A Connecticut Yankee in Bellingham

Speaking Volumes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defining Terms - Religion vs. Religiosity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking The Prize

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oiling The Cogs of Cognitive Dissonance I

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

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

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

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

Another example?

How about Jamie Leigh Jones?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, Mr. Willlllllsson!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Code Talkers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s Not You; It’s Me.

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

His guilt or innocence is irrelevant.

His reception at home is irrelevant.

The complexity of the government’s motives is irrelevant.

It’s not about him. It’s about us.

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

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

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

Iran?

Yes, Iran. Possibly Iran

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Military Prisoner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reality (TV) Check

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

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

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

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

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

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

Backtracking Slightly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empathy Antipathy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say what?

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

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

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

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

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

An Epidemic of Swine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bon voyage.

But...

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

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

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

The Newspeak of Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georgie, We'll Hardly Miss You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reinhard Heydrich and Josef Goebbles, Israelis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now to deal with the title of this entry.

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

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

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

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

Christmas Wars and Televised Simony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck You, Milton Friedman!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fruitcakes I: Ayatollah Dobson and Christo-Fascism

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

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

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

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

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

Money Matters I: Pay Back’s a Bitch

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

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

How dare he!

How unfair!

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

Quel horreur!

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

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

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

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

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

And your point is?

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

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

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

Continued Vilification: McCllellan vs. the Army on the Potomac

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

It all goes to credibility, doesn’t it?

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

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

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

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

Says it all, doesn't it!

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

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

http://www.imvotingrepublican.com

Failing On Her Own: Hillary Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Untruth In Advertising I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1968 II: The Day Hope Died

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…………………

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

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

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

In August, I’ll write more about Chicago.