Moyers on America
I finally found time to read Bill Moyers' latest speech, the one he gave recently here in DC to close the "Take Back America Conference". As one has come to expect, the entire speech is alarming in content and inspiring in expression. This is a tiny excerpt — how to choose only three paragraphs from such a rich vein? — that bring up just one point about the current transition to a second American "gilded age" so hoped for by the wealthy, powerful few.
Set aside some time, read the entire speech, and believe that it doesn't have to be this way.
A profound transformation is occurring in America and those responsible for it don't want you to connect the dots. We are experiencing what has been described as a "fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." From public land to water and other natural resources, from media with their broadcast and digital spectrums to scientific discoveries and medical breakthroughs, a broad range of America's public resources is being shifted to the control of elites and the benefit of the privileged. It all seems so clear now that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. Back in the early 1970s President Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, predicted that "this country is going to go so far to the right that you won't recognize it." A wealthy right-winger of the time, William Simon, President Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury, wrote a polemic declaring that "funds generated by business…must rush by the multimillions" to conservative causes. Said Business Week, bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less…It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."
We've seen the strategy play out for years now: to cut workforces and wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash the social contract and the safety net meant to protect people from hardships beyond their control, make it hard for ordinary citizens to gain redress for the malfeasance and malpractice of corporations, and diminish the ability of government to check and balance "the animal spirits" of economic warfare where the winner takes all. Streams of money flowed into think tanks to shape the agenda, media to promote it, and a political machine to achieve it. What has happened to working Americans is not the result of Adam Smith's benign and invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate money, ideological propaganda, a partisan political religion, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us.
It's an old story in America. We shouldn't be surprised by it any more. Hold up a mirror to this moment and you will see reflected back to you the first Gilded Age in the last part of the 19th century. Then, as now, the great captains of industry and finance could say, with Frederick Townsend Martin, "We are rich. We own America. We got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it."
They were deadly serious. Go for the evidence to such magisterial studies of American history as Growth of the American Republic (Morison, Commager, and Leuchtenberg), and you'll read how they did it: They gained control of newspapers and magazines. They subsidized candidates. They bought legislation and even judicial decisions. To justify their greed and power they drew on history, law, economics, and religion to concoct a philosophy that would come to be known as Social Darwinism – "backed up by the quasi religious principle that the acquisition of wealth was a mark of divine favor." One of their favorite apologists, Professor William Graham Sumner of Yale, said: "If we do not like the survival of the fittest, we have only one possible alternative, and that is the survival of the unfittest. The former is the law of civilization; the latter is the law of anti-civilization."
[Bill Moyers, "Losing the American Revolution", at the Take Back America Conference, Washington DC, 3 June 2005.]
Not To Be Thrown Away
Without further comment, a very short excerpt from a remarkable essay about being American, and why we might might question whether those who loudly claim their greater love of country are really to be believed.
Right after the Abu Ghraib photos surfaced, but before I had had time to truly assimilate them, I was at a working meeting with some Canadian academics. We were talking about the war, and one of them said: how, exactly, is America better than Saddam Hussein? That's an idiotic thing to say, I replied. We don't just throw people in prison for no reason and torture and kill them. At that point someone asked: are you sure?
[…]
The thought that I could not say, with complete confidence, that my country would never throw people in jail and torture them, would never beat innocent taxi drivers to death for no reason, would never ship prisoners off to be tortured in other countries, and would never try to lock up its citizens without charges, trial or counsel — that was among the most horrifying thoughts I have ever had. And it was horrifying because I love my country, and because I love it not just because it is mine, but because of what it stands for. And I cannot stand to see it thrown away.
[hilzoy, "More Things We Throw Away", Obsidian Wings, 9 June 2005.]
Just Talk About It! (BBA VII)
Is it just me, or is anyone else getting tired of the oppressively meta nature of today's political discourse?
It's been months — perhaps even years — since we've just talked about some event. I mean, we used to talk about the Vietnam war, how evil Nixon was, stagflation, the Middle East, the hostages in Iran, voodoo economics …. Real conversations about things.
Today, there are only two things that we talk about:
- What the MSM is talking about; and
- What the MSM isn't talking about.
I find it rather tiresome really that, instead of just discussing an issue, we have to couch everything in terms of whether the MSM is giving enough attention to that issue. (If the issue is important, they never do; unimportant: saturation.) Then we guage how the discussion is going by how much people are talking about how much the MSM isn't talking about it.
I'm an old fart; it confuses me and it wears me out. To me, it would seem so much easier just to talk about it, and f…orget the MSM.
Take, as a random example, the Downing Street Memo. Could we just talk about it please? Discuss things like what the implications are, whether conspiracy to defraud the American people is a "high crime" or "misdemeanor"? Perhaps even discuss right and wrong?
Or must we continue talking about how the press is not talking about it? To state the obvious, if we redirected all those words talking about how no one is talking about it….
Oddly, even the "real" journalists these days seem to be talking about why no one is talking about the DSM. I suppose that's easier than actually doing some research, using all those "real" journalist things like sources and stuff, and writing an investigative report or something. Or are all the "real" journalists spending too much time in DC's underground garages waiting for the story to come to them?
Everybody's getting in on the act. Even Senator Ted Kennedy has had something to say:
The contents of the Downing Street Minutes confirm that the Bush Administration was determined to go to war in Iraq, regardless of whether there was any credible justification for doing so. The Administration distorted and misrepresented the intelligence in its attempt to link Saddam Hussein with the terrorists of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden, and with weapons of mass destruction that Iraq did not have.
In addition, the Downing Street Minutes also confirm what has long been obvious – that the timing of the war was linked to the 2002 Congressional elections, and that the Administration’s planning for post-war Iraq was incompetent in all its aspects. The current continuing crisis is a direct result of that incompetence. […]
[Edward Kennedy, "Senator Kennedy on the Downing Street Minutes", June 2005.]
Pretty strong stuff. He did slip in one little bit about the effort being spent to get "the media and those in government" to speak out (i.e., talk about it), and he does suggest that we can help him speak out by — you guess it! — writing our senators and asking them to talk about it!
Kennedy's statement was filled with gusto, but now there needs to be action to back it up. I suppose, since he's in the minority party, things might go more easily if he has a groundswell of grassroots support behind him, but is asking us to ask others to talk about it really leadership?
Nevertheless, I think it might signal progress, although I notice that it hasn't been talked about much.
[This continues my series of posts concerning the pre-Iraq-war actions of the US administration, aimed at increasing awareness of those activities, as part of the Big Brass Alliance (or BBA) and it's support of AfterDowningStreet.org. For more information from me, see my first posting on The Downing Street Memo: "Worth Remembering"]
Heroic Tapirs
Jesus' General is alarmed ("Death rides a two-toned tapir") about creeping, godless secularism in the public schools of Utah, and wonders whether Utah State-Senator Buttars is going far enough to stem the tide:
I was very angry when I first heard that you are introducing a bill to mandate the teaching of divine design in our schools. To me, it sounded like an attempt to sneak the homosexual agenda into our classrooms. In my mind, I pictured a three hundred pound transvestite teaching our children about the various advantages and disadvantages of using particular fabrics.
Fortunately, the General soon realized that the good senator was referring to Creationism, or, as some like to style it, "Intelligent Design".* He gets right into the swing of things then and suggests some ways that science education could be brought into line with Mormon Scripture. For instance:
And what about history? Do you know of any textbook currently used in Utah schools that mentions the fact that the Lamanites are Jewish? I bet you can't. Heck, they don't even call them Lamanites. They're referred to as Native Americans instead.
Imagine if you will, the many hours of joy we could provide to our children if we taught true, Latter Day Saint history. Kids love to hear the story of the 2000 brave stripling warriors riding their heroic tapirs into battle against their iniquitous Lamanite brethren. Why shouldn't they have the opportunity to learn about it in our schools?
He also has a few suggestions for physics and astronomy that I think should be instantly appealing to ID types.
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*Which, when you think about it, since it's only "method" is to scratch one's head and say "yep, I sure can't think of a way that could have happened, so it must have been God who done it", should probably be more aptly called "Unintelligent Design".
In: All, Common-Place Book, Splenetics
Cut in Pay
On average, jobs leaving America pay $22,457 more than the jobs being created. Tell that to your kid.
[Andy Stern, "A Dreary Day at GM", The Huffington Post, 9 June 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Iraq is Anti-Marriage
When it comes to hitting nails on the head, Shakespeare's Sister ("En Gard") has a very precise aim with her hammer:
I have a question for conservatives who support both the Iraq War and banning gay marriage. Can you produce one instance of a gay marriage actually undermining the sanctity of a heterosexual marriage, or causing the divorce of a straight couple? And if I could produce evidence that the Iraq War is detrimental to marriage, would you support a Constitutional amendment immediately requiring the withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and banning future preemptive wars the same way you support a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage? Because I can: […]
Personally, even though I am one of the dreaded marriage-wreckers myself, I've never quite been able to figure out just what the "save marriage first" crowd is all about. Ever since their "marriage is about procreation" argument was quickly seen to be specious over a decade ago (the way I remember it, but some persistent folk just haven't gotten the memo), they've been trying to work up this "end of civilization through marriage wrecking" argument.
Overstating, of course, over reaching, and generally overlooking all the shortcomings of this marriage approach, too. Usually things like imagining marriage an unchanging institution* that stretches back at least to the extinction of the dinosaurs (young-earth timeframe, generally speaking) and silly statements about just what marriage is for, with some salty seasoning about the downfall of those civilizations that go the gay-marriage route.
The best I've ever come up with is simply the observation that, in the last couple of decades, as gay visibility increased and overt gay-bashing vilification decreased (for awhile, at least, before we became such a valuable "wedge issue"), it made it safer and easier for more mature people to realize their orientation and to choose to act on it. Thus, the phenomenon of middle-aged men who'd been married for over 20 years "suddenly" (so it appeared to clueless and shocked observers) turning gay and leaving their wives. What was never recognized by these (clueless and shocked) observers was neither the years of pain these men suffered from repressing and hiding their feelings, nor the fact that many of them only separated from their wives after lengthy, private working with their wives to arrive at the coming-out point.
Clearly, the war in Iraq is a much more serious marriage-wrecker than the militant homosexual agenda, and one that people serious about protecting marriage could do something about even while implanting their snowflake babies and getting their "sanctity of life" certificates, suitable for framing.
Why, even the Downing Street Memo alleges that Bush is anti-sanctity!
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*Let's get real: the only institution that has been unchanging for nearly that long is the Roman Catholic Church, and even they managed to change their views about Galileo after 400 years.
Red Herrings (BBA VI)
Kevin Baas, in "My conversation with a person from another world", gives us a record of an electronic exchange he had with a Bush/DSM* apologist, who is, as Mr. Baas notes, clearly from another world.
My favorite part of the exchange is where the Person From Another World (or PFAW) loses his dismissive cool and lets his hair down (and his punctuation and grammar start to suffer as well):
Once more: In the CONTEXT of 9/11 Saddam Hussein represents the very element that fell The Towers. He had to go. Now he is gone and the world is a better for it. You wish to SMACK Bush. That is the only thing this is all about. You use historical revisionist hocus pocus to draw your conclusions. You do this to smack Bush whom you believe is Satan and must be stopped in the most embarrassing way possible as soon as possible all the voters be damned.
Go away son you speak not of this world but of some you have created in liberalist utopia desires.
Fascinating insight into how the PFAW mind works — or doesn't quite work, as the case may be. I find it interesting that the PFAW seems not to make the specious assertion that Hussein was actually responsible for the 9/11 events, but that he "represents" the "element" that "fell the Towers". (Is this an attempt to get back to good old King-James style biblical english? "Fell the towers" is quite an impressive phrase.) Of course, what "the context of 9/11" means here is anybody's guess, but it seems that the PFAW realizes that Hussein had no actual involvement with the events of 9/11, so a nefarious connection must be created somehow now that we're in "the context of 9/11".
The "element" that is "represented" is evidently "evil" (on a global scale, manifesting the presence of Satan); it's akin to "hating American freedoms", which ultimately translates into the fanatical Islamic vs. Christianity crusade rhetoric.
"He had to go", of course, merely reinforces the message of the DSM, which the writer was hoping to weaken, that Bush had already decided this and was looking for a pretext that would be acceptable to the American people for long enough to get the war underway.
The reference to Satan, of course, is a reverse projection kind of thing; the PFAW always sees himself fighting against Satan and his army of infidels, which includes me, a godless atheist who hates America first. The final flourish ("Go away son…") manages to be dismissive, patronizing, and evoke that King James Bible all in one short line.
There are several standard red herrings that Bush apologists have adopted as standard responses to anyone who criticizes Bush, hence America ("Hate America Firsters!", another ungainly neologism), and which were evident in this exchange between Baas and the PFAW:
- It's just a memo, someone said someone said….
- Everyone knew Saddam had WMDs back then.
- There were plenty of reasons Saddam had to go, not just WMDs.
- It's old news anyway — get over it.
- Jesus said so.
Number 1, of course, just tries to dismiss the allegations as hearsay, with a bit of contempt for authority thrown in. One does note, however, that the memo was official minutes of the Blair / UK government, and the allegations were made by the head of British Intelligence. Allegations always begin with someone asserting (or "alleging") something. So, far from being "hearsay" (an operative concept only in a legal-defense context), this "allegation" is, well, an "allegation".
Number 2 usually goes along the lines of asserting that, at the time, everyone thought Saddam had WMDs. Of course, that's not true: virtually no one thought so. However, as part of the deal necessary to get Blair to support the invasion (see the DSM), Bush had to support the UN's sending of inspectors to Iraq –> clear evidence for the "no smoke without fire crowd" that everyone thought there were WMDs in Iraq. NB: usually the "no smoke without fire crowd" bring their own smoke to manufacture the presumptive fire; see, e.g., the "controversy" about evolution in Kansas.
With Number 3, we're getting into that part that always sounds to me like desperate defense lawyers listing all the possible reasons why their client might be thought not guilty just in case some of them don't work. There may have been plenty of reasons, and most of them have been used after the fact to justify the invasion, but the WMDs were the original, manufactured and untrue justification. The allegation here has nothing to do with WMDs; the WMDs are merely a catalyst. The allegation is that the President participated in a conspiracy to manipulate intelligence results, to mislead the US Congress, and to mislead the American people.
Number 4 I think has been used for awhile, but I didn't really notice it until Bush's hopeful remarks that, after the election, the "accountability moment" on Iraq had passed. Somehow the idea seems to be that if the Republicans can get by without something being noticed for a certain amount of time that they're home safe. "Oh, that's old news" they trot out, tiresome and dealt with already. Well, the DSM does indeed concern events from a few years ago, but it's not old news, it's not tired, it's by no means passé. One notes in passing that there is no universally recognized "accountability moment" for war crimes.
Number 5: generally deemed unassailable and all too common with the current president, who feels he has a "mandate" from God, and with the radical fundamentalists who feel they convinced God to give Bush the "mandate". Remember, this isn't just a "War on Terrorism", it's also a "War on Evil". I can't really comment with any authority though, since I'm a godless atheist.
[This continues my series of posts concerning the pre-Iraq-war actions of the US administration, aimed at increasing awareness of those activities, as part of the Big Brass Alliance (or BBA) and it's support of AfterDowningStreet.org. For more information from me, see my first posting on The Downing Street Memo: "Worth Remembering"]
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*DSM = "Downing Street Memo", of course.
Anal Sibation
Pope Benedict, in his first clear pronouncement on gay marriages since his election, on Monday condemned same-sex unions as fake and expressions of "anarchic freedom" that threatened the future of the family.
I was getting a little worried there: what was taking him so long! After all, he'd known for years that gay marriage was a pseudo-thing — he should have had the pronouncement written already.
The Pope, who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger headed the Vatican's doctrinal department for more than two decades, said "pseudo freedoms" such as gay marriages were based on what he called the "banalisation of the human body" and of man himself.
Which is it: "anarchic freedom" or "pseudo freedom"? And what would "pseudo freedom" be? Is it that Republican approach that says more laws that keep citizens under surveillance create more freedom?
I'm pretty interested in that "banalisation" remark, though. Any idea what that might mean?
At the moment, I'm fixated on the fact that it's an anagram of "anal sibation". Sure, I don't know yet what "anal sibation" is, but give me some time and I expect I can make up something good. For starters, it's no doubt part of that whole gay pseudo-thing, so it's got to be riproaring fun.
[Quotations from "Pope condemns gay marriages as 'anarchy' ", Reuters via Yahoo! News, 6 June 2005.]
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Splenetics
"The Battle Against the Truth"
Are we doomed to repeat history?
By May of 1973, the White House coverup was unravelling, and the stalking of Richard Nixon by the wider press corps had begun. Woodward and Bernstein had been more than vindicated. The Nixon Administration, mired in a losing war in Vietnam, was also losing the battle against the truth at home. Throughout the two-year crisis, Watergate was perceived as a domestic issue, but its impact on foreign policy was profound. As memoirs by both Nixon and Kissinger show, neither man understood why the White House could not do what it wanted, at home or in Vietnam. The reason it couldn’t is, one hopes, just as valid today: they were operating in a democracy in which they were accountable to a Constitution and to a citizenry that held its leaders to a high standard of morality and integrity. That is the legacy of Watergate.
[Seymour M. Hersh, "Watergate Days", The New Yorker, 13/20 June 2005 issue, posted online on 6 June2005.]
How Big is Aruba?
[Update: For those who are looking for an answer to the question, the Caribbean island of Aruba has an area of 193 sq km (74 sq mi), about the area of Washington, DC.]
This just in from the public-radio station I listen to most days, WBJC*: There is some sort of search, evidently with teams of volunteers, going on for a missing child# in Aruba. The search is covering a "tip of the island". According to my newscaster**: "the call originally went out to comb the entire island but had to be scaled back when officials discovered how large Aruba actually was."
Thank goodness for those officials, keeping an eye on the size of things there.
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*WBJC is from Baltimore. I rarely listen to WETA from Washington, DC, and haven't done for years. Over the last decade the amount of real music they played kept going down in favor of public-affairs programming, of which there is no dearth in DC. Several weeks ago they switched to all-talk radio. Blech, even if it is largely BBC talk programs.
#Update [7 June]: I understand from friends that the missing person is a teen-ager who was celebrating graduation from high school. However, Aruba is still just as large as it was yesterday.
**A local, public-radio announcer, more in tune with pronouncing difficult names of classical-music composers and performers, who likes reading headlines twice an hour.
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Writer or Wonk?
In my early blogging days, I tried doing politics for a little while — a very little while, actually, but I don't really find politics all that interesting. I am not consumed by the feeling that the activities of self-important, inside-the-beltway personnel (NB: "inside the beltware" is only about 5 miles from where I type this) is the most important concern of modern civilized life. At least, it shouldn't be. Yes, when the administration is doing things that I feel affect me directly in their stupidity and homophobia, then I reserve the right to vent my spleen. However, as a steady diet, politics irritates the bowels.
Part of the reason I wrote some political things is that in the early days it was political blogs that I read the most, and I'm frequently a writer who reacts to things I've read. Now, there was no particular motivation for that reading of political blogs, it's just that early on those were the ones I'd tripped over. Now, as time has gone on, I've followed links to other blogs, who had links to other blogs, so on and so forth for several generations, until I'm finally moving into regions of the Blog Venn Diagram that breath air other than the rarified vapors of hard-core political blogs and their camp followers. Besides, as I've noted before, I just didn't feel comfortable calling everyone by his first name, usually because I couldn't keep sorted which Dave or Kevin was which — clearly marking me as an outsider.
Now that I've read this piece by Lance Mannion, "A little jello wrestling, a little cheesecake, and, voila! Problem solved" I feel better about it, too. "It", in this case, is this feeling I have that my blog here just doesn't measure up because I can't seem to focus on just one thing (either something important, like politics, or something clearly unimportant, like cosmology or quantum physics, which I was never all that good at anyway being a classical type of physicist myself, which is generally deemed even less important than quantum physics).
I much prefer the smörgåsbord approach to blogging: an overabundance of delicacies presented for one's delectation. Unfortunately the meal may be followed by indigestion, but the delightful new tastes may have made the discomfort worthwhile.
Besides, this is the way my mind works, like an overstuffed filing cabinet in which the contents of the files keep getting mixed up with each other.
Fortunately, this is not a taste for intellectual stimulation that is universally reviled, even if it is universally ridiculed and rejected: just too, too Ascot in a NASCAR neighborhood. There are others like me, as revealed by Mr. Mannion, although it is clearly the case that we are a near-invisible group.
True, he was addressing the somewhat different rhetorical and tiresomely persistant question: "Where are all the women bloggers?"* Nevertheless, as he looked at some differences in blogging style, he established there are some of us who choose, quite to the uncomprehending amazement of the big guys, not to stick to a single subject, but to roam freely across our intellectual landscape.
Some of us actually aspire to be writers and not mere wonks. I think I can live with that.
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*The answer, of course, is they're the ones standing over there waving their arms and shouting "over here!" while all the "hot-dog male bloggers" look the other way and ask, their voices tinted with concern, "Where are all the women bloggers?"
More Guns = More Death
Joel Shurkin, in "The actuarial cost of gun violence in the U.S." (2 June 2005), summarizes the results of a report (yet to be published) that looks into the cost of handgun violence in the US. These are the bits of his gloss that I found the most telling.
In a study to be published in September in The Journal of Risk and Insurance, Jean Lemaire, a professor of insurance and actuarial science at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, takes on the actuarial cost of the Second Amendment. And the result is staggering.
Lemaire points out that in 2000, the U.S. recorded 11,000 firearm deaths. The European Union, with 25 percent more people had fewer than 1,300. Japan had 22. Looking at that same year, Lemaire pointed out a study showing that gun violence costs the U.S. society $100 billion annually or $360 for every American. But that might not be the most serious cost.
[…]
He does not think Americans are more violent than other people. He also thinks the notion that if we didn?t have so many guns we would find other ways to do each other in specious. If you compare two similar cities, Seattle and Vancouver you find that 41 percent of people in Seattle have guns while only 12 percent of people in Vancouver do. The rate of assault with a firearm is seven times higher in Seattle, and the homicide rate is 4.8 times higher. The people in Vancouver didn?t resort to knives and hatchets to commit mayhem when denied guns. They just committed fewer murders.The evidence is clear, he concludes: The availability of handguns in Seattle increases the assault and homicide rates with a gun, but does not decreased the crime rates without guns, and that restrictive handgun laws reduce the homicide rate in a community.
Wow! What Commas!
Every time I quote something from The Huffington Post, I usually make a remark about all the writing errors (grammatical, punctuation, syntax, spelling, you name it) in the piece I'm quoting. Why, I keep wondering rhetorically, doesn't Arianna pay me a reasonable if somewhat over generous retainer to copy edit the pieces from her "celebrity" posters and keep these little embarrassments from happening in the first place?* If you run into her, you might mention it for me.
But anyway, this time the punctuation is the subject, and an object of wonder itself. Look at the amazingly creative and generous use of the comma in this opening paragraph from "Tom Cruise, George W and Religion" by Karen Finley:
For God’s Sake, or should I say, for Ron Hubbard’s sake? I don’t see what all the fuss is, with Tom Cruise and Scientology. Tom Cruise, is no different than our President, or many of our world citizens, in expressing church rhetoric, finding religion and expressing their faith on company time. Tom, whose own Father, abandoned his family, as a child, displays symptoms of extreme Father Hunger. In interviews, Mr. Cruise is passionate in expressing a distant void with his Father. God, religion becomes the replacement for Daddy Love. Ron Hubbard, becomes the perfect, Science-Fiction, Pagan Idol to transfer the need of devoted son.
That aside, her point was an interesting one, except that she never quite made it. The compare-and-contrast message is this: Why is Tom Cruise being criticized for promoting his religion in his workplace, when the President does the very same thing — in the very same wide-eyed, incredulous fashion no less — and yet is widely lauded for doing it?
The answer that I posit is illuminating: Cruise's is the wrong religion. Yes, despite all the cries from reactionary theocrats that they just want to put religion, any religion, back into society, they really, really, really mean only their own form of fundamentalist Christianity. Scientology just won't do, thank you.
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*Curiously, the errors are often corrected only a few hours later — I know because the corrected versions reappear in the RSS feed (sometimes more than once).
Ode To Dick (BBA V)
In yet another instance of "how could I pass up a title like that":
Compared to George W., Richard Nixon had an all consuming passion for the truth. The Watergate transcripts are basically a desperate attempt by Nixon to keep his lies straight. He was genuinely concerned about what lies he had told to whom; painstakingly repositioning aides and agencies inside his web of plausible deniability lest his actions be found out.
Today's misdeeds make the Huston Plan look like an exercise in progressive government. Having to defend something like the Downing Street Memo would've dissolved RN in a puddle of vindictive jowl sweat. Yet the media never dares trouble our unconcerned Caesar for an explanation.
[Jerry and Joe Long, "Ode To Dick", The Huffington Post, 2 June 2005.]
About Nixon we can look back, almost with nostalgia, and discover several things in the "well, at least he did…" good kind-of stuff category — but whatever will we say about W?
I vividly remembering suffering through the Reagan dark ages, the first presidency in my memory when we thought: how could it get any worse? The answer, of course, was Bush the First. So, we suffered through the first Bush administration, thankfully avoiding re-election, thinking: how could it get any worse? Right! Bush the Second. Four years of wondering how it could possibly get any worse — re-election! Can anyone imagine anything good that we'll have to say about this administration in 25 years, or is its purpose merely to top the list of Top-Ten Worst Presidencies?
And so, this past week, we got to re-live some of the Watergate excitement with the rather ho-hum revelation about the identity of Deep Throat. At least I'm old enough to remember why one might have cared, once. Rather in the way that no one particularly noticed or cared that the "American Family Association" — one of our foremost wacky fundamentalist organizations — finally ended its 9-year-old boycott of Disney, did anyone truly care who "Deep Throat" was, and does it really matter?
At one time it seemed a matter of supreme importance, of course, but not because his identity amounted to a hill of beans. It was the information that mattered, not its source. Rather, his anonymity taunted the right-wing politicoes who needed someone to blame for a situation that they had created themselves. As continues to be the case, they regretted that they had been caught in the coverup, not that they had done it. Now maybe they can get some closure at last by pointing and yelling "traitor", except that after this much time Deep Throat has largely become a folk hero. It's a modern reactionary paradox, very much like celebrating the Supreme Court's decision Brown v Board of Education of Kansas by rallying against "activist judges" (as many Repubican lawmakers did on the recent anniversary). It's a good thing that reactionaries have no sense of irony, otherwise they'd probably explode.
And the resonance with the Downing Street Memo? It's that whole Watergate gestalt, and how it all began with a "third-rate burglary". On the whole, the Memo is a smallish thing, its revelations nothing really that we didn't already know. However, it is tangible, it's message is clear, and it's allegations are specific; it may or may not be the smoking gun, but there's a whiff of creosote in the air.
[This continues my series of posts concerning the pre-Iraq-war actions of the US administration, aimed at increasing awareness of those activities, as part of the Big Brass Alliance (or BBA) and it's support of AfterDowningStreet.org. For more information from me, see my first posting on The Downing Street Memo: "Worth Remembering"]
Unrealized Moscow
For most of my adolescence, I planned to make architecture my profession. I drew plans and sketches of buildings, read books on the subject, took four years of drafting classes in high school, the whole thing. Why it was that I then went to college and majored in physics I don't really know; I can't really say that I regret being a physicist, but I still feel an urge to design buildings and other useful spaces for people; I am, therefore, frequently frustrated at having no good outlet for these design urges.
I can remember, in some vague way, seeing collections of architectural renderings for fantastic projects that were never built: giant buildings — whole floating towns even — that probably could not be built, buildings of the future, and quite a number of memorials and monuments of one type or another. The latter, which for the most part were otherwise useless structures, often exhibited the most fanciful forms, looking more often than not like some Claus Oldenberg sculpture gone bad. I remember seeing one for some giant Soviet Monument to the Nationale or the Worker or some such, fashioned as a giant spiral of enormous height. I'm sure I saw it in films of the same vintage as documentaries of Dada. The monument concept, of course, retained it purity and was never built.
This is one beguiling path of nostalgia that I always find inviting, so I enjoyed it when I tripped, someplace, over this link to a website documenting
The Architecture of Moscow from the 1930s to the early 1950s. Unrealised projects.
(Click on the grey arrows.)
Precisely! Heroic, monumental architectural renderings of heroic, monumental structures that were too great ever to be built! Sometimes I think I feel artistic and idealistic enough — and now old and crazy enough — to devote myself to creating outlandish renderings of buildings that will never be realized, only dreamt.
In: All, Reflections, The Art of Conversation
Is the Memo Too "Reality Based"? (BBA IV)
In a remarkably lucid, detailed, and calm-voiced piece to appear in The New York Review of Books on 9 June 2005 (written 12 May 2005) called "The Secret Way to War", Mark Danner writes about the unfolding of events leading to our invasion of Iraq, and the significance of the Downing Street Memo.
The [Downing Street] memo, which records the minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior foreign policy and security officials, shows that even as President Bush told Americans in October 2002 [in a televised appearance after the US Congress had just voted to authorize the President to go to war against Iraq] that he "hope[d] the use of force will not become necessary"—that such a decision depended on whether or not the Iraqis complied with his demands to rid themselves of their weapons of mass destruction—the President had in fact already definitively decided, at least three months before, to choose this "last resort" of going "into battle" with Iraq.
[…]
Seen from today's perspective this short paragraph [summarizing the report of "C", the head of MI6, after his visit to Washington] is a strikingly clear template for the future, establishing these points:
- By mid-July 2002, eight months before the war began, President Bush had decided to invade and occupy Iraq.
- Bush had decided to "justify" the war "by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD."
- Already "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
- Many at the top of the administration did not want to seek approval from the United Nations (going "the UN route").
- Few in Washington seemed much interested in the aftermath of the war.
[…]
What the Downing Street memo confirms for the first time is that President Bush had decided, no later than July 2002, to "remove Saddam, through military action," that war with Iraq was "inevitable"—and that what remained was simply to establish and develop the modalities of justification; that is, to come up with a means of "justifying" the war and "fixing" the "intelligence and facts…around the policy."
The piece continues, detailing the course of events that followed:
- How the British expressed a desire to have the UN issue an ultimatum, presuming that Saddam would react negatively, giving a pretext for invasion.
- How 'Vice President Dick Cheney had appeared before a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and publicly denounced "the UN route." Asserting that "simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and] there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us"….
- How the President manipulated the UN to start marketing his war.
- How Saddam frustrated the Administration by admitting UN inspectors, suggesting that Cheney's worst nightmare had come true: that the "UN route" might succeed.
- How 'As the gap between administration rhetoric about enormous arsenals— "we know where they are," asserted Donald Rumsfeld—and the inspectors' empty hands grew wider, that gap, as Cheney had predicted, had the effect in many quarters of undermining the credibility of the United Nations process itself.'
(Recall: the Administration depended on the UN route's failure to provide an excuse for invasion.)
In his concluding segment, after noting that the publication of the Downing Street Memo apparently affected Tony Blair's majority in the recent UK elections, Mr. Danner notes tht it's had little effect in the US:
The war continues, and Americans have grown weary of it; few seem much interested now in discussing how it began, and why their country came to fight a war in the cause of destroying weapons that turned out not to exist. For those who want answers, the Bush administration has followed a simple and heretofore largely successful policy: blame the intelligence agencies. Since "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" as early as July 2002 (as "C," the head of British intelligence, reported upon his return from Washington), it seems a matter of remarkable hubris, even for this administration, that its officials now explain their misjudgments in going to war by blaming them on "intelligence failures"—that is, on the intelligence that they themselves politicized. Still, for the most part, Congress has cooperated. Though the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the failures of the CIA and other agencies before the war, a promised second report that was to take up the administration's political use of intelligence—which is, after all, the critical issue—was postponed until after the 2004 elections, then quietly abandoned.
He suspects that, as that unnamed (and manifestly over worked) "senior advisor" to the President famously said, the new breed of politician no longer lives in a "reality-based community", but now he makes hisr own reality:
Though this seems on its face to be a disquisition on religion and faith, it is of course an argument about power, and its influence on truth. Power, the argument runs, can shape truth: power, in the end, can determine reality, or at least the reality that most people accept—a critical point, for the administration has been singularly effective in its recognition that what is most politically important is not what readers of The New York Times believe but what most Americans are willing to believe.
Without irony, our author then quotes Joseph Goebbels on the same topic, who approached it rather more directly:
There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be "the man in the street." Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.
At the end, the compete text of the Downing Street Memo is reprinted.
[This continues my series of posts concerning the pre-Iraq-war actions of the US administration, aimed at increasing awareness of those activities, as part of the Big Brass Alliance (or BBA) and it's support of AfterDowningStreet.org. For more information from me, see my first posting on The Downing Street Memo: "Worth Remembering"]
Hot-Headed, Zealous Atheists
I was fascinated by this chronological sequence of quotations from a piece by Don Herzog, "blast from the past (one)" (at Left2Right). Although some of the passionate distrust of atheists like myself has apparently dissipated in the last 200 years (despite the current attempts at a resurgence), hence some of the excitement, I do feel a little safer. Oddly, contrary to Burke's assertion, it is no longer the atheist who "aims at dominion"!
From [Edmund Burke's] Thoughts on French Affairs, 12/1791:
- Of all men, the most dangerous is a warm, hot-headed, zealous atheist. This sort of man aims at dominion, and his means are the words he always has in his mouth, — "L'égalité naturelle des hommes, et la souveraineté du peuple."
There's a nutshell presentation of the view of the great conservative theorist. Atheism is a threat to social order, and atheism gets wrapped up with dangerous talk of natural equality and popular sovereignty. The great liberal John Locke took a similar view in his Letter concerning Toleration (first published in English in 1689):
- those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God.
Locke thought atheists couldn't be counted on to be moral, keep their promises, and be upstanding members of society. Why? Because of his wacky theory of moral motivation. Locke thought we maximize pleasure, and what keeps us in line on earth is the threat of divine punishment and the promise of heaven.
By Burke's day, though, liberals had made their peace with unbelief. Here's Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia from 1781-82:
- it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
In: All, Common-Place Book, The Art of Conversation
I Win, You Lose
Geraldine Laybourne ('The NY Times Has No Idea "What Women Want" ') was not too pleased with John Tierney's recent piece in the NYTimes ("What Women Want"):
Tierney’s conclusion was women don’t like to compete. Hello?
So, she imagines writing a "Dear John" letter from which I lift this excerpt:
You understood how talented and accomplished women are but quickly made it into a liability instead of an asset. Please don’t put us in old boxes.
We’ve been in the workforce, on the athletic fields, in the military in full force for about 30 years. We’re doing really great. We love to compete — using our ideas, our energy, our skills. But the curious thing is we compete differently. It’s not the be all and end all for us to have someone lose. We actually get significant joy out of seeing a team win, a supplier win or even an entire industry win.
I am but a slow-witted guy when it comes to stuff like this, but I like this idea she suggests that women like to win because women like to see other people win, but that men like to win because men like to see other people lose.
Okay, so this isn't a fully developed thought, but it appeals to me. I know I should have all sorts of insights since I'm gay, which various people think means I have insights into how other various groups think, but in fact I don't have any keen insights that leap to mind.
I did try it out this weekend with some friends of the female persuasion while we were at a Memorial-Day picnic-type affair, and they seemed to think it was rather obvious.
Tchotchkees for Christ
I have been known, at times, to exhibit either bad taste or else an unnatural fascination for tacky things. Although I don't suffer nearly so badly as some of our friends, I do have a smallish collection of really tacky nativity scenes that I put out at Christmas time as a sort of atheist's nod to the spirit of the Holidays.
But, when it comes right down to it, I'm really a novice at it, with few standards. I'll even giggle over clichés in snowglobes, and those statues of Jesus in white robes playing soccer with the boys (the link escapes me right now, although I can't really bothered to look for it either).
But behold: The Passion of the Tchochkee. This is quality stuff, not to be missed. Things like crucified-Jesus-lampshades and the Mexican-folk-art portrayal of the Last Supper entirely with mermaids.
How do I know this is quality kitsch? Because I can already hear our friend Gerry — a true connoisseur of the genre — squealing in horrified delight when he sees them.
Really Old Jokes
Sometime recently I posted something and called it an "old joke". Well, that was nothing. Now I've gotten a glimpse of really old jokes, thanks to John J Emerson's "700-year-old Syriac Jokes" (and his participation in the History Blog Carnival).
Find out, for instance, why the rooster lifts one leg when it crows, or why the ewe had to be stoned. Perhaps they lose something in the translation, but you can't deny the humor in the Victorian name of the scholar who did the orignal translating: E. A. Wallis Budge, author of The Chronography of Gregory Abu Faraj the Son of Aaron, The Hebrew Physician Commonly Known as Bar Hebraeus (2 vols. Oxford, 1932).
In: All, The Art of Conversation