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.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
The Newspeak of Freedom
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.]
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.]
Monday, January 19, 2009
Georgie, We'll Hardly Miss You
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.
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.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Reinhard Heydrich and Josef Goebbles, Israelis
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.
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.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Christmas Wars and Televised Simony
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Fuck You, Milton Friedman!
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.
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.
Saturday, July 5, 2008
The Glorious Fourth: Some thoughts on Patriotism, Jingoism, Chauvinism, and genuine love of country.
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.
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.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Fruitcakes I: Ayatollah Dobson and Christo-Fascism
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
But to return to the most recent ex cathedra statements from Ayatollah Dobson, he has injected himself into the 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
Money Matters I: Pay Back’s a Bitch
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,
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
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
Continued Vilification: McCllellan vs. the Army on the Potomac
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.
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