Neo-Fascist, N.Y.) bring it up in his hearings into domestic terrorism but if I were Ayman al-Zawahiri, the new leader of Al Qaeda, I would be finding ways to send all of the bin Laden billions and any change I could shake out of the sofa cushions to the Tea Party and the Republican Party. Flying planes into skyscrapers and government buildings isn’t anything compared to destroying the “full faith and credit” of the United States government. I have believed that the Republican Party has essentially been a criminal conspiracy since at least the 1950s. But with the passing of control from the old guard oligarchs to the young Turks of the supply side, Ayn Rand true believers who came in with Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich in the 1980s the Republicans have become a full blown terrorist organization.

I give some credit to President Obama on two issues. First, he has kept in mind that he is the President of the United States of America, not just the leader of the Democratic Party. He has consistently acted in the interest of the nation as a whole rather than following the Republican paradigm of acting solely in the interests of the relatively small number of super-rich backers who control the money that buys power for the Republican officeholders and finances the Astroturf movement known as the Tea Party. It was President Obama’s job to save the American economy in the face of Republicans, particularly Tea Party Republicans, who expressly stated that the nation’s economy was of less importance to them than making a statement about their perverse political ambitions and philosophy. The Tea Party and Republicans more broadly have read too, too much of that proponent of fanatical sociopath, Ayn Rand, and decided that they were collectively Howard Roark. Their stated solution to America’s problems was to blow up the nation in the hope that they could gain something by demagoguery while standing in the rubble. After all, they blew up the economy in 2008 after 30 years of relentless work at doing so and created the Tea Party by demagoguing in the ruins. The president is president of all the people regardless of how stupid, misled, craven or sociopathic they are. Barak Obama deserves immense credit for understanding that basic principle.

The second issue on which President Obama deserves credit for giving a nod to the “leaders of the Republican Party” in his statement following reaching the agreement on the debt ceiling on Sunday, July 31^st. Again, in the interest of responsible governing, President Obama has put aside partisanship, if only minimally, while Republicans have not. By contrast Speaker Boehner’s subsequent statement that same night was a purely partisan polemic.

Still, regardless of attempts at conciliation by the president, make no mistake, the terrorists won this round. The lunatic wing of the Republican Party (as opposed to the neo-fascist mainstream) embraced extremists like Michelle Bachmann and Ron and Rand Paul to create a crisis where none existed before. Their voices magnified by Majority Leader Mickey Kantor nearly wrought complete destruction of the economy in the name of saving future generations from onerous debt. So let’s look at that issue of “onerous debt”.

I could go into a history lesson but the fact is that Republican insistence on low tax rates has kept revenues low while spending has increased. Most of those increases have come from useless, pointless and unjustifiable wars and military excesses whether in Vietnam, Granada, Nicaragua, Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Persian Gulf and Iraq not to mention the similarly unjustifiable covert actions in places like Chile, Bolivia, and other parts of the world, especially the Middle East. Deficits rise under Republicans because of their commitment to a grossly unfair tax system that exempts the wealthy and burdens the middle class. During the 1990s after a tax increase the nation’s economy boomed and we were on track to reducing the nation’s debt. But the Republicans then switched tunes. Instead of allowing the Federal government to run at a nominal surplus which would reduce the debt, they insisted that governments shouldn’t have more tax money than was absolutely necessary to pay for operations. That gave us the Bush tax cuts that reduced taxes on the wealthiest 10% of the population more than on the entire remaining 90% and just to make matters worse the Republicans created a much needed Medicare prescription drug benefit but refused to fund it, they initiated two wars, one in Afghanistan that had some justification and one in Iraq that had no justification whatever and they either deregulated or refused to regulate industries and markets at home. The result of reduced revenues alone was that any surplus available to reduce the national debt ceased to exist and the continuing Republican waste and mis- or non-management ballooned the debt quickly and immensely.

In the meantime prices for goods and services kept increasing, often out of all proportion to actual costs while wages for most workers remained stagnant and the real value of those wages declined. Pressed by stagnant wages and rising costs the middle class was encouraged by banks, investment firms and the financial media to use credit especially to mortgage their homes to the hilt on the false promise that real estate prices never, ever fall.

We saw the result in 2008. The joy ride came to a screeching, crashing halt just in time for President Dubya and his crew of criminals to slink out of office and leave the mess for someone else to clean up.

There is only one tried and proven way to clean up an economic collapse on the world wide scale that befell us in 1929 and 2008. That solution is massive government spending on programs that put people to work and which also subsidize lower branches of government faced also with falling revenues. It increases the debt in the short term while reducing the economic disruption for states, counties, cities, towns and families. The subsidies to the lower branches of government prevent job losses in those sectors and generate private jobs by promoting municipal projects like road improvements, construction of and improvement to public buildings, parks and such. Programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s put people to work who might not have been able to support themselves otherwise and trained those people in trades that they frequently pursued in private employment for the rest of their lives. Both the CCC and WPA were major creators of middle class employment both in their time and for the rest of that generation yet they are reviled by the neo-fascists as “make work” programs.

Once again the Republican propaganda machine changed tack and went into overdrive. Having piled up a massive debt then wrecked the economy so that current revenues could not keep up with that debt the Republicans decided that debt was bad per se. It was an evil that must be stamped out, however, those most able to help reduce that debt, those who benefited most by running it up had absolutely to be exempted from paying a penny more in taxes. They conveniently ignored the fact that many of those wealthy ultra-right wing oligarchs already pay not a penny in taxes.

The neo-fascists party line is that we are burdening “our children and grandchildren®” with a massive debt. There is no question that our national debt is large but if the ultra-right wingers were truly concerned with anyone’s children or grandchildren they would pony up and use their billions to help reduce the debt by paying another percentage point or two in taxes.

But aren’t those people the “job creators” we here so much about?

If they are, where are the jobs?

Well, they can’t create jobs because of “uncertainty”!

What “uncertainty”? They have bought themselves a minority of a minority in Congress that makes retaining the huge subsidies for their corporations not just certain but holy writ. That same minority insures that they will never have to worry about increases in taxes so what, pray tell is the “uncertainty” that stymies these alleged “job creators”?

Well, look at Europe! There’s a debt crisis there that could tank the world economy.

If those poor, beset “uncertain” “job creators” were truly worried about a collapse of the world economy their money would not be flowing at phenomenal rates out of the United States into investments in China, India, Brazil and elsewhere. The “debt crisis” in Europe is no more real than Standard and Poor’s reasoning in reducing the U. S. bond rating or the tooth fairy. That “crisis” is the creation of bond rating agencies which are the wholly owned subsidiaries of the ultra-right wing oligarchs whose corporations those agencies purport to rate. Standard and Poor’s, for example, is all in a tizzy over the debt of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland and a few other smaller countries besides the United States. By contrast they were just ecstatic about the bonds of Enron, AIG and all those mortgage backed securities that destroyed the world economy when we found that they were worthless in 2008. The European “debt crisis” is a fiction created by some enormously wealthy people speculating in currencies and bonds while using that speculation to destroy the social fabric of nations purely for their own profit.

The end of all this is that the ultra-right wing propaganda machine led by Fox News and the various Foundations and Institutes that those oligarch have established to give a veneer of rationality to their irrational greed promotes a bunch of “Big Lies”. The “Big Lie” was not invented by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels but he did bring it into the age of mass media. The “Big Lie” is a lie shouted often enough and loud enough that some fools begin to believe it. Worse yet, in the age of 24-hour news networks desperate to fill air time, people and media that should know better talk about those “Big Lies” as if they had some credibility. They trot out the con men of the Heritage Foundation, Hudson, Manhattan and Cato Institutes and their odious kin and allow them to peddle their snake oil as if it were efficacious medicine.

The result is terrorism. The American public lives in constant fear and anger. The purveyors of the “Big Lie” direct public anger away from the rich who pay little or nothing toward maintaining the American social fabric and direct it toward the poor and the unemployed. They dare not talk about eliminating Social Security or Medicare so they pontificate about reducing “entitlements”. The paid liars for the ultra-right wing oligarchs won’t say that your child shouldn’t have coverage on your medical insurance policy until he or she finishes her education or that a cancer patient should be denied care because he or she forgot to mention a minor surgery 20 years before the person got coverage but they can rail against “Obama-care”.

And should someone have the temerity to demonstrate how false and empty their arguments really are, they fall back to the equally craven and empty position of pretending to be protectors of “our children and grandchildren®”. These con men so concerned about the financial burden on “our children and grandchildren®” are simultaneously arguing that government should not intervene to protect those same children and grandchildren from contaminated food, water, air and unsafe products.

The true terrorists are the monied sociopaths like the Koch Brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife and their ilk who bought and paid for the Tea Party Republicans. They have done more to destroy America than ever Mohammed Atta and the rest of the September 11^th hijackers did or imagined that they could do. It’s time to treat them with the horror and disdain that we reserve for those Al Qaeda murderers because they are the true enemy within, the true domestic terrorists.

Brothers Under The Skin: Osama bin Laden, Fred Phelps, Harold Camping and Terry Jones

2011-05-16T17:42:00.000-07:00

A war on terrorism is a perfect example of treating the symptom rather than the disease. The disease is fanaticism. As I've written before, it doesn't matter whether it's religious fanaticism (e.g. bin Laden, Fred Phelps), political fanaticism (e.g. Michele Bachmann, Pol Pot, Timothy McVeigh), simply fanatic, egotistical greed (e.g. the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdock, Donald Trump) or egotistical lunacy (e.g. Jim Jones, Charles Manson) fanaticism is the disease behind terrorism of the ilk of the Tea Party, Al Qaeda, and the Killing Fields. Fanaticism is inherent sociopathic and should be treated with the same sanctions that we place on a Charles Manson or a Ted Bundy.

However, sometimes it can be absolutely hilarious. Case in point: Harold Camping of Family Radio, an alleged CHRISTIAN broadcasting group though it's more the megaphone for Camping's religious lunacy and fanatic egotism. Camping has predicted that the "true" CHRISTIANS will be Raptured this coming Saturday starting at 6:00 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time. Let's forget for a moment that The Rapture is a bunch of utter nonsense though no more nonsensical than worshiping, in George Carlin's apt phrase, a "Big Imaginary Friend in the Sky". For now let's focus on Camping's prediction alone.

Camping has been eagerly searching for the date of the end of the world for a very long time. Some seventeen years ago he informed all who would listen - unfortunately there were at least as many credulous dolts then as now - that the world would end in September, 1994. Now let's all get out our calendars, boys and girls. You will notice that it is generally agreed that this is 2011 and, unless we all, along with Harold Camping, missed something, his September, 1994 Armageddon is a bit tardy. But hold on. You may remember that the Republicans lead by New Gingrich took over the U. S. House of Representatives in the elections of November, 1994, as clear evidence of Satan's ascendance as I can imagine. Be that as it may, one might think that such a whopper of an error might deter someone from uttering similar whoppers in the future but you'd be wrong. Learning from one's mistakes is the activity of a rational mind, something of which Harold Camping is manifestly not possessed. So what did Camping use as an excuse for such a whopping error. His excuse was essentially, "Son of a gun! Look at that! There's a Book of Jeremiah in The Bible. It was there all along and I just must have missed it!" Quite an admission for a self-proclaimed Bible expert. Still Harold Camping returned to his search for the hour of his personal Rapture.

Frankly, Camping seems a bit selfish to me. He is now 89-years old and unlikely to get another 17 years to recalibrate though there is that adage that "only the good die young". But I also think he's rushing things because he's trying to beat the Mayans. If the world ends in 2011 I think Camping believes the score will be Jesus 1, Quetzalcoatl 0. Not only is Camping cooking the books to insure that he's above ground for The Rapture but he's trying to win one for the Jeezer.

Some unkind souls have suggested that Camping and his followers should commit to not being in this world on May 22nd but I'm not quite willing to go that far even for as total a waste of breath and space as Harold Camping. Camping insists that "there is no plan B", that The Rapture will occur on Saturday, May 21, 2011 absolutely and without fail. I'm sure that on Sunday, May 22nd Camping will show up in church somewhere and suddenly discover some other book of The Bible that he'd heretofore overlooked. After all there's a whole 14 books in The Apocrypha or maybe he just forgot to carry a 1. But you must forgive me for suggesting that on May 22nd Camping needs to be true to his beliefs and pack up his radio ministry for good - in several senses of that term. My reasons that Harold Camping needs to find a nice, quite assisted living facility and shut up for the rest of his life is that, if he's correct, clearly he has been found unworthy of The Rapture. By his own definition he is an unredeemable sinner left behind to suffer the tribulations and ultimate damnation.

As I've said already, I think that The Rapture is utter nonsense. It is an heretical fantasy of an ego driven CHRISTIAN cult obsessed with an idea best expressed as, "Jesus loves ME and not you. I'm saved and you're not. Nyah-nyah-nyah." It couldn't be farther from the Jesus who offers salvation to all. So, if The Rapture is lunatic, egotistical nonsense what of Camping? Should he still "go gentle in to that good night"? I think so still. Camping owes it to those he's misled and the rest of us to shut up for whatever time remains to him because if his god hasn't judged him unworthy that leaves only two alternatives. Either Harold Camping is a charlatan who's profiting from conning a bunch of gullible fools about the end of the world or he's simply a lunatic who's disguised his tinfoil hat as a cross. In either case he does not belong on the public airwaves. He is abusing his license to broadcast either by intent to defraud or by being a deranged sociopath. In neither case does he deserve a forum.

So why do I link him with Osama bin Laden and the equally odious Fred Phelps and Terry Jones? Through their fanaticism. Bin Laden's fanaticism inspired truly horrific acts turned against innocent people. Bin Laden's murderous fanaticism may be quantitatively worse but is gualitatively no different from Jim Jones' leading the gullible to mass suicide in Jonestown or Timothy McVeigh's murders at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Phelps and Terry Jones too share this perversion of religion into the service of their own fanatcism and egotism. Their acts haven't cost many lives yet but they are trying to up the body count. "Pastor" Jones in particular has blood on his hands from provoking other lunatic fanatics with his own lunatic fanaticism.

I can't emphasize enough that our Constitutional guarantees of Freedom of Religion also guarantees Freedom from Religion regardless of what CHRISTIAN fanatics like revisionist historian David Barton would like to sell the gullible. I don't want anyone deciding what is the "true religion" or even the "true" form of worship but I think we have slipped too far from freedom into fear and perplexity. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously proclaimed that freedom of speech does not license those who cry "fire" in a crowded theatre. Currently we have an insane system where Christain Scientist parents can watch as their tiny son dies of a readily treatable intestinal blockage, Mormon sectarians can "marry" 12 and 13-year old children, cult leaders like Jim Jones or Heaven's Gate's Bo and Peep can shepherd their flocks into mass suicide and Phelps, Jones and Camping can preach their perversions of religion to anyone who's foolish enough to listen. We protect ourselves against profiteers who would feed us poison in our food, infected meat and impure drugs. I think the time has come to look at what is religion and what is just fanaticism and lunacy. Let's protect the former and sanction the latter.

Friends and Unfriendly

2011-05-08T14:34:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago I was in the process of garnering signatures for a petition on something that was, most definitely not a pressing social issue. I was advised to join Facebook in order to increase the total number of signers. I did join Facebook, had no idea what I was doing - in innumerable ways as it turns out - and added minimally to the petition's signatures. Still, that put me on Facebook. Periodically I get e-mails from that site notifying me that someone wants to be my friend. When I know the person by name or association, I approve the request, leave Facebook and visit it again the next time those requests pile up and get insistent enough to warrant my attention.

I really didn't have much of an opinion about Facebook for a very long time. I truly despise the usage of "friend" as a verb. There seems to me something rude, drooling and imbecilic about "Friend me," as opposed to "May we be friends?" That's probably a function of my age and respect for language. Yes, I understand that languages are living, mutable things but that doesn't mean that they have to grow niggling and stupid like the sleaze from the Cato Institute I recently heard insist that because he is a "Libertarian" he will use any word he pleases, regardless of the ignorance it betrays in him, until it shows up in the dictionary.

Last autumn I got a message from an old and very dear friend. The message was one of the nastier and angrier I've ever received. She and I have been friends since the spring of 1967 when a mutual friend introduced us. We dated for a bit in college but have remained in touch more or less regularly ever since. We've spent hours on the phone during various crises in each of our lives consoling one another or simply allowing each other to vent. In short, she is a friend, an actual, real world friend and has been for some 44 years.

Earlier in 2010 she'd been diagnosed with breast cancer. She is undergoing some aggressive and, from what I gather, debilitating treatment that, like much cancer therapy, runs a three-way race to kill the cancer before the cancer or the treatment itself kills her. My friend tends to focus outward rather than in. She is angry - as she has a perfect right to be - at her predicament as well as frustrated by the lack of control that she has over the disease and her body. She can't take out that anger on the cancer itself. It just doesn't listen. If the cancer could listen to her it would have left her body within minutes of its discovery. She can't be angry with her doctors because that's simply counter-productive in the extreme. Still the pressure of that anger and frustration is building up like unvented steam in a boiler. She must fall back on her friends when she needs to vent the venom.

The sources of the vicious message was that she'd decided that I and "unfriended" her on Facebook. That was news to me. First, I hadn't even logged onto Facebook in several months. Second, I'm not sure that I'd known that she was on Facebook or that I'd "friended" her there. Third, and finally, after logging onto Facebook and searching for an actual hour and a half, I still have no idea how one "unfriends" anyone. Please don't send me a response with detailed instructions on how to "unfriend" someone. I simply do not want to know. The real point of her message was a shout that translates as, "I'm here and you're not paying enough attention." Both points are true and might have been remedied by a phone call but the steam needed venting too and I'm far less likely to shy away after being scalded than a doctor or the impassive and relentless cancer.

I try to be in touch more frequently now but the other effect of that angry message was to get me to examine Facebook and how I feel about it as a site as well as linguistically.

I have friends most of whom have been close to me for between 30 and 50 years. They are genuine friends, people whose lives I have orbited, some closer, some farther away, from the days when we were children to the present in which we have grandchildren. They are my friends, my true and enduring friends.

I have other friends who are congenial people whom I know from some of my activities. I know this larger group of friends usually because we share a common interest or because we have worked in the same place bearing with the same horrid boss. A few of these friends I have never met face to face. A couple of them are in Sweden, a place I've never been. I think of them as friends as well but there is a difference born of duration and the comprehensive sharing of experience that characterizes the first, small group.

I also have acquaintances, the largest group of all, who come from the same spheres as the second group but whom I am in no way close to. I like their company, respect their abilities and knowledge but, nice and congenial as they may be, they are not anything like what I call friends. This is the group that tends to gather to me on Facebook. It's not that I don't like them. It's not that I don't care. But they are not my friends nor are they truly likely to be. I think their activities are sometimes interesting but I am not going to spend more that a couple of minutes every few months to find out what they are.

Friends, true friends, the first kind of friends I've described, are the family we choose for ourselves and who, better yet, who choose us. They aren't companies who want to keep us apprised of new products or offers. They aren't people who simply want our attention. They are the people who are godparents to our children. They are the people who know that they can phone us at 3:00 A. M. when the world had dealt them a blow and we will listen to their anger and tears because we love them and have loved them time out of mind with a love that no number of 3:00 A. M. phone calls can diminish.

So I may -may - link up with you on Facebook. But without that true friendship born of time and love and shared crises, you are not my friend. Don't be offended, please. It's just that true friendship isn't an Internet phenomenon. It is the absolute antithesis of "social networking". I may give a glance to you vacation photos, the pictures of your children or grandchildren or even the latest thing you want to sell me though the chance of that last is vanishingly small. Just don't delude yourself into thinking that because you have taken the time to do the linguistically foul act of "friending" me that we are friends. We are acquaintances at best. You are not like Lynn and Jeff, April, Anna, Richard and Anne, Harold and Karen, Michael and Rilla, Tony and K.R., Aleisha, my daughters all of whom know how to reach me without using Facebook.

Southwest of Fascism

2010-06-22T17:09:00.000-07:00

It didn't start with Barry Goldwater though his 1964 presidential campaign began the realignment of racists, Klansmen, and similar bigots to the Republican Party consolidating them with the fascists of the American First Movement, the neo-fascist McCarthyites, the John Birchers and the militia movement's progenitor, the Minutemen. No, Arizona grew its own species of racism, bigotry and fascism that, honestly, Goldwater was less a part of than he was a symbol for.

But now Arizona has followed Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the contemporary avatar of Birmingham, Alabama's Jim Clark, off a cliff with its immigration legislation. Despite much blather to the contrary, Arizona has adopted a racist law under the influence of fired con-man, Lou Dobbs, the looniest ultra-right wing members of the Republican Party and it's Frankenstein monster, the Tea Party Movement.

The right wingers object to "aliens" because they are "illegal" as if "illegal" were a quality that is genetically determined, like hair or eye color. As always we can divide those with this opinion into two groups: the sheep/fools/idiots who are too incapable of reflection to understand that they have been sold some snake oil and the scum who manufacture and sell the snake oil for fun and profit (e.g. Lou Dobbs). No person is born an "illegal" anything. Immigrants to America are those who have documents issued by the United States Government under a series of laws that favor wealth and power, white Europeans and suspect cronies of some dubious Americans and the corporate and governmental agencies who employ them. No one ever called Rupert Murdock an illegal alien even before he became a naturalized citizen in order to consolidate his media empire though he is certainly the most vile and destructive immigrant to American since Al Capone. Our laws make people, primarily black and brown people from neighboring countries, "illegal" and afford them little or no avenues to "legality". In fact, few of the parents and grandparents of those screaming about the threat of "illegal" immigration and none of their ancestors who came to America before 1879 would be "legal" under today's laws.

Plenty of people, governments and organizations are contemplating or have already instituted boycotts of Arizona on some level or other. The Arizona legislation has also energized the movement for immigrant rights while presenting President Obama with a dilemma that he doesn't need.

A poll released this week by the Northwest Health Foundation, public radio stations of the Northwest and the polling agency Davis , Hibbitts and Midghall finds that the citizens of Washington state, Oregon and Idaho finds that 61% of residents of those states support Arizona's immigration law. Another 58% would deny government benefits, including schooling, to the children of undocumented immigrants and think that those children should be deported "back where they came from" ignoring the fact that most "came from" right here and are citizens of the United States by birth. Those might seem significant majorities and lead one to cite the Federalists on the "tyranny of the majority" along with reminders that an even greater majority of residents in states from Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas east through the rest of the old Confederacy supported segregation in 1954. But the poll contains its own analysis of those attitudes. You see some 73% of residents of the three states polled also state that immigrants of all sorts are honest, hard working people. Even more people state that they have no contact of any kind with immigrants, documented or otherwise. These people who have such clear and strong opinions on immigrants are utterly ignorant of the people who are the subject of those opinions.

What comes out of the survey and information from other polling is that people are insecure in an economy destroyed, not by immigrants or poor folks, not by Al Qaeda or some Islamic fanatics but by bankers and businessmen, by the greed of executives motivated solely by profit. Yet rather than focus on the true predators in our midst, we're out with torches and pitchforks in great numbers after the people who sneak across our borders to do unskilled day labor in building our homes or to empty the bed pans of our neglected and ill elders.

British Petroleum has destroyed the livelihood of thousands if not millions, besides the 11 they initially killed, along our Gulf and Atlantic coasts in the name of saving, relative to their income, a vanishingly small amount of money. And yet we have the spectacle of Republican Representative Joe Barton apologizing to BP executive Tony Hayward in a flirtatious wave to the man as he endured a day's grilling by angry Democrats before spending a weekend relaxing at yacht races off the Isle of Wight. There has not been a more perfect display of the Republicans' true allegiance. They care nothing for the nation that suffers from their greed and malfeasance. They have no patriotism for they have reduced that to wearing a flag lapel pin and given it no more thought. Their oft spouted concern for the intent of the "founding fathers" ends the moment that the express intent of those same men runs counter to corporate interests.

No the Republicans are true fascists in Mussolini's sense of the seamless marriage of corporatism and government. Their only allegiance is to the people who pay their bills. Send Sarah Palin to Bloomingdales and pick up her bills? She'll spout any nonsense the script writers can ink on her hands. Drop an acknowledged million on Joe Barton's campaign fund and probably much more in unacknowledged perks and he'll apologize to satan for Christianity if you want him to.

Yet we allow these frauds and the scum who thump for them on Fox News to misdirect popular ire toward immigrants and the poor. No one questions these con artists when they pontificate about the injustice of passing huge national debts down to our grandchildren when the obvious answer is that they should accept the "personal responsibility" they so often trumpet and decide that we will pay higher taxes now to relieve that burden on our dear grandchildren. That's too hard to do. Besides, the corporations have legions of flacks who will trot out to disparage any attempt to fairly tax the rich and corporations, confuse the ignorant already, like the people in the Northwest survey, fearful for their continued livelihoods and squelch the true solution to our debt: pay the bill ourselves.

We are left with fear for our abilities to provide for ourselves, ignorance of the cause, confusion and ridicule of anyone who points out the real villains in the piece. Confused and ignorant we gather to the loud screeching of a Tea Party rally that becomes a lynch mob looking for someone who might be an undocumented immigrant. Sheriff Arpaio will provide security for the lynching and several Tea Partiers will bring the rope. Full coverage on Fox.

Suitable Unintended Consequences

2010-04-08T16:26:00.000-07:00

So we now have health care reform legislation that provides for many good things in the effort to make health care accessible and a right for every American. The corporate sock puppets of the Republican Party continue to rail against it and have made destroying the reform an article of faith. Because blind, lock-step opposition to any program proposed by Democrats, especially President Obama, is the litmus test that every Republican must pass, those Republicans bent on keeping their positions (vide David Frum and the American Enterprise Institute) or advancing scramble to find ways to ingratiate themselves with the looniest, neo-fascist mob members (e.g. The Tea Party Movement) while simultaneously supplicating themselves to their corporate oligarch masters.

In my home state of Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna wants to be governor some day. He is a Republican who has rather good moderate, centrist credentials. Those are exactly the kind of credentials that will keep him from ever winning a Republican primary while Fox News is marshalling the Tea Party zombies. So McKenna has joined a gaggle of Republican Attorneys General who are suing to declare a key provision of the health care reform bill unconstitutional. The Provision they have chosen to attack is the mandate that individuals must buy private medical insurance.

First off, let me state that I think that McKenna is not just positioning himself to be acceptable to the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of the Republican Party. I think he's positioning himself as one of the adults in the case and trying to form a plausible legal argument while the neo-fascists from other states blather about nonsense on which even Antonin Scalia and his ventriloquist's dummy, Clarence Thomas, will be unable to hang a favorable decision.

After listening to a rather detailed interview with McKenna I suspect that he may be able to fashion a winning argument, one, at least, that will get a 5 to 4 decision striking down the mandate to purchase private medical insurance. In the time that it will take to get this suit to a Supreme Court decision many things will happen not least of which may be a new Justice on the bench. Some of the events intervening include the multiple provisions of the law that directly affect the lives of a majority of citizens, provisions such as students remaining on their parents' health insurance plans, a halt to recensions of health insurance coverage for the ill and a prohibition on denials of medical insurance for preexisting conditions, first for children. As those provisions take effect more and more people will come to like and depend on the reform law. Therefore, when and if the Attorneys General and Sonny Purdue's special hit man get a decision in their favor, the reform bill unravels and health care unravels.

Yet the reform will then have a constituency, a big constituency. Despite the false claims that the neo-fascists are not attacking the positive provisions of the bill, they will have done it in...not. Rob McKenna and the whole neo-fascist crew he's courting have gambled their entire future on destroying health care reform. They learned nothing whatever from running headlong into an epic defeat in Congress. Worse, even if they had the capacity to learn, their constituents, both the oligarchs and the mindless rabble, will not let them act on that learning.

The economy is improving. Better yet, the perception that the economy is improving grows stronger daily. As the economy improves President Obama and the Democrats gain strength because they gain the argument that the Republicans destroyed the economy and the Democrats saved it. If that perception continues into November and the Republicans keep goose-stepping rightward, the Democrats may retain their legislative majorities or even increase them.

So we get to the 112th Congress in January, 2011. The Democrats retain majorities in both houses of Congress perhaps even sending Scott Brown back to his pickup truck in Massachusetts and the health care reforms now have a clear majority of Americans pleased with the outcome. McKenna and the other ultra-rightist Attorneys General remove the only provision that guarantees insurance coverage to all Americans. The result might very well be the longed for and much more sensible "single-payer option" probably achieved through a universalization and broad expansion of Medicare. Thus McKenna and the loony ultra-right may achieve for us of the left what we could not achieve without their mindless opposition.

Should my preferred outcome manifest itself, look for Rob McKenna to claim credit. We already know that Republicans are more craven than your average politician in leaping, as if they were playing jump-rope, from one side of an issue to the other. I expect that Rob McKenna will try to salvage his political career in Washington by claiming that he knew it all along, that he guided the law suit specifically so that the courts would force Congress to enact the single-payer option.

A lot of speculative events would have to combine to bring about the result I've outlined but in the interim we have already had the insurance companies working hard to make our arguments for us. You see, one of the primary arguments for a government run, single-payer health plan was that it created competition for the insurance companies and forced better behavior on those insurers. Of course, the neo-fascist defenders of "free market" economics suddenly argued that in this one case competition would destroy rather than improve the market. Right-wing fanatics have never had a problem with being on both sides of an issue at once. Still, the brazenness of the insurance companies hasn't been on more transparent display than when, less than a week following signing of the health care reform legislation, they decided that they had found a semantic, quasi-legal way to circumvent the provision that they must cover children - in case you did not catch that: CHILDREN - with pre-existing medical conditions. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sibelius, quickly issued a directive that the evasion that the insurers proposed using was not only incorrect but would result in vigorous opposition from DHHS. Yet the insurers in this announcement clarified the impression that they will not accept reform quietly and are working overtime to find ways to circumvent the reforms. So much for the arguments from the American Enterprise Institute and insurance trade groups that they need no oversight or competition to enforce their providing high quality medical insurance coverage.

So cautiously I look forward to insurance executives' greed, right-wing fanaticism, and mindless opposition to any Democratic proposals creating the atmosphere in which government run health care with not only be inevitable but popular and enacted into law.

Newt and the Pope: Responsibility has been Shifted

2010-03-27T20:44:00.000-07:00

So first there was this issue with sexual abuse of children by a number of Roman Catholic priests in the Boston Archdiocese over many decades but that was just a function of the decadent, permissive society in America. And anti-Catholic propaganda. Don't forget that any negative publicity about the behavior of the Church of Rome is always just anti-Catholic propaganda regardless of how true and accurate it may be.

Then it seems that the same thing happened in Canada and it even had implications for the government of Quebec because they lack total separation of church and state. But that was simply infection from the decadent, permissive society in America which didn't have adequate border controls to prevent French or other Canadian Catholics from independently abusing children. Just more anti-Catholic propaganda inspired from south of the Canadian border even though it mostly occurred before the first story about such abuse appeared in a U. S. newspaper.

Then, horror of horrors, the same behaviors showed up in Ireland. Ireland! Saints preserve us! The Americans have infected the people whose monasteries "saved civilization"! And those horrible anti-Catholics have infiltrated the Irish press too!

And then some German choirmaster named Ratzinger seems to have physically abused choirboys. And those anti-Catholic newspaper people, clearly non-Aryan, not echt Deutsch, and probably under the influence of the Elders of Zion have constructed the falsehood that this choirmaster is the brother of Pope Hitlerjugend I, alias Josef Ratzinger, Benedict XVI.

And worst of all, those decadent, permissive Americans have reared up again, this time in Wisconsin to put forward the obviously contumacious and defamatory charge that Pope Hitlerjugend I himself, as Cardinal Ratzinger, covered up the abuse of deaf children by a priest. These anti-Catholics have gone so far as to dress up some hired shill to pose as the retired Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland to falsely confirm the pope's involvement.

Clearly there is a vast conspiracy of Jews, atheists, Protestants, apostates and (fill in the name of the group that you, as a good Catholic, hate most here) to defame Pope Hitlerjugend I.

So, let me get this right. The Roman Catholic Church covered up sexual and physical abuse of children for decades. Any insinuation that the current pope while Archbishop and then Cardinal of the Munich Archdiocese may have known about the actions of priests, choirmasters or his own biological brothers is clearly defamatory. The current pope, whose portfolio as one of the most powerful cardinals in the Vatican at the time, was the ultimate Vatican official overseeing complaints such as those of the magnitude of the Wisconsin situation against priests had no knowledge of these cover ups. The current pope who, as cardinal, engineered the exit from the Boston Archdiocese to a sinecure in Rome far from the reach of American laws and victim lawsuits of Bernard, Cardinal Law was unaware of any of these egregious abuses. And it necessarily follows, as day follows night, that any doubts about Pope Hitlerjugend I's story are biased and unwarranted attacks on his office and the Roman Catholic Church.

We can't call this "blaming the victim" exactly because the Roman Church has avoided doing so. They leave that to various radical Catholic lay organizations for the sake of plausible deniability. However, it is certainly an absolute evasion of responsibility and a craven form of misdirection.

Simultaneously with this continuing tale of a Roman Catholic Church we have a very similar tale in American politics. Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, perhaps the person who best typifies the cravenness, fraud, deception, vileness and lies what are the core of the Republican Party has gone the whole hog. Rather than taking the Vatican route of farming out blaming the victims of abuse, Newt has embraced that role himself.

The lunatics of the Tea Party Movement, whipped up to a frenzy by neo-fascists like of Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Tom Tancredo, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, started making threats against and vandalizing the offices of Congresspersons who voted for the Health Care Reform Bill. They sent envelopes of white powder (hopefully inert) to at least one Congressperson, Faxed and phoned in threats against not only the Representatives but against their families and even grandchildren, all for having the temerity to extend a basic right to health care to all Americans. At this juncture one might think that a group of cool-headed adults might step forward to discipline the out-of-control children before someone really gets hurt. Falsely presenting himself as such a grown-up, Newt came forward to insist that the Democrats who enacted the bill were responsible for the frenzy.

Of course! It should be obvious to everyone. The victims of the lunatics he and his cohorts have been whipping into a frenzy since November 4, 2008 were at fault because they weren't Newt. I expect that his excuse for his adulteries with his employees resulting in his second and third marriages had nothing to do with his ego or psychopathology but rather with the fact that wives 2 and 3 wore provocative clothing or gave signals that they wanted him to violate his marriage vows.

People listen to Newt, this neo-fascist scum bag, because of his position and the cash that ultra-rightist plutocrats keep funneling to him to keep him in the limelight. Yet ultimately he's in the same position as the current pope. Gingrich and Ratzinger are both attempting, through propaganda that might even give Josef Goebbles pause, to misdirect the focus from their own immoral, dishonest and, in some cases, criminal acts to save their own skins. Their standard enemies receive their blame because their egotistical self-absorption cannot admit of the least fallibility on their parts.

And, frankly, I am pleased, even ecstatic in both cases.

Newt and Pope Hitlerjugend I both are bent on the marginalization of their institutions. They are moving farther and farther into the ultra-fascist right both in political and religious doctrine. They reflexively excuse their worst followers while refusing to reform in ways that might gain them broader power. The scandals in the Church of Rome will continue to multiply and fester. Over 30 years of right wing popes have skewed the curia and the College of Cardinals toward fundamentalist hard liners making serious reform of the church all but impossible. The fanatics and con men that Rupert Murdock and Roger Ailes promote on Fox News along with scum like Newt Gingrich, John Bolten, Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol and the Tea Party lunatics are dragging the Republicans so far to the right that they can't even see the territory of Conservatism any longer. Even some of those who watch Fox News are inevitably going to find this extremism distasteful.

Within the Republican's corporate controlled hierarchy the purges have already begun. I have not the slightest mote of sympathy for David Frum. He's an amoral ideologue with no loyalty to anyone but the person who pays his bills. Still Frum's fate this week demonstrates that the Republican's circular firing squad has loosed its first volley. That he is, so far, the only one not to kowtow quickly enough to evade the whizzing bullets indicates the absence of anyone amongst the Republicans who isn't somewhere to the right of Benito Mussolini.

Senator John McCain, one of the very few Republicans who can fool people into thinking he's a moderate even after he opens his mouth, has claimed that Democrats will get even less cooperation from Republicans following the passage of Health Care Reform than they got before passage. How he figures that Democrats will have less than zero cooperation and even more unreasoning opposition I don't quite know but I'm sure that the neo-fascist opposition will figure it out. President Obama this week challenged the Republicans to "bring it on." I sincerely hope that they do.

If the Democrats are smart (always an iffy proposition) and emboldened (which they now are) their next legislative priority will be Senator Dodd's Banking Reform Bill. I eagerly await the spectacle of Republicans tying themselves in knots to defend their masters in the biggest banks.

The Tea Party Movement is an arranged marriage of ultra-rightists, the lunatic Libertarian fringe and some confused and worried people gullible enough to be suckered in by Republican fearmongering. Quite a substantial portion of those folks didn't like giving taxpayer money to big banks and investment houses that had just fleeced them of their retirement funds. Some will be dumb enough to stick with the right wingers but a substantial number are going to walk, run or just drift away as the Republicans insist that this isn't the right time or way to reform the banking system. The status quo in financial markets is a disaster for the small investors, homeowners, parents trying to save for a child's college education and middle-aged folks looking hard toward retirement. I fervently hope that the Republicans will defend that status quo. Such blocking of financial reform will dissolve the Tea Partiers leaving only the hardcore fully brainwashed by Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. I only hope that the Democrats can time exposure of the Republican's suicide pact so that it falls after their lunatic fringe has picked slate after slate of unelectable ultra-rightists giving the Democrats say, 67 Senate seats and about 300 House members.

I wish I could say that I thought that the Roman Catholic Church could save itself. As an institution and as currently organized I wish it the same quick, dramatic, self-inflicted and painful demise I wish upon the Republican Party. Still it saddens me to say so because of the many, many decent, caring priests, nuns and brothers I have known to work and sacrifice for those in need of comfort and of the most basic needs for food, shelter, clothing and respect. I know that those people of sincere and deep religious calling are pained by and ashamed of the actions of their church hierarchy. Most are attached to their church in ways I respect even as I fail to understand them. Still I can feel that pain and shame and wish they did not have to go through it. I'm sure that they know far better than I that they are the source of any vitality in their church and sole hope for its survival if, it manages to survive rotting from both head and core. Pope Hitlerjugend I and his curia and College of Cardinals are the cancer that is killing their church just as Newt and his neo-fascists are the cancer killing the Republican Party.

Oiling The Cogs Of Cognitive Dissonance II

2010-03-23T11:49:00.000-07:00

BBC listening provides me with a lot of material lately.

First, let me say that there are two uses for the term "holistic". The first definition simply means considering the whole. If we are discussing medicine - which we will be momentarily - the most benign version has the doctor considering interactions of medications, how diuretics might aggravate a patient's tendency to form kidney stones and the like. In that sense, holistic anything is wise practice and a clear boon. But the second definition is a popular one that involves a raft of New Age nonsense about auras, spiritual healing, crystals, copper bracelets, herbalism and the like. It is largely hype, sympathetic magic and con-artistry giving a bad name to those who would practice the first type of holism.

Let me also note that I have some qualms about lumping herbalism in with the other scams. As the existence of Taxol, to cite just one famous instance, proves chemicals naturally synthesized by plants can have beneficial effects on human diseases. Plants from lowly molds (e.g. penicillin) to trees (e.g. Taxol) have provided us with some effective treatments for human disease. That said, however, it give no pass to all the extremist herbalist nonsense put forward by con men looking to separate the gullible and the desperate from their cash. I saw this foolishness first hand some years ago. A very dear friend suddenly collapsed one day. She had a particularly aggressive and nasty cancer. Her doctors told her that this cancer was inevitably fatal. She might live 6 to 12 months longer, sometimes people survived a bit longer. Someone in her circle convinced her that a macrobiotic diet was the answer to surviving longer so she rejected conventional treatments with chemotherapy and radiation. The disease ran its course and she was dead in 11 months. The macrobiotic nonsense did nothing for her. It was a placebo. It neither hastened not slowed her cancer's progress. It was simply worthless though a macrobiotic counselor and "holistic health practitioner" made some substantial cash by peddling their worthless trash and nonsense.

What brings this subject up is a recent report by the BBC that the British National Health Service is considering discontinuing payment to holistic medicine con men in a money saving move. A double blind study found no effect of any kind on any medical condition studied by holistic practitioners' efforts.

The radio report brought together a person involved in the study for Britain's National Health Service and a holistic practitioner from Germany. What struck me immediately was the German holistic practitioner's insistence that his form of medicine must be valid because it has a more than 200 year history. He also insisted that "school" medicine has a bad track record because 200 years ago it promoted treatments that have since been discredited. Both statements are independently verifiable and true. What he did not say is that the quackery of times past in large part involved exactly the quackery he practices today.

A dear friend of mine has an adult daughter who has a "practice" in Southern California, an area that's almost a cliche for its eager adoption of all manner of quackery and lunatic nonsense. His daughter is a very sweet woman. She styles herself, however, as a spiritual healer and is currently making a nice living by charging clients $150 per hour for "healing" them over the phone. It is flat out quackery that persists because the one positive thing that anyone can say about this con is that no one is poisoned as frequently happened in centuries past. The hurt is simply the extraction of cash from someone stupid enough to pay for foolishness that he or she believe has more than a placebo effect.

But back to our German con man/holistic healer. I would suggest that he cannot argue that his form of medicine is effective and valid because it has been practiced continuously since the 18th or 19th Centuries and in the next breath argue that "school" medicine is less effective and valid because medical practices of the 18th or 19th Centuries were unenlightened and have been shown to be quackery. The fact is that the very practices which modern medicine from Harvey and Pasteur onward have relegated to the dustbin are the practices that our German practitioner, my friend's daughter and others like them who are either dishonest or delusional perpetuate today.

I can't applaud the British National Health Service loudly enough for their decision to call a con a con and stop wasting scarce health care cash and resources on garbage. But don't look for that to happen in the United States. Two decades ago some very well connected con men bought Robert Dole, senator from Archer, Daniels Midland, as their front man in removing many of the restrictions the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had on these snake oil remedies. In the guise of speeding drugs to the market we limited the review functions of the Food and Drug Administration. Much as Phil Gramm shilled for rapacious bankers to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 giving us the multiple banking frauds whose destructive consequences continue to ripple through the world economy, so Dole shilled for Big Pharma (you didn't think he became a viagra spokesman because he was so sexy, did you?) in pulling the teeth from FDA regulations and attacking then FDA Administrator, David Kessler.

Thanks to Dole, the FDA can report that scams like "energy" drinks, cosmetics that can cause permanent damage while effecting unnecessary and minimal changes and snake oil "breathing" remedies are ineffective but can't remove them from the market until and unless they kill people. Thanks to Dole and his corporate sponsors we now have "pro-biotics", the current manifestation of the American fixation on laxatives, that correct the problems that the processed foods with which those corporations stuff us by stuffing us with the bacteria removed from the processed foods. In short, we have less protection from scams, more crap on the market and waste more money on it both in tax dollars and out-of-pocket.

With a reform of the American health care system now enacted into law, we need to take a long, hard look at the British National Health report and start shutting down some of these scams if for no other reason than to control our health care costs. The first step in the process of putting an end to the "holistic" nonsense is to stop assuming that simply because a practice has been going on for hundreds of years it has any validity whatever.

The Republicans of North Korea

2010-02-15T15:38:00.000-08:00

Yes. I admit it. I an Un-American. I listen to the BBC. The BBC offers a look at the world beyond the United Kingdom. That view is not entirely free of prejudice but it is almost entirely free of limitations. Partly I presume that that larger view is a legacy of the British Empire on which the sun never set as opposed to America on which, to look at our Teapartiers and other neo-fascist lunatics, one would think that the sun never rose.

I have just finished listening to a report of a BBC correspondent who visited Pyongyang, North Korea's capital for my geographically challenged fellow countrymen. He attended an open meeting with college students in the North Korean capital. One young woman confronted the correspondent and asked in fluent, nearly unaccented English if she seemed uninformed about the world, malnourished, oppressed or ignorant? Clearly she was none of those things. What she was is part of North Korea's supremely entitled and privileged ruling class. Of course she was not ignorant. Of course she was not malnourished. Of course she was not uninformed about the larger world. And of course she was not oppressed because she is part of the elite that oppresses the rest of the nation.

Hearing that report I was struck by the correspondences between that North Korean student's view of her nation and its place in the world and that of our own Republican Party.

In the Republican view, they still have jobs and are very comfortably off thanks to their unconscionably enormous bonuses paid by companies they've driven into the ground at the expense of the less privileged classes. They need no "stimulus package" and, therefore, in their blinkered reasoning, no one else does either.

In the Republican view, they have health care or can afford it if they don't. They need no public option and in fact want to stifle the competition for the insurance companies which they run or on whose boards of directors they have lucrative sinecures. So what if some people they don't know die sooner of preventable diseases or have their families impoverished so their doctor friends can buy that new titanium putter and drive up the the golf course in the newest BMW?

In the Republican view, taxes, any taxes at any level, are too high because they want all of their money. Let the rest of the population make soup out of bark or grass or dirt. After all, the Republicans great-great-grandfathers pulled themselves up by the bootstraps of slaves or non-union workers or exploited immigrants to create the trusts, family foundations and dummy corporations from which the current generation draws a comfortable living. Therefore, the rest of the nation, every single one of them, should be able to do the same even after the Republicans have repossessed those boots, straps and all.

The Republicans pooh-pooh the disintegration of society...except when they need to do so for fear mongering purposes to distract the attention of the hoi poloi. After all, things are quite civilized in their country clubs and gated communities and they can always hire additional armed security if things amongst the lower classes get more unruly. After all, why should they put their (great-great-grandfather's) hard-earned cash into things like education, health care, jobs programs and social services that only make the great unwashed...uppity and less suitable for service.

The terrible thing about these attitudes shared by the privileged ruling classes in North Korea and America is that the attitudes arise from a lack of empathy and willful ignorance. It matters not in which country these oligarchs live they share and retain power through a pattern of lies designed to maintain their own privileges regardless of the viciousness visited on their fellow citizens.

The Teaparty movement here in the United States is only the latest manifestation of the fact that lying loudly and long enough will always convince one third of the population of your rightness and confuse another third sufficiently to provide an opening for the oligarchs to regain or maintain control.

And oh, if you are worrying about your health, unemployment or mortgage payment those of us who profit from your predicament think it's really all your own fault, but never mind...look over here...there's the Super Bowl...er...Olympics...Final Four...er...some starlet not wearing panties is scooting across a limousine seat.

Miscellany, January, 2010

2010-01-14T15:57:00.000-08:00

To paraphrase Benjamin Disraeli, "There are four kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, statistics and Fox News."

The people who are most violently opposed to abortion are those whose parents could have gotten the greatest benefit from the procedure.

Similarly, I completely agree with Barney Frank who observed a couple of decades ago, "Republicans believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth."

Religious fundamentalists and rabid sports fans are living proof that evolution doesn't hold true...in all cases.

Orly Taitz was not born in the United States. Her hair color and grasp of the law are equally honest.

The louder, more often and more emphatically you say you're a "CHRISTIAN" the less likely you are to be one.

If the people who believe in "The Rapture" are the people who will be populating Heaven, being left behind is going to be a picnic. Besides, I'll have my choice of cars.

If the neo-fascist ultra-right thinks Sarah Palin is a leader why haven't we just won by default?

I just adore protesters opposed to single-payer, universal health care who chant, "Hands off my Medicare!"

Shouldn't we ask the police officers murdered from October, 2009 in Washington State whether they think that the Second Amendment conveys an individual right to own firearms? Oops! My bad. They were shot so we can't ask them.

I have ancestors who served in the American Revolutionary Army including at Lexington and Concord. The current groups calling themselves "Minutemen" are an affront to all those who fought for American independence though they fit right into the traditions of Italian Black and German Brown Shirts.

Ditto for the Teaparty Movement.

The essence of Libertarianism is, "Do unto others, grab as much as you can for yourself and get out of there before you're caught."

Nobody needs to undermine the authority the Roman Catholic Church while so many its priests, bishops and cardinals are doing such yeoman service in undermining it themselves.

Nobody does enough work or works hard enough to justify salaries, let alone bonuses of more than $1,000,000.00 per year.

Stupid us! We give sports, movie and rock stars multiple millions of dollars while they are still in their teens and twenties and then we are shocked (SHOCKED!!!!) when we find they're using drugs, alcohol and screwing everything that passes within reach. Exceptional talent doesn't mean that the person is any brighter than the guy mumbling to himself while dumpster diving.

Not everyone can be President of the United States nor should be. We just spent eight years under the administration of criminals and fools, hopefully putting that idea to rest.

The Bush family is living proof that the British Royal Family isn't the only one suffering from in-breeding.

That Newt Gingrich still speaks about "traditional family values" is irrefutable proof that the right-wing hasn't a single shred of integrity or honesty.

As a cynic and lover of irony, I am delighted that the party of Mark Foley, Larry Craig, Mark Sanford and David Vitter is the party of "family values".

Facing Satan

2010-01-13T18:45:00.000-08:00

If we atheists didn't already have Pat Robertson we would have to invent him.

Actually, fundamentalism is the best thing that ever happened to atheism. It's far harder to rip apart a Prince of Peace or a god whose embodiment is love than it is to piss all over blinkered idiots whose god spouts war on unbelievers and hate generally. As I've written before here, fundamentalism is not religion; it's religiosity. That doesn't keep some of the people who are foolish or stupid enough to adhere to it from being pleasant generally and even decent under narrow circumstances. But narrow is the active word here.

I don't believe in either a Big-Imaginary-Friend-In-The-Sky or Satan. I believe that what good there is in the world comes primarily from people being kind and decent to one another in living this life as if it were the only one they will ever have (because I think it is). I also believe that the bulk of evil in this world - and there certainly is evil even without a satan - comes from people being hateful and selfish and narrow minded toward others while living this life as if it were a rehearsal gone wrong as they wait for some reward in another life that will never come.

But let's, for a moment, postulate universe in which both that Big-Imaginary-Friend-In-The-Sky and Satan exist. If I were satan and wanted to drag as many fools to hell as possible, I can think of no better Pied Piper for the task than a neo-fascist hatemonger disguised as an avuncular fellow who professes himself to be a CHRISTIAN. You want proof? The 700 Club's name derives from the number of the Beast, 666, and Pat Robertson's official age in 1964, the year Barry Goldwater was defeated for the presidency and the year that Lyndon Johnson decided to make sure that Pat's father was defeated in his next senatorial campaign. That's right, folks, Robertson's own program identifies him as an agent of satan.

Want more proof? It's a "club", right? And what color are clubs in a pack of cards? Right! Clubs are black! And satan is the prince of darkness and darkness is black. It's right there in the name.

Ridiculous?

According to Pat Robertson today, January 13, 2009, "Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French ... and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French.' True story. And the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal,' . Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another."

How would Pat know it's a "true story"? He couldn't...unless he was there! He has admitted it. In 1804 Pat Robertson himself was in the meeting between the rebellious black slaves of Haiti and satan. Now, we know that Pat certainly is not black...of African descent, I mean. So if he's not a former Haitian slave that only leaves one other presence in the meeting...satan. There you are, boys and girls, proof positive or certainly good enough for Pat Robertson and Glenn Beck, that Robertson is, himself, satan and no other.

You want more proof?

Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and not because its people lack industriousness or invention. It is poor for a variety of reasons that range across the natural, personal and political spectrum over two centuries. Someone who controls such things must hate Haiti, right? But Jesus loved the poor. Jesus comforted the poor and afflicted so whoever is harming Haiti must be working counter to Jesus. And who is the adversary of everything CHRISTIAN and religiose?

Whoever said, "Richard Dawkins" should just close this blog now. You don't get it.

No, silly, it's satan again. Satan has visited on Haiti this massive earthquake. It killed the Archbishop of Port au Prince, didn't it? Or would Robertson say that's simply because he was a Catholic? I'm not sure on that one. Still, obviously this is satan's handiwork and satan himself, Pat Robertson, is trying to throw everyone off the track.

Or, perhaps we could look at things a little differently.

Isn't it possible that the Haitian slaves of the 18th and 19th Centuries felt that slavery was an injustice counter to every decent Christian religious principle? Isn't it possible that they were inspired by the revolutions in America and France to seek their freedom and independence? But then again, isn't that another proof that Pat Robertson is satan? After all, who but satan would ascribe to satan a yearning for freedom and independence? Or is it, perhaps, that Pat Robertson is really saying that in 1775 a group of delegates from colonies met in Philadelphia and made a pact with the devil. John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the rest said to satan, "We will serve you if you will free us from the English." and the devil said, "It's a deal." Perhaps that is what Robertson is saying, after all, he was there. He would know.

E-Klan Robes

2010-01-11T20:23:00.000-08:00

The argument is utterly absurd on its face.

Here in my home state of Washington and now in Federal Court in California right-wing bigots are claiming the right to wear virtual hoods over their heads. The ironic and absurd contention is that if these terrorists are identified in public they may be subjected to ridicule and intimidation. On its face their argument is that we bigots have an inalienable right to intimidate others but no one else should dare to assert a phony right to intimidate us.

The issue here is not race hatred but rather hatred of gays, lesbians and transgendered individuals who are seeking equal rights with their heterosexual peers.

Back in May of 2009 the Washington Legislature finally gathered the courage to pass what we refer to as the "Everything But Marriage Act" allowing domestic partners of either sex the full benefits of marriage but without legalizing same-sex marriage per se. This act skirted an issue in Washington created by the bigots themselves. In 1998 a voter initiative passed creating a Washington State "Defense of Marriage Act". Marriage, which has had a sad and checkered history throughout time, has been an institution used briefly and, sometimes often, for a half century in America but the threat from which the red-neck bigots and fundamentalist loonies found it needed defending was the possibility that couples of the same sex might marry. Their hysterical rant claimed that heterosexual marriages were somehow threatened by homosexual marriages. How and to what effect they never could coherently specify. The best argument they could muster was that their Big-Imaginary-Friend-In-The-Sky said it was a no-no. This, of course, came from people whose direct antecedents claimed that Afro-Americans were an "inferior" race based on the advice of that same Big-Imaginary-Friend-In-The-Sky. With the Washington "Defense of Marriage Act" on the books, legislators had to tread a bit lightly. Thus they did not do the obvious and correct thing in having the "Defense of Marriage Act" declared unconstitutional followed by passage of a bill extending full marital rights to same-sex couples.

Light tread or not, the bigots marshaled their night-riders and set out to terrorize the state. On September 1, 2009 the Republican Washington Secretary of State certified initiative petitions containing enough signatures to put Referendum 71 on last November's ballot. The bigots are not without lawyers. After all Kenneth Starr and Antonin Scalia are, sadly, still breathing. They managed to couch the petition in language sufficiently obtuse that a Yes vote retained the "Everything But Marriage Act" while a No vote would have repealed it. Thanks, in part, to the bigots' efforts to confuse voters about their purpose and their success in doing so, Referendum 71 was defeated in the 2009 state elections. But what is relevant here is the history between September 1 and November 5, 2009.

Initiative petitions are public documents. That is and has been settled law in Washington State and throughout the United States. But when a pro-gay rights group in Washington announced plans to create a public, on-line database of the signers of the Referendum 71 petitions, all hell broke loose amongst those awaiting The Rapture. Good heavens! They were simply trying to deny equal rights to others and now they might face discriminatory treatment themselves! Horrible! That is, after all, why Klansmen wore hoods!

The courts, up to the U. S. Supreme Court in the person of "Justice" Anthony Kennedy, decided to punt on the issue. If I am being charitable, and, being a dyed-in-the-wool Lefty, I must be even when it grates, I suspect that the punt was meant to split the difference between the settled law that the petition signers' names are public records and the worry that they would be targeted for some unspecified violence (burning rainbows on their front lawns?). In any case, election day, 2009 came and went. The odious Referendum 71 went down to well deserved defeat and the case became moot.

Now we have a trial in Federal Court in San Francisco, California raising the issue of the even more odious Proposition 8 which actually amended the California Constitution to outlaw same sex marriages. Judge Vaughn R. Walker presiding over the case, a Libertarian-leaning appointee of Poppy Bush, wanted to televise the proceedings. Once again the right-wing night-riders objected to having their hoods removed for a broad public claiming that they might be subject to witness intimidation. A compromise went for nothing and now the Supreme Court, once again in the person of Anthony Kennedy, has punted but this time with a level of unabashed absurdity that exponentially exceeds the Washington case.

Indeed, the bigots won't appear in inglorious color on YouTube but there is nothing to prevent any person attending the court proceedings from reporting their names and other identifying information in any public forum available. In short, the Supreme Court injunction will do nothing but turn a video record into verbal reportage.

Yet the very real issue is one of darkness and light. Light, whether sunlight or scrutiny, disinfects. Lots of noisome things grow in the dark. The bigots who promote gay bashing, whether in individual, physical attacks or in public legislative attacks on our gay brothers and sisters, need to be brought out into the light to disinfect our society. The real issue is that these bigots are ashamed of their vile bigotry just as the Klansmen that they resemble needed hoods to hide their identities from the larger public. When we turned over the racist rocks under which Byron dela Beckwith, Cecil Price, Lawrence Rainey, Sam Bowers, Robert Chambliss and Thomas Blanton cowered, the killings and bombings stopped and Afro-Americans could go about their business in Mississippi and Alabama with far less fear than when the hate of those monsters festered in the darkness. It's now time to expose the current crop of night-riding bigots to the light so that their public shame and native cowardice ends this odious chapter of American bigotry.

We had to wait thirty years for the play and subsequent movie Inherit the Wind publicly showing the vacuousness of the fundamentalists in the Scopes Monkey Trial. I doubt that we will have to wait so long for the public display and discrediting of this new subset of bigots. It won't do away with the bigotry in itself just as we are still battling over evolution eighty-five years after William Jennings Bryan discredited himself and fundamentalism in Dayton, Tennessee. However, dragging the bigots into the light will quiet them and purge the public forum of their hateful viciousness.

We need this publicity not only for ourselves but for our world as well. The fundamentalist bigots are now financing and promoting gay bashing legislation in Uganda that is only slightly different from that in Hitler's Germany. Their churches and the overflowing, tax-free offerings on which their ministries of hate depend operate in darkness. They preach that they "hate the sin but love the sinner" while sponsoring the death penalty for the sinner. Public exposure of their bigotry will necessarily cut into the offerings in the plates passed on Sunday mornings as people unwilling to be publicly associated with such odious policies opt for other, less extreme places of worship.

So I am cheerfully awaiting the first reports of the names, addresses and even cell phone pictures of the bigots who want to deny that most American belief that "all men are created equal" and the fulfillment of that in the assertion that we all have equal rights regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, or who we love.

An Inconvenient Religiosity

2009-12-21T13:23:00.000-08:00

I just recently spent a week with my oldest daughter, my son-in-law and my four grandsons. It was wonderful to see the boys who are far too far away. While I was there my daughter related an incident from one of her recent speaking engagements that is my current subject.

The daughter in question is a notable in the movement toward sustainable uses of the environment, particularly in agriculture. She spoke at a conference in Georgia organized to bring evangelical Christians together with environmentalists over global climate change. From the environmentalist point of view it seemed as if an immanent threat to the creation of the evangelicals' big imaginary friend in the sky should create a natural alliance. After all, if you want to save the world it doesn't much matter whether you're saving it because you don't want to die or because it violates something you misinterpret from a work of poetry and historical fiction you call "The Bible".

Unfortunately, the fundamentalists who make up the bulk of evangelical Christians, as I have noted before have answers and need not ask questions. With the discussion turning to rising sea levels that could drown a number of populated islands and coasts one fundamentalist offered that there was nothing to worry about because his god had promised Noah that he would not again destroy the world with a flood.

Say what?

Well, it's right there in the King James Version, isn't it? God, speaking in his native Jacobean English, promises Noah that he will send no more floods to cover the earth. Ergo and ipso facto all this melting of ice caps is simply irrelevant. God said no more floods.

My daughter couldn't learn tact from me because I don't have any, but she did learn to think on her feet and answered this poor fool that god may have promised that he wouldn't flood the world again but he didn't say he would stop humanity from destroying the earth with a flood. This, she said, seemed to give this person pause. Whether it will penetrate the armor of ignorance this person has eagerly donned we shall see and can only hope. Personally, I don't think it will. Such a distinction requires too much of the thought from which fundamentalists flee headlong.

Thought and questioning are anathema to fundamentalism but what is absolutely essential to the fundamentalist mindset is victimhood. These folks absolutely must see themselves as a tiny, persecuted minority in a vast sea of humanity fully prepared to attack them at the slightest provocation. They are never the oppressors. In the evangelicals' delusion they hang the witch, assassinate the apostate, burn the book and hold themselves apart in a closed and closed minded circle of their congregations as a desperate defense against the attacks of others whom, in their clouded minds, they would never think of attacking.

Take the farrago of "the homosexual agenda" for example. For the evangelical fundamentalists they are a tiny island of true Christians amongst a vast sea of corrupt mainstream sects and homosexuals salivating over their children. The mainstream sects, in their view, have capitulated to the gays, lesbians and transgendered but weren't "true" Christians to begin with since only the fundamentalists descended, uncorrupted from the original Christian apostles. The homosexuals are out to victimize this tiny, beset minority. The gays are the lions to whom the mainstream religions, in the role of Nero's Roman legions, would feed the poor defenseless evangelicals. A simple demand for equal rights under law like the right to visit a sick partner, inherit the share of what had been joint property for many years and, of course, the right to marry are not cries for justice, they are subtle attacks on these "true" Christians.

The fact is that these evangelical fundamentalists, the Bob Jones, Oral Roberts, Fred Phelps, Pat Robertson followers are not Christians at all. Their crabbed, selfish and blinkered religiosity is simply a fun house mirror version of Christianity, distorted beyond recognition and with barely a millimeter or two of depth. They know what their god said to the fictional Noah but not what is actually happening to their own world. Worse yet, their willful ignorance speeds the destruction of what they claim is their god's creation. Further, and worst of all, when they do acknowledge that destruction they find some excuse that fits with their willful ignorance much as those twin banes of genuine religion Falwell and Robertson did when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. And, of course, when tornadoes destroy churches in Kansas or Oklahoma their god had taken a lunch break or perhaps was away in the bathroom and just didn't notice. Those devastations are accidents, not visitations of their god's wrath. Perhaps they should be wary of the fact that no voice from the skies has instructed any of them to build an ark. Perhaps their god has simply decided that they are so blockheaded and stupid that explaining the measure of a cubit wouldn't be worth his while. Perhaps their yearning for victimhood will get it's final expression when their big, imaginary friend in the sky makes them the victims of climate change.

How Quickly We Forget or We're Forever Blowing Bubbles

2009-11-19T20:40:00.000-08:00

Someone, Napoleon, George Santayana, who really said it doesn't matter, observed that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Of course, the originator of that quote was himself speaking in an age before mass electronic media and definitiely before those mass electronic media were completely made subservient to corporate con men and pirates.

Just over one year ago the worldwide economy collapsed because a bunch of con men and pirates convinced people who were supposed to know better that securities based on dodgy mortgages were a good thing because everyone, just everyone knew for an absolute fact that home prices would never ever fall and that every person conned into signing a mortgage contract built on incomes just as falsified and inflated as those home prices would make every single payment. Mortgage backed derivitives were a scam just as surely as Bernard Madoff's investment firm was a scam.

As I write this the spot price of gold has reached $1,145.90 and has risen as high as $1,500.00 per ounce of 24kt gold bullion. Just a decade ago the price of gold was at $284.00 per ounce.

Ask yourself a few questions, please.

In the last decade have we stopped mining gold?

In the last decade has three-quarters of the world's gold supply disappeared?

Is there anything to indicate that there is less gold today than there was a decade ago?

The answer to all these questions is a definitive and resounding, NO!

So why is gold over 400% more valuable in late November, 2009 than it was in late November, 1999?

The answer to that question is, gold is not more valuable now than a decade ago. But what it does signial is that the con is on again. Or as the late Fred Rogers would have said, "That's a big word but can you say it with me? Bubble."

I know that this will be painful for those who have trouble remembering that they were conned just a year ago or those who see the world through the not so Funhouse mirrors of Fox News but we have actually been here before. Let me whisk you back some thirty years and more to the last gold bubble. It was a bubble blown by a silver pipe.

Back in the early 1970s as our fourth truly criminal president*, Richard Nixon, was finally being driven from the office he never deserved to hold in the first place, the Hunt Brothers of Texas, Nelson Bunker and William Herbert, commenced a scheme to corner the world silver market. With the support of some similarly criminal Arab plutocrats, the Hunts drove the price of silver from $1.95 per ounce up to a high of $54.00. Their scheme was virtually identical to that carried out by Jay Gould and Jim Fiske in cornering the gold market a little more than century before. The Nixon Administration's removal of the cap on the price of gold was the immediate spur for the Hunt's actions.

The scheme foundered in March, 1980 when the price of silver dropped by more than 50% in one day and caused a 16% drop in the Dow Jones Stock Market average. The Hunts and their Middle Eastern cronies made a pile of money to add to the piles they already had and, in the meantime, lengthened the economic recession that began under Nixon.

As a corollary to the silver fever that developed and even persisted after the collapse of the Hunts' silver bubble, gold skyrocketed. In mid 1980 it hit about $600.00 per ounce before falling back to less than a third of that high. A lot of con men and pirates profited while a lot of other folks were left hiding $600.00 Krugerrands that were subsequently worth only about $200.00 in safe deposit boxes. The economy continued in the doldrums through 1983.

We hear the same drumbeat today that we heard back in 1980. The world economy is in the crapper. The only safe hedge against inflation is something of intrinsic value like gold. Gold can only go higher. Fear spread by the con men and pirates pulls money out of the economy and into the pockets of the same con men and pirates who were selling you mortgage backed derivitives just over a year ago. The con men and pirates profit from the fear they spread and in a few months someone holding a fist full of $1,200.00 American Gold Eagles, Canadian Maple Leafs or Krugerrands will be out between $600 to $800.00 per coin and the con men will be that much richer.

Can you say, "Bubble?"

We are not simply condemned to repeat the history from which we don't learn. Rather we are condemned to repeat the history that the con men and pirates convince us to unlearn. They appeal to our fear, our greed, our ignorance and our bigotry for their own profit then distract us with tabloid crap until they can run the next scam. Caveat emptor is their battle cry and excuse. Those stupid people whose incomes mortgage brokers inflated outrageously should have known better. Blame the victim of the scam, not the criminal who perpetrated it.

Just remember to sell those Krugerrands bought in 1980 now and stay away from the gold scammers of 2009.

*(Note: I count Rutherford B. Hayes, Warren G. Harding and Calvin Cooledge as first through 3rd of our 7 truly criminal presidents. Herbert Hoover was an ideologue who founded an institution that has become a criminal enterprise. Ronald Reagan and the Bushes, Poppy and Dubya round out the 7.)

Speaking Volumes

2009-11-07T03:45:00.000-08:00

During the summer of 2009 we were beset by a collection of charlatans, dupes and dunces shouting, "Read the bill," at town hall meetings held to discuss health care reform. The charlatans knew, the dupes didn't know and the dunces were to stupid to care that there was no one bill to read.

Now we have the Congressional Republicans introducing a 200 page health care reform bill and touting it as a work of exceptional brilliance when contrasted with the majority Democrats' bill that is some 1900 and more pages long. This is the same mentality that equates reading the Cliff's Notes of War and Peace with reading the entire novel. It is great for the dunces whose attention spans are shorter than the life of most subatomic particles. But there's an adage that, I think, applies here: you get what you pay for.

So why would a bill hovering in the range of 2000 pages be so large and another bill purporting to do the same thing be one-tenth that size?

First, let's consider that health care and related industries represents somewhere between 30 and 35 per cent of the American economy. The Republicans will tell you that in ominous tones as if that much of the nation's economy were about to be murdered. So, let me ask you, would you like about a third of the nation's economy considered carefully and in detail or would something that is, by contrast, scribbled on the back of an envelope be equally good?

Second, there is the long, arduous effort that Democrats have made to consider and include Republican ideas where they have been offered in a cooperative spirit. Not just this year but over the last thirty years Democrats have made sincere efforts to overcome objections by Republicans even when, as now, the objections are simply hysterical and obstructionist. Currying favor with senators like Olympia Snow of Maine has added bulk to a health care overhaul.

Third, the stated goals of health care reform are to extend coverage to all Americans, improve health in the population as a whole and control the run-away inflation of health care costs while not reducing the coverage enjoyed by anyone who currently has health insurance. Achieving those goals requires some careful consideration of the effects of reform on private insurance plans, on Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans and Indian Health Services, military medical care, private for profit and non-profit medical facilities, health care cooperatives, HMOs, the Federal prison system and 50 states and additional territories and their state and state licensed health care systems and providers. The dunces, dupes and charlatans may clamour for something that their tiny minds and blinkered visions can encompass, but I for one think it's a very good idea that there be a great volume of paper in a bill that has attempted to consider all the implications of reform on these systems.

The point is that a 200 page bill is not a serious consideration of health care reform. It cannot possibly be such. Yet to the dunces, that segment of the population that the great H. L. Mencken aptly called the "booboisie", are ready to surrender themselves to something that is a sham simple version of health care reform in the same way that they surrendered themselves to a sham common man and genuine simpleton in George W. Bush. They take the absurd position that something one-tenth the size must be better than the larger version.

Even these booboisie could figure out that a box containing 20 ounces of corn flakes is a better deal than one containing 2 ounces if both are priced the same but when it comes to a bill in Congress they clamour for the short weight that short changes them.

But that's not the only issue with volumes currently in the news.

Sarah Palin has uh...written a...book. Her biography is a hot item on Amazon despite its being weeks from actual release. There may actually be some fun in reading whatever the ghostwriter recruited by Palin's handlers has put together but for it to be a best seller even before publication raises my eyebrows and probably ought to raise yours.

Let me pull out an incident from my long memory to contrast a little here.

Back in 1988 and 1989 there was a scandal involving House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas. It seems that Speaker Wright had actually written a slim book. Not many people were clamouring for copies for some friends of Wright's bought some copies in bulk. Those friends freely admitted that they were attempting to help Wright finance his campaigns for his seat in the House of Representatives. They were using the book purchases as a subterfuge meant to evade campaign finance limits. This scandal caused Wright to resign his seat in May, 1989.

Given the paucity of ideas rattling around in the space between Sarah Palin's ears, perhaps someone ought to look into the sales of her book. Perhaps some of the neo-fascist plutocrats that regularly hire amiable dunces as political fronts for their rapacity are buying cases of the Palin book for kindling in their ski lodges or hunting camps. Their bulk purchases could be seen as political contributions except for one thing. Governor Palin isn't governor any longer, is she?

Everyone was puzzled by the dramatic resignation of Palin as Alaska governor last summer. Puzzled, that is, unless they were just a little bit cynical and were thinking like trailer trash. You see, Sarah Palin is not now running for anything. She can rake in all the cash she wants without violating anything but reason and decency before she declares herself a candidate for something like president of these here United States of America. Had she remained governor of Alaska to the end of her term she would have been that much poorer and have had about a year and a half less to suck at the teat of embarassingly large private neo-fascist fortunes.

In the one case we have the dumbing down of complex issues seen as a positive thing by the boboisie that the forms the Republicans base and in the other we have the very personification of that dumbed down booboisie pretending to be a bestselling author...with a little help from her neo-fascist friends. It's an apotheosis of ignorance that speaks volumes about the Republicans and their base, you betcha.

Defining Terms - Religion vs. Religiosity

2009-11-03T01:57:00.000-08:00

I have been wont to contrast the terms "religion" and "religiosity" in these entries. It's more than time that I define their meaning.

A number of factors make this a timely discussion but the most immediate causes are the attempt by Pope Hitler Jugend the First to poach Anglican bigots and the decision by a French Court to cut through the religiosity, the veneer of religion, and define the Church of Scientology for what it is, the cult of a bunch of con artists purveying a lot of idiotic nonsense for personal profit.

Despite the appearance that I deride all religion, I have a certain respect for actual religion sincerely held. True, I do not believe in any god of the sort that George Carlin called "a big, imaginary friend in the sky." However, I do believe that religion - and here I specifically mean "religion" - can be a good thing. There is clear evidence for that positive benefit. The current Dalai Lama is unquestionably a person of deep religion and a force for good in our world. Dorothy Day and her Catholic Workers' Movement have been a force for good. The great Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by the neo-fascists of El Salvador for his religion. I have known a number of people of deeply held religious belief from nuns and ministers to captains in the Salvation Army to decent lay people who manifest their religion in positive ways. I have also known good people who find comfort in their religion during trials physical, moral and circumstantial as they progress toward that universal vanishing point of death. What is common to all of those people is a depth of knowledge and understanding that comes from examination of their faiths. They have posed questions and found an answer in something far larger and more mysterious than themselves. They have decided that the grand mystery is god while I have decided that it is chance. Their decisions and mine come from confronting our questions and finding our own satisfactory answers.

Religiosity is the opposite. Religiosity derides understanding, thought, questioning and genuine confrontation with problems. Religiosity can be very comforting but at a cost. It matters not at all whether we are discussing Christian, Jewish, Mormon, Islamic, Hindu or any other form of fundamentalist religiosity, the basic message to adherents can be summed up as, "Don't think. Don't question. The answers are already laid out for you." Religiosity is religion for dummies, real dummies. Those dummies may be relatively smart people in other areas but they have such a need for certainty in something that they are willing and even eager to put aside rational thought to achieve that certainty.

Why that eagerness? I cannot look into the minds of those eager to empty those same minds and know for certain the motives - reasons would be granting them far too much - of those who surrender to the ignorance of religiosity. Clearly those motives are closely related if not identical to those of cultists. Essentially those motives seem to stem from blind egotism, selfishness and an utter lack of empathy. Yet also included seems to be a species of infantilism, a yearning for an authority figure who will tell the follower what to do and think and feel in all aspects of his or her life. The religiose seem to find comfort in a top-down structure in which a guru, Duce, Fuhrer, Pope or preacher pander to their weaknesses and bigotries.

While religion - many of whose sects started out in bursts of religiosity's fervor - tends to say that there are many things which we do not understand raising many questions. Religion suggests that in considering those questions and attempting to reach understanding it has concluded that the resolution to their uncertainty a god of some name or other.

Religiosity, on the other hand suggests that there are no questions and that a lack of understanding is simply a species of "over-thinking" the problem. All answers have been laid out in the past. All answers are in some book. Any confusion results from an imperfect understanding of that book, an understanding which the local imam, guru, rabbi or pastor is more than willing to supply for you from his special, revelatory insight. You need only surrender to the book, the leader, the cult. And, by the way, how do you take your coffee and would you like a piece of the cake that Mildred made?

Yes, the cultists are nothing if not welcoming and homey. It's only when you find that you like these people and you get some clues that they share your biases, fears and anger that the dogma of religiosity comes out. It may sound a bit odd at first but how can it be bad if it comes from the nice grandmother handing you a brownie and how can it be wrong if these people fear what you fear and hate what you hate?

A few years ago a person whom I'd met over the Internet through a common hobby interest insisted to me that her Baptist sect was not Protestant. She was a committed follower of Bob Jones, Sr. It seems that Bob Jones, Jr. had strayed into error in her view when he allowed some room for some contact amongst the races. She insisted that her faith had been transmitted directly from the original disciples of Jesus through the Cathars and Albigensians and that her faith as preached by Bob Jones, Sr. survived uncorrupted and undiluted until 1927. Apart from the fact that even a rudimentary knowledge of the beliefs of the Cathars and Albigensians quickly turns that claim into utter nonsense, the very premise that one set of ideas could be passed down for over 1900 years without the least divergence creeping in is simply insane. Yet what she claimed had its own logic. Like all cults, in order to isolate its adherents from all others there must be an ideology that the cultists are different from everyone else. They must be an elect with entitlement to special knowledge and privileges not available to those without excluded from or not yet privy to special grace conferred on the cultists. She had "drunk the Kool-Aid" in a way that is the metaphorical equivalent of the Jonestown horror from which we get the phrase.

This woman did not need to think. She was part of the Bob Jones-town Cult and enfolded in the unadulterated teachings of the Jesus who said, as Scripture tells us, "Suffer the little children to come unto me...but not the niggers." Her Jesus says, "For as much as you have done it unto these, my brethren, - only the white ones who are of the Bob Jones approved faith - you have done it unto me. And the rest can go suck wind." She holds these beliefs because they are part of her own visceral bigotry into which no thought, no question can penetrate and of which no deeper understanding is necessary or even allowed.

When former Arkansas governor, hale fellow well met and thoroughly frightening presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, insists that he opposes the idea of evolution, he is placing himself in this camp of the religiose and mindless. Despite all attempts to manufacture phony evidence to the contrary, there is an overwhelming body of empirical evidence that life on this planet evolved by random, natural selection over millions of years. There is no valid evidence to the contrary. Yet Christian fundamentalist dogma insists that every word of the Bible is true, accurate and the word of their "big, imaginary friend in the sky." The answer "for dummies" is that the Biblical account, quick, easy and confined to a couple of chapters is the only answer. The Biblical account must necessarily be the only permissible answer largely because if it is not literally true then other Biblical stories might not be literally true either. If one thread in the fabric unravels the whole system of belief comes into question and questions are exactly that from which the religiose flee.

Religiosity would simply be the stuff of satire - not that it isn't already - were it not deadly dangerous. The Hasidic gangs in some New York City neighborhoods that beat up Jews moving their cars to the opposite side of the street on a Saturday are different only in specifics from the Hindu fundamentalists who destroyed a mosque in Amritsar or the suicide bombers who flew planes into the World Trade Centre eight years ago. The details of the acts are different, not the fanatical motivation.

Another aspect of religiosity, peculiar to American Christianity but with analogs in other religions, manifests itself in a perverse dogma of wealth and material success. One would think that the religion whose founder insisted that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into heaven might not be a congenial home for a doctrine that Jesus wants his followers to be rich yet from the late Rev. Ike to the salesmen preaching in contemporary mega-churches the doctrine of Jesus the bringer of wealth finds voice in sermon after sermon. Like the hot coffee and pastries after church, this is part and parcel of the con. Not only is the mega-church welcoming and friendly but it promises its adherents prosperity and wealth through it many personal networking opportunities. After all, the wealth and success of the parishioner means a heaping offering plate and hefty income for the pastor.

It is actually nothing new. One of the great examples of architecture in the city of Boston is Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church in Copley Square. Trinity is the church built for the great 19th Century preacher Phillips Brooks. If we posit a pantheon of gods the great god of Old Boston Brahmin wealth and Robber Baron lucre resides within Trinity's Roman arches there in Copley Square. Yet Brooks preached to his well-off congregation of responsibility and the obligations which their wealth imposed. Today's gospel of wealth is blissfully devoid of guilt. Any number of preachers will tell you that you deserve every penny you can squeeze out of anyone in your path. There is always an appeal for the odd addition to the church, personal jet for the minister, etc. Still, as I've pointed out before what's good for the parishoners' wallets is equally good for the preachers' wallets as well. It is a very ancient problem which, in early Christianity, was known as Simony, a term too little used and far less understood today.

The wonderful Sarah Vowell published an insightful and quirky study of my ancestors entitled The Wordy Shipmates. She concludes that both the best and worst of America originate with the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Plimouth Plantations. Though their self-righteousness is the bedrock of the worst bigotry, xenophobia and jingoism in the American character, their rejection of self-satisfaction and insistence that greater knowledge of their world led to greater knowledge of their god forms the bedrock of what is great and good in the American character too. Ms. Vowell's coming to that conclusion takes questioning and thought. It's why she is a writer and performer worthy of attention and on many levels. It is also why she and her book are anathema to religiosity.

Religiosity is, no offense to Soren Kierkergaard, always deals in eithers and ors. Everything must be true or false, black or white, in or out, right or wrong. There can be nothing between. Complexity leads to questions, uncertainty and confusion. Religiosity avoids complexity just as it does thought and questioning.

The great Rev. William Sloane Coffin said that we cannot blame god for the people who believe in him. I think he was correct though I think we can properly separate those who espouse religion from those infected with the disease of mere religiosity.

So when I use the term religion properly I am speaking of something of substance. Religion has depth, intelligence and complexity. One arrives at religion through understanding and questioning. Religion is open, permissive and alive. It can grow and change as ones understanding develops and evolves.

When defining religiosity the facile phrase "a mile wide and an inch deep" springs to mind but that phrase is far too generous. Religiosity is narrow, crabbed and without perceptible depth. It is an excuse for bigotry, hatred and exclusion. Religiosity is, quite literally, the apotheosis of ignorance.

So that is the distinction I regularly draw between religion and religiosity. It is what I mean by the terms. I will apologize for the times when I rage at fundamentalists and their claptrap and lump the religious with the religiose. What I will never apologize for is insulting religiosity because it is impossible to insult such crap too much. Religiosity is, at ground, the worst insult to religion there is.

Taking The Prize

2009-10-24T15:14:00.000-07:00

In Richard Rhodes magisterial work The Making of the Atomic Bomb he recounts how the Nobel Prize committee was concerned for the safety of Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. Fermi’s wife, Laura, was Jewish and Fermi himself was no friend to Mussolini’s Fascist Regime. Members of the selection committee for the 1938 Physics prize made overtures in advance of the award to see if Fermi would be ready to leave Italy if the Nobel could get him and his family out to Stockholm and safety while providing them a financial buffer. Thanks to the award of that Nobel Prize in Physics the first controlled nuclear fission reaction happened in a squash court at the University of Chicago and not within the confines of Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany.

That story came to my mind when I heard the announcement that President Barak Obama was the selected recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

Since the award we have been subjected to cogitations by an array of fools, scum and thinkers opining on whether President Obama deserved the prize. Some have objected that there are groups working, often with little recognition, to promote peace in The Congo, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Horn of Africa generally and promoting democracy in China, Burma, Iran, Saudi Arabia and a raft of countries that once were part of the Soviet Union who might lay more claim to this prize. Others, mostly lurking in the neo-fascist shadows of Fox News, the Heritage Foundation and the Weekly Double Standard, have attempted to argue that Obama does not deserve the prize at all based on a thinly disguised version of the racist “it’s just affirmative action” farrago.

I am about as far from knowledge of what goes through the minds of the people who select the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize as one can get. Still that story about Fermi came to mind.

To those who consider themselves members of the political Left who object that President Obama has not yet closed the Concentration Camp at Guantanamo Bay, repudiated all of the odious acts of the previous Administration or withdrawn troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, let me point out that in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the Peace Prize for organizing and hosting the Portsmouth Conference that ended the Russo-Japanese War. At that same time Roosevelt was pursuing a genocidal war in the Philippines and bullying much of Central and South America.

America’s next Peace Prize winner, Elihu Root, was a staunch Republican from Clinton, New York who won the prize for his work in that bugaboo of the xenophobes and jingoists in his own party then as now, international law. Root won despite his record of support for Theodore Roosevelt’s worst imperialist tendencies and service to William McKinley in promoting the overtly imperialist Spanish-American War. In short both TR and Root won their prizes more in spite of their records promoting strife rather than their records of promoting peace.

But let’s go back to the story of Enrico Fermi’s prize in Physics. The Nobel Committee chose Fermi as much because of his future potential as for his past accomplishments and, most significantly, to demonstrate its opposition to Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s Nazism. Those wise men, whose formative experience had been the senseless and vicious World War I, now saw their world descending rapidly toward the horrors of World War II. Their practical motive was depriving the forces of fear and violence of a great mind whose genius might be forced to feed the fascist monsters’ military bloodlust. Their ideological motive was to demonstrate their opposition to fascism.

The faces of the committee members have changed many times in the last 71 years but the motive to oppose fascism has, I think, remained constant. I would suggest that the Nobel Peace Prize winners, particularly since 2001, have demonstrated the committee’s increasing fear of America’s descent into fascism.

In 2001, the prize went to Kofi Annan who had capped his service as Secretary General of the United Nations by opposing the Bush Administration’s imperialist militarism. In 2002, as the Bush Administration gear up for an unjustified, ill-planned and ill-executed war against Iraq, the prize went to former President Jimmy Carter for his 21 years of work toward world-wide democracy and peace. Carter, we should note, has been the neo-fascist’s whipping boy since the day of his inauguration and at no time more than during the Bush Administration. In 2005, as the Bush Administration ginned up nuclear fears for a third war against Iran, the prize committee chose Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in good part for his refutations of Bush propaganda. Then in 2007 the Peace prize went to Al Gore for his work in raising awareness of global climate change though no one could miss the rebuke in honoring the man from whom Bush and Cheney stole the 2000 presidential election.

And now we have the selection of President Obama. The president has accepted the prize with characteristic modesty and decency while the neo-fascists scream that he’s done nothing to deserve the prize. That, however, is only in their blinkered and clouded eyes.

Throughout most of the rest of the world Barak Obama has done many things from addressing the Arab-Israeli conflict in real terms to trying to mitigate the world-wide economic collapse created by American financial pirates. But his greatest achievement is neither his personal history, his understanding of Islam nor his skin color. President Obama has done enormous service to world peace simply by not being George W. Bush or, in fact, any other Republican. Just not being a representative of American fascism is to be worthy of the prize in the eyes of those beyond our borders.

And, I believe, the committee that chose him as the 2009 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize also had in mind another factor that may have moved them to significant haste. You see the Nobel Committee awards the prizes to living persons. I suspect that committee members may have worried that their time might be short. America’s reputation for violence and insanity, its racism, its senseless fetishizing of guns and its history of turning character assassination into actual assassination may have influenced the award while the committee had the chance.

The Nobel Committee, I’m sure, wishes President Obama well and long life just as I do. Yet I cannot but think that some members saw the news footage of neo-fascist lunatics bringing pistols and assault rifles to presidential appearances and thought those pictures a prelude to their worst fears for the President.

So I have to conclude that the award of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama was both earned and timely. Earned by the simple fact of his presidency making the world a less dangerous place and timely because we do not know when the next Timothy McVeigh, Byron de la Beckwith or Eric Robert Rudolph incited by a Rush Limbaugh, James Dobson, Fred Phelps or Glenn Beck will target this good man.

If those considerations entered into the prize committee’s deliberations I am as ashamed for my country as I am proud for President Obama. I am glad he’s been awarded this honor. After eight years of wishing that my president could live up to even the lowest aspirations of my country I find myself in the position of hoping that my country will rise to the least of President Obama’s expectations for it. However, since this award, we seem to have been bent on demonstrating that Americans generally stand shoulder to shoelace with the president.

Oiling The Cogs of Cognitive Dissonance I

2009-10-23T02:41:00.000-07:00

When General Motors and Chrysler were in financial trouble in the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009 we heard very little about the ways in which management had screwed up those companies. What we heard was a deafening chorus primarily from those in the pocket of the Chamber of Commerce and similar neo-fascist organizations of blame heaped on the unions. A great, Visgothic Horde of pillaging unionists were sucking the lifeblood out of the American auto industry having steamrollered a valiant phalanx of noble executives and directors in a 20th Century Thermopylae. There were no incompetent, greedy members of management. The Unions alone were the ravening wolves dragging down American industry. In fact, this is a chant we've heard for decades. Noble corporate executives aided by white knights like Lee Iacocca, Carl Icahn, Kenny-Boy Lay and Jeffrey Skilling and more faceless others are simply overwhelmed by the selfish, vile trade unionists who make unreasonable demands like living wages and decent medical care for their workers or comfortable pensions for those who've given their productive lives in service to the company. The critiques were all but silent on the multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses paid to executives and directors regardless of the health of the companies. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fox News, The American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institution and economists well aware of the side on which their bread is buttered from The Wharton and Harvard Business Schools or that nexus of neo-fascist thought, the University of Chicago demanded the gutting of union contracts as the sole prescription for saving these corporations.

Yet when it came to bonuses in the millions and billions of dollars for the people at banks who had bankrupted their own institutions, their investors and the nation as a whole, with barely a pause for breath, we were told by the same propagandists for neo-fascism that the contracts with these pirates must be honored, the exorbitant bonuses paid. While perpetuating this con they mount a vociferous defense of the necessity of paying these traders and executives to blare from their propaganda machines.

This is only one of the more subtle -yes, subtle - examples of how the Republican Party, fundamentalist religion and the right wing generally actually are a corporate sponsored criminal conspiracy got up in ill-fitting but no less ugly Halloween disguises.

Another example?

How about Jamie Leigh Jones?

Ms. Jones is a very pretty young woman. Let me note at this point that those are three attributes over which she has little or no control: pretty, young and female. They are an accident of birth. Her husband was in the military and at age 20, she decided to do her part by taking a job with Halliburton's subsidiary, Kellog, Brown and Root (KBR), Inc. Subjected to the unwanted advances of a KBR supervisor at its Houston headquarters, Ms. Jones requested a transfer. We don't know whether Ms. Jones refusal to put out for her supervisor influenced the choice of tranfers offered to her but she was sent to work for KBR in Iraq. KBR placed Ms. Jones in a dorm with no separate facilities for women. The bathroom was one floor below her bunkspace accessed through a men's dormitory.

Ms. Jones was subjected to continual harassment whenever she had to pass through that dorm. At this juncture it seems only fair to note that the sexual harassment of Ms. Jones has nothing to do with accidents of birth other than the lack of intelligence in those who carried it out. The harassment is behavior over which the rapists engaged in it and their employer had complete and absolute control. Had KBR personnel docked the pay of or fired any of the harassers they would have sent a powerful message that such behavior had to stop.

Ms. Jones complained about the harassment to her supervisors exactly as she was supposed to do. The next day following her complaint she was cornered, drugged with a date-rape drug and repeatedly gang raped. As the drug began to wear off she made her way back to her bunk only to find another rapist lying there. The next day she reported the rape to a supervisor. She was sent to an Army hospital where they took a rape kit and photographs. The medical staff also completed reports all of which were supposed to be confidential. Yet the next day her rapists threw her into a shipping container where she was imprisoned without food or water by the rapists under armed guard for more than 24 hours.

After she'd been out of contact for a couple of days, her father back in Houston contacted KBR for news of his daughter. He got no help from KBR and so contacted his Congressman. The Congressman contacted the State Department which eventually sent a delegation that freed Ms. Jones from her imprisonment and got her out of Iraq.

What is eminently clear so far is that the KBR supervisors colluded if not participated in Ms. Jones' drugging, rape and imprisonment. Moreover, the Army may have colluded with KBR because reports and photos of Ms. Jones taken at the Army hospital in Iraq remain missing. In fact, the damage even now continues. You see, Ms. Jones found that she had signed away her right to sue KBR over its, at minimum, negligence as a condition of her employment under a policy implement under the leadership of - I'm sure you're way ahead of me here - Dick Cheney. In short and in fairly typical right wing cognitive dissonance Ms. Jones was not even entitled to the apology that Cheney undeservedly got from a friend whom he'd shot in the face during a drunken quail hunt.

Ms. Jones was more than a little upset by her treatment by co-workers and KBR. When she found that she could not hold her rapists or KBR accountable she went public and testified before Congress. This, of course, set off the whores paid by Halliburton in the neo-fascist blogosphere. Predictably they have projected their own trade on Ms. Jones. After all, those neo-fascist bloggers voluntarily line up to accept money for what they do. But there is more which is how we now come to the most interesting development in this case.

One would think that gang rape would be unable to gather much public support. You would think. Yet this is not just a matter of gang rape. It involves Halliburton and KBR. If you are a Republican Senator and very well paid to lie back and make noises like you enjoy whatever Halliburton chooses to do to you, you do as you are told.

Senator Al Franken of Minnesota proposed an amendment inspired by this case to a military funding bill. Franken's bill would withhold Federal funds from corporations that attempt to shield themselves from liability when their employees rape a co-worker. Not a tough call one would think. Yet 30 of the Senate's Republicans bent over for Halliburton, just as they have been well paid to do, and sang, "Do It To Me One More Time."

Amazing? Who would go on record siding with rapists rather than their victims? I am so glad that you asked.

From Alabama - Sens. Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby
From Arizona - Sens. John McCain and John Kyl
From Georgia - Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson
From Idaho - Sens. Mike Crapo and James Risch
From Kansas - Sens. Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts
From Kentucky - Sens. Jim Bunning and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
From Louisiana - Sen. Mike Vitter
From Mississippi - Sens. Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker
From Missouri - Sen. Kit Bond
From Nebraska - Sen. Mike Johanns
From Nevada - Sen. John Ensign
From New Hampshire - Sen. Judd Gregg
From North Carolina - Sen. Richard Burr
From Oklahoma - Sens. James Inhofe and Tom Coburn
From South Carolina - Sens. Lindsay Graham and Jim DeMint
From South Dakota - Sen. John Thune
From Tennessee - Sens. Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker
From Texas - Sen. John Cornyn
From Wyoming - Sens. Mike Enzi and John Barrasso

To be honest I don't think that any of these senators are in favor of rape, gang or otherwise. The issue for them was not crime. The issue was who pays their bills. These senators, all of whom will grab a noose and scream for the public hanging of the odd criminal, even rapist, who is not a generous campaign contributor found themselves suddenly overwhelmed with Christian charity and, dare I say, empathy when the issue became the profits of corporations that pay for their campaigns. They have spent a great deal of time on the public airwaves and in the Congressional Record decrying Federal funding for ACORN which tries to insure that all Americans actually get to vote and are counted in the census, but will eagerly give KBR a pass on gang rape.

These senators argued that the Federal government should not interfere with the terms of private contracts. They were arguing a few months ago that the Federal government needed to void all sorts of terms of the contracts between both current and retired workers of General Motors and Chrysler.

These same senators have argued that there is grave moral hazard in renegotiating mortgages of families who were conned into contracts that they plainly could not afford by loan officers and companies interested only in their own commissions. Yet these same senators see no moral hazard in exempting corporations from liability when they fail to protect all their employees.

To a man they argue that 1 trillion dollars over a decade is too much to pay for universal health care for Americans yet have had no trouble in writing 1 trillion dollars in checks to pay for an unnecessary and ruinous war in Iraq.

They claim a mantle of fiscal responsibility in the face of deficit spending while expecting everyone to forget that when they came to unrestricted power in 2001 they immediately turned a Treasury surplus into the largest deficits in American history.

The fact is that we aren't even talking about cognitive dissonance which implies honestly held opinions at variance with one another. We are dealing with simple, old fashioned fraud. The Republican Party has long been bought and paid for. One can reasonably argue that has been true since it emerged as a majority part following the Civil War. Yet over the last six decades with the fascist militarization of America the whoring of the Republican Party has reached its apotheosis. We accept that both parties are in thrall to wealth and particularly corporate wealth. Yet the Democratic Party has created the "big tent" that the Republicans lie about having. The Democrats' multiple constituencies both immobilize it, at worst, and make it, at best, responsive to the people. The Republican Party, the ultra-right religious fanatics and Fox News whores who promote it, is responsive to none but its corporate masters. The Republican Party is more a criminal conspiracy like the Mafia than a political party and far more a threat to the nation than most of organized crime.

So when a Republican or one of the neo-fascist apologists from their foundations, institutes or propaganda outlets like Fox News begins to spout about fiscal responsibility, moral hazard, or the necessity of something utterly counter-intuitive, ask yourself, "Who's profiting from the course he or she proposes?" If it's not you and/or your partner and your combined income is less than $75,000.00 per year let me suggest that regardless of any buzz words in the presentation, it is not in your interest. Taking a position opposite to the con man to whom you are listening is almost certainly the best for you. The Republicans would not know moral if it bit them on the ass. It is they who are the hazard to America.

Oh, Mr. Willlllllsson!

2009-09-10T14:30:00.000-07:00

Remember Dennis the Menace? Hank Ketchum created the annoying but loveable Dennis nearly 60 years ago to menace the stuffy neighbor, Mr. Wilson.

I think we need someone to menace Representative Addison Graves "Joe" Wilson, Sr. of South Carolina's 2nd Congressional District. First, one can sympathize with his use of "Joe" when he is actually named after two rather awful diseases. That may account for some of the odd bent of the man. Mr. Wilson cut his political teeth working for Floyd Spence and Strom Thurmond both (R-Racism). Joe has a penchant for blurting out an inappropriate comments in public to his betters and then, dripping crocodile tears, making a public apology that no one takes seriously. And, of course, he's done it again during President Obama's speech to Congress on health care reform on September 9, 2009.

Rep. Wilson has apologized to President Obama (drag out the crocodile!*) and the President has once more demonstrated that he is an infinitely better and more gracious human being that Joe Wilson or, in fact, the bulk of the Congressional Republicans of both Houses by accepting Wilson's apology. Once again President Obama has demonstrated why he, rather than any Republican drawing breath today, deserves to be the leader of the nation.

During a speech in which the President went out of his way to validate Republican concerns, Republican ideas and Republican legislators who have a serious interest in improving health care for all Americans, Wilson and the neo-fascist, ultra-rightist jackals booed the President and, in their pusillanimous, partisan response, rejected his extended hand. By doing so the Republicans show clearly that they feel that by leaving millions of Americans without adequate health care, allowing insurers to steal the premiums of thousands of taxpayers only to revoke their coverage in time of need, and sewing lies and fear about health care reform they can win back control of Congress in 2010 much as they did in 1994. The problem with that strategy is that it's not going to work this time.

The President has met the Republicans more than half way and a majority of Americans know that despite the screaming antics of lunatics and bought-and-paid-for professional protesters. For every family afraid to go to a doctor because they have no health insurance, for every hard-working American denied coverage during an illness, for every household forced into bankruptcy by outrageous medical bills there are friends, neighbors, relatives and co-workers who are going to hold the Republicans responsible for any failure of reform in the 111th Congress. The Republicans are not going to be able to claim that they are running against a "do-nothing" Congress because, this time around, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi and the President are going to be out hanging any failure of health care around the necks of the Republicans of the House and Senate.

Joe Wilson won't have any trouble being re-elected, of course. The professional soldiers, veterans and retired military personnel who form the core of his support in and around Beaufort, South Carolina will rail against "socialized, government-run" health care to and from visits to the base and VA Hospitals. But other Americans are going to hold Wilson's party responsible when a friend or loved one dies.

The issue that was the proximate cause of Wilson's outburst during the President's speech was the matter of extending health care to "illegal" immigrants. Right now I'm not going to take up the issue of "illegal" immigration other than to say that no immigrant is "illegal" until we make him so. If the Wampanoag tribe in coastal Massachusetts had had an immigration policy similar to America's currently my ancestors, William, Susanna, Resolved and Peregrine White would have been summarily deported from Plymouth Rock. Yet Wilson's narrow partisanship is more to the point. So is his profoundly un-Christian attitude. After all, isn't it better that we treat the 1 "illegal" than leave the 90 and 9 uninsured and untreated? Not in Joe Wilson's world of Old Testament wrath it's not.

President Obama's call was to rise above partisanship and care for our neighbors. It was a call to take both personal and societal responsibility for the health of our nation and its citizens. The President called us to look in the eyes of our neighbors and offer our help. The Republican response was a resounding "no". The Republicans, as they always do, put themselves and the profits of those who pay their bills ahead of the good of the nation while couching their disdain for their fellow citizens in concerns for deficits and "illegal" immigrants and other nonsense that is just, as the President said, plain lies.

The problem with Mr. Wilson is that he's lied so long and so hard that he can't recognize a real lie, especially his own.

* It seems that we now know for a fact that Wilson's apology was not his idea (as if he had any). He was told to call and apologize to President Obama by the House Republican Leadership. Of course, Minority Leader John Boehner has gone as far as to repeat the lie that health care reform will cover "illegal" aliens and defend Wilson. One wonders if one has to be born craven and corrupt to be a Republican or if it is a fault acquired as one grows? Given the extent of inbreeding amongst Republicans it is very hard to know, especially when we are speaking of Southern and Ohio Republicans.

Code Talkers

2009-09-09T16:17:00.000-07:00

No. This has nothing to do with the heroic Navajo who sacrificed much to win the war against Imperial Japan in the 1940s. It certainly has nothing to do with anything one can reasonably call heroism.

No. I am writing about the talking heads like Glenn Beck, Steve Doucey, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs. I am talking about the hardcore of racists who have learned to frame their bigotry in code.

When an American president cannot tell the nation’s school children to work and study hard without being accused of “socialist indoctrination” we are off into something other than simple political disagreement. We are in the realm of something darker, more vicious and more odious, something that, if dragged out into the light, would discredit its purveyors completely. This, of course, is why those purveyors take such pains to hide it in irrelevant language, disguise it as religious preference or even claims of upholding the law.

The storm of protest over disseminating President Obama’s speech on the opening of the public school year on September 8, 2009, had nothing to do with conservatism, nothing to do with indoctrination, nothing to do with socialism. It was the most thinly disguised expression of racism yet by the neo-fascists who call themselves Republicans. The accusation of “indoctrination” is of a piece with the “Birther” insanity. President Obama is not “white,” therefore he is not one of “us.” His father was an immigrant from Kenya and, therefore, his Hawaiian birth certificate must be phony. He must have been born in Kenya say O’Reilly, Dobbs and Hannity and many whose fathers were Italian, Greek, German or Polish. Clearly no one whose father or grandfather or some ancestor was born outside the United States can’t be a real American especially if he’s not white. Clearly, if he’s not white, President Obama is out to control the minds of our children and better hide the white women while we’re at it.

Basically, the right wing of this nation is racist at its core. It built itself just as the German Nazis and Italian Fascists did on fear and bigotry. We have simply substituted Afro-Americans and “non Aryan” immigrants for Jews. The fascist America Firsters of the late 1930s dug in while Liberalism fought World War II only to reemerge as the Red Scare McCarthyites of the post-war period. And at the very moment when their heroes, Tailgunner Joe and his vile factotum, Roy Cohn, discredited themselves and their movement, Brown v. the Board of Education came along to reinvigorate the American neo-fascist movement with an influx of racist rednecks. It took a while. After all Dwight Eisenhower sent troops into Little Rock, Arkansas. He was a Republican and a war hero which is why the billboards in the South all demanded, “Impeach Earl Warren,” and never called for Eisenhower’s impeachment. But the cultural shifts of the 1960s that disoriented those who, having lived through World War II, wanted no more upheavals and a nation conditioned to see any cause in which America fought as just, regardless of all contrary evidence, gave the neo-fascists their opening to join sweaty palms with their white racist brethren in Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”

This marriage of bigotry and fear has a pantheon of Boogie Men. They raise up the straw men of “socialism”, “communism”, “homosexuality”, “indoctrination” even as the Log Cabin Republicans commune with their peers at the country club and indoctrinate anyone within earshot about a “free market” that demands billions of taxpayer dollars to salvage it from their mismanagement. We have had tastes of this vile bigotry before. It has been test marketed with the accusations of homosexuality by Teletubby Tinky Wink and Sponge Bob Squarepants. But now the veneer applied to this racism is getting thinner and more transparent.

Glenn Beck and the rest of the neo-fascists will certainly trot out black and brown friends to claim that they are not racist. Unfortunately, those black and brown right wingers prove nothing of the kind. They merely prove that there are minorities too who are as venal, amoral and self-promoting as there are whites.

We have reached the point at which we need to start calling this racism and bigotry for what it is. We need to drag it out in the light where the good people easily confused by rhetoric can look at this deformed, odious, disgusting thing and shun it before it churns their stomachs further.

It’s Not You; It’s Me.

2009-09-06T15:57:00.000-07:00

His guilt or innocence is irrelevant.

His reception at home is irrelevant.

The complexity of the government’s motives is irrelevant.

It’s not about him. It’s about us.

When the Scots Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill gave compassionate release to the only person convicted of the 1988 PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie on August 20, 2009 he faced a storm of criticism. The storm rose in volume and intensity when Abdelbeset al Megrahi landed in Libya to cheering crowds. The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has washed his hands of the matter while expressing outrage at Megrahi’s reception and President Obama has similarly expressed his dismay. Subsequent releases of government documents and speculation on the multiple considerations that lead to Megrahi’s release have further incited anger and conspiracy theories. Amongst the families who lost children and other family members aboard the PanAm flight a range of equally stormy emotions rage. Some are plainly angry. Others despair that they will never know whether Megrahi was a mass murderer or simply a sacrificial goat.

Before going further, let’s consider what we actually know. On Wednesday, December 21, 1988 a bomb loaded inside luggage at London’s Heathrow Airport exploded on board PanAm Flight 103 as it passed over Lockerbie, Scotland on its way to New York. The bomb killed 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 Lockerbie citizens on the ground. An investigation lasting nearly 3 years concluded that Libyans al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifah Fhimah had participated in the bomb plot. The Scottish arrest warrants for al Megrahi and Fhimah could not be served for 8 years during which time sanctions and negotiations proceeded with the Libyan government. Finally the parties created a compromise that allowed the Scottish Courts to try al Megrahi and Fhimah in the Netherlands on a former military base and under Scottish Law. The result was that al Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was acquitted. Al Megrahi was sentenced to life in prison.

But al Megrahi and his attorneys continued to protest that he was innocent of the charges. Many people in Lockerbie and even some of the victims’ relatives came to believe that al Megrahi was simply the goat sacrificed to atone for and mask the guilt of others in Libya or possibly Iran.

Iran?

Yes, Iran. Possibly Iran

Lest we forget these things too quickly, on July 3, 1988 a missile from the USS Vincennes destroyed Iran Air Flight 655 over the Straight of Hormuz killing 290 passengers and crew. Some felt that it was a greater and far more proximate cause of the PanAm 103 bombing than the air strike on Libya on April 15, 1986 that killed 40, including a 15-month old adopted daughter of Libyan leader Muammar al Gaddafi.

The point is that there has always been some doubt about al Megrahi’s guilt. But whether he is guilty or innocent is utterly irrelevant. The facts, as we know them are that a plane was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland killing 270 people. An investigation ensued followed by a trial and a conviction. Those are facts. Guilt or innocence are at best findings, judgments. Without specific evidence those judgments can be wrong. But in this particular case let’s grant out of hand that the judgment against al Megrahi was correct and just and he was guilty. Even so his guilt is irrelevant.

Let us also grant out of hand that doing business with Libya, exploiting its oil reserves was one of the complex of considerations that motivated the British Government in its acts or inaction surrounding Megrahi’s release. That too is irrelevant.

What is relevant to the issue at hand is that al Megrahi is dying. He has spent 8 years in prison. Now he will be dead in a matter of months…3…6…who cares? Al Megrahi is dying. That is a fact. The length of time until his death is not relevant to anything. That Libya has orchestrated a hero’s welcome for a murderer is not terribly relevant either.

What is relevant – perhaps the only thing relevant to MacAskill’s decision - is compassion. I think that we can agree that whoever blew up PanAm Flight 103 for whatever reason was utterly lacking in compassion. Whoever plotted and carried out that horrible murder showed no compassion for the people on the plane, those on the ground or the families who survived those victims. The act was despicable and criminal. Anyone who participated in that horrible act deserves ostracism from the community of all decent people. But it is a mark of our decency, our compassion that we supersede our anger and outrage and, especially, our lust for revenge.

If we are in fact decent people, better, more civilized and of higher moral standards than Megrahi, Gaddafi or any other person who participated actively or passively in the bombing of that plane 21 years ago MacAskill’s decision was correct.

When faced with vile acts the lust for revenge is understandable. Yet if we are to display why those acts are vile we must be able to rise above them. We must be able to assert compassion in the midst of our anger and disgust for by doing so we demonstrate that as a society we are not on the level of the murderers, the terrorists, the criminals.

Though I have never seen it adequately expressed the failure to understand that just chanting, “We’re number 1,” does not make it so. We have to demonstrate our moral superiority by our acts. In fact, the utter failure to understand that it is by our acts of empathy and compassion that we establish that superiority is one of the hallmark differences between the right and left wings of American politics.

George W. Bush demonstrated his absolute unsuitability for the office of president by proceeding with the execution of Karla Faye Tucker and further confirmed his unsuitability by mocking her pleas for clemency. That vile, vengeful inability to rise above his basest instincts also played out when he sent inadequately armed and armored American troops to die in an unnecessary war in Iraq. He also demonstrated his basest instincts with his insensitivity to the plight of the people of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit.

Bush and Cheney more clearly demonstrated that they are no better than the murderers and terrorists they claim to abhor by instituting their own reign of terror with secret prisons, renditions and torture. Certainly they cloaked their confirmation that they are no better than Megrahi, Gaddafi, or bin Laden in claims that they were defending the nation against a terror that their acts further incited. Still by surrendering to revenge and sadism their whole Administration demonstrated that they are not to be trusted with any level of power.

More broadly the neo-fascist Republicans have demonstrated that they are, as a group unsuitable for high office let alone leadership by defending those violations of law and decency perpetrated by the Bush-Cheney Administration. They continue to do so by sewing lies and fear to defend the profits of insurance companies in the health care debate and polluters in the debate on climate change.

In the health care debate Republicans have abjured any sense of compassion for their fellow citizens by actively campaigning for the implicit exclusion of their fellow citizens from effective medical coverage. The Republicans couch their arguments in red herrings like the cost of extending coverage when they really are concerned with the profits of their supporters in the insurance industry. They terrorize elderly citizens with false claims that they will lose Medicare coverage when the real purpose is to extend Medicare to every American. The opposition is mean, dishonest and utterly lacking in compassion for their fellows.

In the debate over mitigating climate change, the Republicans make great and loud lamentation over the cost to this and future generations of reducing dependence on oil and coal while defending their contributors and employers in the oil industries even as they jeopardize the health and welfare and even the life of future generations.

It is about us. Are we better? Are we decent enough to translate our concern for our children and grandchildren to the children and grandchildren of every person on our small, blue-green planet? Are we decent enough even to a murderer to show compassion? If we are, then we have some claim to that chant of “We’re number 1!” If we cannot, then we are down in the sewers with the murderers and terrorists we claim to abhor.

Kenny MacAskill did the good and right and decent thing in releasing a man, Abdelbeset al Megrahi, who is probably neither good nor right nor decent. I repeat, it is not about Megrahi. It is about us. It is about demonstrating our goodness, our rightness and our decency. Is it not, after all, what we are commanded to do in that cliché voiced by some old, dead white guy, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”?

Military Prisoner

2009-08-05T16:35:00.000-07:00

We probably learn before age six that reality can easily shatter the very best of intentions. Reality, the practical, tradition and expediency have an inexorable way of grinding the correct, the decent, the humane, the Constitutional alternatives into dust. We always face negotiations with those who are not correct, decent, humane or respectful of our Constitution and so it was in May for President Barak Obama.

Entering office on the hopes of a majority of Americans so large that race became irrelevant and the political machines of the Republicans could not steal sufficient votes to upset elections as they did in 2000 and 2004, President Obama tried to make good on his pledges to restore Constitutional Law and decency to America at home and abroad. He even pledged to make a government made impenetrably opaque by the neo-fascists of the Bush Administration and their cronies on the U. S. Supreme Court, transparent to the people who are the government in a democracy.

To his credit, in one of President Obama’s first acts he signed an order requiring that the infamous concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay close by the end of 2009. Of course, the neo-fascists immediately launched a campaign using their most familiar weapon: fear. In no time at all Congressmen and women had hysterical constituents calling to oppose housing Osama bin Laden under each of their individual beds.

The fact that the neo-fascists were able to spread fear so effectively highlighted the main failing of the Obama closing order: that in the rush to perform the symbolic act of closing the Guantanamo concentration camp, the President failed to decide where those prisoners would go. Certainly President Obama, during his first days in office, thought that we needed to look at individual prisoners to determine whether they needed to be held at all or not. Still, let it never be said that the American herd will stand around for nuanced explanations when a bunch or drunken cowboys with guns like Rash Lamebrain, Glenn Beck, Steve Doucey and Bill O’Reilly are bent on starting a stampede.

To date, prisoners remain at the shameful concentration camp on American occupied Cuba and the closing date becomes ever more hazy and distant. Reality has pulverized decency, law and good intentions. But the clearest example of the ineffectuality of Constitutional Law, decency and humanity in the face of negotiation is the death of openness in the name of pursuing an effective strategy in the Afghan War. We can call the political calculus, at best, pragmatic but truly it is ruthless and Machiavellian. In our violent society rife with patriosity rather than patriotism, people who stop wars are reviled while those who pursue them, however wrong headed, are exalted. President Obama needs to put an end to the neo-fascists’ imperialist debacle in Iraq. In order to do that he unquestionably must rattle the sabre elsewhere and the logical place to do so is Afghanistan. American militarism requires that he do so. That is one of the ugly truths about our society.

Upon entering office, President Obama inherited a gung-ho military commander in Army General David McKiernan. General McKiernan’s tenure in Afghanistan was much like the disgraceful mismanagement of William Westmoreland in Vietnam forty years ago. His portfolio was the kind of “get the country ‘pacified’ by any means necessary” use of massive force against the Taliban’s guerrilla campaign that resulted in the fall of Saigon in 1975 and was having similarly poor results in the mountains of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, all the information coming to military and civilian experts convinced them that the Afghan people hate the Taliban but hate the random violence and insults from NATO and especially American invaders more. The inescapable conclusion reached by those not blinded by neo-fascist ideology was that a policy that respected the population, confined violence to bad actors like the Taliban and helped build a stable infrastructure one school, road, hospital and town meeting at a time could defeat the Taliban, up-root Al Qaeda, capture bin Laden and stabilize Afghanistan to a point unknown since 1979. General McKiernan was definitely not the person to implement that policy.

So President Obama needed a new general. He knew that. Defense Secretary Gates knew that. The Joint Chiefs of Staff knew that. But that also didn’t mean that General McKiernan was without friends either real or ad hoc. The military wanted some things of its own, chief amongst them continued secrecy for the Abu Ghraib photos that might well reveal complicity of high ranking officers in the abuses of that particular torture chamber. Conversations ensued. Ultimately, the President and Secretary Gates got Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, a policy that will tend to kill fewer Afghan civilians, build friendships within the Afghani population and infrastructure to cement the fragments of tribal areas into something sufficiently like a nation to survive NATO withdrawal. In return, the American High Command got secrecy and probably immunity from their involvement in torture and similar war crimes in violation of American and International Law.

President Obama’s choice was, inherently, one of those uncertain “Lady or the Tiger” problems. If by protecting high military officers on whom he must depend to achieve his goals in Afghanistan he can lower the death toll of civilian Afghanis and build a nation that 250 years of Western interventions had repeatedly destroyed, would it not be worth the cost? If we can trade immunity for war crimes by the American General Staff for the destruction of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, will we not have gotten the better of the bargain?

The short term answer is, yes, of course. A policy that saves innocent lives and achieves several important political and military goals, including an end of bin Laden and his lieutenants is worth the price of continued secrecy for the Abu Ghraib photos.

The long term answer is, of course, no. Immunizing military commanders from the consequences of their war crimes has horrible and destructive consequences for American democracy and Constitutional Law. The continued secrecy of information that may show complicity in war crimes by our general officers is detrimental if not fatal to civilian control of the military and raises genuine fears for the future of our democracy.

There are many times in our history when the fate of our nation has balanced precariously on the willingness of our military to accept the authority of our Constitution over their own will to power. General George Brinton McClellan’s political ambitions might well have meant an end to the Lincoln Administration in 1864 had not Ulysses Grant and George G. Meade demonstrated what a disastrously incompetent military commander McClellan was in the field. The nearly unchecked power of the military in the former Confederacy following the Civil War led President Andrew Johnson to belatedly restore some balance between the President and the military by removing Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War in 1868. That same threat to civilian rule was a factor in the Faustian bargain struck by Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 to end Reconstruction and pass the much maligned Posse Comitatus Act. In 1933-34 Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler exposed a plot for a military coup against Franklin Roosevelt’s government thereby ending a plan that might have put America firmly in the fascist camp as World War II began. And, of course, in the 1980s we had a presidency controlled by the military and conspirators against Constitutional rule like Defense Secretary Caspar Wineberger, Admiral John Poindexter, Colonel Oliver North and neo-fascists Elliott Abrams, John Negroponte, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

The fact is that any President of the United States who is not at least a tacit co-conspirator of our military interests (uniformed and corporate) is its prisoner. He remains its prisoner so long as he is unwilling to assert control over the military and its true masters, the corporate interests. Right now there is a battle going on within our government. Defense Secretary Gates, while a creature of the military-industrial complex, is certainly aware that its wild excesses are themselves a threat to military-corporate hegemony. Thus we have the fight to kill the F-22 fighter plane and other ridiculously unnecessary war toys from the enormously bloated Defense “budget”. Yet the military still holds an armored fist to the throats of civilian authority in America. I hope that President Obama can break that death grip over the next three and a half or seven and a half years. How he loosens that grip or does not do so will, sad to say, determine whether he has a second term in which to loosen it. Further, it will determine whether a successor Democrat can extend the process for another four or eight years. Until he does so, just as surely as the people held in the concentration camp at Guantanamo, I think we can say accurately that President Obama is a military prisoner.

Reality (TV) Check

2009-05-11T02:31:00.000-07:00

One of the more absurd issues that the neo-fascists who disguise themselves as Republicans and Libertarians have is their apparent inability to distinguish fact from fiction. The list of examples is long and runs the gamut from the absurd in Dan Quayle's inability to discern that Murphy Brown was a fictional character played by Candace Bergen to the horrifyingly serious in the "ticking bomb" scenario incessantly dragged out to justify the Bush Administration's torture policies despite the lack of any evidence that the scenario exists outside of the Fox (of course) series 24. Despite the genuine danger of the phrase "Republican principles" becoming a synonym for cognitive dissonance as well as an oxymoron the ultra-right wingers continue down this dead end path.

As one example there's the inability of Fox flacks like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck to make up their minds as to whether the Obama Administration is bringing socialism or fascism to America. That may not be the best example because it smacks more of a bunch on impotent, frustrated hacks flinging epithets at the Administration in the hope that one will stick and give them the focus that they currently, utterly lack. There is also the attempt to attack same-sex marriage by lumping the practices of some committed, loving couples with a catalogue of bizarre sexual practices and inclinations that only the neo-fascists themselves seem to know about. (We won't even consider the motives that have those "family valies"-types eagerly combing the literature of pervertions for new terms to get all breathless and sweaty over.)

But now we have proof that right wingers are unable to distinguish fact from fiction. A study by three researchers from Ohio State University titled The Irony of Satire has found that conservatives have convinced themselves that Stephen Colbert is one of their own. Yes. I am not making this up.

Colbert's personna is a satire of Bill O'Reilly in all his smug, self-satified, self-righteous, neo-fascist venality. According to the study conservatives find Colbert funny and know that he's satirizing some of their icons but they have convinced themselves that Colbert does this with a wink and a nod, that he's really one of them. Perhaps their limited self awareness entails a rationale of, "I think he's funny so he must think like me." Whatever the illogic involved it is simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. Colbert is anything but in sync with the ultra-right wing claptrap spouted by those he satirizes but clearly there is a core of neo-fascists who can convince themselves of anything. After all, Dubya still had a core of support in the range of 20 to 30 percent of the population as he left office. A similar percentage of the population were convinced that Richard Nixon had done nothing wrong while in office. At our peril we consider them idiots. They are not. They are something far more disturbing and dangerous. They are people who will pervert any reality contradictory to their ideology into something that reinforces their own bankrupt view. It is the same willful ignorance that fires the deniers of evolution, the Holocaust, that pursued collectivization in Stalinist Russia in the face of widespread famine, that massacred the Tutsis of Rwanda and littered the killing fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia with bodies.

When the neo-fascists mistakenly adopt Stephen Colbert we laugh but that is the absurd and comic flip side of a dark and dangerous record that is playing itself out in a broken world and American economy, unnecessary and unwinnable wars and degradation of civil and human rights. The real reality is not a television show and it is not funny.

Backtracking Slightly

2009-05-10T15:08:00.000-07:00

Maybe I'm just vacillating. But first, a digression.

There is a wonderful Terry Gilliam movie that appeared in 1981, Time Bandits. Suffice it to say that it's a film with which every child in the range of 7 to 14 years old will identify and in which parents will find much to love as well. Without spoiling anything in any significant way toward the end of the film Sir Ralph Richardson's Supreme Being intervenes to render David Warner's threat less serious with the result that the cast must collect all the bits of charred and glowing "pure evil" lest they infect the world further. But, of course, they miss a piece that young Craig Warnock's Kevin can't get to before he's transported back to his bedroom in the present. Kevin's house, you see, is filling with smoke because his hopeless, clueless parents have attempted to cook a roast in a microwave. The Fire Department appears and Sean Connery, whom we've previously seen as an heroic Agamemnon, in fire gear, gets the family out onto the lawn along with the smoking microwave. Kevin's parents open the microwave to find what they think is a spoiled Sunday roast but which Kevin recognizes as the unretrieved shard of pure evil. Despite Kevin's shouted warning, the parents reach for the evil and disappear in an explosion, no doubt to reappear as creatures in a Ramsey Campbell or Clive Barker novel. We know that Kevin will be all right because Sean Connery is there to take him under his wing and so the movie ends. (My apologies for the spolier but the ending is hardly the point of the movie.)

That unretrieved bit of pure evil is, of course, Dick Cheney (also an old supervisor of mine named Kathy Vadala) who embodies in every way the vilest, most despicable darkness in the American soul. I have previously written that we must have an open investigation of the crimes of the Bush Administration in order to purge our nation of the evil it represented. I based that conclusion on the recurring nightmare of Cheney's reappearances to croak about how the Obama Administration is destroying America. Yet now I'm not so sure.

I still think that a public airing of the Bush Administration's crimes will make it hard for the ne0-fascist Republicans to repeat them in the future but I am backtracking on the timing. Cheney's latest appearance - they are getting fairly regular by now - leads me to wonder about his motives. His motives are necessarily nefarious. That's beyond question. It's which nefarious motive that has me worried.

President Barak Obama (I just love that construction!) consistently says that he wants to look forward rather than back. I can't argue with that intention. As he's stated himself, Obama has two wars, the Middle East, a failing Pakistan, an insanely childish North Korea, a schizoid Iran, problematic relations with Latin America, a major economic crisis, properly funding Social Security, a crisis in health care and the dismemberment of government that's taken place over the last 40 years to worry about. And did I forget to mention the hysteria over the non-pandemic of N1H1 flu or the search for a new Supreme Court Justice? He obviously has enough crises to keep him off the streets and out of trouble for a week or two.

Now let me suggest to you that Cheney, whose ego is almost as enourmous and comprehensive as his evil, keeps coming out to croak his vileness in order to challenge Obama. I am sure that he believes that he can hand Obama his head in a debate and that a concerted attempt to silence him can only disrupt the new Administrations plans. Taking up Cheney's croaked challenges would only further polarize the Congress and the nation. It would also, in some more mindless circles, make Cheney the sympathetic victim of the great, implacable Obama Socialist Juggernaut ( a registered trademark of Fox News).

So I am going to backtrack. I still think that exposing the Bush Administration's crimes and removing from serious consideration from Federal Office all those who participated in those crimes is essential for the mental and political health of this nation. Yet for now I think it is also essential to ignore Cheney and the other strident neo-fascists. Marginalizing them is nearly as effective as prosecuting them and, at the moment, far more important.

President Obama needs to focus on undoing the damage that Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Poppy Bush, Gingrich and Dubya have done and the damage that Carter's impotence and Clinton's political cravenness allowed to continue. If he continues to demonstrate what effective government can do to relieve the burdens the neo-fascists have shifted from the wealthy onto the middle class, the Republicans, Libertarians and their ultra-right wing sponsors will remain out of power for at least the next 30 years. In that time we will have ample opportunity to consign the Alberto Gonzalezes, John Yoos, David Addingtons, Jay Bybees, Condoleeza Rices, Cheneys, Bushes and others who violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution to the hell that they so richly deserve. For now, ignore the bastards. They don't deserve the air time that Fox gives them let alone the exponential increase that prosecution would provide them.

Empathy Antipathy

2009-05-08T11:01:00.000-07:00

It's so very Republican, isn't it? After all, if one understands the concept of empathy and actually has empathy for others one can't be a Republican much less a "Conservative" at least as defined in the last four or five decades.

Empathy is the ability to understand and feel the distress, pain, and the sting of injustice visited on others as if it were your own. Further, it is the ability to translate that understanding, that feeling into the will to prevent further distress for yourself and for the others with whom you empathize. Clearly that is a dangerous thing. If we have empathy we will want to do horrible things like improve treatment and conditions for whiny, special interest groups like wounded veterans. We might be moved to stop traditional practices like racial, ethnic and religious bigotry and even that great tradition of lynching. We might disrupt traditional families by insisting that women have a right to education, work outside the home and flee abuse by the men in their lives. No. Empathy is something that leads to the destruction of the world as it was meant to be.

But perhaps I'm being too harsh about Republicans, Conservatives and their thinly disguised cousins, Libertarians. They do have empathy. They have shown it when they've defended the six and seven figure bonuses to the financial whizzes who drove their companies into bankruptcy. They show it every day when they insist that we must remove onerous regulations that keep disease and poisons out of our food and drugs. They even show it when they seek to protect the populace from evil drugs like marajuana by insuring that those people whose pain and suffering it eases never get it. In short Republican, Conservative and Libertarian empathy knows on which side its proverbial bread is buttered. Right Wing empathy is always bought and paid for.

What the neo-fascists really rail against is empathy for the great many people whose lives are made worse while they forcefully protect their rich friends. Those rich friends are the ones who fund their campaigns and, when out of office, pay for their fellowships at the American Enterprise, Cato and Manhattan Institutes, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution or for their chairs at neo-fascist incubators like Pepperdine University.

If we get involved in empathy we would be rejecting the greatest of the neo-fascist prophetesses, Ayn Rand. The alleged philosophy of "Objectivism" is nothing but the apotheosis of an utter rejection of empathy. No. We can't have that. Atlas Shrugged is second only to the exerpts of The Bible that fundamentalists prefer (no Matthew 25 in those Bibles) as holy writ.

Let's take a famous example, the recently corrected travesty of Lilly Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Lilly Ledbetter went to work for Goodyear in its Gadsden , Alabama plant in 1979. When she started working there she was recieving pay comparable to the men doing the same job and who had similar experience but over the years and unbeknownst to Ms. Ledbetter, a gap began to open. In 1997, on the verge of retiring she found that she was making $3,727 per month. That's a very nice pay check that I would have happily receieved. But at the same point the men doing her job were receiving a minimum of $4,286 per month and as much as $5,236 per month. There was ample evidence that Ms. Ledbetter's sex was the sole factor in the difference of roughly $500 to $1,500 per month reduction in pay. Goodyear had not only discriminated in Ms. Ledbetter's pay but had kept the information about that discrepancy secret for most of two decades.

So I think that most people would see Ms. Ledbetter's treatment as unfair. You wouldn't want your mother, daughter, sister or wife treated like that. However, if you're reaching that conclusion you are falling in to the dangerous role of a "fellow traveler" of empathy. You should thank whatever god to which you pray that there are five Supreme Court "Justices" who are Republican and Conservative enough to be utterly unaffected by empathy. Writing for his fellow protectors of business over labor, wealth over poverty and crime over justice, Samuel Alito threaded a very fine needle and rejected Ms. Ledbetter's argument. Sure she'd been victimized by Goodyear and sure that victimization represented illegal discrimination but Lilly Ledbetter hadn't filed suit soon enough.

Say what?

You see, Ms. Ledbetter's lawyers had argued that every time Goodyear cut a pay check for Ms. Ledbetter the company committed a distinct act of pay discrimination. The law included a limitations clause requiring that the discrimination claim be filed within 180 days of the act of discrimination. Judge Alito along with Antonin Scalia, Scalia's Houseboy, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy decided that argument was wrong. Goodyear had decided to discriminate against Ms. Ledbetter way back in the 1980s and though Goodyear had kept the fact secret and Ms. Ledbetter's typical human clairvoyance was somehow impaired she hadn't filed suit soon enough. A judicial wag of the finger went to Goodyear with a stern admonition to behave and Lilly Ledbetter got a simple, "Sorry. Go fuck off."

Now if Alito, Scalia, Thomas (included soley for completeness; not seriously), Roberts or Kennedy had succumbed to that dangerous empathy for Lilly Ledbetter all manner of evil would have flowed from the decision. Ms. Ledbetter would have recovered the back pay unfairly withheld from her with interest and damages for discrimination and the cost of the settlement might have been so great that Goodyear and even other companies might have decided that they'd better not do the same to their employees. In short, Goodyear would have gotten a lesson in the "personal responsibility" that Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians always insist is lacking in the poor who don't pay the bills for those Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians.

In 2008 Congress attempted to remedy this situation albeit too late for Ms. Ledbetter. But the Republicans in the Senate, also unaffected by empathy, filibustered the bill to death. Had it made its way through the Senate there is no doubt that George Bush, whose sole claim to empathy was his desire to limit the persecution and suffering of the noble Lewis "Scooter" Libby, would have vetoed the bill that President Obama has since signed.

So as we look for a Supreme Court appointment worthy of the title "Justice", watch out for that code word "empathy" and the horrors that it could visit on our nation. If there were a majority on the Supreme Court with empathy we might find all manner of horrible decisions coming down as some empath "legislates" from the bench. We might see decisions that hold mortgage originators responsible for defaults by home buyers whose incomes the originators inflated, foreclosures might be stopped in cases where the lenders lied about the terms of the loans or withheld information from the borrowers. Food processors who allowed their plants to use unsafe and unsanitary practices or introduced poisons into their products to boost profits might be held responsible for those acts. Even companies that illegally evade taxes might be called on to pay their fair share. The consequences for the Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians would be dire. Their sponsors might not have sufficient disposable income to finance their campaigns and the fellowships that keep them on the cable news networks in spite of their lack of anything relevant to say. William Kristol might disappear from view entirely.

So let us not fall into the trap of empathy. I certainly hope that the fundamentalist preachers will get on this anti-empathy bandwagon. Clearly it's an assault on Christianity whenever we get involved in something like empathy that boils down to an odious statement like, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my bretheren, ye have done it unto me."

An Epidemic of Swine

2009-04-30T13:44:00.000-07:00

We're all gonna DIE!!!!!!

At least that's what you'd think if don't think critically, watch 24-hour news channels on cable television, and can't get through a day without keeping up with the latest paralyzing fear being hawked to you much like fast food.

The current virus set to wipe out you, me and everyone we love has contracted the unfortunate (if you're a pig) name of swine flu. The ah...idiots, of whom there are appallingly many, and those with political and religious agendas (e.g. the government of Egypt) have leaped on the name and decided to slaughter every pig in sight or stay away from pork. Ball Park franks' sales down. Hebrew National all-beef hot dogs sales on the rise. There are always winners and losers. Never mind that it's impossible to contract the disease from eating pork, if what frightens us is called swine flu, we should kill something! And besides, there are a lot fewer laws against killing pigs than there are against killing the guy who just sneezed on you at work despite the fact that that jerk at work probably deserves it more.

But we should never, ever let a good, general hysteria go to waste so I have a proposal. Just bear with me a moment while I explain some facts.

It seems that this current, worrisome virus has, due to the peculiar nature of viruses, picked up genetic material from humans, pigs and birds. Viruses are like that. It's sort of like a person who might eat breakfast at Denny's, lunch at Domino's Pizza and have supper at an Asian restaurant we'll call Paisley Thais. The difference is that instead of doing as the human being does and converting the food to sugars and fats before excreting the rest, a virus becomes part Denny's pancakes, part pepperoni pizza and part Pad Thai and all future generations of that virus carry with them pancakes, pizza and Pad Thai. We know that the virus does this because we can look at the genetic material in the virus and actually see the parts that, in the case of our current worry, came from viruses that were originally unique to humans, pigs and birds.

Now here comes the shock to a good part of the populace of America. The swine flu virus evolved and in that process acquired the ability to infect, first birds, then pigs and finally, to the great pleasure of CNN, humans. We would not be facing this particular virus at all if it were not for evolution. Thus the virus that has you shunning family, friends and public places is positive proof that Darwinian evolution takes place.

Some uncritical..ah...people who wouldn't know cognitive dissonance if it came up and bit them on the ass will tell you that, sure, evolution works for viruses and bugs and mice but god created man and he's not a part of the evolution that effects every other living thing on this planet, which, by the way, is only about 6,000 to 10,000 years old.

It is those ah...people whom I now wish to address. The Mike Huckabees, John Hegges, Fred Phelpses and Pat Robertsons. I'm also addressing the graduates of such institutions of ah...learning as Bob Jones, Oral Roberts, Liberty Baptist, Regent and similar universities and Seattle's Discovery Institute as well as fundamentalist preachers across this nation. Please stand up for your principles and the "revealed truth" that you preach and refuse vaccinations, Tamiflu and all other treatments. Invite your students to stay in school, in class, your parishioners to come to church, pass the peace and stay for the coffee social after services. You are sure that evolution is a myth so you need to stand up for your principles, act on them and not be deterred by some foolishness about immanent death. There is no evolution. You know that. Therefore, if there's a virus that's going to wipe out the human race it exists solely by the will of your god and clearly, irrefutably, god wants you dead.

So, my fundamentalist ah...friends, I urge you to look at the swine flu as an opportunity. Think of it as The Rapture by Sneeze. Your god is calling you to witness for your faith and, if you believe the cable news networks, god's calling you home as well. Heed that call. With any luck he'll call Roger Ailes and the rest of Fox News as well leaving me and the rest of us poor sinners to suffer in a much improved world once you've left us all behind. Certainly we'll have fewer swine to deal with.

Bon voyage.

But...

Oops! You got vaccinated for something? You are laying in a supply of Tamiflu? Perhaps you should acknowledge creationism for the utter nonsense it is and send a card to the Charles Darwin Bicentennial Celebration because evolution not only is responsible for the virus that might make you ill; it's also responsible for all the actions that science (yes, that "alternative religion of the secular humanists", science) has taken to keep you and yours alive in the face of any epidemic.

Sort of like the old saw about there being no atheists in foxholes, if you haven't gotten smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, or tetanus because of a little shot in your arm, you're not as much of a creationist as you pretend to be, are you?

There was some old guy...can't think of his name just now...some crazy, radical ranter...he had a word for people like that. I think he called then "scribes and pharisees". The word was hypocrites.

The Newspeak of Freedom

2009-03-15T16:14:00.000-07:00

We are all familiar with George Orwell's remarkably insightful focus in 1984 on how perversion of language controls thought and discourse. In Orwell's world the "Ministry of Truth" redefines freedom as slavery, war becomes peace and anyone who notes a discrepancy between reality and definition must be re-educated in Room 101. Unfortunately, we too often reassure ourselves with the lie that Newspeak is "just fiction" or simply a critique of Nazi and Stalinist propaganda. We don't like to believe that it is being practiced on us now, here in the United States of 2009.

The Orwellian perversions of language start with the titles of organizations. The Heritage Foundation is only interested in the heritage of fascism which it constantly promotes for the United States. The Manhattan Institute's name is meant to evoke the urgency of the World War II Manhattan Project when it's real focus is nuking American institutions, particularly free public education. The very term Conservative in politics has nothing to do with a conservation or deliberation that might have been recognizeable to Theodore Roosevelt, Everett Dirksen or even Barry Goldwater. It is an entirely different creature that is wholly owned by major corporate sponsors, a cadre of ultra-rich oligarchs and neo-fascist lunatics who have spent forty years attempting to destroy government with the deregulation and militant jingoism that has succeeded in destroying American power in the world and the world economy with it.

But there is a far more perverse and insidious use of Newspeak that seeks to murderously distort the very language of our human and civil rights for the purpose of destroying those very rights. I've noticed this for a long time but what has gotten me exercised at present is my listening to an alleged bastion of Liberal "bias". Recently a Seattle NPR affiliate spoke with a couple of practitioners of the current incarnation of Newspeak and largely let their perversions of language and ideas go unchallenged.

The first instance came in a discussion of same-sex marriage a Joseph Backholm of one of those Orwellian-named organizations, the Family Policy Institute, put forward the bald faced lie that legalizing same-sex marriage would infringe the "religious freedom" of "people of faith".

The first bit of nonsense in that assertion involves in defining "people of faith". By Mr. Backholm's construction same-sex couples are not and can never be "people of faith" and that no "person of faith" could believe that same-sex couples have the right to marry as do couples of mixed sexes. That implied assertion is nonsense on its face. He is actually saying that the people he represents, afflicted by a narrow, bigoted, shallow religiosity rather than anything resembling true religious feeling, oppose same-sex marriage. The fanatical people who fixate on a few select scriptural passages rather than a large overview of their religion's writings would be challenged by general availability and recognition of same-sex marriage.

In a sense Mr. Backholm is correct. The minority of religious fanatics who share his views will be offended by the general availability and recognition of same-sex marriage...just as Holocaust deniers are offended by the newsreel footage of the Nazi death camps. To which we should simply say, "Screw them!"

But the truly appalling bit of Newspeak in Mr. Backholm's specious argument is that legalizing and recognizing same-sex marriage is an assault on freedom of religion. I am tempted to assert that only the Prince of Lies could put forward a perversion of the concept of freedom - let alone religion - as extreme and horrible as that. In fact, what Mr. Backholm is asserting is that his narrow, bigoted religiosity is threatened with suppression by the free expression of a differing view of religion. I do not think that it is news to Mr. Backholm that his one, specious assertion of "freedom" should not, should never suppress the the freedom of others. In point of fact, Mr Backholm's argument amounts to an assertion that the practice of any religion at variance with the one he espouses should not be permitted. The whole point of creating the United States as a secular state in which religious freedom is guaranteed was to prevent fanatics and bigots such as Mr. Backholm from suppressing the religious expression of others.

But Mr. Backholm has no shame. He claims that a religious organization, for example, Catholic Charities, that refused to place children for adoption with same-sex couples would have its freedom of religion infringed. He asserts that this very thing has already happened in Massachusetts. But lets examine that a little closer.

Faced with potential discrimination complaints for refusing to place children with same-sex couples, the Archdiocese of Boston - the very organization where the scandals of church subornation of child abuse by priests originated - decided to withdraw from the state sponsored program and contracts under which it had placed adoptees for many years. Please note that it was the choice of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, not an order by the state. Massachustts correctly determined that placing a child with a stable, loving couple, regardless of the sexes of the members of that couple, was a boon to the child. Just as it had determined that refusing to place children with families based on race, religion or ethnicity was prohibited discrimination, Massachusetts rightly included sexual orientation in that list of prohibited discriminatory practices. Having done so, the representatives of the Roman Catholic Church in Massachusetts, who had no visible moral compunctions or firm principles when it came to protecting a minority of abusive priests, suddenly grew a sense of morality and a set of unyielding principles and withdrew from the state sponsored, paid and contracted adoption system.

Note that Massachusetts officials expressed their regret at the withdrawal of Catholic Charities from the adoption system but no one tried to force Catholic Charities to place adoptees with same-sex couples. They simply shook their heads and waved goodbye. The Roman Catholic Church's freedom to practice its selective version of morality remains intact. The Archdiocese of Boston, if it is threatened at all, is under no threat except that of its own behavior in suborning child abuse. And, more to the point, a very questionable allocation of taxpayer funds to a religious organization has ended. No bands of torch-bearing same-sex couples have roamed through Boston burning Catholic Churches and Convents as the Protestant Know-Nothings did in the 1850s. Freedom of religion remains intact in Massachusetts and, happily, the separation of church and state so dear to the framers of the Constitution has been strengthened.

In a similar propagation of Newspeak the same radio station gave a forum to a con-artist from the ultra-rightist, labor-rights suppression group called the Evergreen "Freedom" Foundation. The subject was a bill, killed in this legislative session thanks to a stupid and ill-considered e-mail from a supporter, that would have given employees the right not to attend employer mandated meetings that have the purpose of expressing the employers views on politics, religion or union organizing. That doesn't seem so terrible, does it? Employers have held meetings in which they have implied that employees would lose their jobs if they did not vote the way the employer approved, joined a union or even did not accept the same religious dogma that the employer espouses. That seems like a clear violation of individual and civil rights.

But the Evergreen spokesperson Scott Dilley made the Orwellian assertion that this legislation to protect workers' freedoms is an infringement of the employer's freedom of speech. It's utter nonsense of course but for neo-fascist cultists like Scott Dilley it is an effective way of perverting the dialogue. What Mr. Dilley refuses to acknowledge is that we all have a freedom to speak or withhold our opinions and we have a concomitant freedom to listen or not. No one has to read this blog. In fact, were someone to attempt to force it on anyone, I would fight for that person's right to not read it. Not so Mr. Dilley.

What Mr. Dilley wants to sweep under the rug is the vast power gulf between employer and employee. A fanatic who owns a company can rant to his employees at will on any subject but employees exercise their freedom to ignore those rantings at the peril of their jobs. In an economy destroyed by the excesses of the very employers Mr. Dilley represents, no employee can take the whims of his or her employer lightly. In this era when workers need union protections more than at any time since the 1930s it is perfectly reasonable to rein in employers' excesses. But Mr. Dilley obfuscates by introducing the language of freedom and civil rights in service of enslavement to employers' whims.

Mr. Dilley's argument on behalf of employers is exactly the same as arguing that arresting and jailing a rapist or child molester is an infringement of his freedom of expression. It is an argument that deserves no credit and no unchallenged hearing. But George Orwell has been dead for over half a century and no one likes to think that a neo-fascist propaganda machine as effective and as vile as Josef Goebbels' is operating in 21st Century America.

After all, isn't Fox News "fair and balanced"?

[Note: In the many years I spent working in social services in the Boston Area I knew many Roman Catholic priests and nuns as well as Salvation Army officers and other people of faith whose religion was strong and broad and decent. All of whom were appalled at the minority of their fellows who abused their positions to abuse parishioners and even more so at the church structures that hid those abuses and allowed them to continue. The Archdiocese of Boston may have behaved appallingly but many individuals within it behaved responsibly, morally and in keeping with the expressed principles of their faith. It is their church heirarchy that has tarred them, not I.]

Georgie, We'll Hardly Miss You

2009-01-19T12:06:00.000-08:00

In the couple of months between Election and Inauguration Days we were treated to reviews and tweaking of what has been referred to as "the Bush Legacy". The main problem with that phrase is that we no more want Dubya's legacy than we want Dubya himself.

We've heard the utterly meaningless mantras of "I've made the hard decisions" and "history will decide" and "protected America" repeated in the typically Republican magical thinking that insists that repeating a nonsense phrase enough times makes it so. Bush apologists have trotted out people who, largely with straight faces, claim that Dubya is "intelligent", a "nice man", "pleasant" and "engaged".

My parents' generation knew such propaganda for what it truly is: "The Big Lie". "The Big Lie" was the shorthand applied to Nazi and Soviet propaganda that painted monsters like Hitler and Stalin as benign patriots and benefactors to the world at large when in fact they were dangerous, totalitarian, psychopathic dictators. Dubya and his Svengalis, Poppy Bush and Dick Cheney, may not sink to the level of monstrousness of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. They may not even sink to the slightly less appalling level of Pol Pot, Idi Amin or Slobodan Milosovic but that doesn't mean that they are not denizens of some level of the same hellish pit that houses those refutations of the term "humanity".

I began writing this as the inaugural ceremonies for Barak Obama were under way. The pomp and circumstance of that day are now a bright, warm memory. Now that the presidency of George W. Bush is well and truly over we can say with some certainty that it was a presidency begun in fraud, pursued through crime and lies and concluded in unmitigated disaster for the United States and the whole world. Dubya has descended into an occasional run to a convention of congenial oil men sufficiently foolish, fascist or clueless to pay for a few inept words from him and a bit of glad handing. He's traveled as far as the plains of western Canada being careful not to venture into any country that might arrest him for his many and manifest war crimes. Cheney too emerges once or twice a month from the evil darkness that he carries within himself to croak warnings that restoration of the U. S. Constitution is an lure for terrorist attacks on Americans. However, Cheney's demeanor of hatred makes one wonder if his friends at Halliburton and the "re-branded" Blackwater are not arranging for the attack he predicts as inevitable.

Obama and his Administration have repeatedly and strongly expressed the desire to put the last eight years behind them even as they root about in the back-up of sewage that the Bush Administration left in its wake. In a pragmatic sense they are correct. Once the neo-cons turned the American ship of state into a Titanic, courts martial for the captain, designers, navigator and engineers would only get in the way of evacuating the ship and saving as many as possible. In the larger scheme of American politics, both parties understand that the vengeful Republicans would bide their time and hone their skills at hiding their criminal acts until they could again destroy a Democratic president out of sheer revenge for Nixon's impeachment and exposure of the Iran-Contra Affair as they did with the noisome prosecutorial misconduct known as "Whitewater". Never mind that the Republican wrong doing was criminal at best, traitorous at worst while the Democratic wrong doing amounts to some raunchy heterosexual diddling.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, to his credit, has proposed investigating the criminality of the executive branch from January 20, 2001 through January 19, 2009 but his proposed investigation is limited and entirely toothless. I have come reluctantly to believe that we need a full exposure of the criminal acts of the Bush Administration regardless of the distraction it might be. What has decided me on this point is the repeated croakings of Dick Cheney.

Cheney's allegations that Obama's policy of treating prisoners lawfully poses a threat to America needs to be challenged. We desperately need a wide declassification of documents to debunk the canard that the Bush Administration's disregard for human and civil rights, Constitutional and International Law and treaties did anything but make America and Americans less safe, less secure and more vulnerable.

I understand that I should "be careful what I wish for." The possibility that even one of those tortured in secret, foreign prisons may have provided some pertinent and useful intelligence could blow the whole process up in the Democrats' faces and make credible the Republicans who have so effectively discredited themselves. Still, I am confident enough that all the illegal, draconian acts of the Bush Administration were completely ineffectual that I'm willing to risk it. After all, would they have been so excessively secretive about the information they received if the least little mote of it had been of value? You might pose that question to Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson. The only way they can claim that their descent into fascism was justified is by the absence of results remaining a secret.

Also, we hardly need worry that the demagogues like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rash Lamebrain and Ann Cun...er...Coulter will come up with a rational critique of the policy. They are already off the deep end, flailing about in search of some epithet that will arrest the attention of and re-mobilize the lazy and thoughtless who filled out their core audience of knuckle-walking idiots.

No, we need an investigation, out in public. We need evidence of malfeasance and misfeasance and names, not just of the prime movers but of the quiet, minor bureaucrats insinuated into the government. We need the dismissals and resignations that root out the Monica Goodlings, Kyle Sampsons, the graduates of the "Law Schools" of Regent and Liberty Universities, the Bob Jones-ites and similar pseudo-scholars and shyster lawyers. In short, we need the kind of purge that the neo-fascists worked from 1946 through 1956 through HUAC and Joe McCarthy only this time for actual cause.

But then, we're Democrats and Liberals and unlikely to be so effective or decisive. Yet were we to act outside our nature this once we might finally, actually know the real Georgie, Dickie and their appalling attempt to destroy our nation. We might even go a long way to avoiding a repeat in the foreseeable future.

Reinhard Heydrich and Josef Goebbles, Israelis

2009-01-18T15:04:00.000-08:00

Today the Israelis and Hamas have entered an uneasy truce in the Gaza Strip with an Israeli invasion force inside Gaza allegedly to keep the peace. In fact, the Israelis are there for no such purpose. Rockets from Gaza are simply the excuse for continuing Israeli genocide against the Palestinian population but let's put that aside for a moment to consider a couple of points relative to the most recent three weeks of murderous Israeli attacks on Palestinians.

Let me first address the myth that opposing Israeli government policy and being anti-Semetic are the same thing. That farago is the same crap dealt out by the Bush Administration when they have claimed that opposition to their odious policies is un-patriotic and "gives aid and comfort to the terrorists." It is manifest nonsense. Personally, I support the existence of a nation of Israel living in peace with its neighbors. It is because I support Israel that I oppose Israeli government policies toward the Palestinians. Israel's governments, in a nearly unbroken line for the past 62 years have engaged in policies that seal its doom rather than promote its survival.

Israel, from its inception in 1947, has engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide to displace and/or kill the indiginous Palestinian population in the name of a mythological grant by a non-existant god to the probably mythical Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Even Israeli scholars have demonstrated that much of the official history of the founding of Israel is, like most founding histories, largely myth covering a much more noisome reality. Palestinians did not voluntarily surrender their homes because of their bias toward Jews. They were forced out of their homes and into "ghettos" more than passingly reminiscent of the Warsaw Ghetto by an ethnic cleansing that makes the acts of Slobodan Milosovic and Radovan Karadzic look amateurish by comparison.

Israel owes its existence to a deft and even sometimes justified application of both lies and guilt. Almost all of us who are not Jews bear some guilt for the anti-Semitism that had its hellish apotheosis in the Holocaust. I would be lying to myself if I said that that guilt does not inform my support for Israel. My father and paternal grandmother were casually and at the same time vehemently anti-Semetic, an aspect of their characters that I despise even as I loved them for their other qualities. Yet it is this very guilt that I feel that has been outrageously exploited by Israel. Successive Israeli governments and Israel boosters have used that guilt to equate anti-Semitism and opposition to Israeli policies, stifling reasonable debate on Israeli government actions and policies.

The sibling of that exploitation of guilt is the farago that Israel is the weak, beset and persecuted orphan of the Middle East. That may have been true in 1947-48. It may well have been true through 1956 and even a bit later. It has been utter nonsense since 1967. Jews have been persecuted world-wide for centuries but that does not mean that Israel has not become the persecutor of Palestinians over the last 40 years. While there is certainly bitter irony in that fact, those are most definitely not mutually exclusive notions.

Israel is and has been, largely with unquestioning American support, the dominant power and even the bully of the Middle East since 1967, the Yom Kippur War not withstanding. It is a nuclear power. Its military dominates its competing and fragmented neighbors. Israel is not persecuted. It is not in danger of being wiped from the map yet the constant selling and reselling of the notion of Jews as a defenseless, persecuted minority has colored all discourse about Israel making that discouse irrational and, frequently, impossible. The Jewish people have been and often are a persecuted minority even today but Israel is not so simply by extension.

Nor is Israel a democracy in any sense intelligible to Americans. An enourmous portion of the population that falls within any version of the borders of Israel is prevented from voting in Israeli elections. There are persistent efforts within Israel to disenfranchise Palestinians, even those who support Israel as a nation. Israel is regularly referred to as "the Jewish state" without any thought to the parallels that exist in that very phrase to the 1994 attempt to turn Rwanda into "the Hutu state" or the on-going efforts to turn Tibet into a "Chinese state". In fact the very use of the word "state" is Orwellian. When not calling Israel aptly "the Jewish state", we regularly refer to Israel as "the state of Israel." Is there another nation on earth referred to in that construction? We do not refer to "the state of France" or "the state of Ukraine." We do, however, refer to "the state of Connecticut" and "the state of Idaho". Words have power to direct our conversations and the construction "the state of Israel" reinforces the idea of an intimate connection between the United States and Israel that does not really exist. The disconnect between the propaganda that would have Americans see Israel as a part of our own nation and reality is made manifest when we recall the bombing of the USS Liberty or the spying of Jonathan Pollard. America may have an interest in an Israel that lives in peace with its neighbors but we have no interest whatever in supporting at murderous Israeli government and its currently dysfunctional attitude toward its American benefactor.

Now to deal with the title of this entry.

Reinhard Heydrich was the odious, murderous Nazi Gestapo chief who chaired the Wannsee Conference that set the Nazi agenda for the extermination of the Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other "decadent" people that fell under the Nazi hobnail boot heel. He was assassinated in Prague in 1942 though the world would have been a far better place if he'd been killed in 1912 or 1922. Among the many horrific punishments that Heydrich pioneered were the the Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) Decree adopted by the George W. Bush Administration in it's alleged "War On Terror" and the murder of an escalating number of civilians for each Nazi killed by resistance fighters. The even more horrible Reichs Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbles, "honored" Heydrich's policy by decreeing that 150 Jews would die to requite the "terrorism" that resulted in Heydrich's death. Goebbles also had the Czech town of Lidice wiped out in the memorial Operation Reinhard.

In December, 2008, Israel, having lost 4 citizens to Qassam rockets fired from Gaza attacked the population of Gaza and killed, by the time of today's truce, about 1,100 Palestinians. Please forgive me if I see an Israeli adoption of the Heydrich and Goebbels policies in this current attack on Gaza. A lot of people will, no doubt, express deep indignation at a comparison of Israeli government actions to the actions of a pair of notorious anti-Semites. Go ahead, express your indignation. All the indignation in the world does not make the comparison any less apt. Indignation is not an argument against the manifest similarity of Israeli government and Nazi policies. In fact, I am indignant that any Israeli government should adopt any policies that so much at hint at a comparison with Nazi policies. And, further, I would equate indignant Israeli government apologists denying that obvious parallel with Holocaust deniers. Even as I love my own country while hating the criminals and frauds of the Bush Administration or love my late father and babci while hating their anti-Semitism it is past time for those who love Israel to hate its wrongs to the Palestinian population.

For Israel to disingenuously claim that it did nothing to provoke Hamas even as it blockaded Gaza for years and forced disease, darkness and starvation on the population of the Gaza Strip is as obscene as murdering Polish soldiers and dressing them in Nazi uniforms to justify the 1939 invasion of Poland or doctoring the evidence of an Iraqi weapons program to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Shelling and bombing United Nations schools and aid warehouses or Red Crescent hospitals is as much a war crime as hacking up defenseless Tutsis seeking sanctuary in a church.

My four grandsons, my oldest daughter and beloved son-in-law are Jews. So are, at the risk of cliche, friends to whom I owe much and love more as were teachers who gave me the tools to think independently and deeply. I hope for the survival and well-being of all the good people of Israel. Yet I have the same hope for all the good people of Gaza and the other Palestinian lands. I do not see those hopes as mutually exclusive. And simultaneously, I damn the current Israeli government and power hungry fanatics like Bebe Netanyahu. I would hope further that all those, Jew and gentile, Palestinian and Israeli, Islamist and unbeliever alike would share that hope and condemn, not Israel, but Israeli government policies.

Christmas Wars and Televised Simony

2008-12-07T23:24:00.000-08:00

One of the worst aspects of religious fundamentalism and fanaticism is their love of victimization. They must be the one true faith, and as proof of that, persecuted by some larger entity that surrounds and threatens to engulf them. That, of course, is typical of cult behavior and also psychosis. The poor, sad individuals who are desperate to feel special despite their innate mediocrity can't really be blamed for seeking shelter under the wing of a religion that makes them feel special. Yet we can blame the despicable con men who sell the various brands of claptrap to the rubes. I'm singling out hucksters like Pat Robertson, Billy and Franklin Graham, L. Ron Hubbard, Sun Myung Moon, Jim Jones, Bob Jones and similar frauds peddling a half-assed religiosity rather than genuine religion. But in this case I want to focus on Bill O'Reilly.

O'Reilly is about as vile a person and opportunist as this society has produced. Each year he tries selling the idea that there is a "war on Christmas". It's a blatant con to whip up a frenzy of fear and victimhood in the hearts of the mindless marks of this video fraud. Just looking at the tsunami of Christmas kitsch that descends upon us, usually about the time the Halloween decorations get marked down, the persistent, insistent, ubiquitous presence of creches, carols and Claus belies the idea of a "war on Christmas." Drive through any residential neighborhood or any commercial district from Thanksgiving through New Year's Day across America and you'll be convinced that Christmas has warred and won against all comers. But facts and logic have never been friends to Bill O'Reilly.

This year the chief, perhaps only, hook on which O'Reilly has been able to hang his "war on Christmas" con is the atheist statement included in a Washingtom State display of seasonal memorials. What's especially bad this year is that that statement deserves some criticism though not anything that comes from O'Reilly's bloviations.

The text of the sign reads, "At this season of the Winter Solstice may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”

Had the Freedom From Religion Foundation stopped at the second sentence I would have been in complete agreement. In fact I agree that religion is "but myth and superstition." However, I have seen the beneficial effects of religion in many people. I have know many truly religious people who express their various faiths by helping their fellow men. These people have shown me open hearts and freely questioning minds. It is the kind of narrow religiosity peddled by the con men named above and their ilk "that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

Let's take an example. I truly love the King James Version of the Bible. It was the first version that I heard as a child attending the Methodist Church. I still credit the rich Jacobean prose of that translation with giving me entree to Shakespeare, a fact self-sufficient to warrant admiration and love. But one of the tenets of much recent fundamentalism is that the KJV is the sole authoritative version of the Bible. Apart from the absurdity of claiming that Moses, the Prophets and Jesus wanted to be passed down to us in fulsome Jacobean prose that assertion is born of ignorance, descends into stupidity and all in furtherance of a pernicious agenda.

First, it ignores the fact that most of the fundamentalists of Elizabethan and Stuart England accepted only the Geneva Bible as authoritative. My New England Puritan ancestors considered the KJV a Papist abomination that had no place on the lecturn in their churches. The Geneva Bible was the version that Shakespeare knew best. His plays echo its phrasing in a number of sublime passages. Yet the Geneva Bible itself has antecedents not the least of which is John Wycliff's Middle English translation. The KJV is a major revision of Miles Coverdale's Tudor Great Bible that derives from William Tyndale's 1525 translation that became the basis for the Matthew Bible, Coverdsale's immediate predecessor. Additionally, some of the language from Thomas Cranmer's translation of the Book of Common Prayer for Henry VIII informs the KJV, particularly in the Psalms. And Wycliff, Tyndale, Coverdale, Cranmer, Erasmus, Melancthon and all the others had as their starting point Jerome's Latin Vulgate. So the King James Version touted as uniquely authoritative by the Protestant fundamentalists, is no more authoritative and no less so than its antecedents. That's where the ignorance comes in. Sort of in the same way that one is having sex with one person and all of those who've had sex with him or her before, the KJV is just the early 17th Century slut with whom you're currently sleeping.

But the surpassingly stupid and the primary purpose of asserting the primacy of the KJV is the insistence that no subsequent translation has authority. The idiotic subtext of this assertion is that all knowledge and divine inspiration ended in 1611. How divine inspiration could escape all translators and scholars of the last 400 years while being readily available to your friendly, neighborhood fundamentalist preacher is clearly a divine mystery. If the church service can include a hymn composed more recently than 1611, we shouldn't have much to fear from more recent translations. However, the real point in asserting this absurdity is to keep the faithful from questioning the authority of their con men/preachers.

If, as current scholarship has definitively shown, the sole Biblical allusion to a divine trinity is a 16th Century insertion, that calls into question the principle that the KJV is the one, true, immutable and definitive word of god. We can't have that, now, can we? Calling the text into question in any way turns the Bible into a work of men, not of god. It means that slavery, racism, homophobia and other disgusting justifications of bigotry as well as the claim of the Jews to the land of Palestine lose their Biblical support. But the irony is that none of that challenges the existence of a god.

This may sound funny coming from a proud atheist but fundamentalism, be it Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Islamic or any faith's, is a greater insult to god than my lack of belief ever can be. That one's faith is so shallow, fragile and mindless that, for example, the filioque (if you don't know what that is, look it up!) being exposed as a marginalia note by a later reader and not an article of faith shakes one's faith, then it is not rightly faith at all.

Religious fundamentalism is a mental straight jacket for those so intellectually precarious that they probably need an actual straight jacket to keep them from harming themselves and others. Fundamentalism is a comfort because it allows its adherents to check their minds at the door on the presumption that all thinking has conveniently been done for them. One of the reason such people are a danger to society is that they have been taught the Orwellian idea that their ignorance is actually intelligence of a higher order.

If a greeting like "Happy Holidays", an assertion by an atheist group or any such petty expressions constitute an attack on your individual faith then it is your problem that your faith is weak and insubstantial and no "war on Christmas" as a neo-fascist demagogue like Bill O'Reilly would con you into believing. If you are genuinely religious then the contrary opinions of others are of little or no consequence. If you are possessed by a narrow, puscillanimous, windging religiosity then of course your faith will be challenged because it is really no faith at all.

I have neither patience nor respect for the religiose. And I have far less tolerance or respect for the demagogues who exploit their narrow, ignorant religiosity to incite them to fear and hatred against some object of the demagogues' wrath.

Is the man with the biggest, most elaborate creche on his front lawn, lit by the greatest wattage the most religious person in the neighborhood or town? I doubt it. I also doubt that the person who makes the most noise about his faith, howsoever he expresses it, is the person of deepest faith. If you have genuine faith your works will witness to it. If the great joy and mystery of the whole power and potential of life itself coming in the form of a newborn baby moves you as a thing sublime then not even a real war on Christmas can meet the slightest success. The only thing you need fear or hate is the simoniac who would pervert your faith, your religion into something that can be threatened by a phrase.In short, the only person warring on Christmas is Bill O'Reilly himself.

Fuck You, Milton Friedman!

2008-09-17T17:49:00.000-07:00

In my view when Milton Friedman died in 2006 at age 94, his passing was was a good 60 years overdue. Friedman claimed to champion the individual and the "free market" over government intervention. He famously said late in life that government had to be starved of taxes in order to curtail its excesses. Of course, in Friedman's view government "excesses" were things like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and any regulation that inhibited the swashbuckling of "free market" pirates. His disciples extend far beyond the infamous "Chicago School" of economics and the odious Hoover Institution into international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Friedman's essential insanity was the proposition the markets are "rational". By this he meant that unfettered markets would always correct themselves achieving balance between buyers and sellers, supply and demand. The concept is insane because, first, we have centuries of evidence that markets are nothing like rational and, second, because his postulate presumes that the people who participate in those markets are, ultimately, rational too. We haven't a single shred of evidence in all of human history for that preposterous proposition.

Essentially Friedman was a very smart man who, for some reason probably unknown even to himself, proposed an economic ideology as foolish and destructive as Scientology. That ideology was very congenial to a widely separated and utterly unprincipled collection of capitalist plutocrats who saw the potential for profit in such an insane ideology and financed its promulgation. Those plutocrats lionized Friedman and those of his acolytes who were most dedicated and least principled. The plutocrats gave the true believers forums, fellowships and fame thereby insuring that they would become confirmed toadies of those plutocrats. Friedman and his followers became famous because those whose interests they served promoted them, published their books and paid their expenses. Most of us tend to succumb to bombardment. The more often we hear that someone is famous the more we tend to believe that publicity. Thus Friedman and his followers, rather like Paris Hilton, became famous, even lionized, because their publicity said they were. We are not supposed to notice that there is nothing whatever that is rational in that process.

At this point some toady is going to offer the fact that Friedman won a Nobel Prize in Economics as if that validated his ideology. Actually, the Nobel Committee cited Friedman's work before his conversion to unfettered free marketism. His theory of rational markets is part of that work. His fanatic pursuit of it is not. Thus in Friedman's case and rather like another Nobel Laureate and neo-fascist darling, William Schockley, the Nobel Prize is simply a red herring.

As ideology became more and more important to Friedman and, simultaneously, he became further and further divorced from economic reality, he failed to notice that the plutocrats who kept him as their pet were systematically removing all countervailing forces to themselves. They brutally reduced and blocked greater union participation, evaded anti-trust laws, bought legislators and legislation that made them ever richer and burdened the middle class with disproportionate taxes - disproportionate because the middle class was the only group left to absorb the shortfall as the plutocrats ceased to pay even a modest fee for running the government that protected their wealth. Just as the forced collectivization in the U.S.S.R. under Stalin destroyed the Russian economy, the Friedman ideology destroyed the American economy...but only for the middle class.

The great mass of us were faced with rising taxes, curtailed services, increasing bureaucracy and wages that fell in real buying power faster than they grew. This environment set the stage for tax revolts, like California's Proposition 13, which were themselves financed by the plutocrats who most benefited from them. Each of these Trojan Horse "limitation" initiatives served only to exacerbate the problem.

In contrast to the ideological, through-the-looking-glass world of Milton Friedman let's consider the real world for a moment. As was proved in October, 1929 and 2007-2008, when consumers can't afford the products they are supposed to consume, they cease buying. When consumers cease buying, producers cease selling. When producers cease selling they cease generating capital for their investors. When capital ceases to grow, this whole house of cards comes tumbling down, stock markets crash, deflation ensues and there is economic disaster.

The Friedman ideologues, rather like Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion stand about with their eyes shut tight intoning, "I do believe in free markets! I do! I do! I do!" Meanwhile, all about them, the economy comes tumbling down. There is nothing rational about "securitizing" mortgages or credit card debt. Worse still, there is nothing rational about credit default swaps that back those attempts to pretend that a debt is really an asset. The fact is that markets are greedy and greed is not rational. Markets are greedy because the people drawn to operate them are, themselves, greedy. It is only by regulating markets up the yin-yang that we inject even a modest amount of rationality by curbing their instincts toward greed.

For 40 years we have systematically dismantled the regulations put in place during the Roosevelt Administration to prevent the Great Depression's recurrence. During that same time we have reduced personal incomes and increased prices, forcing people to live on credit. As the middle class' debt rose many who were less ideological than Friedman and his disciples understood that there would come a point when all the cards were maxed out and consumers had no ability to buy. We have reached that point. Actually, we reached it almost a decade ago but the plutocrats then encouraged everyone to turn the equity in their homes into ready cash because property values could go nowhere but up. Another ideologically inspired farrago. Finally, within the last year even that resource was tapped out and the collapse we now endure inevitably came. There is nothing complicated about the economics. It's simple. If consumers can't buy....

I wish I could claim that there is an evil genius behind this, that there is some conspiracy to be uncovered and rooted out. There isn't. Each of us has greed in his heart. Given the chance and the right information every one of us would have "securitized" debts and called them assets in order to feed our greed. But, that said, it is just more reason to say, "Fuck you, Milton Friedman!"

The sole bright spot in this whole economic meltdown is that the Republican Party, a wholly owned subsidiary of the plutocracy and unvarying force for evil has had the disaster they were so eager to make laid right in its lap. As in 1929 they deserved it. With any luck it will be at least another 20 years before they can regain anything even vaguely resembling power and we can rebuild our society again.

The Glorious Fourth: Some thoughts on Patriotism, Jingoism, Chauvinism, and genuine love of country.

2008-07-05T03:04:00.000-07:00

This Fourth of July, 2008, the 232nd anniversary of American independence, the news came that former North Carolina Senator, and life-long racist, neo-fascist, homophobe and vile scum, Jesse Helms, had died. Unfortunately for our nation he died 86 years too late. A statement from Dubya’s White House characterized the odious Mr. Helms as a “true patriot”. It’s a good thing that we’ve long since ceased to credit any statement from this White House gang else that characterization of Helms would confirm of Ambrose Bierce’s modification of Dr. Johnson’s definition of patriotism: that it is the first refuge of a scoundrel. Jesse Helms succeeded in a way that far too many before him had in embodying the worst characteristics of America. He was the poster boy for jingoism, bigotry and hate-mongering. The nation is better for his passing and would have been better still had he never lived. Yet calling him a “true patriot” calls up the question of what “true” patriotism might be.

Vladimir Nabokov said that we know that we’re in the presence of the sublime when the little hairs on the backs of our necks stand up. At some point on each July 4th those hairs stand up for me. I may be when I hear the Declaration of Independence read, occasionally by myself, or when someone plays Ray Charles singing America the Beautiful. They might stand up in the presence of the sublime manifest in a number of ways, including the utterly trite snap of a flag on the summer breeze. I respond that way when the Statue of Liberty fills the screen and someone reads Emma Lazarus’ The New Colossus or Francis Bellamy’s unadulterated Pledge of Allegiance.

Yes. I admit it. I love my country. I am not one of those doomed to be “unwept, unhonor’d and unsung” of whom Sir Walter Scott wrote,

“Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
‘This is my own, my native land!’
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd
From wandering on a foreign strand?”

Yet I am loathe to call myself a patriot not least because it might associate me with the likes of Helms, Dubya, Cheney, Feith or some similar charlatan. There is nothing even casually patriotic about that gang of criminals. But what is it to be patriotic? Why is this crop of neo-fascists not patriotic while I think that I am?

Flags and flag pins, patriotic songs and gestures like rote repetition of the Pledge of Allegiance are simply trappings. They are not the nation any more than are my cats. Burning a flag may have symbolic meaning but it has nothing whatever to do with respect for the principles of this nation. Those things are gewgaws. They may be gewgaws that we treasure but they are not the core of the nation despite their being mistaken for such by far too many people.

What is the core of our nation is its Constitution as amended and, to a lesser extent, the statement of principle in our Declaration of Independence. Our public officials from the president, congress and the Supreme Court on down to the lowliest bureaucrat swear to protect and defend our Constitution, not the flag, the national anthem, or any particular item. It is the Constitution that is at the core of America and why we are a nation of laws not men. Yet few citizens and even fewer of those who wear their patriotism on their sleeves read the Constitution or understand the history and the debate that led to its adoption. I dare say that perhaps one in 50 of us have even heard of the Articles of Confederation that preceded the Constitution’s adoption. The so-called Libertarian Movement thrives on the ignorance of the Articles of Confederation because we tried their prescription for governance from 1777 through 1787 and it didn’t work. Out of that failure came our Constitution.

The ultra-rightists who currently run the Executive Branch, have a stranglehold on the Legislative Branch and have largely taken over the Judicial Branch are not patriotic because they violate our Constitution on a regular basis. The right wing that now has usurped the Republican Party may talk a good game, wrap themselves in the flag and the gewgaws of patriotism but their actions demonstrate that their entire program is one of undermining the Constitution by sewing fear and keeping the populace fragmented and distracted by meaningless issues like opposition to same-sex marriage or who does or does not wear a flag pin.

There is not a person serving since January 20, 2001 in the White House staff or above the Deputy Assistant level in the cabinet departments who is not just unpatriotic but a traitor to the Constitution.

So, I do consider myself a patriot. I’ve seen a great deal of this nation. I come of a family that came to New England on the Mayflower in 1620 and that had men in all this nations wars through World War II. Those hairs on the back of my neck stand in the presence of many of the symbols of my nation and in the significant places like the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials or on the hallowed ground of Gettysburg. Yet I am nothing so much as furious at those who trade in a shallow, triumphalist patriotism while trampling on the Constitution.

Fruitcakes I: Ayatollah Dobson and Christo-Fascism

2008-06-26T13:28:00.000-07:00

Dr. James C. Dobson is a doctor of pediatric psychology. He has made it clear that he is not an ordained minister of any denomination. He has stated that he is not a theologian. He comes by his religion via his father who never bothered to study theology either but made his living as a “preacher”. But, though he disavows theological learning, he is awfully quick to interpret the Bible. Of course his interpretation leans heavily on the Old Testament and even more heavily on passages that reinforce his many and deep bigotries. In point of fact, Dr. Dobson is simply an ultra-right wing bigot who couches his hate in slightly less incendiary language than say, Rev. Fred Phelps. Dobson is, since such coinages are de rigueur these days, a Christo-Fascist (not crypto-, nothing crypto-fascist about him) whose ravening hunger is political power. He simply conceals his voracious ambition for power under a thin cloak of religion to fool the rubes and, just incidentally, get a tax exemption or two.

In his Dictionary of the English Language, Dr. Samuel Johnson, a man of great faith, defined patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” About 140 years later, the American writer and humorist, Ambrose Bierce, a man of far fewer delusions, noted that Dr. Johnson was incorrect because patriotism is the first refuge to which the scoundrel runs. Bierce, apart from being correct, did not see fit to cite anything as that “last refuge.” A long list of jailhouse conversions by criminals including Charles Colson, Eldridge Cleaver and Manuel Noriega have served to point out what Ayatollah Dobson confirms with every breath, that the true last refuge of a scoundrel is religion or, rather, religiosity.

To digress for a moment, I really haven’t any argument with people who are religious. I’ve known many good people in many religious groups who express their faith by making the love and mercy of the gods in which they believe manifest in our world. They work with the poor and homeless, with the sick and lonely and with all manner of the least of these, their brethren as their gods direct. Religiosity, however, is a cathedral wide and a communion wafer deep. Religiosity uses faith as a cloak for hate and bigotry and, sometimes, insanity. As examples of that religiosity I would cite Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the Heaven’s Gate Cult, the Worldwide Church of God and Focus on the Family. Religiosity is, at best, the faith of the lazy and ignorant. It has no depth, learning or understanding associated with it and puts its emphasis on the fear of god and the word of a preacher whose ignorance may be greater than that of his congregation. At worst, religiosity is the mask behind which bigotry, hatred and fascism hide from well-deserved prosecution. Ayatollah Dobson’s brand of religiosity is of the worst.

But to return to the most recent ex cathedra statements from Ayatollah Dobson, he has injected himself into the 2008 U. S. Presidential race by attacking Barak Obama’s understanding of the Bible. He’s called Obama’s call for a sensible view of the Bible “a fruitcake interpretation.” Understanding that if anyone should know “a fruitcake interpretation” of scripture based on acquaintanceship since birth, it’s James Dobson, this is an extraordinary statement from a self-confessed non-theologian. Dobson’s political fatwa against Obama is actually revealing. It strips from Dobson the cloak of religion to reveal his true interest which is in unelected political power. Indeed, Obama’s crime in the view of Ayatollah Dobson is not just an humane interpretation of the Bible, it is being humane itself. If Barak Obama’s faith, with its emphasis on Matthew 25 were to prevail, it would expose Dobson’s pusillanimous, hate-filled interpretation of scripture for the noisome perversion it is. The best we can say about Dobson’s most recent ravings are that they are the outcry of a simoniac, exposed and abandoned by the public he’s heretofore deceived.

Money Matters I: Pay Back’s a Bitch

2008-06-20T23:21:00.000-07:00

Barak Obama is not going to limit his fundraising by taking Federal matching funds for the general election.

How dare he!

How unfair!

Poor little Johnny McCain with his stunted fundraising abilities will get just under 85 million dollars in Federal matching funds for his run at the presidency while Oprah can find that much by cleaning the change out of her couch.

Quel horreur!

Maybe Johnny will have to hit up his wife, Cindy, for some cash if he can get away from calling her names not usually used by husbands who expect to stay married very long. And it will mean that the neo-fascist and racist cash cows of the Republican Party and the up-and-coming Karl Roves and Lee Atwaters (including Karl Rove?) they have under contract will have their Willie Horton/Swift Boat ads answered within one news cycle.

That Obama sure plays dirty. He won’t even let the ultra-rich far right and the Natzionalistiche Republicanische Partei scuttle his candidacy. Damn! Not fair!

I actually believe that the public air waves are public in consequence of which broadcasters must provide free coverage of political events and free political advertising. I also believe that all elections must be totally, publicly financed. But I feel about Obama’s decision on public financing much the way I felt about the execution of John Wayne Gacey: I think that capital punishment is wrong but for him, I’ll make an exception. I’m willing to give Obama a pass on this one.

Ultimately, Obama is correct. The current public financing system is broken. The allegedly unconnected interest groups like the Swift Boat Veterans in 2004 can be set up quickly, financed anonymously by one or more rich neo-fascists and skew the results of an election. Obama has shown the ability to raise huge amounts of money, most of it in relatively small donations, and is not going to allow himself to be hamstrung by the party of wealth. In fact, one can argue that Obama’s fundraising has been more democratic, more populist than any Republican’s since, quite possibly, Ulysses Grant.

But I was struck by an interesting but of serendipity. On the same day, June 19, 2008, that Obama announced that he would forego public financing of his campaign two hedge fund managers from Bear-Stearns were arrested for bilking investors out of millions. The most important term in that sentence is hedge fund. The Investopedia defines a hedge fund as “a mutual fund for the super rich”.

And your point is?

That no one who’s bilked a family out of its savings and home with an unaffordable mortgage is going to jail. The big mortgage companies that were constructing mortgage applications out of whole cloth and pixie dust are still in business. But two guys who lied to millionaires and cost them a few percent of their trust funds are headed for jail.

Mathew Tannin and Ralph Cioffi probably each deserve a cell in Attica, preferably each will have a huge cellmate who hasn’t seen a woman in about 15 years and won’t be seeing one anytime soon. They have committed crimes for which they should pay but their arrests demonstrate that money matters. Those who bilk the rich are headed for court. Those who bilk the poor and middle class get a pass once they insinuate that the families they cheated should have been aware that they were being cheated. That’s the blame-the-victim argument just as surely as is “if she didn’t want to be raped she shouldn’t have worn a sexy outfit". But the mortgage companies’ attempts to blame the victim aren’t the only similarity between their actions and rape.

The case of the Bear-Stearns managers and Barak Obama’s refusal of Federal matching funds for the presidential election likewise are similar. They are flip sides of the same issue: money matters. Those who have money get what they want whether it’s the presidency of the United States or the arrest of the con men who cheated them. The rest of us can go suck wind. In the case of the Bear-Stearns hedge fund managers we have all the trappings of the sacrifice that will distract everyone from the real criminals amongst us. In the case of Barak Obama we have the first indicator that those of us who truly want change and a more just America will once again have our hearts broken. Unfortunately a broken heart is not anywhere near as lethal as the bloodsucking that we’d get from continuing the neo-fascists in power.

Continued Vilification: McCllellan vs. the Army on the Potomac

2008-06-20T18:42:00.000-07:00

It all goes to credibility, doesn’t it?

I’m no defender of Scott McClellan as you can read in the post below. He continues to defend Dubya as a good man, an evaluation that holds less water than a sieve. He also continues to defend the right wing despite the bankruptcy of their ideology that our experience of our national decline and whose inner corruption he himself has now brought to light. He has also not adequately explained why the outright lies and defamations he fed to the press in his daily briefings shouldn’t damage his credibility now. Yet I believe Scott McClellan’s current account of his time in the White House despite the man himself. My reason for this belief in spite of my suspicions is that the people speaking out against him are even viler than he is.

It’s not quite an “enemy-of-my-enemy” situation as much as it is that I can’t help noting the viciousness of the neo-fascist attacks on McClellan must mean something. Those attacks are bitter, vile and continuing…and loud. It’s as if the whole neo-fascist right-wing were sticking its collective fingers in its ears and shouting, “La-la-la-la-la-la! I can’t hear you! And neither can anyone else.”

Yes, McClellan was chief liar-for-hire at the White House before Dubya hired the even more odious Tony Snow, but the array of voices set against him only makes him more, not less credible. The neo-fascists who are trying to drown out some level of truth in McClellan and his book by protesting so disproportionately much are making him more, not less credible.

The mole rats are calling Scott McClellan ugly. That doesn’t make him the handsomest man on earth but it does rub a little of the tarnish that he spent many years acquiring off of him. I’m not sure whether the shine we’re beginning to see is gold or brass but it’s certainly cleaner and more worthy than any of his critics.

Says it all, doesn't it!

2008-06-17T14:16:00.001-07:00

Generally I like to rant on about topics that interest me but a friend sent me the following link that is hilarious largely because it's so dead on. People, except in West Virginia, it appears, have learned to use euphemisms so that their ignorance and bigotry won't be glaringly visible. Yet strip away the linguistic acrobatics and this is what you get:

http://www.imvotingrepublican.com

Failing On Her Own: Hillary Out

2008-06-08T14:04:00.000-07:00

Ultimately Hillary Rodham Clinton didn’t deserve to be President. She has the fortitude and experience and the energy for the job. She even started out with a good deal of respect but it was exactly that respect that she forfeited as the primary campaign progressed. She proved herself willing to say and do anything to win which, in turn, proved the suspicion that I and others had about both her and Bill: that everything, without exception, is fungible in the interest of their own power. She couldn’t be trusted and squandered that considerable fund or respect all by herself.

A lot of women would like to believe that Hillary was done in by sexism. Hillary made that argument herself as she found her campaign foundering. There unquestionably was some sexism voiced in the media and amongst parts of the electorate. Yet Hillary proved in Pennsylvania, Indiana and West Virginia that racism trumps sexism every time. And Hillary exploited that racism when it suited her.

The most specious argument that she put forward during the campaign was that she won the primaries that mattered and Barak Obama carried the insignificant caucuses. She was trying to turn her own failing against her opponent. Hillary initially fell victim to her own publicity and her inherent hubris. She believed that she was the overwhelming front-runner for the Democratic nomination and that she should be. She bought into her own publicity and failed to organize effectively in the caucus states. In the meantime Obama, a community organizer from the get go, organized the pants (you should excuse the expression) off her.

In February when I went to my precinct caucus I was amazed to find that the Obama people had out organized Hillary’s campaign. There were nearly 3 times as many Obama supporters at the caucus as Hillary supporters. In fact there were more than 5 times as many Democrats of all stripes at those caucuses as there had been in 2004. There was no reason for the lopsidedness of the caucus attendance other than that Hillary hadn’t organized. If she had, she would be the presumptive Democratic nominee today and Obama would be a hopeful for the nod as vice-president.

And before some mourning Hillary supporter calls me out on it, there is no sexism in calling her Hillary. Go back and look at her campaign literature and signs. She styled herself as Hillary and then had the temerity to foster the nonsense that it was sexist to call her what she called herself. If she’d wanted to be called Ms. Clinton, Sen. Clinton or Hillary Rodham Clinton she should have put that on her bumper stickers.

Despite the protestations of Clinton pit-bull, Harold Ickes, Hillary was not deprived of anything that she won fairly by the Democratic Rules Committee. The whole rules fight was an embarrassing attempt to change the rules that she’d whole-heartedly endorsed last fall. She was losing and so she reversed her earlier position and tried to re-roll the dice in her own favor. I will not dwell on the resemblance of that tactic to her sudden conversion to Iraq War opposition. Suffice it to say that this attempt only further cemented my inability to trust her. Hillary has issues that she’s long supported but no core principle that isn’t for sale if the price is an increase in personal power.

I started out this campaign supporting Bill Richardson. I still think that he would have been a fine president but his campaign never grew legs. But early on I was impressed by Obama’s oratory. I was then impressed with his good humor and coolness under pressure and, finally, by his intelligence. Yet above all I was impressed by his consistent instinct to take the high road in competing with Hillary. I’d been won over to Obama well before Bill Richardson left the presidential race.

By contrast, Hillary never failed to take the low road. She whined about the order of questions to her and insisted that she was the candidate of “good, hard-working white people”. She even blurted out the revealing remark about Robert Kennedy’s assassination.

I am a Democrat. There is no Republican for whom I would vote and no Democrat for whom I would not vote. Joe Lieberman is a special case. He’s a Republican in everything but name. I kept telling people right to the end that I would vote for the nominee of the Democratic Convention regardless of who that might be. Even Mike Gravel would have been infinitely better for the nation than any Republican. Yet as the primary campaign ground on to the final showdown between Obama and Hillary I found myself getting edgier and edgier whenever I considered Hillary as the nominee. I all goes back to 1996 when Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform bill. I didn’t care who cleaned his pipes, how or where but I would have impeached him for signing that bill. I was left impressed with his abilities as a politician but appalled by his willingness to toss the poor of our nation overboard in the interests of his reelection campaign. Hillary constantly proved that ambition trumping principle was not solely Bill’s problem in the Clinton family.

No Hillary shouldn’t have won this race and, thank heavens, didn’t. She should not be on the ticket with Obama either. Hillary has had her time in the sun. She can go back to the Senate and do as Ted Kennedy has done by making herself an important voice for good in the nation. She might even make a good appointment to the Supreme Court. But she doesn’t and shouldn’t move into higher office. Worse yet, were Hillary to become vice-president Obama would be saddled with two vice-presidents, Bill included, one over whom he would have some control and a second, unofficial VP over whom he’d have no control whatever unless he had Bill spirited off to Guantanamo Bay in the wee hours of next January 21^st. Consider the problems that Hillary’s campaign had with Bill’s logorrhea and he ostensibly was trying to help her.

At the end of the day, Hillary Rodham Clinton did herself in regardless of what diehard supporters would like to believe. Those grieving for her ambitions are weeping over a suicide and not a murder victim.

Untruth In Advertising I

2008-06-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

You’ve seen them, those Visa Check Card commercials. The whole world is an harmonious, well-oiled machine. Everything is running in sync with the music, varying from Raymond Scott’s Powerhouse or Ary Barroso’s Aquarela do Brasil to Danny Elfman’s Breakfast Machine from PeeWee’s Big Adventure, until someone pulls out…

a) cash
b) a check
c) something else that most people actually have.

The consequence of this implicitly anti-social act is that the music slows and stops, things fall from the sky, disasters ensue until someone with a Visa Check Card comes along and sets the world to rights again. The music swells, and everything resumes moving harmoniously.

I’m going to gloss over the paradigm implicit in those commercials of regimentation and conformity, a society that cannot run smoothly if it admits of any individuality at all and go straight to the point that we all knew from the beginning: they’re a load of crap.

A day ago I was in a local grocery store. As is my wont, I found the shortest checkout line. There was a mother and daughter team who had a huge, combined grocery order that ultimately totaled $486.77. The cashier was moving the order right along so I unloaded the dozen or so things from my cart and awaited my turn to pay.

I could almost hear Powerhouse playing as the items went over the scanner. The $486.77 total came up on the register and mom pulled out her Visa card. She wanted to use it as a debit card.

First there were problems in running the card through the machine. It didn’t read. It wasn’t swiped in the correct sequence. The third time was the charm or, rather, the curse. The transaction was rejected.

It seems that mom’s card didn’t process transactions of more than $200 all at once. What? What would have happened if she were buying furniture? But we hadn’t figured that one out yet. Oh, well. Mine not to reason why. Mine just to stand and wait. So the manager was called over, the transaction voided and there was a second try. Still no good. Another transaction voided. Both the cashier and manager were giving me apologetic looks. I was actually enjoying the process and mentally working on this blog entry. Well, next they broke the transaction up into a pair of $200 and $286.77 pieces. The $200 was good. The $286.77 didn’t make it. Again a transaction voided.

Now they broke the $286.77 into two pieces of $200 and $86.77. The second $200 went through as a charge rather than a debit once the attempt to do it as a debit resulted in voiding another transaction. The $86.77 didn’t go through. She was now over limit. Well, that’s o.k. Just write a check. The check processes as insufficient funds. As if that hadn’t been obvious already when the last debit failed.

By that time my milk was past its “sell by” date.

As the mom and daughter began sorting out things that they could do without to reduce the bill to $400, the manager took me to another register and arranged for me to get a $3 credit for being so patient and good humored about it.

Let me be clear that I have great sympathy for that mom. We’ve all been there. The card is rejected. The check bounces. We forgot our wallet or don’t have enough cash in it. We knew our balance but underestimated the cost of the things in our cart. It’s an embarrassing moment that we don’t wish on anyone and I certainly wish that the mom preceding me through that checkout line could have been spared that torture. Still, the next time you see one of those Visa commercials, think of that mom and don’t be conned into thinking that you need a Visa Check Card. You’re an individual person, not a cog and the only machine for which that card provides the grease is Visa itself.

Finally, you’ll notice that this is the first installment of “Untruth in Advertising”. I have a feeling that it’s going to be a very long series.

1968 II: The Day Hope Died

2008-06-06T16:40:00.000-07:00

In high school we’d had local radio stations in the Waterbury, Connecticut area sponsor students in Junior Achievement. I’d worked for a couple of them, call letters that, I believe, are now long gone: WATR, WBRY. The last was WOWW. “Radio WOW! 1340 (AM) on your radio dial. Red Carpet Radio in Naugatuck, Connecticut.” I worked there during my senior year in high school and was invited to stay during the summer of 1967 and back for the summer of 1968.

I was scheduled to work in the afternoons each weekday and on Sunday mornings. On the morning of June 5^th my mother knocked on my bedroom door and announced that Robert Kennedy had been shot. It was hard to believe. After Martin Luther King, Jr. to have an assassination of another major American leader seemed impossible. That began a deathwatch that lasted until June 6^th, 40 years ago today.

I went to work and spent far more time than ever before running back and forth to the AP news printer. This murder did not affect me as deeply as had Dr. King’s. I think that I was a little numb after April 4^th. And I was not as invested in Robert Kennedy as I had been in Dr. King.

I couldn’t support Hubert Humphrey despite his long and strong record of support for Liberal causes. He was, just as John McCain is today, tied, nay, shackled to the, wrong, insane, pointless Vietnam War. I did support Eugene McCarthy but had little hope that he’d be elected. Though I viewed Robert Kennedy as an opportunist and Johnny Come-Lately to the race, I was convinced that he was the one Democrat who could take the party nomination and rally the country to its better, more hopeful nature. The Kennedy name and power, the residual good will from his murdered brother could overcome the stark divisions in the country and lead America into a positive direction.

It was already clear that George Romney of Michigan was not going to get the Republican nomination and the ultra-right wingers who’d managed to nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964 were not going to allow Nelson Rockefeller of New York to win the nomination either. James Rhodes of Ohio, the man who would later order his National Guard to murder student protesters at Kent State University, hadn’t killed enough people yet to gain any real chops with the neo-fascist Republicans. It was already clear that the Republicans would nominate the psychologically unstable, blindly ambitious, pathological liar and criminal Richard M. Nixon. He was, in a very real sense, the essence of the Republican Party and “the new Nixon” (really a repackaged old Nixon) would run again for President.

Had Robert Kennedy lived to contest the general election, we would have had a second Nixon versus Kennedy contest resulting in a Kennedy win, this time by a far wider margin. In that sense, Robert Kennedy had to be killed lest he keep the Republicans out of power for 16 straight years.

I am not a conspiracy theorist but I believe that the elections of Reagan, Poppy and Dubya Bush are the culmination of insidious action by the neo-fascist underbelly of America for whom assassination would be a tool rather than a horror.

I kept running to the AP printer until the afternoon of June 6, 1968 when the bulletin came that Robert Kennedy was dead. I went back to my disc jockey’s console and pulled down the record I’d had beside me for 24 hours. I put on the last cut on the original cast recording of Camelot and out came Richard Burton’s sonorous voice reciting Alan Jay Lerner’s poetry:

Each evening from December to December,
Before you slip to sleep upon your cot,
Think back on all the tales that you remember,
Of Camelot.

Ask each person if he’s heard the story,
And tell it loud and clear if he has not,
How once there was a fleeting wisp of glory,
Called Camelot.

…………………

Don’t let it be forgot,
That once there was a spot,
For one, brief, shining moment,
That was known as Camelot.

At the end of the cut the chorus swells for those last 2 lines. I took the turntable out of gear and let the record slow down trailing off to nothing.

The Kennedy loyalists tried feebly to rally his delegates behind George McGovern of South Dakota but that came to nothing. It was over: the dream of Camelot, hope for America. The dark night of Nixon’s rule and our long slide to the neo-fascism of today would soon be upon us but there was another horror to come before that horrible year descended to Nixon’s election.

In August, I’ll write more about Chicago.

Scott Free: McClellan vs. the Army on the Potomac

2008-05-29T19:39:00.000-07:00

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has written a book and the level of vilification from the Bush White House, neo-cons and other ultra-right wing loyalists has been swift and deafening. The gist of all the criticism from the neo-fascist propaganda mill from Ari Fleischer to the noisemakers at Fox and other ultra-right wing media is, "How dare he!" The amazing thing to me is that the response has been so swift and so rancorous the McClellan must, at long last, be telling the truth.

The criticism I've heard most frequently goes something like if Scott thought that something was wrong, why didn't he step up and say something at the time?

That question is what's known as a "gimme". McClellan saw what happened to Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame when Wilson reported honestly that there was nothing to one of the neo-fascists' rationales for the Iraq invasion. Looking at that and knowing how the Bush loyalists fetishized loyalty he had only two choices. He could resign in protest and probably be relegated to the same outer darkness that the neo-fascists are hustling him toward now or stay on and try to make money and connections that would support him should he eventually find himself in that outer darkness.

In some sense the choice he made is a quintessentially Republican one. He chose to stay on because he, even today, excuses Dubya and because staying was in his self-interest. Self-interest ahead of nation, community and law is the ultimate Republican characteristic. Thus, asking why McClellan stayed is both foolish and self-evident. For hitman, Karl Rove, to pose that question is deliciously ironic and reveals two more essential characteristics of Dubya’s neo-fascist crew and Republicans in general: they know neither shame or irony.

One of the other questions frequently asked is, “Why now?” Why did McClellan put his account of Administration machinations and perfidy out now? That too is obvious. It’s an election year. This year his book is likely to sell better than in any other year. Again, self-interest trumps everything. Still, being a little less cynical, I think that Scott McClellan, like several former denizens of this Administration like Colin Powell and George Tenet before him, knows that this crew of war criminals and civil rights violators is going to be called to account as soon as they are out of the White House and regardless of the raft of pardons that Dubya, like Poppy before him, is going to issue on his way out the door. McClellan is jockeying for position. He’s a relatively little fish. If he suddenly develops or counterfeits a moral compass the coming storm is likely to break lightly on his head.

In 1980 Cyrus Vance who’d differed with Jimmy Carter over the disastrous Iranian hostage rescue mission allowed the mission to fail and then had the decency to resign once his reservations had proved all too prescient. But Vance was a Democrat a bit less steeped in total self-interest than Republicans. McClellan, like his Republican cronies, talks a good game when it comes to morality, personal responsibility and shared values but doesn’t stand up until it’s too late for the nation and profitable for himself.

To be a true Republican of this time it seems to me that one must have steeped one’s self in Ayn Rand’s pernicious screeds Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. The wildly misnamed Objectivism contends that nothing matters but the individual and what that individual deigns to grant to others and society as a whole. Indeed life is characterized by the struggle of the individual against society. In truth it is extreme subjectivism and a close, even incestuous, cousin of fascism. Scott McClellan hasn’t had a change of heart; rather he’s decided that his bread is buttered on a different side. Still, that he’s being more truthful today than he was while he was one of Republican minions is to be celebrated but much in the way that one thanks a match seller for turning in an arsonist he before sets another fire. While we congratulate him for his current honesty we should remember that had he found a spine in 2004 we would have been spared some of the depredations of the last three and a half years of neo-fascist rule.

Rights at the Wrong Time: Bad timing from the California Supreme Court

2008-05-15T16:22:00.000-07:00

First, though it's going to seem a bit hollow, I have long supported gay rights. I've had gay and lesbian friends since I was in high school more than 40 years ago. All the hoopla over rights for blacks, women, gays, etc. in fact is something of a continuing shock to me because it seems to me obvious that we all should have those "unalienable rights" of which Thomas Jefferson wrote. We are all human beings (though I have doubts about Dick and Lynn Cheney, Pat and Bay Buchanan and am quite sure that Ann Coulter is not) and by virtue of that fact we all inherently have those rights regardless of our color, ethnicity or whom we love. That said, I am more than a little ambivalent about the decision of the California Supreme Court today (May 15, 2008) declaring California laws banning same-sex marriages illegal.

I would, however, have no ambivalence whatever had this same decision come down on, say, November 10, 2008. The Supreme Court's decision is obviously and unquestionably correct. But this decision in our largest and most populous state is only going to electrify the bigots and loonies during an election campaign. The effect is likely to be that we will spend more time talking about same-sex marriage than we will about the criminally prosecuted war in Iraq or the decimation of the American economy by the neo-fascist ideologues of the Republican Party.

This past Tuesday we were treated to interviews with older white voters in West Virginia making clear that their bigotries had survived unchanged since the 1950s. They offered a raft of false excuses and outright racist statements for rejecting Barack Obama's candidacy. Their bigotries reveal the dark, noisome depths of American ignorance, fear and hatred that the Republican Party has mined so effectively for the last 60 plus years. The Republican prescription for winning elections has been to fragment and intimidate the electorate. They exploit the fears of black and white, young and old, rich and poor, gay and straight bringing those ephemeral and foolish issues to the fore so that we never have to consider why the United States alone amongst the industrial nations of the world deny our citizens health care, adequate housing and decent pensions.

Ultimately the California Supreme Court's decision was long overdue. It was correct. The dissent that would have it that the decision violates the separation of powers is, prima facie, absurd and an abdication of judicial responsibility. If it is not for the Supreme Court to rule on the Constitutionality of a law, what is the Supreme Court for? I am glad that my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters now can legally marry in California as well as Massachusetts. Still, had I had my druthers I would have allowed the injustice to continue for another 6 months so that we could have a presidential election without scum from Focus on the Family and other bigots energized by this decision. I'm not proud of that position but I must own it mine.

Part and Parsing: Why Antonin Scalia must be impeached.

2008-05-08T20:15:00.000-07:00

In neo-fascist circles, Antonin Scalia is what passes for a major intellectual. I refuse to call him "Justice" Scalia because justice and Antonin Scalia don't belong in the same sentence. Like most ultra-right wing pseudo-intellectuals Scalia is well read but nothing that he's read penetrates the denser-than-a-black-hole certainty of his ideology. Mr. Scalia in interviews with Lesley Stahl and with the BBC has insisted that torture is not "cruel and unusual punishment". That terminology comes from, among other places, the 8th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution which reads in its entirety, "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

Mr. Scalia, being a "strict constructionist" and all, he obviously knows the language of the 8th Amendment. Since Mr. Scalia claims to be a legal scholar he obviously also knows the history that culminates in the 8th Amendment. He knows that it derives from the English Bill of Rights of 1689. He knows that the English Bill of Rights stems from nearly 400 years of almost constant civil war in England going back to the reign of Edward II. In those wars winners used such punishments as impaling their live opponents on stakes or drawing and quartering. Burning and beheading were also favorite forms of punishment. Of course, often as preparation for trial, what modern attorneys call the "discovery process", came torture, usually in forms that make water boarding look positively benign. Mr. Scalia's scholarship certainly includes reading in the history that led to the language of the 8th Amendment. Which is, of course, exactly the point. Mr. Scalia can read the history, read the records of the public debate leading to the 8th Amendment, read the entire history of the law's interpretation by our courts and have none of it penetrate his impenetrably black ideological certainty.

I do think that I understand Mr. Scalia's specious logic. I think he must be relying on a definition of punishment that beggars Bill Clinton's parsing of the word is. I believe that Mr. Scalia has convinced himself that punishment is something that follows adjudication. Since the people that we are and have been torturing over these last 7 years have not had an adjudication of their guilt or innocence, the torture is not, in Mr. Scalia's view, punishment per se. It may be cruel. It may be unusual, but absent an adjudication it cannot be punishment in the ideologocally benighted mind of Antonin Scalia.

In typical neo-fascist fashion, Mr. Scalia insists that what is sauce for the liberal goose can't even come close to the ultra-rightist gander. The Constitution which, as a "strict constructionist", Mr. Scalia believes does not enshrine a right to privacy does clearly enshrine a right to torture. He maintains this ideologically insane position despite the reading that clearly informs him that the right to privacy was of paramount concern to the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights while torture was anathema to them.

Mr. Scalia lacks what is losely referred to as a "judicial temperament". His refusal to recuse himself from the deliberations in Cheney v. USDC for the District of Columbia shows that his ideology and friendships override his legal judgment when it suits him just as did his vote in Bush v. Gore. But now he has gone beyond the pale. He has shown himself willing to embrace the kind of "judicial activism" (albeit from the far right) and "moral relativism" so decried by his fellow neo-fascists. Once more we see that the people most apt to wrap themselves in the flag are those with the least respect for the Constitution that flag represents.

I would hope that my fellow Democrats and anyone with even modest respect for our Constitution, for civil and human rights would stop the nonsensical pursuit of a bill of impeachment against Dubya and Cheney and put that energy into a bill of impeachment against Antonin Scalia who is a clear and present danger to the U. S. Constitution.

An Oxymoron from a Nazi and a Moron: No good words for Benedict XVI

2008-04-18T15:07:00.000-07:00

On April 19, 2005 then Cardinal Ratzinger delivered a homily to which Our Fearless Leader, Dubya, saw fit to refer in his introduction of now Pope Ratzinger...er Benedict XVI at the White House last Tuesday, April 18, 2008. In that homily the Cardinal stated, "Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and “swept along by every wind of teaching”, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires."

One of the most serious faults of reasoning is allowing some conman with an agenda to set the terms of a debate. "Clear faith" hasn't anything to do with fundamentalism. The Cardinal, now Pope knows as much. He's a well educated and knowledgeable man whose faith, I presume, is "clear". Like most people of "clear faith" Josef Ratzinger has found that faith and reason have come to him together. Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive.

Fundamentalism, however, is exactly the antithesis of Josef Ratzinger's path. It insists on blind faith, not clarity. Fundamentalism insists that reason is faith's enemy, that mindless acceptance of absurd literalism is the true path of belief, and that questioning the Bible and the teachings of your church or preacher is heresy. (And, yes, I too have an agenda about which I’m being far more honest than Benedict XVI.)

So let’s continue to parse the Cardinal/Pope’s homily. Relativism is “letting oneself be tossed and ‘swept along by every wind of teaching’….” in Ratzinger’s phrase but is it? I am an atheist who comes by his lack of faith through a solid grounding in the teachings of the Methodist Church and life-long inquiry into religion. I consider myself relativistic but in a different form than that which Joseph Ratzinger seeks to define. As the starkest example of which I can think, let’s consider abortion.

According to the Catholic Church and certainly in the view of Benedict XVI, life begins at the moment of conception. In that moment an act of god has occurred. I think that the Pope and I could agree that in that moment there are the stirrings of the great mystery of life and that something sublime is occurring but we would be talking of very different things. What to the Pope is an act of god is, to me, an act, sweaty, gasping, straining and delightful, of two people carrying out a biological imperative and the entirely random, haphazard serendipity of male and female cells meeting.

So where does relativism enter the picture? In our attitudes to the results of those stirrings of the great mystery of life.

For about three week of initial development the fertilized egg remains a mass of largely undifferentiated cells. Only in the eighth week does that mass of cells begin to resemble anything like a human baby. And even then the organs are undeveloped and there’s no possibility that the fetus could exist outside the mother’s body. Only after about 12 weeks is the fetus sufficiently formed to be viable outside the mother’s body. Therefore, I don’t think that there is anything “relativist” about acknowledging that the fertilized egg up to the 12^th week of pregnancy is entirely a function of the mother’s body. Yet Catholic dogma says otherwise. The dogma here relies on blind faith rather than “clear faith”.

Absurdly, the Roman Catholic Church opposes all methods of birth control. Catholic dogma insists that methods of birth control whether physical or chemical interfere with “god’s plan” as if any god had the time to determine a plan for pregnancy in every copulating couple. I personally have some squeamishness about abortion. I think it far better to reduce or eliminate the risk of pregnancy before the fact than after yet the Roman Catholic Church and certainly Pope Benedict XVI will not hear of birth control as a means for reducing the need for abortion.

Similarly the Catholic Church preaches against a “morning after pill”. The fertilized egg hasn’t even attached itself to the uterine wall to begin developing into a fetus but chemically preventing that attachment is anathema to Benedict XVI. Thus Roman Catholicism places itself in an absurd and self-defeating straight-jacket. Preventing pregnancy is a violation of “god’s will” and abortion is too. Again blind faith paints the Catholic Church into a corner into which “clear faith” wouldn’t have allowed it to go.

But the most troubling aspect of this fundamentalist blind faith is the attitude toward the living. Steeped in the dogma of sin abortion is impermissible even if the life or health of the mother hangs in the balance. The reasoning appears to be that the baby is innocent of all but “original sin“ (a pretty dodgy concept in itself) while the mother is ipso facto a sinner. Therefore, preserving the baby’s life is preferable to that of the mother. Is it any wonder that some have seen a gross anti-feminine bias in this dogma?

So it’s “relativism” to see that a woman might have other children if this fetus that threatens her life were aborted and, therefore, save her. It’s relativism to weigh the two lives and find in favor of the woman rather than the baby. If that’s relativism then so be it. I will proudly wear the mantle of relativist.

And, yet again, comes the con that relativism has “has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires." Josef Ratzinger did not become a cardinal or pope without setting his own ego and desires ahead of everything else. To fail to see that this pot is calling all the other kettles black is utter absurdity. I’m sure that he would tell you that he was elected by the holy spirit moving amongst his colleagues rather than by careful pruning of the College of Cardinals throughout most of the last 3 papacies, ruthless attacks on all liberal interpretations of Catholicism and incessant politicking with his colleagues. Convenient how the holy spirit is so in tune with Josef Ratzinger’s ambitions, isn’t it? But the biggest con of all is the characterization of relativism as a dictatorship. One has to expect that one’s audience is willing to jettison all rational thought to accept that oxymoron. Relativism, also known as empiricism, by definition, looks at the circumstances of a given situation and tries to find the least hurtful or most accurate resolution to the situation. It is fundamentalism and dogma that impose an immutable will on the world and all circumstances admitting of no other choice but that dictated by its hidebound inflexibility. It’s dogma that insists that the mother must carry to term a child of rape, incest or one whose continued development jeopardizes her own life, not relativism.

Pope Benedict XVI has taken some pains to distance himself from his past as a member of the Hitlerjugend. What he’s not done is reject the inflexibility of his Nazi past. Certainly he may visit a synagogue or confer with some Imams but Benedict XVI, like Cardinal Ratzinger and young Josef Ratzinger before him believes in a totalitarian dictatorship of his version of Catholicism. In that sense he has merely exchanged Hitler for Roman Catholic dogma. That Dubya should give lip service to the Cardinal’s oxymoron is both typical and blatantly dishonest. For Dubya and his mal-administration to condemn “relativism” when they have parsed the meaning of torture in ways that make Bill Clinton’s parsing of “is” look inconsequential. For a man who insists that his government does not torture people to attack relativism while his top advisors manage the very torture he denies is beyond despicable. But then again, Dubya is probably too “incurious” to realize that he’s contradicting himself. I wonder what Pope Benedict’s excuse is?

So?

2008-04-07T03:27:00.000-07:00

So?

So!

It’s just too perfect. When asked about polls that show that 80% of Americans don’t support the neo-fascist, colonial war in Iraq Dick Cheney answered “So?” This is the man who was at great pains to con the American people into believing that the will of the majority required an end to the recounting of votes in Florida in 2000, the man who tries to sell the idea that our invasion and occupation of Iraq was justified at every turn, the man who spouts his support of “democracy” everywhere in the world but in America who now, conveniently, thinks that the opinion of his constituents matters not at all.

And when asked about the toll this war is taking on our servicemen and women, Cheney’s similarly unfeeling answer was, “They enlisted.”

When Marie Antoinette asked a courtier why the Parisians were rioting in the streets she was told the people had no bread. Her reply, “Let them eat cake,” has become a proverbial statement of the insensitive stupidity of the ruling class. Yet in Marie Antoinette’s defense we must say that the word traditionally translated as “cake” probably more accurately meant “rolls” and in her removal from the plight of her subjects she was so uninformed that she could not conceive of a world in which rolls or cake could not instantly substitute for a temporary dearth of bread.

Cheney, however, unlike the Queen of France, knows the situation and doesn’t give a damn. He doesn’t care that young Americans are dying daily to increase the value of his holdings in Halliburton. And he certainly hasn’t the least use for democracy except as a convenient cover for the imperialism that he favors.

They enlisted.

That remark is of a piece with Donald Rumsfeld’s rationalization that, “As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time,” to explain why the military in Iraq was inadequately equipped. Like the neo-cons’ contempt for actual democracy even as they bandy the word about at every opportunity, Cheney believes in tossing out the phrase “support our troops” while doing nothing to actually support them.

Cheney’s interview with Martha Raddatz confirms that he is probably the highest ranking sociopath in this Administration if not in any American Administration since Aaron Burr.

Any number of my friends and fellow Democrats insist that both Cheney and Dubya must be impeached. It’s far too late for that now but they and their partners in crimes, Con-yo' Sleeza, Rumsfeld, Gonzales and Wolfowitz, should be remanded to the International Court of Justice in The Hague for their war crimes if only to establish that no American, regardless of how thoroughly convinced of his unassailability, is above the law. Cheney would probably plead that his alleged heart condition precludes his imprisonment, that dragging him off to the cell of Slobodan Milosovic as justice demands, would be tantamount to a death sentence.

So?

1968 I: The Day Our Conscience Died

2008-04-06T17:38:00.000-07:00

(I began writing this entry, after a long absence, on April 2^nd. Life often interferes with plans, even well-intentioned ones and so it did here. But also I must admit that returning to 1968 to give context Dr. King’s murder is, in many ways, as difficult as living through it was. It is a time that is vivid in memory as is the worst of nightmares. Looking back into the maw of evil in 1968 has taken longer than I thought.)

Last Friday was April 4, 2008. It is one of the saddest anniversaries in American history, the day that Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The anniversary of the day that the conscience of America, the voice of what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” was murdered at the hands of the racists and neo-fascists amongst us. Please don’t mistake any part of that statement as hyperbole. Dr. King was our conscience personified. That doesn’t deify Dr. King. A conscience may be imperfect but most certainly Dr. King called America to its best nature, to fulfill its promise and strive toward its dreams something impossible to say of most of our leaders since.

Let me set the scene for myself and for the nation for you in case you do not remember that time.

On April 4, 1968 I was 3 months short of my 19^th birthday. I was a freshman at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, a sleepy hamlet whose chief industry was the college about 10 miles from Utica. I was involved in theatre. That evening I had a rehearsal for a production of Georg Büchner’s play, Leonce and Lena. Hamilton still is a private college where Ivy League, particularly Princeton, wanna-bes go when they aren’t quite up to snuff for the more prestigious schools. Hamilton at that time was a men’s school only. The majority of my fellows in the student body of less than 900 were sons of wealth or better than comfortable means.

Most upper classmen were members of fraternities. We freshmen, however, all lived in a horrid cinderblock, prison-like dorm, Dunham. The noted architect, Edward Durrell Stone, designed the building at best on the cheap, at worst as revenge for some wrong done him in the past. It was a “U” shaped building opened toward the east. It was one of 3 Stone-designed buildings on campus in all of which I spent considerable time, which is why I have not the slightest grain of respect for him as an architect.

Apart from the blight of the Stone buildings, Hamilton College had a very beautiful campus, especially when it wasn’t buried in snow. Elihu Root, who’d been U. S. Secretary of War and State and was a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, had been born on the campus. His elderly daughter-in-law still lived across the street from the campus in The Glen House. Her home derived its name from the Root Glen, a piece of early 20^th Century landscape architecture as sublime as the Stone buildings were appalling. The Glen itself was a carefully planted “natural” space which had one patch of formal garden just behind the Glen House. Though the Glen was a beautiful delight, that small formal garden was a place of order and peace to one side of the studied rankness and riot of the Glen.

From the specifics of where I was, let me explain how it was.

The year 1968 is the pivot point on which turns American history from September, 1945 to the present. It is the most horrible year in my memory. In 1968 American neo-fascism cemented its position with murder and made the world in which we live today nearly inevitable.

Since World War II we’d given in to our fears: real fears of nuclear holocaust, imagined fears of communist subversion and general fears of a world utterly changed by war, economics and nationalism. We call it The McCarthy Era instead of the Eisenhower Administration and ignore that it might as well be called The Martin Dies Era, The Nixon-Hiss Era, The Apotheosis of J. Edgar Hoover or any one of dozens of other more apt names that don’t have the comforting sub-context of an alcoholic conman who was finally exposed, disgraced and dead; nothing more to worry about.

In 1960 enough of the old New Dealers and Left-wing patriots coalesced around John Kennedy to get him elected president and all too briefly turn the nation from its fears to its hopes and aspirations.

I am not going to do more than brush against conspiracy theories here. Suffice it to say that I don’t believe that all of the people responsible for the assassinations of the 1960s were ever caught or named or have ever paid for their crimes. But regardless of whether my belief is foolish or factual, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Allard K. Lowenstein, Fred Hampton and Robert F. Kennedy sought to turn us from fear toward hope, from resignation to aspiration. When it became clear that they would use power to focus America on its hopes and aspirations, they were murdered and the disciples of fear and resignation profited.

In 1968 if your hair were long enough to cover your ears, you had a beard or a moustache, didn’t wear the "correct" clothes or supported the “wrong” ideas the police could freely stop you without cause. Such detentions were as illegal then as they are today but the society was bent on keeping a lid on any variations from a comfortable norm. Conformity, rigid, debilitating and demeaning conformity, meant security to the many. Those who didn’t fit their rigid norms were treated as Muslims are since September 11, 2001 or Hispanic immigrants are and have been.

The vile Richard Nixon was again running for president spouting specious claptrap about a “secret plan to end the Vietnam War” to pander to the anti-war majority while developing a “Southern Strategy” meant to enfold the racists and other neo-fascists, who’d been allied with the Democrats since the Civil War, in the loving arms of the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan was governor of California, elected on a platform of fear and neo-fascism supported by the likes of Max Rafferty.

The fact was that the nation was in the grip of change, some growing pains if you will. Anyone who was dissatisfied with the status quo was a “commie”, a “subversive” or, regardless of name, someone to be crushed so that nothing might change. Like King Canute, the guardians of the norm were trying to hold back the tide. Unlike Canute, this alliance of wealth, business interests, old pro-fascists, America Firsters and rabid anti-communists had a bloodthirsty eagerness to use force to hold back the tide.

The National Review was the front organ for the more rabid Human Events. The Young Americans for Freedom was the front organization for the John Birch Society. It was a time that grew out of the McCarthy Era and made its progenitor look tame. Still it was not the top-down institutional neo-fascism that’s gripped America since January 20, 2001. In 1968 it was still societal and informal even if in both cases snarling hate for anything that challenged the entrenched norm was the order of the day.

After supper on the night of April 4, 1968, I went back to my depressing dorm room to ready myself for rehearsal. On my way out my suite-mate, Lenny Kornberg, was listening to the radio and told me that Dr. King had been shot. I went to rehearsal not knowing whether he was alive or dead but fearing the worst. By the time rehearsal ended for me some other cast members had brought the news that King was dead.

On returning from rehearsal, I went into my room and shut the door. I sat at my desk numb for I don’t know how long, certainly less than half an hour. I sat there only until the celebration began.

Out my open window I heard voices, then cheers and fireworks. Some of my classmates were having an impromptu celebration of Dr. King’s murder.

I couldn’t take it. I put on my coat, grabbed a flashlight and went out to the quiet and peace of the bench in the formal garden of the Root Glen. By the time I got there I was moving from fury at the scum celebrating in the Dunham courtyard to an overwhelming sadness for my country and my world. I sat on that bench and cried for more than half an hour.

The night had grown misty. I was cold. Eventually I was worn out. I went back to my dorm. The next day I heard and read about the rioting that had erupted. I resolved to place my hope in Eugene McCarthy though I’d be quite happy to have Bobby Kennedy as president too. I crawled into bed believing that there might still be hope that we could salvage America from the fear merchants.

I was wrong.

[P. S. (November 8, 2011) Not long ago a friend of mine mentioned that he'd read this entry. He asked me how many of my classmates were out celebrating Dr. King's murder that night. I told him that I did not know. It certainly was at least two and, from the cheering I heard rather more than three. Richard then made the point that a group of two or three or four racists was different from having a majority of my fellow students celebrating. On the surface he's correct but that is, I'm afraid, a parsing of the situation that is inaccurate as it is comforting. That anyone was out cheering a murder is pretty appalling. It's the same repulsion I felt at the dancing in the streets the night Osama bin Laden was killed. I'm not sorry that bin Laden is gone. He was a man of disgusting evil made worse by it's veneer of religiosity, much like Pat Robertson, Fred Phelps or Terry Jones. Personally, I'd be privately pleased if any of them were shot through the eye; however, I'm not about to dance in the streets should they be. What is worthy of note is that the college took no action against the celebrants. The incident didn't raise as much concern as fraternity vandalism.

What I would point out an illustrative incident that took place almost exactly two years later. By 1970 Hamilton College had undergone some changes. The coordinate women's college, Kirkland (since absorbed into Hamilton) opened in the autumn of 1968 bringing some civilization to the campus. The times and attitudes were slowly changing toward a consensus for personal liberty though the national slide into fascism was accelerating. We actually had significant numbers of students participating in efforts to keep military recruiters off the campus. On Thursday, April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon went on television to announce that his "secret plan to end the war in Vietnam" included, as all neo-fascist "peace plans" always do, expanding the war into Cambodia. The response from America's campuses was predictable and angry but largely non-violent. That opposition was most definitely growing. Over the weekend Republican President Nixon referred to the protesters as "thugs". On Monday, May 4, 1970, as the school year was winding toward its conclusion, the Ohio National guard under the direction of Republican Governor James Rhodes, murdered four students and wounded sixteen others. Ten days later the Mississippi State Police murdered two black students at Jackson State. Largely in response to the Kent State murders a national student strike gained momentum and reached the Hamilton Campus. A group of my fellow students, motivated by worries that the police and military were now shooting white students like themselves and seeing more of an opportunity for advancement than a way to express a real conviction, convened a meeting in the college chapel.

The student strike committee had commitments of cash for supporting strike activities and there were various resolutions on how to apply that cash to express the opposition of Hamilton and Kirkland students to Nixon's expansion of the war. Among the requests for money was one from the Black Student Union for a modest amount. I don't recall the amount exactly but don't think it was more than $250. The debate went on longer than for many more dubious requests we'd already approved. I rose to advocate for the allotment to the black student group. Another man rose to oppose it and said the we had no idea how "those people" would spend the money. I replied that his statement was the most racist comment of the many I'd heard during that debate. I was generally and loudly booed by hundreds of students for pointing out that they were actually racist and ended up shouting down the entire assembly. The black students did not get any money from the strike committee and no one ever got an accounting of how the white students spent what they'd reserved to themselves. The point is that Hamilton College's administration and its student body in the years from 1967 through 1971 tended toward an easy, passive racism of which the celebration of Dr. King's murder was a stand out example regardless of whether two or two hundred students were out that night setting off fireworks. Not everyone was racist. I knew many who were not. I also know that we were a distinct minority of the student body.]

Do You Know Santa Claus?

2007-12-26T22:31:00.000-08:00

It's been a while, hasn't it?

Computer problems. Other problems. Life sometimes intervenes to inhibit blogging though it really should be the other way around.

In any case, I have survived another Christmas Season. The enforced "joy" of this "most wonderful time of the year" is a little hard to take even when you have some reasons to be joyful. Christmas music is one of the harder things to take. It is ubiquitous. It is incessant. It is worse than elevator music in that many of the tunes are vicious ear-worms that eat away at your brain. Now, please don't misunderstand. I like some Christmas music. The minor key O, Little Town of Bethlehem, has an ominousness that makes it stand out amongst carols. My personal favorite is Good King Wenceslaus with its message of decency and generosity:

So, you Christian men be sure,

Wealth or rank possessing,

Which of you would bless the poor,

Shall himself find blessing.

I'm also partial to God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.

Among Christmas songs, there are 3 from the years of World War II that are special favorites. All speak of longing for something past and only tentatively possible in the future. The best known is, of course, Irving Berlin's White Christmas. In it the quiet, white world under its glistening blanket of snow is a dream of the past as it must have been for a lot of servicemen when it was written. Similarly, I'll Be Home For Christmas is filled with the ache of longing. Yet I find the most moving to be Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.

The song was introduced by Judy Garland in the 1944 film Meet Me In St. Louis. The song originates in 1943 and was so depressing that Garland demanded revisions. According to the Wikipedia entry, the song opened thus:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

It may be your last.

Next year we all may be living in the past.

and continued:

Faithful friends who were dear to us,

Will be near to us,

No more.

While those thoughts certainly were in the minds of many a person as the fourth year of war and second since America's entry into it concluded, they don't represent anything up-lifting. Hugh Martin, at Garland's urging changed the lyrics to a form only partially familiar today.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

Let your heart be light.

'Til next year our troubles will be out of sight.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

Make the Yuletide gay.

'Til next year our troubles will be miles away.

Here we are as in olden days,

Happy golden days

Of yore.

Faithful friends who are dear to us,

Gather near to us,

Once more.

Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow.

Until then we'll have to muddle through some how,

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Loss and a very conditional hope for the future suffuse the song and make it all the more poignant when we consider its historical context. The final injunction retains the feeling that one must sieze this opportunity for a merry little Christmas because there may not be another. I don't mean to be so sober and depressing, but it is an achingly beautiful song even in the more up-beat and familiar Frank Sinatra version. Still, to return to my original point, there are some Christmas songs that need to be quietly and permanently retired. The dogs barking Jingle Bells is certainly the one that only the person making royalties from its play could love but the Chipmunks Christmas song needs to be buried very deep right next to those barking dogs.

But enough of the cynicism! How was my Christmas? Not so bad.

My friend, Anna, and I shared Christmas dinner with her soon-to-be 91-year old mother at the assisted living facility where Emma Catherine lives. We had a very good institutional meal which was punctuated with the poor enunciation of one of the servers. You see, the meal offered a choice of roast beef or roast turkey or both. Probably because of the two kinds of meat there were two kinds of potatoes, baked and mashed. The woman serving the side dishes asked each personoming through the line, "Mashed or baked?" She didn't enunciate clearly, however, and tended to elide and run her words together. So I'd barely begun eating when I thought I heard her say, "Masterbate?" "No. She can't have said that," I thought. Then I heard it again. A moment or two of processing and I realized that she was saying, "Masht er bak'd" Anna had heard it the same way I had so we had to explain it to her mom, adding that it was a good thing that the server hadn't any comments about plucking the turkey.

But the sort of high point for me came on Saturday, the 22nd. I was working as a cashier in the local arts association's Christmas store. A couple came up to my register with their little girl who was probably about 4 or 5. While I was ringing up their purchases the girl asked me, "Do you know Santa Claus?"

"Yes. I know him a little."

"I'm kind of afraid of him."

"Well, you don't need to be. He's o. k. Besides, did you ever think that Santa might be a little afraid of you?"

It took a second or two but her face screwed up and she began to cry. I felt terrible. I said, "He might be afraid that you wouldn't like him." That got her thinking and the tears went away as quickly as they'd started. Her parents understood and I think she might have left a little less afraid of Santa Claus. I hope so.

In any case, as cynical as I am about the commercialization of this season and the enforced conviviality that gives us some license for viciousness for the other 46 weeks of the year I do know Santa Claus a little and wish you all "a merry little Christmas".