GAMIN

Mosque Mess

2010-08-18T18:03:00.005-04:00

The President was correct in his initial remarks in support of the mosque in New York near the site of the trade center. He was equally right when later he appeared to weaken that initial statement. Our nation is now almost violently bifurcated, partly along party lines and partly along racial lines. In his initial statement in support of the mosque's location he was simply reaffirming his faith in our American mythology of equality under the law and absolute freedom of religion. The far right immediately jumped on the opportunity to criticize the President and get in a few digs at him and all democrats. This criticism was immediately met with equally vociferous argument in support for his position.

Then when the President appeared to be softening his original stance on the issue, again the far right jumped in to denounce him for waffling and many democrats also felt that he had at least partially pulled back from his original support. Both groups are completely wrong and looking at the issue from too narrow a perspective. This issue is not about scoring political points. It's about maintaining out democratic ideals.

The President seems to be the only person who sees that he must maintain a calm position as a counter weight to the intense emotions that govern reactions of most everybody else. We need to deal rationally with this problem and the President's latest remarks show that he is thinking like a President, seeing the need to tone down national rhetoric so that we can resolve the problem without further widening the chasm between Americans. In other words, he is thinking like a President. How fully aware he was of the hit he was going to take, I cannot know, but I believe that he knows that a President has to look beyond parochial concerns to larger national interests. In this case, that larger national interest is to foster social and political peace and stability, not aggravate already contentious relations. That is the job of a President. I think this President is filling that role well, taking a punch when necessary but maintaining a calm demeanor and hold a steady course.

History, I think, will show that Obama, abused as was Abraham Lincoln before him, has the self-assurance and inner strength to lead this nation through an equally trying period of our history.

A RIGHT TO ANGER

2008-03-19T06:34:00.002-04:00

Blacks have a right to be angry at the treatment they have received in America. That is an important message in Barack Obama's speech yesterday. Brought here in chains to work the white man's plantations, even when finally freed from legal slavery, they suffered personal, economic, and social discrimination not much less bitter than their former condition of servitude. For those reasons Black anger and hostility is understandable and, admit it or not, fully legitimate. The Reverend has a right to be bitter and angry, and his rant is legitimate and fully justified by his experience in America. This a bitter pill, but one we need to swallow.

This is the way Obama put it, "But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."

White America needs to accept the legitimacy of Black anger, for without this acceptance, racial peace will not be achieved. It is no longer sufficient to demand that Blacks meekly accept a reduced place in American culture; we have passed beyond a point where that is a functional respsonse to increasingly complex economic and social reality. Clearly, we need to function more efficiently, both socially and economically, if we are to continue to prosper as a nation. Racial conflict is antithetical to efficiency. Hence, if we face this Black anger, accept it, and work our way beyond anger to reconciliation, we will take a giant step toward efficient use of our human resources and an equally giant step toward the "more perfect union" that Obama and the founding fathers aspired to.

SHAKEDOWN

2007-10-18T09:50:00.000-04:00

Wanna know the real lowdown on the Larry Craig mess?

First, the legal angle:

It's a shake down obviously. Jurisdictions all over the country are using the police to shake down citizens for revenue. The last few years have brought constitutional revenue raising, that is, taxes into ill favor. In fact, taxes are the biggest bugaboo politicians use against each other to deny funds for common good issues, such as health, environment, or infrastructure repair and to blast their opponents. Yet at the same time that taxes are being denied or selectively reduced, more money is needed just to keep the nation functioning. Combine this refusal to raise taxes with an increased demand for expensive public services and it's not surprising that new schemes for raising money are coming into use.

In my county, an all out effort has been launched to increase the number of citations for violations punishable by a fine. More egregiously, the state now adds additional fees, sometimes up to $3500, to standard fines for traffic violations. Even worse, a county in an adjoining state sent a bevy of policemen to an elementary school to write tickets to students for jaywalking. The children, of course, would have to take the tickets home to their parents, who then would have to pay them. Watch to see if this nefarious practice catches hold!!

This kind of shakedown, I suspect, is what happened to Larry Craig in the men's room at the Minneapolis Airport. Many lawyers say that no crime was committed by Craig in that men's room. Still, most people caught in such a situation would willing pay the $500 fine just to keep everything quiet. I suspect this is just what Senator Craig did, too. At $500 a pop, that men's room was probably a little gold mine for the city of Minneapolis or the Airport Authority.

Frankly, I hope he can beat the rap. This has been an improper use of police power and we need to keep alert to wherever it occurs. If a jurisdiction needs more money, let it seek to raise the money through constitutional means, which is taxes. This gives citizens a voice in whether they're willing to put up the money or prefer to do without some services.

The hypocritical angle:

Larry Craig has been a consistent and long time foe of gays and anybody whose sexual behavior does not agree with what he considers proper. He helped generate an atmosphere of hostility and hatred for those who commit just such acts as he did. Now that attitude has caught up with him and he has to face the consequences of his bigotry. Being hoisted on his own petard is, I think, thoroughly just and appropriate punishment.

My conclusion:

1. Larry Craig should have all the charges against him dropped and his guilty plea to a misdemeanor wiped from the record.

2. Because of his hipocracy and the use of his Senate position to launch unjust attacks on a fairly large segment of the American population, he should give up his seat in the U. S. Senate immediately.

2007-09-11T07:29:00.000-04:00

It was impossible not to watch some of the House's session with General Petraeus. Little else was shown on the tube, if one excludes soap operas. It was quite a show, a circus, in fact. Poor dumb politicians stumbling over themselves to fawn over this contemporary icon and Bush's confederate.

General Petraeus, gaily bedighted with row upon row of ribbons descending from the left top of his chest to his belly button, and bangles and wings and ropes hanging from other parts of his torso, became a rock star for a few hours.

It was a pathetic performance. We all knew what would happen. Military officers don't become generals by expressing their true opinions, not even by displaying competence in military skills, but by sucking up to every other officer one grade higher than themselveds. If that other "officer" happens to be the Commander in Chief, the sucking reaches monumental proportions. That is what we saw yesterday.

It is all a part of Bush's pattern of using the military itself to justify maintaining high troop levels in Iraq. He knows that the generals on the ground will strain their guts to always do what the higher rank wants. The generals know that if they fail to tell the President what he wants to hear, that they'll be out of a job before sundown.

Thus when Bush "leaves" the decisions about troop levels to the generals, he guarantees that there will be no draw down in the foreseeable future.

ANOTHER HYPOCRITE BITES THE DUST!

2007-08-28T17:19:00.000-04:00

If you put yourself up as holier than other people, then you damn well better be. By setting high standards of behavior for other people, you correspondingly raise the standards they expect of you. There is no getting around that fact. High standards are fine, laudable in fact, but you must be prepared to meet at least the same standard of rectitude as you demand of others. If not, one slight mistake and your comeuppance is inevitable.

The justice in the case of Senator Craig is marvelously appropriate. He devoted his career to abusing gays and minorities, working to restrict their rights as citizens and growth as human beings. With his limited human values and oppersive cultural policy goals, he did all he could to build a cultural attitude of hatred for all who disagree with his neocon views. Now that very culture he helped generate turns against him. It is a satisfying fate to honest Americans. Live by the sword, die by the sword; live by bigotry, die by bigotry. Ironic and appropriate.

HANDICAPPING THE FAVORITES

2007-08-26T11:01:00.000-04:00

Who will win the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations? Assuming they won't all be knocked out in the preliminary rounds, I boldly handicap the leading contenders as of this date. Wish me luck!

DEMOCRATS

Clinton will hang in and take the lead. She is generally regarded as "safe" among about all groups of democrats. She may not be terribly exciting but she is establishment and stable. I suspect that's what most American voters want.

Obama will also hang in but not win. Potential voters are less certain about who he is and where he stands. They are not comfortable with their knowledge of what he would do under trying circumstances.

Edwards will fall by the wayside. Americans do not like poor people. Whether they're willing to admit it or not, there is among middle and upper classes in America a distinct dislike of poor people. You just have to watch people to see this contempt, really hatred, ooze out in their every face to face contact with poor people. Edwards, in making much of his poor background, unleashes this subterranean opposition. It will catch up to him and cost him the nomination.

REPUBLICANS

Giuliani will drop by the wayside among Republicans. When Americans look at Rudy Giuliani, they see the shadow of a New York ethnic thug. He looks the part, sounds the part, and some of his business dealings reflect the part. Most Americans simply will not be able to support such an image.

Romney, too, will fall aside. Too many Americans are too straitlaced fundamentalist to ever accept a member of a religious group as different as Mormonism from conventional or evangelical Christianity. His money will not buy him enough votes to get the nomination.

McCain has blown his chance. He was once truly a hero. He went through a lot in that Vietnam prision and conducted himself as a man of true character, strength, and courage. We all admire him for that. Unfortunately, he has abandoned that man and lost himself in a mad desire to be President. In that misdirected quest he aligned himself with George Bush and shadowed him like a dog during the 2006 Presidential election, accepting any abuse just to stay in the political spotlight. He has parroted the Bush line ever since. Hooking himself to the wrong star will cost him the nomination.

So who's left for the Republicans to nominate? I simply don't know. No other candidate looks like much of a prospect right now.

Warner Runs Again

2007-08-24T12:16:00.001-04:00

We now have an answer to the question as to whether John Warner will run again for Senator . The answer, I think, is yes. Yesterday he made what some claimed to be an earth shattering announcement that we should begin pulling troops out of Iraq by Christmas of this year.

Recall how he made that announcement: He lay the blame for the need to begin drawing down solely on the Iraqi government. Not a hint of criticism of the misguided and failed policies of the Bush administration. It's all the Iraqis' fault.

By couching his statement in this way, he expects to distance himself from the Bush policy without antagonizing Bush supporters in Virginia, whose numbers are legion. In short, he is attempting to appeal to both those who want us out of Iraq and those who want us to stay. This is an old tried and true Warner tactic.

I recall well during the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton that Warner straddled the issues then by voting for conviction on one charge and acquital on the other charge. I was watching the voting and as soon as Warner cast his second vote, I knew that he was positioning himself to run for Senator again. Clearly he was placing himself firmly on both sides of the impeachment issue, expecting to retain support from both those for and those against Clinton's impeachment.

Now, here he goes again, denying contamination by Bush and his Iraq policies on the one hand and with the other giving support to those who want the war over with. He's still catering to both sides on very important issues.

A Nod to William Carlos Williams

2007-05-26T17:07:00.000-04:00

So much depends
upon

a new minted
general

glazed with false
hope

beside the dead
grunts

The whole four year blunder in Iraq now rest solely upon the shoulders of General Petraeus. Whenever a question about the war pops us, the President and his minions immediately invoke Petraeus's name and the report he is expected to deliver in September. It has become an habitual way of kicking the Administration's dilemma down the road and closer to the next Administration to solve. Petraeus's name may sound like a Greek god, or at least hero, but he is merely a man. No doubt he is more than an averagely competent strategist, but the Administration has shifted the whole blame for success (whatever that is) or failure (almost certain) from itself to this hapless general. He is set up for failure and maybe to become the fall guy for George Bush and the neocons. Sad.

We can wish General Petraeus luck, at the same time realizing that more than luck is required. We need a miracle, but none is in the offing.

JUSTIFICATION VS REASON

2007-02-14T11:38:00.000-05:00

It's about time we began to question Bush's reasons for wanting to go to war with Iraq. When I say "reasons" I don't mean the same thing as "justification." The latter is a bureaucratic term and is not the same as reason or motive. Bureacrats justify actions on rational grounds by beginning with a premise, or series of premises, that are not necessarily germane to the conclusion they want, but which they claim make the desired conclusion valid. But we have to remember that if the premise(s) of our claim are wrong, then the more rigorous our logic, the more likely we are to err. If the premises are totally unrelated to our motives, then they will not reveal our motives. The Bush administration's insistence on claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was just such an invalid premise used to support, while concealing, the real motivations for attacking Iraq.

Way too many of us accepted Bush's premise that Iran had at least some kinds of weapons of mass destruction and its consequence that we had to destroy the Iraqi military to protect ourselves.

As it turned out, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and Bush almost certainly knew that, but still he continued ratcheting up his claim that we must attack Iraq to defend ourselves. As Bush's justifications for the war collapsed, instead of searching for an explanation as to why in spite of all he insisted on starting a war, opposition was devoted to refuting various and sundry claims also founded on premises unrelated to the real reasons for going to war. As with the original WMD claim, none of these new premises even touched the question of motives for starting a war.

Better had we directed attention to searching out Bush's motives than in refuting an invalid claim. But we didn't. The result has been more than three years of yaking that has accomplished nothing, either at home or in Iraq.

Why did Bush and his cronies insist on starting a war with Iraq? I don't know the answer, there are probably several, but I'm very suspicious that whatever his motives, they were not intended to be beneficial to the common good of Iraq or the United States. Results of the needless war show clearly that the administration's motives could not have been honorable, for whatever they were, they have produced only death, destruction, and waste .

Some of the administration's perverted motives that seem likely to me include:

Destruction of the U.S. treasure so that no funds would be available for common good efforts such as social security, education, or a nonconfiscatory health policy. Further, putting the U.S. heavily in debt to other nations would preclude development of common good programs for years ahead.

Few, if any, projects are as effective in eleminating a nation's wealth as war. Not only would a war squander our money quickly, it would make a handy tool for transferring that money into the coffers of a few large corporations.

Being engaged in an active war grants the President much greater power and discretion than he could claim under normal circumstances. We saw Bush exercise this increased power in spying on individuals, intercepting private telephone conversations, torturing prisoners, extraordinary renditions, and abolishing habaes corpus, to name the more egregious examples of his ursurpation of power.

Bush's totally intolerant and ignorant hillbilly Christianity strives for the destruction of competing beliefs.

In the weeks before the invasion of Iraq, Ariel Sharon came to the United States to meet with Bush almost every week. What were they discussing?Was Bush perhaps receiving instruction, or at least encouragement, to use American soldiers and American money to get rid of a feared Israeli
enemy?

PRESIDENTS PAST

2007-01-01T17:00:00.000-05:00

Gerald Ford was an adequate president and pretty much what we needed to help us settle down after Nixon's attempt at taking over the country. Most will let him rest in peace, and even feel gratitude and respect for him. Some, however, even among his own party, seem reluctant to acknowledge that he ever existed. Their farewells are belated, as if reluctantly offered. Notable among these is the current occupant of the White House.

Two words for Saddam Hussein: Good Riddance.

But we fool ourselves if we think we have punished Hussein for his crimes. Putting a person to death does not punish him or her. It merely thrust them into a nonexistence, not different from their nonexistence before birth. The only way to punish anyone is to torture them by inflicting either physical or psychcial pain while they are alive and conscious. In his nonexistence Saddam Hussein knows no pain, no pleasure, nothing. Moreover, he has lost nothing, because he has no memory. Light a light bulb, he is simply turned off.

ON FAITH

2006-03-05T10:25:00.000-05:00

We all need and seek to believe that there is value, meaning, and purpose in life, that our individual lives matter and are important in the scheme of things. The major purpose of religion is provide a way of attaining and holding this faith. Thus faith is the foundation of religion and the reason for its existence. That, I believe, is the answer to the meta question of why we have religions in the first place.

Because we have difficulty exercising pure faith free of an existential basis, historical facts and physical icons become important, if not necessary, to sustain faith. Most of us, being small minded, tend to confuse the icons with the reality we seek, which is faith. To develop and maintain this faith, we seek concrete, historical facts, and we will obtain these "facts" one way or another, either by construing history to suit our purposes, or by making up stories that provide the "facts" we require. In making what is actually a dishonest transition from need to fact, we put the stories we invent ahead of the faith that drives the need for them.

If faith is the primary objective and need, then a search for a historically true set of events establishing a particular religion is unnecessary. The stories of Jesus or Mohammed or Yahweh and questions of whether and how they lived or otherwise existed are not intrinsic to faith. Faith comes first. Faith is primary; stories are secondary. The doctrines of specific religions are examples of stories that support faith and to put the stories ahead of faith is to put the cart before the horse.

This common inversion of story and faith, I think, goes a long way in explaining the enormous conflict between adherents of different stories. We forget that stories are but a means to an end, a way of anchoring our faith, which is the same for all peoples, in something we can see and feel. If we could go back to the source of religious beliefs, to the basic need for faith in the value and meaning of life, we could remove much of the sectarian strife that now dominates human experience the world over.

We will not do it, of course. Human minds are too small and mean to allow such intellectual and spiritual development to take place.

NOVEMBER IS THE CRUELLEST MONTH . . .

2006-02-27T13:39:00.000-05:00

. . . breeding lies of saving medicare out of a confiscatory health policy, mixing fear and schizoid politics, stirring false hope out of a dead theology.

Will we ever learn? Political promises of a campaign, like the renewal promise of spring in Eliot's Waste Land, are but cruel jokes in the waste land we have become. Every year in America the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It is spoils to the victor and greed is always the victor. Worse, not content to lay waste to our nation, the fascist power elite forcefully export their destructive capitalism to other nations around the world.

Where will it end? Large corporations now have the political and economic power to confiscate resources throughout the world. Already in some places, even the rainwater is appropriated and desperate citizens charged for it. Will the world's population become become merely the property of corporate owned governments.

It sure looks that way.

THOUGHTS ON VIRTUAL REALITY

2006-02-04T07:04:00.000-05:00

We like to think of virtual reality as an experience made possible by the advent of modern electronic contrivances that permit us to experience events outside our immediate environment. Actually, we've lived and dealt with versions of virtual reality just about as long as mankind has been on earth. Like most human experiences, virtual reality is new only in its manifestations. It is a mode of experience that we've practiced since the emergence of consciousness.

Even Cavemen recognized a world beyond the physical, a world of imagination, evidenced by cave drawings and the imagination to look toward an afterlife and to devise tools for anticipated, that is to say, virtual hunting and defenses activities. Seeing a world not out there, or one projected into the future, or to imagine a hunt or battle not now taking place and, therefore, not based on immediate sensory perception, is to experience reality in a virtual manner.

We might even go so far as to say that all art is a form of virtual reality. If an artist paints what he sees, however that appearance may vary from everyday perception, he is drawing a reality nontheless and in sharing that perception leads us into a virtual world, too.

ANIMAL FARM REDUX

2005-12-21T10:00:00.000-05:00

It appears that we are revisiting George Orwell's Animal Farm. You will recall in this story, the farm animals revolt and take over the farm. At first everybody pitches in and d0 their best to make the farm work, but before long the pigs gain control and take over not only the farm, but the lives and activities of all the other animals as well. As time progresses, the pigs increase their control, move into the farm house, and began to take on the behaviors, dress, and appearance of the humans they had helped oust. Before the story ends, it becomes impossible to tell the difference between the pigs now running the farm and the humans from whom it had been wrested.

Take a look at what's happening now in our so-called war on terror. We are busily engaged in a needless war in Iraq, killing as many Iraqis, not to mention Americans, as we can, destroying their infrastructure, putting their people out of work, invading their homes and killing their children. In addition, we've adopted the imprisonment and interrogation techniques of terrorism, locking up anybody at will without an pretense of cause and without any recourse to due process, subjecting them to tortures that throughout our history we have abhorred and refused to practice. At home we subject our own people to endless surveillance and suspicion and pervert political principles that have served us so well for over 200 years from tools of freedom to tools of oppression.

All of this makes me think we've taken a wrong turn and ourselves become the enemy we initially set out to overcome. We are a terrorist nation now. All other countries quake at the thought of what we might do to them if they thwart our interests, or if they even question why we're doing all the horrible things we do.

BRYANT IN THE PARK (NOT)

2005-12-16T11:06:00.000-05:00

"To him who in the love of nature holds / Communion with her visible forms, she speaks / A various language; . . . ("Thanatopsis"). But to the perambulating patrons of the park where I walk my dog, she is often not heard at all. An unpleasantly large number of park walkers leave their dogs behind and bring their cell phones instead. It is amazing and offputting to see people who ostensibly go into the woods to escape the hubble and bubble of urban and suburban existence, oblivious to the trees and the birds and the sunshine around them, still clinging mindlessly to their cell phones and wrapped in conversation with some disembodied voice far away. Where is the present, the moment? What is the point of coming to the park but to leave behind the artificiality of our too electronic lives? After all, Nature is the missing reality to most of us. We spend our days in an environment were we walk from our concrete driveways, to concrete parking lots at the workplace, shopping center, theatre, school, church, or other place we visit, without once setting foot on the actual ground, the earth in which we have our sustenance. In paving over the surface of our planet we have obliterated an important part of the real world; by taking a cell phone or other electronic contrivance everywhere we go, we change the remaining fragments of that world to a soulless virtual reality.

What has happened to the poet in us?

GREEDY OL' PARTY

2005-11-29T19:29:00.000-05:00

Looks like the GOP's true colors are appearing now. How many more Republican crooks will be revealed over the next year? Hard to say, except the number will not be nearly enough. Most will escape, as they always do.

So the President is beginning a new blitz defending his Iraq policy (there is one??) and pushing his immigration agenda. Expect weeks of constant lies, misrepresentations, and denials as he criss-crosses the country on a whirlwind tour to make himself seem concerned with the well being of the nation.

COURSE MISNAMED

2005-11-09T11:25:00.000-05:00

The White House has misnamed the ethics class it wants its minions to take. Instead of a "refresher" course, it should be called "ethics 101"). One takes a refresher course to review material already learned but that has maybe become a little rusty. These birds in the White House have never heard of ethics, so they have to start from the beginning.

DELAY HUBRIS

2005-10-21T16:41:00.000-04:00

Another one on the way down. Tom Delay's response to charges of wrongdoing are exactly the opposite of what an innocent and good person would exhibit. When an honest and good person commits an error, he will immediately direct efforts at correcting the situation and do it openly and publicly. And, if the situation cannot be corrected, he will take steps to warn those who might be affected and attempt to ameliorate any bad consequences. Even if there is only an appearance of wrongdoing, an honest person will face the situation head on and work to ameliorate any effects harmful to others before defending himself.

This is far from Delay's response. Delay's response is not only to deny any wrongdoing, but to attack the person(s) who suspects wrong doing. His response is to arrogantly assert that they'll never get anything on him and his modus operandi is bravado. The more clever his denials, the more clearly he reveals his dishonesty. This is all very unbecoming to a person who claims to be a servant of the people. Only those as dishonest as Delay will fail to see through the ruse, or if seeing through it, regard it as an acceptable response.

Time wounds all heels and Delay's day is just around the corner. Hubris takes even a crook only so far. Remember Senator McCarthy. Put Delay in the public eye long enough and he'll be seen for what he is. Even his cronies will walk away when he becomes a liability.

ASSORTED THOUGHTS

2005-10-12T17:00:00.000-04:00

I fail to see what the radical right's objection to Harriet Miers can be. After all, she is a solid hill-billy Christian, holding firmly to that hate filled belief system that defaults to the fires of eternal Hell all except its own exclusive crowd. She also without question be expected to support the interests of business, corporations, and other money-grubbers, while disdaining civil rights for other people. So what is the right's fuss all about? What is the neo-fascists' complaint? They're getting what they want in a Supreme and if they're too stupid to realize it, then let them stew in their own juices until she is on the bench, where I predict she will demonstrate faithfulness to Bush's destructive agenda. After all, he's all she's got.

Stories of the recent police beating in New Orleans makes me wonder why it would take 3 policemen to subdue and old drunk man. My suspicion is that we have here another instance of police aggression gone amok. By its very nature police work selects for aggressive types who carry around in their personalities loads of unresolved hostility. This hostility is all too frequently vented in entirely inappropriate ways (as if there were appropriate ways). If you doubt what I say, just watch any policeman (or woman) and what you will discover is that their every day acts are loaded with unnecessary aggression. Watch the police on the highway crowding the center line or pushing up close behind; watch them in the parks and streets, always crowding, always asserting their presence, aways bullying the poor, the Black, or foreign looking. The aggression that civil people assiduously avoid in everyday life is the normal behavior of types who become police.

Too often the sort of aggression that cops universely exhibit is socially rewarded. Let one of them get hurt and all the papers extol them as heroes. What nonsense. Hells bells, cops voluntarily choose a life of violence and if violence catches up to them sometimes, its only what is to be expected. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

It's hard to avoid a bit of a smirk now learning that the subway panic in New York was all a hoax. I suspect this is not the first time Iraqis, and others, have played mind games with Americans. How much of the so-called intel that guantanamo prisoners have given to their interrogators was anything but a deliberate lie to set the dumb Americans off on a wild goose chase and leading us to spend tons and tons of taxpayer dollars in a prisoners' game of gottcha?

We rant about Islamic extremists as if they were the only extremist on earth. But, the fact is, we have just as many extremists in this country as in the Middle East. What else are all these hill-billy Christians? They're just as sick as the most fanatic Muslims, differing only in lacking the courage of their convictions. The whole world right now is formed into two large camps of fanatics engaged in a unholy religious war that grows larger and larger. Even within our own nation we are divided into religious camps with orthodox religion and science under unremitting attack by semi-literates determined to take us back to the 13th century.

It is far from clear which side will win this war. I fear that we are so over confident in the power of our big weapons, our bombs and tanks and warships, that we fail to realize that other fanatics, what we call terrorists, have equally powerful, if not more powerful, weapons. I think that although we've seen its power many times, we still do not appreciate the power of the suicide bomber as a weapon. We are too hyped up on our own machinery of war.

True, the suicide bomber is not really a new weapon, but the delivery system is beyond anything we can develop. Our most intelligent bombs and rockets, even if armed with nuclear weapons, are no match for the subtlety of the human mind that guides the suicide bomber. It more than levels the playing field. One needs only remember what 19 guys did on September 11, 2001. Not only did they destroy two huge buildings, symbols of western might and arrogance, but worse, they disrupted our economy for years, scared the daylights out of us, and forced us to direct huge portions of our national resources toward devising defensive measures against further attacks.

Given the power of our enemy and the stupidity of our efforts in countering them only with military power, I have great anxiety about the future of western civilization. Empires come and empires go because the barbarians have the benefit of righteous anger and superior weapons.

ALAS, POOR BROWNIE, I KNEW HIM, . . .

2005-09-19T15:05:00.000-04:00

Everybody, including my master, lays blame on Brownie for getting off slow (or not at all) in the early hours after Katrina. I think they're all wrong to see him so. Brownie knew full well Bush's gatekeeper mind. He had every reason to believe that Bush had no intention of wasting money and resources on a bunch of poor people down in New Orleans, especially since most of them were black. So, he held back, bided his time, before stepping in with token assistance. In his position, the perfectly logical thing to do.

Brownie didn't know, nor did anybody else, what a parade of pain and helplessness was to be broadcast day and night over national television for all the world to see and judge us by. No one anticipated that sluggishness in response would become the topic of endless midnight and daytime television commentary.

After a while all those pictures and all that talk began to take a toll on Bush's ratings. That was when he began to react, to expect and demand some response from Brownie and other administration types. When the ratings began to fall, Bush began to look for someone to blame. Ah, yes, good old Brownie, doing a heckuva job down in New Orleans, holding everything up, keeping the gates closed to those ragged, hungry, homeless poor.

What Brownie didn't know was that the loyalty Bush regarded so highly, was to him, not from him. He needed a scapegoat and poor Brownie was it. The foot dragging that Brownie felt would make Bush see him as a faithful servant, instead morphed into a clarion call for Brownie's head. And poor Brownie found himself hanging out to dry.

So, you see, poor Brownie is not to blame. He was just doing what the boss expected. That he probably could not have done the job anyway is irrelevant.

Much of the time we also confronted the agonized face of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, governor Kathleen Blanco, inept but pitying everybody's pain. Wonder what she's doing now. Heard the other day that she was rallying behind Bush and his wild claims that he loves all kinds of people and will do all kinds of good things for them.

Will there be recovery from this disaster? Sure. Some corporate CEOs will be able to trade in their 100-foot yachts for 150-foot yachts, but the poor will remain poor, but homeless. Who can make money rebuilding shantys?

REBUILDING NEW ORLEANS

2005-09-18T10:49:00.000-04:00

Since New Orleans is below sea level, any rebuilding is likely to just set the city up for another disaster no matter how the levees are reconstructed. The obvious need is to raise the city terrain above sea level. The problem is how to do that. Well, my poor dumb master can think and think and never find his own nose in front of his face. But, the solution is dirt simple and despite his obtuseness directly under his nose. I'll give it to you in a word--GARBAGE!

New York city, like many other cities across America, pay good money, not to mention shipping costs, to Virginia and maybe other states to accept and dispose of their garbage. My master tells me that a few years ago a barge loaded with New York garbage floated up and down the Atlantic coast for weeks trying to find a place to unload. Must have cost a fortune. My little mind immediately grabbed at this conceptual nugget and went to work.

Voila! New Orleans, here we come. We'll pay you to take our garbage. You'll get much needed landfill and we'll get cleaner cities. If you don't like the amount of money our cities put up, the federal government has promised all kinds of help for you, so they'll probably chip in to sweeten the pot. You could use that money, I'll wager. Surely Atlanta, Houston, St. Louis, and cities all across the land need a place to dump their garbage. Why not use this otherwise wasted material to build up New Orleans so that city can rise above sea level?

Looks like a win win situation to me, so don't anybody get uppity. Garbage is good stuff that's just been around a little while. Kinda like my master.

ANOTHER USELESS GESTURE

2005-09-14T08:16:00.000-04:00

In an effort to shore up his flagging popularity, President Bush announced that he is taking responsibility for the government's Katrina debacle. That is an uttlerly meaningless gesture. If it had any meaning, he wouldn't need to have let Brownie go. Nor would it have any meaning had it come earlier. It is simply another expression of his contempt for the American people. He thinks that meaningless phrases and useless trips will fool the stupid American people into believing that he is concerned for the well-being of the nation and doing his job as President.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. We are not that stupid. And as for his concern for the nation, that is as phony as anything can be. Bush has a gatekeeper mentality that seeks to horde all national wealth and resources for the use of his own kind, leaving the tens of millions of others to drift in and out of poverty and pain. Sharing America's bounty is that last thing this administration will tolerate. What we have in Washington now is a purely selfish gang of thugs, robbing and pillaging the American economy for the benefit of the few at the cost and suffering of the many.

SLOW SLOUGHING

2005-09-12T16:27:00.000-04:00

Tried watching a bit of Robert's senate confirmation hearing. Couldn't take much of it, though. One impression I got, admittedly faint, is that maybe
Roberts deserves to be confirmed just for sitting through and faking interest in all that self-serving bullshit the senators dished up.

Roberts wasn't too impressive either. Although I didn't hear all of his remarks, I did gather that he was faking it a bit, too. His speech smacked just a little too much of prior preparation. True, it was extemporaneous, as billed, but we have to remember that an extemporaneous speech can also be carefully prepared. It just has to be delivered without written notes.

I will try again on the morrow and see if the question and answer portion has any more meat.

A GATEKEEPER ADMINISTRATION

2005-09-09T14:55:00.000-04:00

From its inauguration, the modus operandi of the Bush Administration has been t0 preserve and protect civil and legal privileges, wealth, natural resources, and basic human rights for the exclusive use of elites. The millions of ordinary Americans who make up the population of the United States have been regarded as mere chattel fit only to be used. In every governmental policy executed, from the Black and Hispanic soldiers fighting the war in Iraq to the supercilious comments of Barbara Bush on the lives of the poor in New Orleans, the imprint of this attitude lies clearly exposed.

Why was FEMA and other government agencies so slow in responding to the disaster along the Gulf Coast? Because the aim of our government was not to serve the needs of people, but to guard the gates protecting the interests of itself and its corporate confederates. The deliberate aim was to hold off assistance, to stall as long as possible, and when finally forced to act, to allow only bare minimum resources to be made available that would appease the public. Money spent on the poor in Gulf states, especially on poor blacks, would, in a word be money wasted.

You will recall that the initial government response was a law and order response. The troops came in with loaded weapons pointed at innocent flood victims. Fortunately, the scheme failed. The media, in its own selfish motivation, bluntly revealed to the whole world not only the magnitude, but the puniness and inappropriateness of the response. Our government responded because it had to, or else lose all credibility and the the ability to retain the power its minions so eagerly covet.

Thus, do we see the sad effects of a government of gatekeepers. Our nation has fallen mightily. And we have seen only the first steps in the ultimate tragedy that Katrina initiated. Just wait until the corporations, the no-bid contracts, the special interest profiteers, the crooked politicians, and the whole range of swindlers set up shop. This time our government will be a facilitator and the gates to booty will be thrown wide open. It won't be a pretty picture.

IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT

2005-09-05T14:44:00.000-04:00

That's the refrain of the Bush administration by way of explanation for their bumbling approach to the tragedy in New Orleans and along the Gulf coast. As usual, their main efforts are directed toward shifting the blame for their incompetence onto somebody else. In this case, they're working overtime to lay the blame on state and local people.

Also revealed in stark reality by Homeland Security's obstructionists approach is that DHS's mission is to curtail civil liberties, not protect the American people.

Expect General Honore to be forced into retirement as soon after completing his assignment in New Orleans as can be effected without its being too obvious.

IRAQ, KATRINA, AND WINDFALL PROFITS

2005-08-31T09:21:00.000-04:00

Call to the mind's eye the devastation of Katrina in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, the destruction of lives, livelihoods, infrastructure, natural resources, transportation, wild and domestic animals, the economic costs of oil loss, and many other kinds of damage that I cannot name.

Estimates as of yesterday were that the costs of repairing the damage of Katrina is around $26 billion. That number may rise, if it has not already.

Now compare the damage along the Gulf Coast with the damage caused by Bush's war in Iraq. Not only is the infrastructure of Iraq destroyed, but its political, social, and belief systems are either destroyed or damaged beyond repair. American deaths there now approach 2,000 and the number of permanently maimed Americans is measured in the 10s of thousands. Probably a hundred thousand Iraqis have been killed or maimed, many of these children.

To put the costs of this war into perspective, note that the costs to American taxpayers for the debacle in Iraq is in the $100s of billions. Just the recent additional budgeting of $84 billion is more than three times the total estimated cost to repair the damage of Katrina. Talk about destructiveness! Katrina is a petulant child compared to the monster war. Just think of the constructive acts we could accomplish if the money spent on killing and destroying in Iraq could be devoted to repairing the damage of Katrina.

WINDFALL ALERT

President Bush says he is going to release oil from the strategic reserves to help restore the loss brought by Katrina. That is a good idea. I just hope the watchdogs who have access to information about this release will look out for and report the windfall profits that are almost certain to accrue to the big oil companies from this release. They need to look out for the price the oil companies are charged for the released oil and the price at which they sell it back to the American people. Remember the oil was originally purchased by the government at prices much ower than they are now. Watch for the oil companies to obtain the oil at those lower prices, or worse still, at no cost, and then sell it to American consumers at today's wildly inflated prices.

FAMILIAR RING

2005-08-30T19:37:00.000-04:00

Three times this week Bush has tried to defend the war in Iraq. Neither of them effective. Now he has come up with another reason(s) for continuing the war: we gotta protect Iraq from terrorists. Shades of protecting us from WMD. I suppose we can expect a whole series of explanations over the next few weeks.

Does he really think anybody but semi-literates will be impressed by his efforts to compare this stupid Iraq war with WWII? Such childish nonsense. Bush's war is a totally unnecessary war that he started for reasons having nothing to do with national security. World War II was a great war of liberation and one that we had to fight. Oh, well. Being but semi-literate himself and knowing nothing of our nation's history, we can't expect much more.

DUELING MOMS

2005-08-25T08:36:00.000-04:00

President Bush has now produced tearful moms to defend his failed war in Iraq. How juvenile can he get? The issue here is not who can trot out the most moms, but the unfairness and evil of any mom losing a son or daughter in a war that should not have occurred in the first place. If Bush had done right from the beginning, there would be no grieving moms or dead and maimed American soldiers to mourn.

The right thing to do now is to bring our troops home and stop killing them and innocent Iraqis. We can do this without any injury to ourselves or to the Iraqis. Stopping the violence and expense would, in fact, benefit all parties involved. Still, Bush claims that pulling out would weaken the United States. Just how that weakening would occur he doesn't explain. Clearly, this is just another self-serving assertion that he expects his simple minded followers to swallow without question.

CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES, UNITE . . .

2005-08-22T16:31:00.000-04:00

. . . We have nothing to lose but our chains to Iraq. We pulled out of Vietnam and the world didn't come to an end. In fact, Amerians were not hurt at all. We can also pull out of Iraq without the world coming to an end or Americans being hurt.

Bush would have us believe that unless we continue killing and being killed in Iraq that we will be undone as a nation and a people. Nonsense. "Staying the course" is so many buzz words. No harm will come to Americans if we pull out of Iraq now. To the contrary, only good will result.

Listening to George Bush plead to continue his war only contributes to his ego mania. He was wrong to lead us into this unprovoked and meaningless war, and it is wrong to continue it now.

THE PERILS OF ADVERTISING

2005-08-21T08:20:00.000-04:00

In my long and uneventful life, I have watched lots of corporations decline from leadership to just holding on and finally to final bankruptcy. Incompetence and indifference at the top seem to precipitate downward to all divisions and ultimately to all employees. Management becomes the role model of precisely the kind of employee the company doesn't need--and may not even want--but that will eventually destroy it. If it is a retail company, shelves will be unstocked, prices marked on the merchandise will not match the prices that come up at the checkout counter, employees will avoid customers and if forced to interact will be surly and indifferent. To reduce costs, the company will reduce the number of employees so that a customer cannot find even and indifferent one when needed. After a while customers lose faith and begin to go elsewhere.

How do corporations respond? Instead of improving service, retraining employees, renewing stock, or improving the quality of merchandise,
almost invariably the company responds by stepping up its advertising. Local TV stations and newspaper will carry increased numbers of advertisements making increasingly exaggeraged claims for the service and merchandise of the company. It does not work, of course, and soon the company files for bankruptcy and that is the end of it.

What does this have to do with the price of eggs? I see by the papers and other media that the Bush administration has now installed Karen Hughes as its mouthpiece to the rest of the world. It is clear that the United States is getting a bad press all around the world. Unfortunately, it is a press well deserved, for we have performed badly. But, instead of correcting the policies that cause the trouble and generate international ill will, the Bush administration adopts a corporate response (advertising) and launches an international propaganda campaign to apply lies and denials to its problems rather than attempt to face them directly and make the changes that would correct them.

It won't work.

NEW CONSTITUTION: A FALSE HOPE

2005-08-20T13:48:00.000-04:00

Bush's claim that we must stay in Iraq and finish the job (whatever that is) is pure malarkey. Even if Iraq succeeds in writing a new constitution, what reason is there for believing that it will bring an end to hostilities? Or that we will gain easy access to their oil? Instead of bringing peace, a new constitution, because it cannot satisfy the demands of all conflicting and hate-filled factions, will likely produce more hostility than it resolves. The drive for a republican form of government in Iraq is not coming from the Iraqis themselves; it is being imposed on them by the United States. We may think that because we have bigger guns and bigger rockets that we can ram a capitalist ridden form of government down the throats of Iraqis, but we cannot. They, as every other people on earth, can accept and live only with a form of government that they devise out of their own needs.

THOUGHTS ON GAZA

2005-08-18T15:35:00.000-04:00

Although I can feel sympathy for individuals and families losing their homes, I have also to recognize that Israelis should never have moved into Gaza in the first place. And all the attention to the pain of leaving cannot obscure that fact. The occupation was wrong from the beginning and is still wrong today. It has continued as long as it has simply because the United States stood behind Israel and protected it no matter what it did.

Things have changed, however, in the past few years. Because of the short-sighted polices of the Bush administration, the United States has lost so much influence in the world, especially the Arb and Middle East part, that we can no longer backstop Israel in its expansionist efforts. Nations of the world don't respect our purposes as they once did and will not follow our lead. More important, they realize that American citizens do not have the stomach for the kind of protracted and unconventional wars fought in the Middle East. Recognizing Americans' growing distaste for the war in Iraq, Israel also sees the handwriting on the wall and appears to realize that its survival now depends less on the United States and more on its relations with its neighbors. Hence the withdrawal from Gaza. As America's stature in the world continues to decline, we may see more softening of Israel's intractable positions and land grabs. On the the upside of decline in American influence we may be less likely to conduct pre-emptive attacks against other countries.

(I see that Bush has said the pullout will strengthen ties between Israel and the United States. We must always beware of any claim Bush makes, for what he says almost always is the opposite of what he actually seeks to make happen.)

WHAT BUSH MUST DO

2005-08-07T18:10:00.000-04:00

President Bush is at this moment confronted with a critical moment of the Iraq war. A mother who has lost a son in this war waits outside his home to see him and ask what is the honorable purpose for which her son died. In her sorrow and loss, she speaks with a moral authority that no other individual possesses. Whether Bush understands his obligation, and even if he does not care, he must meet this mother and hear her plea or forever lose all legitimacy as a man and as a national leader. There is no right of refusal. To attempt to avoid meeting the mother and talking with her will brand him forever as a coward and indifferent to the human cost of his war. Worse, remaining aloof, defensive, and fearful will tell all Americans that Bush is concerned only with himself and his political interests.

What Bush needs to do is walk out to the woman, take her by the hand, and lead her into his house. He should tell her to tell him what she wants him to hear and that he will listen. He does not have to make a commitment that might cause difficulty down the line, but he must face the mother and meet her on her terms. This simple act of honesty and compassion will earn him respect all across the nation.

CHEAP TILE

2005-08-03T19:27:00.000-04:00

I admired John Glenn's courage when he let them shoot him up into space in that little old tin can. Scared me just to think about it, but the vehicle seems to have had some substance to it, if diminutive in size. Now this crowd up there in the shuttle are apparently oribiting around in a really flimsy piece of junk. They needed to repair it but were afraid to touch the tiles for fear that they'd fall off or otherwise be damaged. What kind of tiles are that fragile or so insecurely fastened on? Why would NASA send a crew up in something so dangerous? I advise this crew to get down as soon as possible. If that contraption they're riding around in is so fragile that it's likely to be damaged by simply touching, let alone by an astronaut bumping it, I say get out.

SUPREME THOUGHTS

2005-07-28T14:49:00.000-04:00

While the new Supreme Court nominee is apparently not quite the troglodyte that I anticipated Bush to nominate, I remain skeptical.

First, I cannot believe George Bush would actually nominate a good person for any office. He seems to bottom fish only.

Second, Roberts is highly approved by most of the neocons who have weighed in on the nomination. This is surely cause for suspicion, for they are the most destructive gang our nation has seen in its 200+ year history.

Third, Roberts is being mighty coy. Like the administration supporting him, he seems fearful, secretive, and defensive. From all the secretive defensiveness he's displaying, you'd think he was a doctor.

Fourth, to my mind, he just looks shallow. Perhaps he's not, but so far, despite presumed impeccable credentials, I see are sneaky, dishonest wrinkles about the eyes. This surface appearance may be just a perpetual sneer, reinforced by his aforementioned reticence to open up.

All in all, this is a package that I would be wary of. I hope, however, that I am proven dead wrong, for we'll not get anything better out of Bush and his minions.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

2005-07-14T13:54:00.000-04:00

Many thanks to the French government and people for their gracious and
enthusiastic celebration of my birthday. Only the French know how to do the day justice.

JUSTICE AND DEMOCRACY

2005-07-14T09:26:00.000-04:00

These two much bandied about terms evoke a similar response from everybody. In the courts, justice is the last thing any of us seek. What we want is to win our case. Justice is simply the least we're will to accept without crying foul.

Similarly, democracy is the least desired of all forms of government. But, a pluralistic society is full of competing factions seeking to gain control and impose their wills and agendas on everybody else. In order for such a contentious nation to function, the factions must establish a kind of truce. Democracy is acceptable because it is perceived as the least destructive of each faction's interests. Thus, democracy is a function of pluralism; it works because it is practical.

In the United States today that fragile truce is in great danger; practicality is losing way to ideology and greed. Clearly ascendant are agendas attacking values traditionally touted by Americans, equality, civil rights, and the virtues of different social, political, and economic perspectives. Leading this attack are religious fundamentalists and corporate millionnaires. Strange bedfellows.

A very different situation occurs in the Middle East where we are attempting to establish hegemony. There we are leading an agenda to set corporate greed in control of the society, but the indigenous people want a religious society. There, instead of cooperating as in the United States, corporate greed and religious fundamentalism conflict with each other. Separate beds arrangement.

We have tried to define our struggles in the Middle East as a war on terror. Maybe it is, but I'm less sure about that claim as time goes by. More interesting and important, it seems to me, is the role of terrorists in the struggle for control of the world. In the emerging war between established geopolitics and what for lack of a better name I'll call functional politics, who will win?

LITTLE THOUGHTS

2005-07-13T10:03:00.000-04:00

If George Bush is going to save his schizy friend, he'd better hurry up and name his troglodyte to the Supreme Court.

The WSJ says Karl Rove is a whistleblower. More likely, both are just whistling "Dixie."

BEATIFICATION, ETC.

2005-07-12T08:48:00.000-04:00

Well, looks like Sandra Day O'Connor is going to become a saint before John Paul 2. The stature of both has risen heavenward since they died. Neither had that much adulation in their so-called real lives. The poor Democrats. Their elevation of O'Connor, and her ilk, to near icon status reveals the helpless angst they're suffering and the poor quality of the nominee they are now willing to accept to avoid an ultra, superduper, screaming right winger. But this is precisely the kind of candidate that George Bush is almost certain to nominate to the Supreme Court. Worse, if he gets two (or three) shots at new justices, they'll all be so far right they'll make Genghis Khan look like a communist.

There's not a chance in the world that Bush will forego this wonderful opportunity to turn the Supreme Court into the juggernaut of juridical destruction that he and his neocons mentors have sought for decades. What could better please and inspire his base of corporate millionnaires and semi-literate hill-billy Christians than a divisive, destructive Court that will wipe out all unity and sense of justice among the American people? Not to mention destruction of civil rights and economic viability. The current crop of neocons thrive on hostility. By his nomination(s) Bush will deliberately stir up class and ethnic hatred to divide and conquer honest and well meaning citizens, leaving the nation ripe to greed and all the nation's resources and wealth in the coffers of a few huge corporations.

With the House of Representatives, the Senate, Executive, and now the Judiciary solidly under control of the most regressive regime in American history, we begin a new Dark Age. It is a sad fate and a sad ending to this great country. I've had the priviledge of living through the most prosperous and hunane period of the American experiment, so it is a sad ending to my life as well. I'm sorry to see it all end. But, as empires come and empires go, this one will go, too.

We really need to adjust our language in talking about liberals and conservatives these days, especially conservatives. As E. J. Dionne points out in a op-ed piece in the Washington Post of 7/2, todays's conservatives are hardly deserving of the name. Most, at least those in the administration, are hard right wingers for whom the virtures of the past are of scant value.

Taking my own tact here, I see the current crop of so-called conservatives as little more than thugs, narrow-minded, semi-literate fundamentalists and corporate wolves with no awareness, let alone interest, in right, wrong, civil rights, or human decency.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AMERICA

2005-07-04T15:04:00.000-04:00

I wish you many more, but I don't think you'll have them. In a few years the great experiment will end. Destroyed by its own success. The very people who benefited most from the freedoms you offered have now, through that very prosperity that you made possible, given themselves over entirely to greed and are well on the way to destroying the society that made their success possible. In their short sightedness, they are killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Not satisfied with abundant wealth and power, in their greed they have set themselves the task of taking even that meager share which before had been the portion of workers and the poor.

Is there no shame? Is there no human decency? I fear not.

WHO WILL IT BE?

2005-07-02T08:20:00.000-04:00

Who will be the Supreme Court nominee? I don't know the name of the person Bush will nominate, but I do know (strongly believe) that it will be the most divisive, minimally competent person he can locate. The troglodytes, not all of whom are hill-billy Christian types, in Bush's base thrive on opposition. Mean spirited and small minded, they love nothing better than to rile up the "liberals" and get a good, dirty fight going. That solidifies them as nothing else can. Never mind that a nominee meeting their desires would be harmful to the country, to their interests, and to the constitutional principles that have carried them and us so far.

In private life, when we meet up with hateful people, the best tactic is to remain unperturbed and utterly reasonable. Never try to match virturpertion with them That's their forte. If you try to argue with them, you step into their territory where all the advantages are theirs. Stay calm, speak softly, and watch the wind fall out of their sails.

Unfortunately, in public matters the media step in and a moderate tactic simply plays into the hands of aggressors. Thus, if the Democrats adopt a reasonable and objective analysis toward the upcoming Supreme Court nominee, we can expect the media still to present the debate as a conflict, reason and balanced judgement to fall by the wayside, and the more arrogant side, the neocons, to walk all over the Democrats in public opinion and end up with the Court seat.

On the other hand, if the Democrats adopt a confrontational approach to the new neocon nominee, it will simply invigorate the nominee's right wing supporters. The Democrats will be unable to match the viciousness of the right's attacks against them, and the media will declare neocons the winner of the fight. The American public will accept that judgement and, sadly, our nation will move another step closer to fascist perdition.

Thus do hatred, division, and media greed play into the hands of the totalitarians bent on taking over the country.

A MEASLY $10 BILLION

2005-07-01T15:08:00.000-04:00

Well, it looks like the big tobacco companies are getting pretty much off the hook after all. Instead of the $130 billion originally sought, a measly $10 billion will be sufficient, the Justice Department says. Never mind the millions of smokers who have died from the effects of tobacco. Hell, how much did they ever contribute to any Republican's re-election?

Truth is, no amount of money can compensate for lives lost, but it would be nice to see some indication of awareness of the magnitude of the crime, at least on the part of the government. And, I'm only referring to those who died, or suffered serious health effects from smoking, AFTER it became apparent to the government and tobacco companies that tobacco was a killer. Still, after all the medical evidence against their products, companies deny any wrongdoing and continue manufacturing and promoting tobacco products they know are injuring and killing millions of people all over the world just to enrich themselveds. For this they need to be held accountable.

I don't have figures on the number of persons who have suffered serious health problems or have died as a result of smoking since the manufacturers learned how harmful tobacco is. The numbers have to be in the millions, however, perhaps in the tens of millions, and growing, as the manufacturers move operations overseas and addict unsuspecting populations in undeveloped countries. Which, I think, makes tobacco companies the greatest mass murderers the world has ever seen. And they're getting off virtually scot-free.

IRAQ AND VIETNAM

2005-06-29T15:17:00.000-04:00

Comparisons of the Iraqi war with the Vietnam war tend to consider primarily the conduct and completion of military operations and our inability to get out. A related similarity is that we clearly lost the war in Vietnam, and we are well on our way to losing in Iraq as well. While these are real similarities between the two conflicts, by far the most important similarity that historians will likely note is the role of deception in convincing the American public that the wars were justified. Remember the domino theory: if Vietnam falls, then all Southeast Asian nations will one by one fall to Communist domination. We accept the tenet that Communism was a monolithic empire that stood ready and able to take over any part of the world it wanted unless we stepped in and stopped them. Local people had no say in what might happen to them. The claim in Iraq is not altogether different, but in addition to the recent claim of establishing a beach head of democracy in the Middle East, more importantly our government mendaciously claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a serious threat to the security of the United States.

But what are the real reasons we went to war in Vietnam and Iraq? Not fear that either nation would fall under the sway of a foreign ideology, or that either could seriously harm us. In Vietnam, the primary supporting condition for the war was the threat from the rising horde of American baby boomers just reaching adulthood and demanding good jobs and social and political policies that would mesh with the ideals and hopes of youth. As president, Lyndon Johnson could look back over his shoulder and see 70+ million vigorous young people marching straight at him with all the energy and idealism characteristic of youth. What in the hell to do with them! Here was a force that our nation had never experienced before. How much Johnson consciously thought about this, I don't know, but it is clear that as a nation we were not ready for them. Our four-year colleges could not absorb them, the Peace Corps had absorbed only a few, no where near enough jobs would be ready for them, and yet here they came marching steadily forward in their tens of millions. If there's anything to scare a politician it's what Johnson faced then, a horde of untried and untested potential voters eager to change the political climate.

What better way of dealing with this danger than sending as many of them out of the country as possible? If they got killed, too bad. The necessity was to slow their absorption to a manageable rate. The draft and Vietnam were just the tricks to accomplish this.

Nowhere in the discussion of events leading up the war in Vietnam does anyone ever mention the condition absolutely essential for the conduct of the war, an excess of young men. Yet, without these millions of young men (and women), there would have been no Vietnam war. The American people sensed this, I suspect, and their half conscious awareness of something gravely wrong in our motives sparked the protests that finally brought the war to an end. The comparison we were then, and now, incapable of making, is that we might have done something as egregious as Saddam Hussein did in gassing his own people when they became inconvenient.

Official justification for our attack on Iraq is equally misleading. I doubt that there ever was any real concern by our leaders that Saddam Hussein might actually possess enough weapons with enough power to threaten us. Nor was there reason to think Al Qaeda worked out of Iraq or had any influence there. So why did George Bush and his minions insist on starting this unnecessary war? Two plausible hypotheses come to mind. First, George Bush's near neurotic compulsion to complete the work of his father. In itself, this is a basic impulse among males, but in Bush junior's case the impulse went unchecked, despite the serious consequences of such neglect, largely, I suspect, because George junior lacks the innate intelligence to deveop and maintain the kind of moral standard that could control such a compulsion.

Second, the Iraqi war was and is being fought for money. The current crop of neocons have worked diligently the past several years to turn the United States into a satrapy for corporations. Ronald Reagan began this pursuit and carried it far. His major way of transferring tax dollars into the coffers of corporations was through huge expenditures for (cold) war materiel. Not being able to pay for all these defense expenditures, the nation borrowed enormous sums, the interest charges for which went to, you guessed it, financial corporations. Together the weapons procurements and the costs of borrowing sent the nation trillions of dollars into debt. George Bush is furthering that goal of transferring the wealth and resources of the nation to corporations by his enormous tax cuts, securing legislation that turns natural resources into short term corporate profits, and by the war in Iraq, which is not only expensive in itself, but also offers a convenient way to transfer money directly (think no bid contracts) to corporations. Other efforts helpful in this nefarious enterprise include subsidizing pharmaceutical companies under the guise of drug benefits for seniors, and destroying Social Security by transferring it to private corporations.

Thus, I would argue that comparisons between the Iraqi and Vietnam wars are fully justified. We just need to identify the most salient similarities.

THE COMING LIES

2005-06-28T10:51:00.000-04:00

I shall not listen to the President's speech tonight. Whenever he speaks, I turn the channel or hit the mute button, because I know that George Bush had rather climb a tree and tell a lie than to stand on the ground and tell the truth. Consequently, his speech tonight, like all the others he's given, will be nothing but lies and deceptions. Hell, I'll be better off watching some stupid sitcom. At least they won't claim to be anything but crap.

The really sad part about the President's deception is that the majority of Americans thoroughly approve of that sort of behavior. As the influence of hill-billy Christrians increases, their innate dishonesty will come to dominate public discourse more and more. At the other pole, corporate interests with their values based solely on money, will continue to find lies and deception more and more profitable.

In our public affairs, I think we've turned the corner, but it's the wrong corner.

In an email message today, John Kerry said, "We need to put the Iraqi troops on a true six month war time footing . . . ." That strikes me as the kind of effort we need to begin now. We've talked about restarting the military draft in the United States, but why not initiate a draft in Iraq to build and train an Iraqi army that can defend the country. We train our own draftee armies in six months or less; surely we could train an Iraqi army in the same time frame if we were to put some real effort into it. Of course we would have to provide a safe place for prospective recruits to apply, and not leave them outside in long lines as prime targets for suicide bombers. I can't help but wonder if we're willing to do even this little.

MORE THOUGHTS

2005-06-24T13:48:00.000-04:00

President Bush's defense of his actions with the claim that he is a war time president reminds me of the fellow who killed his mother and father and then pleaded with the court for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.

The sleazy Republicans are after PBS now. Their strategy is the same as that being used against Social Security: attack and claim a problem, even though there is no problem in need of correction. Social Security is not on the brink of bankruptcy, nor is Public Television excessively biased toward liberal views. The Republicans know that just by asserting over and over that there is a problem that eventually people will come to accept the claims as true and begin to demand that something be done. They know that if they repeat often enough and loud enough the claim that Social Security needs saving and that PBS is dominated by liberal ideas people will begin to believe them. This is the same propaganda technique used by the Nazis. A lie repeated often enough will finally be believed. The remedy they espouse for Social Security, of course, is to destroy it, and their remedy for PBS is to fill it with purely neocon political programming.

Sadly, the scheme will probably work. The nation is on a neo-fascist track now and there isn't much that will slow it down, let alone stop the rush to disaster. I don't know why Americans fall for such political manipulation, but I suspect that part of the answer lies in the dumbing down of educational efforts over the past several decades. Of course, simple minded television is also partly responsible. These are only a couple of possible and partial explanations. The simple-mindedness of Americans, like most other phenonena, has many causes and there is no smoking gun that we can point to as "the" cause. The fact is, we are a public incapable of critical thinking and easily led astray by unscrupulous politicans who exploit our stupidity for their gain. The question that bugs me is why anyone would want to be leader of a people too stupid to realize when they're being manipulated. Being a leader among such people strikes me as too much like shooting fish in a barrel to have any appeal: there being no challenge, only those with no self esteem at all will find value in it.

OF PASSING INTEREST

2005-06-10T16:47:00.000-04:00

Well, I see that Republican stalwarts in the House are up to their old tricks over PBS. Seems they think anything that isn't sycophantic praise must be a malicious attack. That's dumb Bush's attitude ringing through; if you're not with me, then you have to be against me. No middle ground at all. So, now Big Bird has to go.

One day I hope Americans wake up and realize what a con game is being played on them. Republican neoNazis care nothing about free speech, democracy, or the American people. All they are concerned about is holding power, which they achieve by sucking up to deep pockets within giant corporations.

The Gray Eminence was back on the Hill, too, for another of his all too frequent dour performances. I keep saying that the stage lost one of its great performers when Alan Greenspan turned bad and took up the study of economics. No one can top his performance before a Senate or House committee. It is sheer theatre.

DEEP THROAT

2005-06-04T10:18:00.000-04:00

I've always loved the pseudonym Deep Throat. It fits so perfectly the situation in Washington at the time. Remember the plumbers were trying to discover and plug all leaks. The money wrench (or pipe wrench), a tool commonly used in this work, is a wrench with the capacity for grasping big items. The part that does the gripping is called the throat. For gripping large objects, the wrench needs to have a deep throat. In the case of Watergate, the large objects to be gripped were highups in the Nixon administration, and eventually even Nixon himself.

There have been some who relate the term Deep Throat to a pornographic movie at the time with that title. Never having seen the movie, I don't know if the association is appropriate or not. I like my associations with a monkey or pipe wrench much better. More poetic (sic).

What about Felt's disclosures? Were they ethical and beneficial? I think so. Not only did Felt swear loyalty to the United States, but so did Nixon and all his minons involved in the nefarious activities of that period. Clearly, the Nixon administration was trying to take over the country and destroy it. Nixon placed his minons in most, of not all, government agencies to keep watch and at least try to control what each agency did. At the time of Watergate I worked for the Census Bureau and we even had one of his political hacks stationed in the Population Divison reading every statistical report that we prepared and sticking his nasty little nose into everything going on. Fortunately, there was a lot of foot-dragging all across the federal bureaucracy that contributed to Nixon's failure to utterly destroy the government.

Sadly, we're seeing much the same thing happening again. Oh, the methods may not be exactly the same, but the purpose clearly is to take over the government and run the nation as a fascist totalitarian state. We managed, through the wisdom and good actions of good people, to put an end to Nixon's attempted coup. I hope we can do the same with the Bush crowd. Recent senate action in thwarting the right wing effort to destroy a bulwark of the checks and balances that make our government work is a positive sign. The emergence of honest and democratic minded governmental and political leaders in that era should give pause to current Bush administrations efforts at destroying our nation. We stopped the takeover once, we can do it again.

THOUGHTS ON RELIGION

2005-06-04T07:40:00.000-04:00

Religion seems to have become one again a major source for structuring Americans' perception of the world around them. In our history we have periodically entered phases of evangelical zeal where we seem to abandon all reason and reach out for magical answers to important questions. It seems that Jonathan Edwards never really died. He's still out there ranting about his angry God. One difference in this reformation and others is that more of the world is involved, or at least because of better communication we are aware of similar trends in other nations. Right now the Middle East is where the most similar pattern of fundamentalism rages. In truth, there is not much real difference between the intolerance developing in this country and the intolerance exhibited by the fundamentalists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and other Islamic nations. Hill-billy Christians are not much different from the Taliban, just more cowardly. Both are sources for most of the evil in the world today.

Contrary to what the religionists would have us believe, religion is not the reason for human action; religion is simply used to justify and defend actions taken for entirely different reasons, usually reasons connected with selfish or nefarious motives.

The Middle East has always been a region of intense emotion and hatred, mixed with some tendency toward supernatural explanations , but primarily a region of hate. Over the centuries this hatred has congealed into three main conceptual systems, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These systems of hatred, incarnated into religion, have been the Middle East's primary export to the Western world. Periodically this imported religion as support systems for hatred rises to dominance in our thinking and we enter another reformation phase where intolerance reigns. Unscrupulous politicians, such as those in control in Washington now, exploit this hatred for their own purposes and we find hatred being promulgated from the government above and our own human weaknesses from below. Thus, what we face in America today is the far right using the simple minded fanaticism of hilll-billy Christians to foster their anti-humane causes.

There is absolutely nothing positive about hill-billy Christianity. Fantasies of burning people who see life differently arise not from a concern for their eternal well-being, as they claim, but from sheer hatred. Thus, hill-billy Christians default everybody to hell. Only by becoming one of them and easing their fears can one escape their wrath.

Like the Puritans of old, hill-billy Christians thrive on opposition. Once the Puritans arrived in the new world and could practice their religion without opposition (the Indians didn't care), they fell apart. After all, their driving force was hatred. Similarly, hill-billy Christians today perceive themselves as persecuted and thrive on this perception. Just listen to their sermons and conversations. To oppose hill-billy Christian simple mindedness is merely to reinforce their solidarity. The best way of dealing with this paranoid cult is to buck up those who know better so that they can practice a religion not based on a theology of hatred.

I suspect that one of the difficulties some have with accepting evolutionary theory is the inability to comprehend the immensity of time involved in evolutionary change. A billion years is an immense length of time; fifteen billion years is fifteen times as long. This is a period of time entirely beyond our ability to take in.

ETERNAL VIGILANCE

2005-05-17T09:12:00.000-04:00

To believe that Fascism has occurred in recent times only in countries like German, Italy, and Japan is to deny the pervasiveness of the drive toward totalitarianism in the world. All nations at all times have totalitarian currents running through them. The totalitarian mentality is always present and we always live with and struggle to keep it under control.

Although in the United States we like to think we have escaped these drives, that's not the case at all. Totalitarianism has always been just under the surface in our nation since its founding in the late 18th Century. It is still here. Worse, it is alive and well. The beginning of the 21st Century presents a reinvigorated strain that threatens to undo more than 200 years of reasonable progress toward a nation in which the majority of citizens live in peace and fair comfort.

The totalitarian wing of the Republican party is now so thoroughly entrenched that there is doubt that we citizens can ever regain any real control over our lives. The House and Senate are already under totalitarian control and soon the Judiciary will fall as well. All traditional vehicles of democracy are breaking down: The press is increasingly intimidated, TV and other media that do not hew the party line are put under pressure until they submit; the so-called Patriot Act lays the legal foundation for destruction of all civil liberties; the economy has been destroyed and a huge national debt created that rules out of the use national resources for the benefit of citizens; public education is under attack; corporations are neither required nor expected to live up to their promises to workers; all varieties of religion except the simplest hill-billy version of Christianity are seen as hostile to the true faith; health care policy confiscates the savings and economic resources of the elderly; the land is stripped of natural resources to feed short term corporate greed; relations with other nations is seen as unnecessary and any country that doesn't do as we demand, we attack and destroy.

I have urged one of my senators (the other is a lost cause) to stand up for America and to exercise the vigilance that Thomas Jefferson told us is the price of liberty. We must reject the so-called nuclear option and keep alive some remnant of the founding fathers' dreams of a just and democratic nation. We'll soon find out if we go down the path of totalitarianism as the current administrations seeks or return to the standards of our fathers. It will be a close battle.

RED ALERT!

2005-05-13T15:10:00.000-04:00

The media is all aquivver over the failure of President Bush's handlers to notify him of the airplane that intruded into restricted airspace over Washington, DC. Well, la de da, it wouldn't have done any good, because George Bush wouldn't have known what to do anyway. Remember 9/11. Bush sat around stupified after being informed of the attack and when he finally realized that he was expected to do something, he got up and jumped onto an airplane and headed for the Rocky Mountains. That's our President. That's our Leader.

I suspect the real reason he wasn't informed in time for a response this time was because his party handlers did not want to be embarrassed if he again displayed his inability to respond in an emergency. Better to keep him in the dark, deal with the problem, and then safely claim that the President hadn't responded because he didn't know anything untoward had happened. Silence can be golden.

ON THE DEATH OF PAMMY

2005-04-25T14:57:00.000-04:00

In my sorrow over the death of my little doggie friend, I draw on the words of Samuel Johnson on the death of his friend (his mother) (Idler No. 41, January 1759).

That it is vain to shrink from what cannot be avoided, and to hide that from ourselves which must some time be found, is a truth which we all know, but which all neglect, and perhaps none more than the speculative reasoner, whose thoughts are always from home, whose eye wanders over life, whose fancy dancies after meteors of happiness kindled by itself, and who examines every thing rather than his own state.

Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death; yet there is no man, says Tully, who does not believe that he may yet live another year; and there is none who does not, upon the same principle, hope another year for his parent or his friend, but the fallacy will be in time detected; the last year, the last day must come. It has come and is past. The life which made my own life pleasant is at an end, and the gates of death are shut upon my prospects.

The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavor tended, is a state of dreary desolation in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horror. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled.

. . .

Yet such is the course of nature, that whoever lives long must outlive those whom he loves and honours. Such is the condition of our present existence, that life must one time lose it associations, and every inhabitant of the earth must walk downward to the grave alone and unregarded, without any partner of his joy or grief, without any interested witness of his misfortunes or success.

Rest in peace, little Pammy.

TROUBLE IN DEMOCRACY

2005-04-20T09:52:00.000-04:00

Democracy has served us well for over 200 years, but unfortunately it carries the seeds of its own destruction. Alexander Hamilton considered this in Federalist Paper 10, where he talked about factions. He thought that factions would tend to cancel each other out and that their ultimate result would be good. That presupposition has seemed to hold for a long, long time, but may well be crumbling now. Factions, now known as interest groups, have attained such influence and voracity that they have made it next to impossible to accomplish anything anymore. No matter what laudable effort is made to alleviate a social or political evil, some group immediately jumps in and claims to be harmed by the proposal or that it is contrary to some other equally laudable effort. And this struggle of faction and counter faction goes on and on regardless of the proposals advanced and so vigorous are they that in the end not only are no adjustments made to the status quo, but social discourse is damaged to the degree that civil society itself is threatened. Thus is factional discord the doorway through which power politics replaces democracy.

Similarly, with the Bill of Rights. Marvelous achievement in the history of governments, but now becoming more and more dysfunctional. Freedom of Speech, for example, is a most laudable ideal, but no sooner is it exercised by one group than another group claims to be harmed. Or the Right to Bear Arms, or what we now call Separation of Church and State, have been exaggerated to cover a multitude of areas never dreamed of by the Founders. Contention and confrontation have attained such dominion over Right that now we are on the verge of social upheaval over whether and how to exerise these ten basic Rights. This, too, is a struggle that can conceivably destroy our whole sociopolitical structure if we don't go back and learn to respect each other and to settle differences without trying to utterly destroy those with whom we disagree.

CREATION AS IRONY

2005-04-20T09:43:00.000-04:00

The Creationists would have us believe that a single Creator in one swell foop created all the earth and all its creatures. Well, if He, She, It did just that, then clearly such a Creator was (is) the Monster of all monsters. For what but a monster would create creatures (same derivation) that could only survive and live by killing and eating each other. This has to be the ultimate irony of life, that all creatures, including us vaunted humans, live only by killing and eating our fellow creatures. Ruminants not withstanding, for the vegetation they eat is alive, too. It's enough to make one send for an atheist. And irony of ironies,
Creationists go on to claim that this Creator is a creature of love. What in the world is this nonsense about?

POPERY POTPOURI

2005-04-20T07:06:00.000-04:00

The morning posts are all full of the new pope, mostly with questions about his assumed conservatism. Such nonsense. On election the man became infallible, so what's this concern over such a mundane issue as whether he's conservative or liberal or in between? Hell, he's infallible. His statements are TRUE. Period. Now either change the doctrine or stop the palaver.

Love the new name. Ratzinger. God knows the Catholic Church has plenty of rats that need zinging. Yeah, I know it's German and has nothing to do with rats, but still the homonym is fun.

Lots of efforts afoot to instill the dead pope with gobs of personal moral authority. It doesn't work, I think. The pope's authority comes from his position; it is wholly institutional. Making him a saint or calling him great doesn't change a thing. Today we don't have anybody on the world scene who speaks with personal moral authority, pope, president, or whatever. Personal moral authority is especially scarce in this country. Too may shysters around. Some tried to make McCain into such a figure, but he turns out to be just another Republican supporting the self-serving policies of the Bush administration. And what a flop Clinton turned out to be in this department!

MUSINGS

2005-04-19T07:51:00.000-04:00

I never cease to marvel at the verbal perigrinations of our peerless leaders in Washington. To believe Tom Delay is to deny reality. Such innocence. Such innate goodness. Such religiosity. Clearly, the man is a saint. Just ask him.

Personally, I suspect he's rotten to the core.

The media would be well advised to devote as much attention to the black smoke rushing from the smokestacks of our factories as to the smoke emanating from the Vatican chimney. The machinations of a bunch of old fools in Rome to elect a chief boogeyman are a waste of time. Better if the media were to abandon the whole process and devote their energy to making the world a better place by pointing out the folly of a church that mocks its message with oppulent displays worthy only of a monster dictator

Spending a lot of time worrying about and with my adorable 12+ year old diabetic Keeshond, Pammy. She's reached the point that she's beginning to lose weight (a fourth of total body weight now) and has a lot of trouble eating. I keep trying new foods and she'll eat some once or twice and then refuses to eat any more. I have her on some stomach medicine, which may be helping a little, but she desperately needs to eat more. In addition, the little warm weather we've had so far this spring is already getting to her. I'll have to lower the AC this summer or she'll really suffer--if she survives that long.

Tax season is over and my 2 1/2-month stint as an AARP Tax-Aide is complete. We did only e-filing this year, because IRS, which sponsors the service, insists that we do it that way . My own taxes I did the old-fashioned way, by hand. It's kinda fun doing other people's returns; my own, I agonize over, although it is much simplier than some I did for other people. I figure just one mistake and the IRS will come out here and shoot me.

Pretty clearly the Republicans are trying to destroy the nation. Bush's main efforts have been directed at destroying the economy, at which he's made much progress, followed now by Congress' efforts at destroying the checks and balances that have preserved our nation for 200 plus years. Not to mention the gratituous attacks on middle and low income people from both the Executive and Legislative branches. Social Security is something the Republicans have wanted to destroy since the day it was begun in the mid-1930s. They can't stand the control it gives older citizens during the final years of their lives. Sadly, the people most in need of a government that champions their needs are the very people most likely to be stampeded by red herring issues designed to frighten and confuse, such as claims that well-intentioned people are out to force homosexuality on their children and/or to destroy the hill-billy Christianity that so dominates the majority of American's thinking.

HERE WE GO AGAIN

2005-04-13T14:13:00.000-04:00

It is more than passing interesting that Ariel Sharon is visiting Bush at this time. In the period just before we launched the attack against Iraq, Sharon visited Bush weekly. Now he is back voicing dire warnings about Iran. Is he trying to induce us to attack Iran as we did Iraq? I'm worried.

MEDIA CIRCUSES

2005-04-05T08:51:00.000-04:00

Media, both print and broadcast, have been pretty much set pieces for the past week or two. First, the circus surrounding the last days of Terri Schiavo and now the nonstop coverage of the pope's last days and illness. The media seem to love last days!

I have a great deal of sympathy for all members of the Schiavo family, although it's a sadly disfunctional crowd. Not being much into the pope and things catholic, I'm not terribly moved by his death. Throughout all the verbiage over his history and legacy, we seem to have forgotten that the Catholic Church is a totalitarian organization inimical to everything we have worked and fought for over the past 200 plus years. Perhaps after more than four years of constant chicanery and destructive politics our desperate need for someone to believe in has kicked in and the dead pope offers us some person to trust, albeit posthumorously. That we'll settle for a dead hero shows just how desperate we are.

The president and his administration, of course, are trying to cash in as best they can on both deaths. Shows what a sleazy crowd they are. All this, too, will continue and we'll get on with the same old same old, politicians trying to butter their nests and the religious right damning to hell everybody who doesn't subscribe to their perverted Christianity.

Moving along to more of my angst at the hill-billy Christianity that has come to dominate public life in the past few years, I am drawn to Emerson's Divinity School Address at Harvard in 1838. In this speech Emerson hit the old fools so hard that they wouldn't listen to him again for 30 years. Believe me, the loss was theirs. In my personal struggles to understand what religion is all about and where, if anywhere, it belongs in my life, I come back again and again to Emerson's statement early into this address that "the doctrine of it [the indwelling Supreme Spirit] suffers from this perversion, that the devine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury." This tells me, or rather it agrees with my understanding, that God and Man are the same, or more specifically, that we are Jesus. Why else is Jesus depicted in a purely human form (although with a few magic tricks) if not to emphasize that he and we are the same. Look at his life. It's a story that encapsulates the stories of our lives, a mysterious birth (all births are mysterious), a childhood (current psychology notwithstanding) of little consequence, struggles to survive and understand his (our) place and duties in the scheme of things, and then ultimately worldly defeat. The essential message is that not only can we handle the difficulties of everyday life, but that through mind and imagination (spirit) we can also confront inevitable defeat (death) and face the end of life with peace and equanimity. Christian theology of heaven, I suspect, was thrown in as a device to help simple, illiterate people understand that death, though inevitable, is not a thing to be feared and that we can approach it peacefully. This is what Christianity is all about. It is what all religion is about: to help us live and die.

The story of Jesus is thus our story. It is not about someone who lived thousands of years ago and thousands of miles away. We are the ones living this life, falling and getting up again, in a perpetual death and resurrection dance that goes on throughout out lifetimes. It is we who die on the cross (earth) and we who rise again. The theme of death and resurrection, of fall and redemption, dominates the mythology of all planting cultures. It derives ultimately from seed and depicts in transcendent manner our grasp of how death of seeds in the ground and their resurrection in new plants is the source of all we have and do. Through the ancient mythology and metaphors of the Middle East we have transformed this fundamental fact of nature into a transcendent experience that allows us to live and die in peace.

SPIRIT AND SPIRITUALITY

2005-03-27T15:09:00.000-05:00

I've spent most of the past hour watching Tim Russert's program Meet the Press. He had a collection of religious types, media types, and politicians discussing the place of spirituality in America today. Many interesting thoughts and ideas were bandied about, but at no point did the group consider defining what they were talking about. What is spirit and spirituality? What is faith and where does it come from?

These concepts are accepted just as anyone wants to use them. There has never in any public discussion that I've heard been a single instance in which anyone attempted to define what the words mean. Everybody just goes about blithly using the terms in their own way without any effort at coming to a common understanding of what they're talking about, with the result that there's never any real meeting of the minds taking place, just a lot of discrete observations and ideas, but no consensus as what spirit and faith really are. This is sad and unfortunate, because I would really like to understand what the words mean. I use them too, without much understanding of what I mean.

Spirit is to me a particularly troubling concept because the term conjures up in my mind images of smoke and vapors floating about a mysterious atmosphere that has no connection with anything in my everyday life. Still, it is a term that I have bandied about as if I knew what it means, usually sneaking it into an argument in a way that precludes any opportunity for my adversary to confront me with my lack of candor about what the word means. Regrettable and dishonest, but alas true.

Spirit, I think, is one those huge words with many connotations and meanings, some of which may even be contradictory. It is related, I suspect, to intelligence, but is not the same; it is related to understanding, but is not just that; it is related to emotion, but is more than just feelings, however elevated they may be; it is not just religion and does not even have to have a religious element. So what is left for this amorphous thing?

Hanging over all this formulation is the annoying question of whether experiences of transcendent evil may also be spiritual. Is perception of evil a spiritual experience? Can evil be spiritual? Rather bothersome questions, but I suspect this may very well be the case. After all, contemplation of the evil in the gratuitous horrors perpectuated by dictatorial governments throughout history certainly elevates our awareness to truly transcendent levels.

Somewhere in one of his many books, Joseph Campbell relates spirit to esthetics, to the appreciation of whatever it is that constitutes art, beauty, goodness, grandness, and all the other transcendent levels we experience inside our minds and hearts. So far I have not been able to improve upon this way of looking at spirituality, but I keep trying, for even Campbell leaves room for more traditional religious notions of spirituality. He describes his experiences in the cathedral in Chartes as being in a spiritual place. I don't reject such a perspective, I just feel that to identify spirit and art or music or religion is too confining of the experience.

Spirit finds expression in all of these, but only when we elevate our experience to transcendent levels, I think, do we enter a realm of spirit. A purist will probably argue that this doesn't come close to answering the question as to what spirit really is, but that I have merely shifted the discussion to something called "transcendent." Well, the critic is probably right, but at the moment I can't do much better.

MEAT-HEADED PRESUMPTIONS

2005-03-24T08:14:00.000-05:00

Robert J. Samuelson in today's Washington Post calls us a nation of "closet welfare junkies," an appellation secured on his definition of Social Security and Medicare as "our biggest welfare programs." Well, straight off, I differ with his presumption that welfare programs are shameful or undesirable. To the contrary, they are among our most civil and humane activities, and much needed to maintain a society in which all citizens can live under bearable circumstanaces. And maintaining itself at minimal levels is ultimately what life is about. Much too often, however, ideology and theology, divisive instruments of power that divide people into warring camps, define human worth and need, invalidating persons unable to maintain minimal levels of living and shaming them for accepting the just rewards of civilization.

At issue, then, at least in my mind, is the question of the value and purpose of government and civilization. Civilization has arisen over the eons as a product of humans' efforts to live together in relative peace and with the ability to provide for at least creature comforts. Civilization also foster spiritual and emotional development, learning, art, and all the other worthy endeavors by which we live out our humanness. Government, on the other hand, structures civilization, adjusting it to the needs and desires of particular groups at particular times. In this adaptive function, government provides, among other things, for the common defense and the securing of livelihoods for all the people under its jurisdiction. Whenever necessary in providing this defense and livelihood, government conscripts its citizens to warfare or provides economic resources for them to survive. Thus, the need for civilization is to sustain life; the need for government is to direct common efforts towards that end. Sadly, the power function of government usually takes over and its sustaining function suffers. To de-legitimize government's sustaining function by defining the majority of citizens as "welfare junkies" is destructive of government itself and sheer nihilist arrogance.

To structure government so that it abrogates to just a few individuals at the top of the food chain a majority of the protections and privileges of civilization is to stand that noble achievement of mankind on its head. Civilization is for all people, and it is the function of government to assure that all peoples reap its benefits. To invalidate the claim of a portion, usually the vast majority, of a people who make claim on government's sustaining function not only defines claimants as undeserving of civilization's benefits, but even brings into question the purpose of civilization itself. This is too much meat-headed greed. Yet this is precisely what the current administration in Washington is determined to do.

VALUES

2005-03-21T18:26:00.000-05:00

What are these things called values? Politicians keep bandying the word about, but nobody defines what values are. Republicans say democrats don't have any, and democrats say republicans have the wrong ones. Yet neither side defines what they mean.

One dictionary definition of values is the intrinsic worth of something. I once defined the term as what one considers worth working for. I suspect that at least in the sense used by politicians values simply refer to the things the speaker likes.

However values are defined, what are the units by which they are measured? The current buzz word is metrics, so what are the metrics of values? If we can't define how values are measured, how can we know if some are better than others?

A different question: Where is the intelligence in a Designer who creates life forms that can only survive by killing and eating each other? Doesn't sound like much thought went into that creative process, certainly not any compassion--let alone love.

THEORY UNDERSTOOD

2005-03-20T09:23:00.000-05:00

Writing in the Washington Post this morning, Steve Olson explains clearly the distinction between a theory and a hypothesis (and maybe conjecture, too). I have long hoped somebody with standing would take on this task, not because hill-billy Christians who so vigorously espouse a creationist theory can understand or accept what he explains, but because maybe his essay will help people who are inclined to accept scientific explanations but who lack scientific training to understand the role of theory in scientific discourse. We've let the creationists get by too long with their treatment of theory as a pejorative term. It is not. As Olson makes clear, a theory is a long established body of research and evidence that enables us to understand aspects of the world which we inhabit. I have sent him an email thanking him for his article.

Scientific theories do not answer all questions. Some things we do not know yet, and may never know, but we are making progress in adding new details to the paradigms we have. Science allows us to continue adapting and changing our theories as new information becomes available. It is self-correcting. Creationism, on the other hand, does not allow for change or improvements in understanding. It only allows us to bury deeper and deeper into faith.

In point of fact, both science and religion are myths. I do not mean that they are lies, but myths, fundamental explanatory systems that connect our brains with the physical world (yes, religion does connect us with the physical world). For the past several hundred years in the Western world we have been in process of shifting from a fundamentally religious explanatory system to a scientific one. Presently these two myths still co-exist in our culture and generally in a relatively peaceful manner. It is only when proponents of one myth get overly ambitious and try to impose their mode of explanation on everybody else that conflict arises. We are seeing that now in the efforts of fundamentalists, evangelicals they're called, to impose creationists teachings in the public schools.

Now comes the meta question: What do we have either myth? The short answer is given above, the need to connect our brains with the physical world. But that only removes the question one step backward without adding any information. I suspect that the reason we have myths is the perennial search of the human brain for answers to fundamental questions about ourselves, how and why we got here, and where the world comes from. The drive for answers to these questions is so powerful that we will pursue the search whether we have a productive methodology or not. If our present systems of understanding are not adequate to answer a burning question, we will simply make up an answer. We do it all the time. The justifications and excuses by which we rationalize our failures and shortcomings, not to mention our efforts to influence other people, attest to the power of this answer creating process within us.

POLITICIZING AMERICA

2005-03-19T07:22:00.000-05:00

Clearly the politicization of America is alive and well. Witness the way politics has come to completely dominate discussion of Terri Schiavo's condition. What should be a family matter has been taken over by the politicians and used for their totally selfish and nefarious purposes. Whatever happened to the kinder, gentler way we dealt with Ian Gonzales, the Cuban boy washed up on our shores? In that case, we kept our cool, seeing the situation in child welfare terms, while the Cubans wholly politicized the boy's situation, using it get in digs at Castro.

No good can come of politicizing everyday life. America has remained a stable democracy for better than 200 years in large part because we have not been a highly political people. In the past, we've lived our lives largely outside the political arena, leaving that to a few stalwarts who love the rough and tumble of power grabs. The rest of go about our business taking a very jaundiced view of politicians and everything they say and do. Now, however, we're getting more and more involved in political debates and turning every social issue and even family problems into political battle grounds between the right and left.

I suggest that we be careful about too much political activity. We can end up with the sort of instability that dogged some European democracies for decades. Unless elected politicians foul up too badly, we are better off to just let them do their jobs while we go about doing our jobs. Then if they make too big a mess of things, we can quietly throw them out in the next election. There is no reason to intertwine every activity of private life with political parties and partisan debates.

Question 1: How can a man who looks like a cadaver inspire confidence in the Department of Homeland Security?

Question 2: Why must jurors give interviews to the media after a trial. It seems to me that the deliberations that take place within the jury room should be confidential forever? Hard decisions have to be made there and a lot of give and take is required to arrive at a fair decision. Let that process remain with the jury members and not become the focus of media attention and second guessing.

PROCRUSTES MOTEL

2005-03-13T19:28:00.000-05:00

One cannot through thought alone understand; action is also required. Only by acting on knowledge does it become part of ourselves; only through action does knowledge and being become one.

I know people whose minds are chock full of answers. Unfortunately, their answers have no meaning because they are not derived from questions. That is the problem with formal schooling. Formal education has little or no value if the answers it provides have not been sought.

The question on the mind of every God-fearing hill-billy Christian (read poor Republican) is "Would you want a gay man to move in next door and marry your son?"

GOBLET

Spun of the ageless sand,
Daughter of fire and wind,
In thy crystaline beauty,
A little of God
And a little of me.

EMPTY NOUNS

2005-03-13T10:07:00.000-05:00

Morality is a useless noun with no immediate referent. So is love. This to say that these terms not only point to nothing, they are unnecessary interpositions between our consciousness and real life experiences. Morality is simply one group of people saying to another group, "Let's you folks do things our way." We would be clearer in our aims and likely to meet with less resistance if we merely point out the incorrectness of a postion or the impracticality of a proposal, instead of praising or denouncing an impulse or act because it does not conform to ways we want others to behave. In reality, we need no better guide to behavior than sheer practicality. The easiest way to deal with other people, collectively or singly, is to be completely honest. Any deviation from simple honesty inevitably creates confusion and error, which then have to be addressed in their own right. As old Ben Franklin said years ago, "Honesty is the best policy." Truth, honesty, and human decency are all the guides we need. Interposing a noun such as morality between these values and our actions not only confuses, it asserts a superior attitude that may very well arouse antagonism.

Love, too, is a meaningless noun interposed between our response to another person or thing that adds nothing to the experience or our understanding of it. Only two species are capable of the experiences to which we normally attach the word love: humans and dogs. In humans, what passes for love takes a masculine and a feminine form. For males, love refers to the desire for sexual control, nothing more. For females, love is behavioral control, nothing more. We experience both forms of control directly, and the interposition of the noun love only adds a verbal layer without enhancing the experience or our understanding of what is taking place within us.

Among dogs, what we call love is simply dependence. We need no other noun to indicate this.

Both morality and love are products of our noun-making ability. We can and do invent nouns all the time that have no referent in the real world. Advertisers do it with abandon. Ever try to figure out what "Gusto" refers to. I submit that we would be better off to drop most of these useless nouns and focus attention directly on the impulse or experience at hand. Too much generalization just fogs up the mind.

CORPORATE TAX COLLECTORS

2005-03-12T05:48:00.000-05:00

The Bush plan to privatize Social Security adds up to a shifting of taxing authority from the government, where it is presumably used for public good, to private corporations, where it feeds corporate greed. If this scheme succeeds, it will be the biggest boon corporations have ever experienced and fulfill Bush's idea that freedom, far from providing for civil liberties, is simply the right of corporations to do whatever they want to American citizens.

To any who are tempted to look upon recent positive events in the Middle East as indications that Bush policies for that area are succeeding I would suggest consulting Gandhi's answer to the age old question of whether ends justify means. Gandhi said that if the means are honorable, the end cannot be anything but honorable. In no sense has Bush's lies and deceptions about his pre-emptive war and subsequent polices in the Middle East been honorable. Therefore, in Gandhi's formulation, there is no way anything honorable or, I would add, anything of value, can result from America's recent activities in the Middle East.

PROCRUSTES MOTEL

2005-03-09T11:03:00.000-05:00

One of the reasons working in a bureaucracy is so mind-numbing is that we have no heroes. There is no great bureaucrat, past or present, that we can look up to and emulate. Instead, we are beset by thousands and thousands of hunchback, souless gnomes who from years of terror that they might be noticed have suffered irreparable brain damage.

Enough of Dan Rather. Not to worry, though, I'm sure another light pole in another hurricane awaits him somewhere.

This has been a morning for dashing about. We completed some errands but before we finished had to pop back home for a bathroom stop. Poor Master can't get three errands out of one pee.

Bush claims that his policy is to expand democracy all around the world. But wouldn't it make more sense to work to extend human rights? After all, democracy is desirable precisely because it fosters human rights.

Around here yard sales are practically a cottage industry. Back in India before I took up with Master, we just gave away whatever we didn't want or need. Here, however, Americans with their accountant mentalities have contrived the yard sale. The last laugh is that the same old junk still remains in the neighborhood.

Procrustes Motel

2005-03-07T14:44:00.000-05:00

Bureaucracies were invented to punish people who are probably going to heaven, but don't deserve to.

Ever notice how the boss's mistakes are called "typos?" If you have, you're not a boss--you've too much self-awareness. Find another job before you give bossing a bad name.

Oh, how I admire big strong feet and detest little weak feet. You can't do anything with little feet; with big feet you can run and walk all day. Little feet tire easily. I wish I had big strong feet. Master says he too would like to have big feet.

Of all the fools in the world, surely the greatest is the fool who starts across the street knowing he won't get all the way, stops midway, then stands there fully exposed to two lanes of fast traffic.

There is a hell,
Where demons shriek
And sinners groan,

But which is it,
To bear eternal misery,
Or to inflect unending pain?

Lifting the Tree

2005-03-06T12:31:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time a man was walking in the woods when a tree fell on him. A neighbor passing by and seeing him lying under the tree said, "Lift it off." No one can deny that this was precisely what needed to be done. Unfortunately, the tree was bigger than the man and he couldn't lift it off.

Is this not the situation when people tell us not to be afraid, or not to get angry, or that we should love our fellow humans?

The New Serfs

2005-03-06T10:13:00.000-05:00

As is our wont, Master and I popped out of bed bright and early this Sunday morning to read the Washington Post. Well, actually, he reads and I help him with the hard words. Big words like watermelon. Anyway, the story that set him off this morning was about people caught up in a web of credit card debt and their valiant efforts to extricate (whew!) themselves. Seems some people get in so deep and remain in so long that they can never get out. Just like the old time tenant farmers in the deep south that I've heard about.

Poor master gets worked up that credit card companies can use every advertising trick in the book to lure naive souls into signing up for their cards and then amassing huge debts that they can never repay. And when they do try to pay off the debt, some new gimmick, a late charge or an additional fee, is thrown at them and the poor card users are worse off than before they ever made a payment. What makes this so bad, and set off poor master, is that the federal government is a party to the scam, making laws that favor the credit card companies over the poor, lone individual. It's an alliance made in hell, government and corporations joined together to create a new class of serfs. Sad. But, Master says, that's what the "ownership society" is all about. It is an alliance between corporations and a compliant government designed to strip individuals of all control over their lives. These credit card scams are just the tip of the iceberg. If I can get this stupid blog to work for him, Master says he will continue ranting about such asymmetrical arrangements now facing middle and working class Americans.

I may go back to India!