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

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?

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

(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?

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".

Most Basic Responsibilities: Neo-Fascists with no concept of irony.

Yesterday America's most visible embarrassment, Dubya, the putative president, signed a continuing resolution to keep Federal departments funded. He used his weekly radio address to accuse the Congress of "failing to fulfill its most basic responsibility". This comes hot on the heels of his photo opportunity in support of the ill-conceived and vastly under-funded "No Child Left Behind Act" in which he informed those gathered to celebrate education that "Childrens do learn." It also follows by a week or so Dubya's outrage at the MoveOn "General Betrayus" advertisement.

In order to be one of the current crop of neo-fascists who style themselves as "Conservatives" one must have no shame and no sense of irony. The Republicans who were appalled at the MoveOn ad most vociferously were not terribly disturbed by the farrago of John McCain's black baby at the time of South Carolina's 2000 Republican Primary. They actively participated in an advertisement in 2004 that morphed decorated Vietnam Veteran Max Cleland into Osama bin Laden and actively supported or, at least never condemned, the Swift Boat Veterans scurrilous attack on John Kerry. And subsequently they have been utterly silent as their favorite drug addict, Rush Limbaugh, has attacked John Murtha. No shame and no sense of irony.

Dubya has to have no sense of irony or else he couldn't get through any given day. And, like his father and grandfather before him, he has no sense of shame. That gene has been bred out of the Bush family for a number of generations and carefully kept from creeping in through marriage.

But the accusation that Congress or anyone has failed in their most basic responsibilities has a special stench coming from Dubya's mouth. You see, on the same day that Dubya was castigating Congress - meaning Democrats - for being unable to pass vital legislation in the face of Republican opposition and his own veto threats the Topps Meat company was notifying the public that tons of hamburger from its plant were tainted with e. coli bacteria and unsafe to eat. What has that to do with failing to fulfill basic responsibilities, you ask? Well the Food and Drug Administration is an Executive Branch agency that oversees the purity of the things that go into our bodies. Leaving aside the issues of lax testing of drugs for the moment, during the last 26 years we have had an ever increasing number of instances of contaminated food. During that same 26 years under Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, the Republican Congresses of 1995 through 2006 and Dubya the FDA has had an ever shrinking budget. Sure we can throw away a trillion or two dollars on a unjustified war that has no foreseeable ending but meat inspectors...they're one example of "big government" and "unnecessary regulation" and "interference in the private sector". Surely meat inspectors aren't necessary since the food industry can adequately police itself, right?

No.

A century ago we had an unregulated meat packing industry that Upton Sinclair exposed in The Jungle. The wholesale violation of sanitary conditions was such an outrage that that notable lefty and closet communist, Theodore Roosevelt, with the support of a Republican Congress passed legislation to regulate an industry that was killing and sickening U. S. citizens at an alarming rate. But that was a century ago. Surely the blind pursuit of profit and negligence couldn't let it happen again!

Topps Meat is not "the canary in the coal mine". It is the latest example of a system that has been intentionally dismantled by ideologues no less criminally deluded than the Soviet planners who killed millions through forced collectivization in the 1920s and 1930s. It is of a piece with the appallingly inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina that more than 2 years later has not properly housed thousands of families. It is of a piece with sending men into battle without proper equipment. It is of a piece with sitting in a Florida classroom inactive while fanatical ideologues flew airliners into buildings. It is of a piece with all of the Republican's other failures to fulfill their most basic responsibilities to protect the people of this nation. It is also of a piece with the actions of this group of neo-fascist ideologues in violating their oaths to "protect and defend the Constitution of these United States" by suspending habeus corpus, spying on American citizens without cause or warrant and other extra-legal measures.

Dubya hasn't any right to outrage over anyone's advertising and certainly hasn't any right to accuse anyone or any institution of failing to live up to their responsibilities. Without either a sense of shame or a sense of irony he will continue to to make such statements. Those of us ashamed of his shamelessness and understanding of the irony in his statements can only hope that enough of the electorate will understand and also be ashamed so that we can have a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress to begin undoing the damage.

Bellingham Moments I: The Art of the Deal

The other day I had a quintessentially Bellingham Moment. I had ridden my bicycle to the Public Market. It's a lovely place with a food market full of organic, free-trade and - sometimes - too airy-fairy, too flaky for words goods as well as the home of a group of wonderful small, locally owned restaurants. I had some business with the owner so I did that and went out to the bike rack to retrieve my bicycle.

There was a young woman, most likely in that 25 to 35 age demographic. She'd temporarily parked her bicycle there to take a call on her cell phone. She was all in a spandex biking outfit, black with red and yellow accents/reflectors that fit her like a glove. And she certainly had a glovely body entirely appropriate to spandex.

Like most people talking on cell phones she had no awareness of her voice volume. She was, in her own mind, alone with her phone conversation. Thus I would have had to have been deaf not to overhear her conversation. She was answering with a series of "yeses" and "I understands" and "umm-hmms" until she concluded the conversation with, "I understand. You need a quote on up-grading your coverage to an umbrella policy for 3 or 5 million. I'll get you that quote and call you back. You too. Good-bye."

With that she closed her cell phone. Took her bike from the rack, flashed me a sunny smile and rode off. I'm sure that her other bike is a Beemer.

Now I'm not about to say that this is an "only in Bellingham" moment. I'm sure that such things happen even more frequently around Stamford or Darien, Connecticut and in some sections of Los Angeles as well as elsewhere. But the organic grocer, the young woman bicycler in spandex and the 7-figure money amounts...that's a Bellingham moment if ever there was one.

Words. Words. Words. The Rhetoric: Troops

When I was a boy my mother spoke of "our boys" who'd fought in World War II or were fighting in Korea. When I was in my teens that terminology was still in common usage for the soldiers, sailors and airmen who'd been sent off on the foolish mission to subjugate Vietnam. If they weren't "our boys" they were soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines. They had some identity. Each was, at least a sailor, a Marine, a soldier. And when they came home broken in mind or body or for burial, there was an individual coffin, an individual loss. We saw those coffins. We saw the funerals, heard the buglers and the fired salutes. On television we even saw them fall.

Today we see no coffins. The horrors of war are little in evidence on the television. The buglers are on tape. The salutes go unfired. Even at their home bases the memorial services are collective rather than separate for each individual loss. And those "boys" are now simply wrapped up in the impersonal plural of "troops". I've even heard those who should know better use the plural, collective noun "troop" to refer to a single person.

Proverbially we are what we eat. I would suggest that most people think what they hear and speak as they think. Or don't think more likely.

It is in the interest of those who perpetrated this obscene, unjustified war in Iraq that we not see the consequences of their hubris and blunders. It is also in the interest of these same war criminals that we think of the human beings whose murder they abet of impersonal, faceless troops rather than individual soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines and certainly never consider them as "our boys".

Unfortunately for Dubya and his fellow neo-fascists who have perpetrated the crime that is the Iraq War, too many troops have gone to the Middle Eastern desert for too long. Too many have come home in pieces for the impersonalization to retain its initial force. As the hollowness of their rhetorical ploys has become as apparent as the open graves into which more and more are laid, Dubya's popularity has plummeted. More people than the neo-fascists thought understand that the rhetoric about "cut and run", "stay the course" and "timetables for surrender" really mean, "We don't care that your child or loved one may die or be maimed as long as we can claim to have remained strong. None of our children stand in harms way so we can safely persist in a policy that never made sense in the first place." Then they can hop into their limousines bedecked with a magnetic "Support Our Troops" yellow ribbon without any pangs over the horrid irony.

We know from countless television and movie crime dramas that murderers, particularly the psychopaths, impersonalize their victims. They refuse to name them individually. I would suggest that Dubya and his co-conspirators are murderers and entirely psychopathic but then did we really need to analyze their rhetoric to understand that?.

Alfred Hitchcock, Future Christian Homemakers and Galaxy Quest

The Paradigm of the Compassionate Conservative

The cable Television channel, AMC, is currently running an Alfred Hitchcock series that picks up with his films for Universal from Vertigo on through his last, Family Plot. Some women friends have watched some of the movies and come away appalled at the Barbie Doll-like quality of Hitchcock's female leads from this period. They were bothered by the helplessness and passivity of Kim Novak in Vertigo and Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Indeed, those women aren't exactly the perfect examples of women from the period. They are the suspense movie versions of Doris Day in those gawdawful Rock Hudson romatic comedies like Pillow Talk. They are also why, when I was a boy, I instinctively preferred Judy Holiday to Doris Day. But I was also probably reacting to the fact that I never saw any women who were, paradoxically (oxymoronically?) as coldly sensual. Not that I didn't look. They just didn't exist in real life. Not only that but they were a recent male fantasy invention. In fact, none of the women who played those roles were actually like that in real life. Nor had they been like that before World War II ended.

The role of the cold woman, repressed sexually, passive, subservient was a specific image born, I think, innocently enough in the fantasies of men away at war and transmitted into the movie scripts that those men directed and wrote. Consider the most famous female icon of the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe. She was sexy, anything but cold and repressed and not taken seriously at all by anyone but Arthur Miller. Not until her last major movie, that incredible confluence of Miller, John Houston, Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift in The Misfits (revealing title, no?), did she get a serious role. But compare Kim Novak and Eva Marie Saint who always had serious roles as the unattainable ideal woman.

This Stepford Wife paradigm was entirely a fiction superbly illustrated by comparing the private and public lives of that television icon of the glamorous homemaker, Loretta Young. Most people who lived it knew that the fictional image and the reality were greatly at odds. In fairly short order the blond ice queen we see in Tippi Hedren became a parody of itself that was supplanted by far more earthy women like Sophia Loren and Melina Mercouri. They were totally eclipsed by even more earthy women like Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Jane Fonda and Sally Kellerman.

It seems to me that the middle aged and older women behind the idiocy of Future Christian Homemakers is that, much as Dan Quayle couldn't distinguish between real women and the fictional Murphy Brown, they can't distinguish between the fictional image of a non-existent woman and the reality. Those women, as I did, grew up with those television and movie images and seem incapable of understanding that the Doris Days and Tippi Hedrens on screen were never real. In similar fashion Ronald Reagan famously couldn't distinguish between the movies he was in and actual events of World War II thinking that he'd actually been in combat when he'd never been even close.

The most superb satire of Star Trek is a delightful movie with a magnificent cast called Galaxy Quest. In the movie the cast of a long-cancelled sci-fi television series, Galaxy Quest, is grudgingly earning a living by doing fan conventions and the occasional big box store opening. Their leader, Tim Allen doing a parody of William Shatner that is only exceeded by the parodies that Shatner does of himself, is approached by a group of weird people who call themselves Thermians for help as the great commander of the Galaxy Quest starship. Since these weirdos fit right in with the run-of-the-mill fans Allen agrees to help them and find himself in command of an actual starship. You see the Thermians have been recieving the old Galaxy Quest television shows and, being excessively, nay, terminally literal, they view them as "historic documents" of the exploits of the great starship commander. I recommend the movie as a very good time and would suggest that the women behind Future Christian Homemakers are Thermians.

On September 10, 2007 the Los Angeles Times reported on a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. New York University and UCLA jointly carried out the study. The researchers identified students who had a range of political views ranging from "very liberal" to "very conservative". They were then put to a test which required the students to distinguish between the letter "M" and "W" when they appeared on a computer monitor. The researchers measured activity in the anterior cingulate cortex of the brain, the area that analyzes conflicts between that which we expect to see and that actually seen. The data revealed that those who described their views a liberal were 4.9 times as likely to show brain activity (that's 490%) than those who described themselves a conservative. Liberals were 2.2 times (that's 220%) more likely to score higher in accuracy.

The researchers concluded that, in general, liberals would be more accepting of new ideas in areas such as social values, science and religion. Perhaps they would also be better equipped to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Still it's rather horrible that girls or anyone will have to suffer for the mental failings of their right-wing lunatic elders.

Female Frontal Lobal Mutilation: It's all part of god's maniacal plan.

A very dear friend sent me a link the other night to the most frightening thing I’ve seen since the movie Jesus Camp. The link was to the web site of – I am not making this up – Future Christian Homemakers™ - whose subtitle is “Teaching Girls To Become Successful Homemakers”. As one might expect the predominant colors of the site are white, green and a pink that any Mary Kay sales executive would be proud of. The mission statement of this organization dedicated to turning perfectly normal girls into Stepford Wives reads as follows:

“Future Christian Homemakers teaches girls how to become successful homemakers.

We believe that a successful homemaker is a Godly woman equipped with the Biblical knowledge and practical skills to manage her home well. The Bible is God's word instructing us how to live now, and for eternity. A woman will find true joy and success in her life when she lives according to God's word.

Along with Biblical knowledge, women need to know how to cook, sew, and keep their home. This instruction should begin at a young age in the home. Future Christian Homemakers seeks to provide materials to help girls learn these skills at home, or through groups in churches, homeschool co-ops, or other settings.

Future Christian Homemakers encourages women to teach the younger women to love their husbands, love their children, and be "keepers at home." Titus 2:3-5 We have much to learn from each other, whatever our age! FCH helps women share their knowledge and skills with the next generation and build strong Christian families.”

Of course, after first being appalled by the very concept it occurred to me that there’s a great deal of absurdity here. Can’t you see the Home Ec class:

Sister Faith: And we will now read from the Gospel according to Betty Crocker, Chapter 14, verses 4 through 10.

And, Lo. It was revealed unto me that first thou shalt preheat thy oven to the temperature of three hundred and seventy-five degrees, for this is the temperature that the Lord hath ordained, that thy oven may bake for thee as is meet and right. Thou shalt, as thy oven heateth, take thy sticks of butter unto three quarters of a pound, no more and no less, and soften it according to the laws of our fathers with thy spatula for it is better to cream thy butter than to leave it whole. And when thou hast thy butter creamed thou must add to it a measure of two cups of the sweetener men know as sugar. And the Lord hath ordained that thou must cream it now also until the mixture is, as the Lord saith, fluffy. And unto that fluffiness of butter and sugar thou shalt beat in 2 eggs (for the Lord careth not for the unborn chicken) and but half a cup’s measure of molasses. And when thou hast created a good and fitting batter, thou shalt lay aside thy beater and arm thyself with thy sifter and sift together with one another in good fellowship four cup measures of fine flour and two teaspoons’ measures each of baking soda and the powder of cinnamon, of cloves and of ginger. And into thy batter shalt thou mix these dry siftings little by little with strong and measured beating until thou hast a soft dough. And so saith the Lord, thou shalt break off a piece of dough and roll it between thy hands into a ball that is nigh unto one inch in diameter. Thou shouldst then flatten thy ball of dough placing each on thy cookie sheet which thou hast heretofore coated with grease as is pleasing unto the Lord leaving a finger’s span between each piece. And the Lord said place thou thy cookie sheet in thy preheated oven and leave it there for twelve to fifteen minutes of the clock for in this way has the Lord ordained that thou shouldst make thy ginger snap cookies.

Satire is always a great way to emphasize the absurdity of a con like “Christian Homemaking” but it begs the larger question of why are these self-professed CHRISTIANS so interested in promoting a traditional, subservient model of womanhood. Tradition is not, in itself, a bad thing but so why does this emphasis on tradition seem so perverse?

I am an atheist. I do not accept the idea of a big, imaginary friend in the sky especially since to do so, in my estimation, requires ignoring obvious empirical facts that no amount of faith or belief can overcome. But I must say that I admire many people who do not share my complete skepticism. I was brought up in the Christian tradition and found in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth a prescription for how to behave in the world whose keynotes are love and forgiveness. Yet it seems to me that those CHRISTIANS who express their shallow religiosity through the fundamentalism espoused in the site at hand live by fear and hate, very un-Christian vales indeed.

We are not facing a tradition here. We are not facing a necessary building block of human society. We are facing fear of change and intolerance of diversity which is self-denying. The women who provide this web site and its teachings can’t possibly be the silent, compliant “keepers at home” that the writer posing as St. Paul demands they be.Who do they admire? Ann Coulter? Bay Buchanan? Lynn Cheney? Phyllis Schlafly? Are these the example of “keepers at home” that they present to the girls that they would subjugate?

What we have here is the fundamentalist CHRISTIAN intellectual equivalent of female circumcision. When one reads accounts of women who have been subjected to that barbarity in every instance the account says that the children are led to the place and time of their mutilation by their mothers, aunts and or grandmothers. These elder women dutifully subject their own children to a horror that they too must vividly remember. I don’t know what goes through their minds as they subject a girl to pain and a bizarre ceremony but we know that they are willingly complicit in the mutilation because they have been brainwashed into believing that their traditions and faith require it.

We understand that an unwarranted disfigurement of a child is the result of brainwashing and barbarity. I suggest that the intellectual brainwashing and barbarity of Future Christian Homemakers™ is no less disfiguring, no less an attempt to brainwash and no less a barbarity.

A General Betrayal and why MoveOn was right on.

In the weeks leading up to the appearance of Gen. David Patraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker we were treated to the same kind of hype that the I-Phone got before its release at the end of June. Like the I-Phone the General and the Ambassador turned out to be a lot less than we'd been led to believe, need a hefty discount to encourage people to buy what they were selling and proved to have a single source for their communications. Ultimately the MoveOn.org "Betray Us" ad proved to be a great distraction for the neo-fascists starting with that pillar of reason and decency Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and including but not limited to Sen. John (I'll say anything you want if you'll just elect me president) McCain. Though I agree with the ad I think that it was ill-advised because it gave the neo-fascists an excuse to talk about anything but this grossly mismanaged war, Patreus' sycophancy and the fact that the promised draw down of troops is really just smoke and mirrors. It also allowed the neo-fascists to tar, swift-boat, sling-mud-at MoveOn.org in preparation for the 2008 election campaign during which they will undoubtedly use MoveOn.org in exactly the same way that Poppy Bush and Lee Atwater used "card-carrying member of the ACLU" against Michael Dukakis 20 years ago.

Gen. Patraeus pulled the Ollie North stunt of appearing in uniform with all the fruit salad he could fit on his chest in evidence as if that made him an honest man. It doesn't. We heard much about his doctorate from Princeton as if education, persistence and a sufficient level of intelligence to carry off the defense of a thesis meant that he wasn't an ass-kissing suck-up with a permanent pucker. It doesn't. I don't dispute that the General has put his life on the line for this nation. I admire his courage and service in the military but do service and courage automatically mean that every word out of his mouth is honest or even, despite protestations to the contrary, his own? They do not. All of that hype is simply an effort to muddle the minds of people who don't often think all that clearly by mixing unrelated facets of the General's character and pretending that those disjunct facts prove that pigs do fly.

I spent nearly 14 years working for the Federal government in the civilian bureaucracy. I did not work for the military but the agency for which I worked was modeled closely on the military as is, indeed, all bureaucracy. One does not rise in the ranks, civilian or military, without a good, stout pucker, forceful inhaling, a tongue that goes anywhere its sent and callused knees. Gen. Patraeus wouldn't have those 4 stars were he not possessed of those attributes. We have only to look at his September 26, 2004 Washington Post op-ed piece to understand that the General knows on which side his butt is K-Y'ed.

Do you have any idea how many levels of review a piece like that op-ed from a government employee would have had to have passed through before appearing in print? Given that he is a general officer, at a minimum that op-ed had to have the personal approval of then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. More likely, and just like the General's Congressional testimony, it was written in whole or in part by the White House no matter what the General proclaims under oath.

Gen. Patraeus saw how Colin Powell got promoted and extolled for his subservience to Poppy Bush. We also know that, despite his efforts at backpeddling ever since leaving the Cabinet, Powell marched up to the United Nations and smeared lipstick all over the WMD pig in an effort to justify an unjustifiable war. Patraeus, almost certainly figures that he too will find himself invited into some lucrative corporate directorships once he passes the Iraq quagmire to the next would-be member of the Joint Suck-ups of Staff. There is far more of selfish sycophancy than selfless service in Patraeus' plea that he be allowed to have more of the men and women under his command killed and maimed for the greater glory of Dubya, Cheney and Halliburton.

As for Ambassador Crocker, his experience in the region is unquestionable. His integrity when it comes to his current job and his future prospects is just as fungible as the General's. Both men delivered the testimony that they were/will be paid to deliver.

I mentioned the Ollie North-ness of Gen. Patraeus' appearance before Congress which brings up his also mentioned oath. Both Col. North and, I believe, Gen. Patraeus are a bit confused about their oaths of office. North's overwhelming commitment to fascism led him to think that his oath to support and defend the Constitution of these United States meant he'd sworn an oath to Ronald Reagan. It didn't then and doesn't now. By undermining the duly enacted laws of this country Oliver North betrayed his oath and his country. He may have carried out the orders he was given but by doing so he acted as a traitor and should have been prosecuted as such. Gen. Patraeus has similarly confused his oath to the Constitution and before the House and Senate Committees with loyalty to his Commander in Chief and in doing so has betrayed his oath to support and defend our Constitution and perjured himself before Congress. So, though I think that the ad in the New York Times was ill-advised I also think that it was both accurate and prescient.