I LIKE HER AS A PERSON BUT. . . FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD . . .
WHAT THE HELL IS SHE THINKING, WHAT CENTURY DOES SHE INHABIT?
To see how deeply the Spokesman’s head is up… well… you know… (in the clouds) here’s a recent column from medieval correspondent, Rebecca Nappi, who reports from the heart of darkest Rome, straight from the Vatican during a recent inquisition investigation.
My response, in all its glory, follows her column. As presented to the SR editorial board, my reply drew hostile fire. This is a long one, folks, so settle your britches and hang on… .
[Open quote.]
Evil reveals complexity of humanity
Rebecca Nappirebecca Nappi
The Spokesman-Review
March 2, 2005
In the summer of 1966, Richard Speck murdered eight nurses in Chicago. I was in sixth grade and read everything I could about it. I did the same a few years later when serial killer Ted Bundy surfaced in Seattle. But as an adult, I've lost my fascination with serial killers, because no one has figured out exactly what makes them tick. If we can't understand them, then everyone we love is vulnerable to their madness.
There's enough to worry about in this world, so I had no intention to read much about Dennis Rader of Kansas, the 59-year-old man suspected of murdering at least 10 people in the Wichita area. But then, in our Sunday story about him, one detail caught my attention.
The serial killer once wrote, "I can't stop it so the monster goes on and hurts me as well as society. It's a big complicated game my friend the monster play, putting victims number down, follow them, checking up on them, waiting in the dark, waiting, waiting."
Was this "monster" actually Satan? Read M. Scott Peck's latest book, "Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption," and you'll ponder the possibility. Peck's book, a swift seller at Amazon.com, is generating some fascinating buzz on spirituality Web sites.
The best explanation of evil I've encountered is in Peck's 1983 book, "People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil." In it, he says that at several points in people's lives, they face moral decisions.
Decide one way and innocent people suffer. Evil ensues. The child an adult brutally beats, for instance, will learn violence firsthand and possibly spread it. Evil escalates, Peck believes, when adults refuse to get help to change their harmful behavior.
"When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder," Peck writes. "Evil is also that which kills spirit. Evil is that force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness."
"People of the Lie" is not about Satan, though Peck briefly discusses two exorcisms he witnessed as a young psychiatrist. He always hoped to write more about the exorcisms before he died. Peck is in his late 60s now, and he has Parkinson's disease. He says "Glimpses of the Devil" will be his final book.
In it, Peck describes exorcisms he performed on two women, Jersey and Beccah. Neither woman seemed likely candidates for possession. Both had been religious. Both had families, education and intelligence. Both wished to be healed from what was considered mainstream mental illness.
Though Peck believes demonic possession is real, he also believes it is extremely rare. He concludes that the women chose to collude with their demonic freeloaders. And they also had to choose to kick them out. Jersey did. Beccah didn't.
The book, written in an almost clinical tone, is no "Exorcist." Still, it's scary as hell. Beccah, for instance, returned from vacations with shockingly deep suntans, because she always felt ice cold inside. The night I finished the book, I didn't sleep well.
The book stirs questions about the true nature of evil. If Rader is the serial killer, how could a devout Lutheran, a man married for 30 years, a father of two, a responsible professional, coldly murder so many people? At one point in the serial killer's life, he faced a choice. He could murder that first victim. Or he could seek help for the compulsion to do so. He allegedly chose to kill. Did the devil make him do it?
I wish it were that simple. But evil is a complex mystery. Every day, people make destiny-altering choices. They get drunk as skunks and drive that way, their children in the car with them. They abuse others, through words and deeds. They refuse psychological and spiritual help when needed and offered. They choose actions that crush the spirits of others, in small ways and in big.
And we're all capable of this kind of evil, no doubt about it. That might be the scariest thought of all.
[Close quote.]
Dear Editorial Board,
Rebecca Nappi’s muddled and uninformative essay on Wednesday about “evil” is a clear example of what I’ve been saying about the fact that no one on your paper represents a rational, useful and clear-eyed point of view on current events. She added nothing to anyone’s understanding of human behavior and so her column was a waste of everybody’s time.
I read a few of Peck’s earlier works, when he was still a bit more sensible, but he’s fallen off the edge now, so to speak. S. J. Gould did a good job of picking apart Peck’s theories of human behavior quite some time ago, and I wish I could recall which of Gould’s essays performed the vivisection so that I could recommend it to the Board.
Who cares whether we call an act “good”, “evil”, “cute”, “bad” or “criminal”? Labeling an act by any name yields not the slightest information of why the act appeared in the behavior repertoire of an individual human being. None whatsoever. Historically, labeling never stops an act from occurring again, never has, and it doesn’t really explain the behavior. If it did, the human race would have had only to experience one Hitler. So Rebecca’s column was just an exercise in futility and commiseration. She waved a soggy handkerchief at the problem of human behavior and turned her back on some potentially real answers.
I’ll cut to the conclusion that Rebecca should have arrived at: an appeal for more funding for the scientific research of evolutionary psychology and a genetic understanding of the real causes of human behavior. In those fields some real understanding of human behavior is already being uncovered. Over and over I’ve recommended to your august company some of the names of those books for your reading pleasure. However, none of the solid and useful information from those books seem to be getting into your paper.
Human behavior does not occur in the way that most under-educated Americans think it does. Really, to hear most people talk, you’d think that all the sensory data which bombards the human animal every second goes to some little room in the brain where sits a homunculus (or soul, armed or unarmed with moral imperatives) which reviews all the arriving data for its moral content then selects from a repertoire of action levers on the wall beside it and pulls one or another to achieve some moral purpose. You’d also think that two other creatures also inhabit this control room, one which tells the little homunculus to chose the good action lever and one which urges it to pull the other lever. If you listen to most babble and commiseration about human behavior, you’ll see that’s what underlies most people’s simplistic idea of how behavior erupts from the human psyche. Nothing could be farther from the truth. How stupid, uninformed and actually immoral in it’s callous disregard for the knowledge being developed that could eventually change human behavior to more constructive ends.
I’ve got a lot more to say about the hows and whys of human behavior, but why should I bother? No one listens down there anyhow and we get the same old religious nonsense to explain everything. I’ll once more recommend a book by a scholar in behavior: Stephen Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”. Then when you finish that book packed with information, look in its index for other books about the whole issue of the evolution of human consciousness and the solid information being developed about human behavior. Anything less on your Board’s part is criminal neglect of your job or, at least, dereliction of duty. I keep appealing to your duty to inform your readers rather than to stroke their ignorance.
Sincerely,
Geo
PS: Really, Rebecca, a Yale graduate, you should be ashamed of yourself for supporting such superstitious nonsense to explain human behavior. Could it be correct that George Bush was right when he said the admission of women into Yale was the downfall of that institution? Please don’t make Bush and Harvard’s current president right nor let us male supporters of feminism down. Show that you do have the ability to think scientifically. I’ll support you one hundred percent.
______________________________________________________________
“I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a break.” —Alexandre Dumas the Younger
“I’ll take the part of the rogue!” —George Thomas the Only. Now that Dad Senior’s dead.
Friday, March 04, 2005
Thursday, March 03, 2005
FUCKIN-A, MAN: THE FIFTH AND HIGHEST FORM OF LOVE
Man, I've been burned by the passion of love more than I care to tell you, specially in the sense that the troubadours sing of it, when the real fuck blends into the spiritual maelstrom, and a man destroys his "sacred" and "lawful" marriage and risks everything just to get a little strange on the side.
"Among the troubadours...," says Campbell, "the beloved to them was a woman, not the manifestation of some divine principle; and specifically, "that" woman. The love was for "her". And the celebrated experience was an agony of earthly love: an effect of the fact that the union of love can never be absolutely realized on this earth." (MTLB, p. 163)
By way of further illumination, the following rumination is from Campbell's lectures in MYTHS TO LIVE BY, pp. 156-157:
[Open quote.]
And so now, finally, what is the fifth, the highest order of love, according to this Indian series? It is passionate, illicit love. In marriage, it is declared, one is still possessed of reason. One still enjoys the goods social position, and the rest. Moreover, marriage in the Orient is a family-made arrangement, having nothing whatsoever to do with what in the West we now think of as love. The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one’s dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm. And the aim of such a love can be only that of the moth in the image of Hallaj: to be annihilated in love’s fire. In the legend of the Lord Krishna, the model is given of the passionate yearning of the young incarnate god for his mortal married mistress, Radha, and of her reciprocal yearning for him. To quote once again the mystic Ramakrishna, who in his devotion to the goddess Kali was himself, all his life, such a lover: when one has loved God in this way, sacrificing all for the vision of his face, “O my Lord,” one can say, “now reveal thyself!” and he will have to respond.
There is the figure also, in India, of the Lord Krishna playing his flute at night in the forest of Vrindavan, at the sound of whose irresistible strains young wives would slip from their husbands’ beds and, stealing to the moonlit wood, dance the night through with their beautiful young god in transcendent bliss.
The underlying thought here is that in the rapture of love one is transported beyond temporal laws and relationships, these pertaining only to the secondary world of apparent separateness and multiplicity. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, in the same spirit, sermonizing in the twelfth century on the Biblical text of the Song of Songs, represented the yearning of the soul for God as both beyond the law and beyond reason. Moreover, the excruciating separation and conflict of the two orders of moral commitment, of reason on one hand, and passionate love on the other, have been a source of Christian anxiety since the beginning. “The desires of the flesh are against the “Spirit,” wrote Saint Paul, for example, to the Galatians, “and the desires of the Spirit, against the flesh.”
[Close quote.]
Speaking of "Radha", Krishna's passion, his "mortal married mistress"—in Spokane, over in Brown's Addition, sits a nice house with a view on the edge of the Spokane River. And in the nicely appointed garage of that house is taught and practiced Radha Yoga, a practice I took two lessons in a very short time ago, but as in all things where "divine" things are spoken of or a "divine light" summoned, Radha Yoga didn't work for me.
I can't get out of my body to spiritual things. Perhaps that's why for me sex was so spiritual and so fraught with the delicate delights of suffering and risk taking. The troubadours must have had the same spiritual problem.
"Hey, out there, I'm trapped," I shout/think.
"O, yeah, guess you'll have to accept it," another, rational voice replies.
__________________________________________________________
"Is sex better than drugs? That depends on the pusher." —unknown author
Man, I've been burned by the passion of love more than I care to tell you, specially in the sense that the troubadours sing of it, when the real fuck blends into the spiritual maelstrom, and a man destroys his "sacred" and "lawful" marriage and risks everything just to get a little strange on the side.
"Among the troubadours...," says Campbell, "the beloved to them was a woman, not the manifestation of some divine principle; and specifically, "that" woman. The love was for "her". And the celebrated experience was an agony of earthly love: an effect of the fact that the union of love can never be absolutely realized on this earth." (MTLB, p. 163)
By way of further illumination, the following rumination is from Campbell's lectures in MYTHS TO LIVE BY, pp. 156-157:
[Open quote.]
And so now, finally, what is the fifth, the highest order of love, according to this Indian series? It is passionate, illicit love. In marriage, it is declared, one is still possessed of reason. One still enjoys the goods social position, and the rest. Moreover, marriage in the Orient is a family-made arrangement, having nothing whatsoever to do with what in the West we now think of as love. The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one’s dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm. And the aim of such a love can be only that of the moth in the image of Hallaj: to be annihilated in love’s fire. In the legend of the Lord Krishna, the model is given of the passionate yearning of the young incarnate god for his mortal married mistress, Radha, and of her reciprocal yearning for him. To quote once again the mystic Ramakrishna, who in his devotion to the goddess Kali was himself, all his life, such a lover: when one has loved God in this way, sacrificing all for the vision of his face, “O my Lord,” one can say, “now reveal thyself!” and he will have to respond.
There is the figure also, in India, of the Lord Krishna playing his flute at night in the forest of Vrindavan, at the sound of whose irresistible strains young wives would slip from their husbands’ beds and, stealing to the moonlit wood, dance the night through with their beautiful young god in transcendent bliss.
The underlying thought here is that in the rapture of love one is transported beyond temporal laws and relationships, these pertaining only to the secondary world of apparent separateness and multiplicity. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, in the same spirit, sermonizing in the twelfth century on the Biblical text of the Song of Songs, represented the yearning of the soul for God as both beyond the law and beyond reason. Moreover, the excruciating separation and conflict of the two orders of moral commitment, of reason on one hand, and passionate love on the other, have been a source of Christian anxiety since the beginning. “The desires of the flesh are against the “Spirit,” wrote Saint Paul, for example, to the Galatians, “and the desires of the Spirit, against the flesh.”
[Close quote.]
Speaking of "Radha", Krishna's passion, his "mortal married mistress"—in Spokane, over in Brown's Addition, sits a nice house with a view on the edge of the Spokane River. And in the nicely appointed garage of that house is taught and practiced Radha Yoga, a practice I took two lessons in a very short time ago, but as in all things where "divine" things are spoken of or a "divine light" summoned, Radha Yoga didn't work for me.
I can't get out of my body to spiritual things. Perhaps that's why for me sex was so spiritual and so fraught with the delicate delights of suffering and risk taking. The troubadours must have had the same spiritual problem.
"Hey, out there, I'm trapped," I shout/think.
"O, yeah, guess you'll have to accept it," another, rational voice replies.
__________________________________________________________
"Is sex better than drugs? That depends on the pusher." —unknown author
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
PSYCHIATRY HAS MADE A FEW MISTAKES
I thought this was a particularly poignant example of a serious mistake that psychiatry has made, but I don’t introduce this to be anti-psychology, like those who speak mindlessly about “psychobabble”. They usually are still in denial about the things that have reduced them to a permanent case of infantilism. To put down psychiatry is their way of letting us know that, “I’m regressed but I don’t know it.”
“The effects of such lobotomies are well illustrated in the movies Francis and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I myself have observed their devastating results. The first patient with whom I attempted psychotherapy had taken off all her clothes one day and run around the streets of her home town screaming, ‘My father is the handsomest goddamn drunk in [X], Pennsylvania!’ She was subsequently hospitalised and then was lobotomised within six weeks. She often continued to shout, ‘My father is the handsomest goddamn drunk in [X], Pennsylvania,’ but she would not take off her clothes or otherwise express her clearly ambivalent and partially sexual feelings toward her father, because she would immediately forget what she was shouting about. Unable to concentrate for more than ten seconds at a time, she was unable to obtain a job outside the hospital or live with relatives. She had, in effect, been sentenced to life imprisonment for having expressed her feelings in a socially inappropriate way. Although lobotomies are now greatly reduced, destructive techniques are far from ancient history.” (from Robyn Dawes’s HOUSE OF CARDS, p. 49)
CHARITY, A PARTICULARLY LIBERAL THING TO DO
Premise: the government under liberals used to practice a pure form of charity. Under current conservative leadership and since sometime in the near past, say since Reagan, pure forms of charity have almost disappeared.
Have you noticed the number of drunks and drifters currently standing on street corners in most major cities of the U.S., holding up their begging bowls, er… signs? Even women have joined them. The question we should be asking ourselves is why this has happened. Drunks have been with us forever, but when I was child and youth, they weren’t standing on street corners. Not that I mind them standing on street corners. After all, if they’re begging for a living, conservative meanies can’t charge drunks with being on welfare, can they? Drunks on street corners with begging signs are earning their living in a not too agreeable way, but they’re at least earning a living. Most Americans who denigrate them probably wouldn’t have the courage to earn their own keeps in that way. They’d steal first, they’d take from the poor and give to the rich. They’d get their Ivy League college buddies to give them a job. That’s how they’d do it if they were brought up in Bush circles and were not too bright. That’s what Bush himself did. That’s Bush-league charity: you rub my back and I’ll rub yours. No charity at all. Do you think Bush would have gotten where he is in a fair test of skills and abilities?
In the past, under liberal leadership, the absolutely destitute drunk could get help and didn’t have to stand on street corners. Believe it or not, a drunk or hobo could get enough pure charity from Democratic government to exist without going to the curbside. Taking their cue from the mythological words of the mythological Jesus (who neocons claim to have close relations with), liberals didn’t judge the drunk. They just pitched in and built a governmental system that helped him. That’s pure charity, charity without strings, charity as it should be practiced if it’s to be called “charity”.
Now, under conservative leadership, pure charity has disappeared. It’s been lobotomized right out of the American consciousness. It’s been replaced by coercive giving, giving with puppet strings attached. Now, the drunk must kowtow to conservative values to get charity, or she must go to Bush’s religious charities to get a hot and a cot. Now government force is being used to make a drunk get Bush’s religion in order to find any help at all. Do it Bush’s way or starve. That’s right, government is now a Christian front organization. Charity has disappeared altogether to be replaced by coercion and bribery. There is no real charity under neocon systems.
In fact, if conservatives were honest, they’d admit that under their forms of governance, charity doesn’t exist. To a conservative, to need charity is already to be judged as unworthy of it. If you need charity, you don’t deserve charity. That’s the Catch 22 of conservative compassion. Even a mother with children is not worthy of help, not even the widow. “Send them to work,” conservative’s say. Never mind that welfare mothers can’t find affordable day care for their children. Screw the children, conservatives say. They say this not with words, because then we’d know them openly for what they are. They say it with every bill they pass and every regulation they level against the poor.
“Every man has three characters—that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.” —Alphonse Karr [Now this one tells on us all, eh?]
I thought this was a particularly poignant example of a serious mistake that psychiatry has made, but I don’t introduce this to be anti-psychology, like those who speak mindlessly about “psychobabble”. They usually are still in denial about the things that have reduced them to a permanent case of infantilism. To put down psychiatry is their way of letting us know that, “I’m regressed but I don’t know it.”
“The effects of such lobotomies are well illustrated in the movies Francis and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I myself have observed their devastating results. The first patient with whom I attempted psychotherapy had taken off all her clothes one day and run around the streets of her home town screaming, ‘My father is the handsomest goddamn drunk in [X], Pennsylvania!’ She was subsequently hospitalised and then was lobotomised within six weeks. She often continued to shout, ‘My father is the handsomest goddamn drunk in [X], Pennsylvania,’ but she would not take off her clothes or otherwise express her clearly ambivalent and partially sexual feelings toward her father, because she would immediately forget what she was shouting about. Unable to concentrate for more than ten seconds at a time, she was unable to obtain a job outside the hospital or live with relatives. She had, in effect, been sentenced to life imprisonment for having expressed her feelings in a socially inappropriate way. Although lobotomies are now greatly reduced, destructive techniques are far from ancient history.” (from Robyn Dawes’s HOUSE OF CARDS, p. 49)
CHARITY, A PARTICULARLY LIBERAL THING TO DO
Premise: the government under liberals used to practice a pure form of charity. Under current conservative leadership and since sometime in the near past, say since Reagan, pure forms of charity have almost disappeared.
Have you noticed the number of drunks and drifters currently standing on street corners in most major cities of the U.S., holding up their begging bowls, er… signs? Even women have joined them. The question we should be asking ourselves is why this has happened. Drunks have been with us forever, but when I was child and youth, they weren’t standing on street corners. Not that I mind them standing on street corners. After all, if they’re begging for a living, conservative meanies can’t charge drunks with being on welfare, can they? Drunks on street corners with begging signs are earning their living in a not too agreeable way, but they’re at least earning a living. Most Americans who denigrate them probably wouldn’t have the courage to earn their own keeps in that way. They’d steal first, they’d take from the poor and give to the rich. They’d get their Ivy League college buddies to give them a job. That’s how they’d do it if they were brought up in Bush circles and were not too bright. That’s what Bush himself did. That’s Bush-league charity: you rub my back and I’ll rub yours. No charity at all. Do you think Bush would have gotten where he is in a fair test of skills and abilities?
In the past, under liberal leadership, the absolutely destitute drunk could get help and didn’t have to stand on street corners. Believe it or not, a drunk or hobo could get enough pure charity from Democratic government to exist without going to the curbside. Taking their cue from the mythological words of the mythological Jesus (who neocons claim to have close relations with), liberals didn’t judge the drunk. They just pitched in and built a governmental system that helped him. That’s pure charity, charity without strings, charity as it should be practiced if it’s to be called “charity”.
Now, under conservative leadership, pure charity has disappeared. It’s been lobotomized right out of the American consciousness. It’s been replaced by coercive giving, giving with puppet strings attached. Now, the drunk must kowtow to conservative values to get charity, or she must go to Bush’s religious charities to get a hot and a cot. Now government force is being used to make a drunk get Bush’s religion in order to find any help at all. Do it Bush’s way or starve. That’s right, government is now a Christian front organization. Charity has disappeared altogether to be replaced by coercion and bribery. There is no real charity under neocon systems.
In fact, if conservatives were honest, they’d admit that under their forms of governance, charity doesn’t exist. To a conservative, to need charity is already to be judged as unworthy of it. If you need charity, you don’t deserve charity. That’s the Catch 22 of conservative compassion. Even a mother with children is not worthy of help, not even the widow. “Send them to work,” conservative’s say. Never mind that welfare mothers can’t find affordable day care for their children. Screw the children, conservatives say. They say this not with words, because then we’d know them openly for what they are. They say it with every bill they pass and every regulation they level against the poor.
“Every man has three characters—that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.” —Alphonse Karr [Now this one tells on us all, eh?]
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
A LETTER TO CAL THOMAS
I don’t know whether or not Cal read this email essay I sent to him, but it was gone for almost a week before it came back with an "unable to deliver" message attached. I thought that only took 24 hours. Well, anyway, someone read it. Here ‘tis for you to read.
Dear Cal Thomas,
May I quote you?
“This is why the slippery slope analogy applies in cases such as stem cell research. Having abandoned an Author and definer of life, it quickly becomes possible and then probable that any value attached to a living thing — particularly a human being — is simply a matter of individual or societal whim. Such values, like a fluctuating stock market, may change at any moment and for any reason, or no reason.” —Cal Thomas
I’m a modern day atheist by which I mean I’m not like Stalin whose stint as a seminarian made him a vicious ideologue in the other direction once he decided that religion tended to keep people meek and in their place so that others could run over them. Then he promptly ran over them just like the Christian ideologue Hitler ran over those opposed to his ideology. It’s ideology that makes people mean, not pragmatism, and I resent your implication that just because I believe in reason and science I’m less human than those who adopt the irrationality and superstition of religious faith. Religious superstition and irrationality have caused just as much if not more harm than science ever did.
All changes are for reason though the reasons are not always the obvious ones. Change may be a result of unconscious processes hidden in our evolutionary natures or through false reasoning, for examples, but to speak of “no reason” is to speak of a logical impossibility.
When I look at the misguided reasons that led to our attacking Iraq and, in fact, the whole history of human behavior, including moral reasoning to conclusions for behavior, I see nothing but whim involved on every hand. To bring whim in as a cause for poor judgment in genetic matters is a canard. Further, for solid logical conclusions, I’ll put my trust in top notch scientists any day above a trust in moralists and theologians who are likely to let dogma decide matters of importance without reference to common sense or logic.
There is no group of people who more “value” the human condition than atheists who put humankind at the center of the universe and, thus, make him fully responsible for every action she takes, whereas, though they don’t admit to it as often as they ought, religionists often lay blame for bad things on forces beyond human will. Evolutionary psychology (see Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate) is giving us a much clearer picture of the springs of human behavior than that imaginary story about the fruit of a badly identified fruit tree and some sexy and tempting woman of six thousand years back.
Now to another column of Cal Thomas’s:
When you were lecturing others in another column recently about fiduciary responsibility, you credited Daddy with helping you and blamed others who might not be so lucky as you because their Daddies didn’t do the job your Daddy did. Do you see how you blamed the child for the father’s actions without really seeing what you did? And you claim to have Bible knowledge which tells you about the sins of the father being visited on the son, etcetera? See… moral reasoning is so relative, isn’t it? Escapes us at times, the full implications of what we moralize about?
Further, why do some people with no parental guidance succeed where others with good parents not “amount to much”, whatever that means? And maybe some of us got good guidance from our parents but were freer spirits than you were and so experimented more than you dared to experiment because, perhaps they feared their daddies less than you did? Some of those freer spirits may have succeeded wildly beyond your level of success. And then other free spirits may have failed because they tried some pretty zany ways to succeed. I think you are being pretty simplistic when you just claim that people succeed to the same measure that their daddies taught them to succeed.
Also, another logical error. If the good old days were better and, presumably, fathers were better teachers then than currently, how did we fall off, why and when did the teaching go awry? How did the good teaching go bad since good teaching, according to your claim, leads to right action? There should be no falling off according to your logic. Good teaching leads to good teaching leads to good teaching, ad infinitum. So, if your good teaching paid off, your teacher had nothing to do with it unless you can logically explain why others fell away from their good teaching teaching. Was it because they were genetically freer spirits, less afraid of their fathers while you were more tightly bound to your father's belt strap? More afraid? Many things to consider here, eh?
Another thing you give no credit to is your good fortune. You should be grateful for your good teaching and for your good genes and not be so busy judging others. The genes which give me a 127 IQ are no credit to me but to my parents. They’re the luck of the draw. The genes which give you more aggression than a meeker man are no credit to you either. I bear no credit for the genes which make me more sensitive than some others. They drove me crazy for some time. Genetic makeup is why great creative genius is born and not made. For the more average sort, like you and me, perhaps effort might have something to do with our survivability but that’s not much difference.
We were both given middleclass values because we were lucky to be born into the manner. That is if you are middleclass and did not go to Ivy League schools which, if you study the class system in America, certainly give opportunity for networking and advancement even for a mediocre mentality like that of George Bush Junior. His genes, like so many of the genes of financially and socially successful people, don’t lead to brilliance, but they do lead to aggressive pursuit and tenacity in the rough going. Again, just a matter of genes. I don’t deny that each of us has some wiggle room within the constraints of our genetic makeup, but it’s less wiggle and more wattle than most would imagine.
I’ve spent a good part of my life with those less successful in adapting to social pressures. Most of them don’t have the genetic drive nor intelligence to really thrive in our current complex society. It was much easier when all one had to do was shove a stick in the dirt, drop a seed, and pray for rain and sunshine. That cultural complexity is the current variable that is leaving so many peoples in the dust, unable to successfully adapt. Culture is beginning to bring an adaptive pressure to bear, and that’s the subject of much evolutionary psychology.
Sorry to have gone on so long, but let me make this last consideration. I think conservatives would be a nicer lot if they felt a little more gratitude for their genes and a lot less time congratulating themselves on their imagined moral superiority.
____________________________________________________________
“Only a [an old-fashioned] mother would think her daughter has been a good girl when she returns from a date with a Gideon Bible in her handbag.” —Frank McKinney Hubbard
I don’t know whether or not Cal read this email essay I sent to him, but it was gone for almost a week before it came back with an "unable to deliver" message attached. I thought that only took 24 hours. Well, anyway, someone read it. Here ‘tis for you to read.
Dear Cal Thomas,
May I quote you?
“This is why the slippery slope analogy applies in cases such as stem cell research. Having abandoned an Author and definer of life, it quickly becomes possible and then probable that any value attached to a living thing — particularly a human being — is simply a matter of individual or societal whim. Such values, like a fluctuating stock market, may change at any moment and for any reason, or no reason.” —Cal Thomas
I’m a modern day atheist by which I mean I’m not like Stalin whose stint as a seminarian made him a vicious ideologue in the other direction once he decided that religion tended to keep people meek and in their place so that others could run over them. Then he promptly ran over them just like the Christian ideologue Hitler ran over those opposed to his ideology. It’s ideology that makes people mean, not pragmatism, and I resent your implication that just because I believe in reason and science I’m less human than those who adopt the irrationality and superstition of religious faith. Religious superstition and irrationality have caused just as much if not more harm than science ever did.
All changes are for reason though the reasons are not always the obvious ones. Change may be a result of unconscious processes hidden in our evolutionary natures or through false reasoning, for examples, but to speak of “no reason” is to speak of a logical impossibility.
When I look at the misguided reasons that led to our attacking Iraq and, in fact, the whole history of human behavior, including moral reasoning to conclusions for behavior, I see nothing but whim involved on every hand. To bring whim in as a cause for poor judgment in genetic matters is a canard. Further, for solid logical conclusions, I’ll put my trust in top notch scientists any day above a trust in moralists and theologians who are likely to let dogma decide matters of importance without reference to common sense or logic.
There is no group of people who more “value” the human condition than atheists who put humankind at the center of the universe and, thus, make him fully responsible for every action she takes, whereas, though they don’t admit to it as often as they ought, religionists often lay blame for bad things on forces beyond human will. Evolutionary psychology (see Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate) is giving us a much clearer picture of the springs of human behavior than that imaginary story about the fruit of a badly identified fruit tree and some sexy and tempting woman of six thousand years back.
Now to another column of Cal Thomas’s:
When you were lecturing others in another column recently about fiduciary responsibility, you credited Daddy with helping you and blamed others who might not be so lucky as you because their Daddies didn’t do the job your Daddy did. Do you see how you blamed the child for the father’s actions without really seeing what you did? And you claim to have Bible knowledge which tells you about the sins of the father being visited on the son, etcetera? See… moral reasoning is so relative, isn’t it? Escapes us at times, the full implications of what we moralize about?
Further, why do some people with no parental guidance succeed where others with good parents not “amount to much”, whatever that means? And maybe some of us got good guidance from our parents but were freer spirits than you were and so experimented more than you dared to experiment because, perhaps they feared their daddies less than you did? Some of those freer spirits may have succeeded wildly beyond your level of success. And then other free spirits may have failed because they tried some pretty zany ways to succeed. I think you are being pretty simplistic when you just claim that people succeed to the same measure that their daddies taught them to succeed.
Also, another logical error. If the good old days were better and, presumably, fathers were better teachers then than currently, how did we fall off, why and when did the teaching go awry? How did the good teaching go bad since good teaching, according to your claim, leads to right action? There should be no falling off according to your logic. Good teaching leads to good teaching leads to good teaching, ad infinitum. So, if your good teaching paid off, your teacher had nothing to do with it unless you can logically explain why others fell away from their good teaching teaching. Was it because they were genetically freer spirits, less afraid of their fathers while you were more tightly bound to your father's belt strap? More afraid? Many things to consider here, eh?
Another thing you give no credit to is your good fortune. You should be grateful for your good teaching and for your good genes and not be so busy judging others. The genes which give me a 127 IQ are no credit to me but to my parents. They’re the luck of the draw. The genes which give you more aggression than a meeker man are no credit to you either. I bear no credit for the genes which make me more sensitive than some others. They drove me crazy for some time. Genetic makeup is why great creative genius is born and not made. For the more average sort, like you and me, perhaps effort might have something to do with our survivability but that’s not much difference.
We were both given middleclass values because we were lucky to be born into the manner. That is if you are middleclass and did not go to Ivy League schools which, if you study the class system in America, certainly give opportunity for networking and advancement even for a mediocre mentality like that of George Bush Junior. His genes, like so many of the genes of financially and socially successful people, don’t lead to brilliance, but they do lead to aggressive pursuit and tenacity in the rough going. Again, just a matter of genes. I don’t deny that each of us has some wiggle room within the constraints of our genetic makeup, but it’s less wiggle and more wattle than most would imagine.
I’ve spent a good part of my life with those less successful in adapting to social pressures. Most of them don’t have the genetic drive nor intelligence to really thrive in our current complex society. It was much easier when all one had to do was shove a stick in the dirt, drop a seed, and pray for rain and sunshine. That cultural complexity is the current variable that is leaving so many peoples in the dust, unable to successfully adapt. Culture is beginning to bring an adaptive pressure to bear, and that’s the subject of much evolutionary psychology.
Sorry to have gone on so long, but let me make this last consideration. I think conservatives would be a nicer lot if they felt a little more gratitude for their genes and a lot less time congratulating themselves on their imagined moral superiority.
____________________________________________________________
“Only a [an old-fashioned] mother would think her daughter has been a good girl when she returns from a date with a Gideon Bible in her handbag.” —Frank McKinney Hubbard
Monday, February 28, 2005
VIDAL CALLS IT "MILITARIZED KEYNESIANISM"
Reading in Gore Vidal's novel, THE GOLDEN AGE, pp. 365-368, I find Vidal does a wonderful exposition that unravels how socialism became state capitalism from the time of Truman to the time of Bush, through the finagling of the military/industrial complex with a judicious dose of fear mongering. Even the good guys are complicit. I've included a long passage from the novel, but I hope you'll find it interesting. Two of his characters, Peter Sanford and Billy Thorne are summing up their views of history. We're meant to dislike the Thorne character and sympathize with Peter in the book. Billy Thorne is squirming his way through the McCarthy era by metamorphosing from being a communist to being a capitalist, meanwhile betraying all his old comrades as he does. Peter remains true to his beliefs which had allowed him to vote for the Communist Norman Thomas in a past election:
[Open quote.]
“Of course, it [arms race with Russia] will cost us a lot, but it will bankrupt the Russians. So maybe the average American couple may be reduced to only one and a half Chryslers per year, but that’s only for a decade or two. A mere generation at the outside. Meanwhile, our defense industries will grow richer and richer as they pay more and more people more and more money to build weapons of every sort while, thanks to the withholding tax, Roosevelt’s one stroke of genius when it came to financing all-out war for all-out peace, the newly rich working class will gratefully finance through their humble little taxes the federal machine that hires them to build these weapons that we need to defend freedom and democracy, forever. What Truman’s people learned from Roosevelt’s act of necessity in wartime is how to use, in peacetime, the same methods to finance an ever-expanding federal apparatus to save us from a savage adversary, longing to destroy us. Oh, they have the nation by the balls, which is why they are grateful for Senator Joe McCarthy’s demented ravings.” Out of breath, Billy lit a cigar.
“I had not believed,” said Peter, gulping the last bit of cheesecake, “that you were so sincere an employee of the Wall Street Journal. You have actually come full circle from communism to capitalism.”
“The scales have fallen from your eyes at last.” Billy blew smoke across the table. “Taken to their logical conclusion, the two are nearly identical. Where the ideal communist’s socialist state would use the national wealth for the good of the citizens, strictly regulated, of course, by a centralized money power, we are now, in the interest of defending ourselves against an enemy both Satanic and godless—very important point, ‘godless,’ in selling high taxes to simple Americans of deep religious faith—we are creating a totally militarized socialist state by ignoring such frills as the welfare of the people themselves. After all, the true American likes to stand on his own two ruggedly independent feet, which our nuclear state will encourage him to do. He is also free to go to the church of his choice, unlike the communist Russian slaves. I must say the accidental brilliance of our leadership still astonishes me. Haberdasher Truman and Lawyer Acheson and Soldier Marshall are creating a militarized economy and state that leaves those two bumblers Stalin and Mao far behind in the dust, staring skyward at our B-29s soon to start darkening their red skies. Peter, you have made me poetic.”
Save it for the Journal.”
“They would never use a word of it. We’re not supposed to give the game away, ever. But, to be fair to my editors, they believe what they write even though it’s always wrong, as the masters of our new nation intend it should be.”
“Militarized Keynesianism,” Peter said, as the change for five dollars was brought him.
“Not a bad phrase.” Billy was in a good mood.
“So you don’t think that in this new world order there is room for World War Three?”
“Who knows? We do keep pushing the Russians. And it’s possible that one day they’ll really push back. But I doubt it. They had their chance over Berlin only to discover that our airlift worked. Next month they’ll accept our terms. No more airlift and we win again, for now Then Congress will start implementing National Security Council order number twenty-something-or-other and you’ll see every last Republican—penny-pinchers to a man—voting in the name of national defense for the biggest amount of government spending the world has ever seen. We are now inventing mega-socialism in order to protect the free world.”
“It sounds more like reinventing fascism.”
“Mussolini wasn’t from Missouri.” Billy put out his cigar. “Not only is industry going to be supported by the federal government but the universities, too.”
“How?”
“Huge federal grants to higher learning to find new scientific ways of defending freedom. Also, new ways to silence the so-called humanities. We’re even planning to set up independent journals and newspapers all around the world to counteract reactionary, un—American papers like yours. Our periodicals will be known as ‘liberal,’ of course, in the Americans for Demonic Action sense. At last true benign socialism.”
“What was wrong with socialism before?”
“It was Russian and they were far too poor and dim-witted to do anything with so noble a concept. They also wanted to look after the education and so on of their people. That’s not for us. Ever. What’s good for General Motors….”
“Is good for General Electric. Yes. I understand you, Billy.” And Peter thought that now, finally, he did.
At the door to the Brass Rail, they parted. Billy’s last words were, “I’m fairly sure Clay’s going to run against my ex-father-in-law next year. I hope Diana doesn’t take it too hard. Ruthlessness is part of Clay’s charm. He’s going to be president, you know If not by 1960, ‘64.... Read his book.”
“I have. Fire over Luzon..
“No. No. That’s Harold Griffiths’ great gushing tribute. Read Clay’s Vision for America:’
“I haven’t seen it.”
“That’s because I haven’t finished writing it.”
Billy stumped down Seventh Avenue towards Times Square. Peter went back into the Brass Rail and rang Latouche and canceled their meeting. Apparently, the movie star John Garfield was being fired from a film because he had known communists in his youth. Peter said that he would do what he could, which was very little. As he hung up he wondered if the bill for a militarized state, based on keeping the citizens in a constant state of panic, might prove, in the end, more devastating than World War Three, which so many, so excitedly, predicted was at hand.
_____________________________________________________________________
“At this moment, probably the strongest ideology in the world is nationalism. This atmosphere is not favorable to bringing about a world without war.” —Norman Thomas [American communist of last century.]
“It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.” —Authur C. Clarke [science fiction writer of last century.]
“Unh? What’s that Clarke fellow mean? And who’s them Vidal and Thomas guys? Sound like comoonists to me!” —George Bush [American presidential bumbler of current century.]
Reading in Gore Vidal's novel, THE GOLDEN AGE, pp. 365-368, I find Vidal does a wonderful exposition that unravels how socialism became state capitalism from the time of Truman to the time of Bush, through the finagling of the military/industrial complex with a judicious dose of fear mongering. Even the good guys are complicit. I've included a long passage from the novel, but I hope you'll find it interesting. Two of his characters, Peter Sanford and Billy Thorne are summing up their views of history. We're meant to dislike the Thorne character and sympathize with Peter in the book. Billy Thorne is squirming his way through the McCarthy era by metamorphosing from being a communist to being a capitalist, meanwhile betraying all his old comrades as he does. Peter remains true to his beliefs which had allowed him to vote for the Communist Norman Thomas in a past election:
[Open quote.]
“Of course, it [arms race with Russia] will cost us a lot, but it will bankrupt the Russians. So maybe the average American couple may be reduced to only one and a half Chryslers per year, but that’s only for a decade or two. A mere generation at the outside. Meanwhile, our defense industries will grow richer and richer as they pay more and more people more and more money to build weapons of every sort while, thanks to the withholding tax, Roosevelt’s one stroke of genius when it came to financing all-out war for all-out peace, the newly rich working class will gratefully finance through their humble little taxes the federal machine that hires them to build these weapons that we need to defend freedom and democracy, forever. What Truman’s people learned from Roosevelt’s act of necessity in wartime is how to use, in peacetime, the same methods to finance an ever-expanding federal apparatus to save us from a savage adversary, longing to destroy us. Oh, they have the nation by the balls, which is why they are grateful for Senator Joe McCarthy’s demented ravings.” Out of breath, Billy lit a cigar.
“I had not believed,” said Peter, gulping the last bit of cheesecake, “that you were so sincere an employee of the Wall Street Journal. You have actually come full circle from communism to capitalism.”
“The scales have fallen from your eyes at last.” Billy blew smoke across the table. “Taken to their logical conclusion, the two are nearly identical. Where the ideal communist’s socialist state would use the national wealth for the good of the citizens, strictly regulated, of course, by a centralized money power, we are now, in the interest of defending ourselves against an enemy both Satanic and godless—very important point, ‘godless,’ in selling high taxes to simple Americans of deep religious faith—we are creating a totally militarized socialist state by ignoring such frills as the welfare of the people themselves. After all, the true American likes to stand on his own two ruggedly independent feet, which our nuclear state will encourage him to do. He is also free to go to the church of his choice, unlike the communist Russian slaves. I must say the accidental brilliance of our leadership still astonishes me. Haberdasher Truman and Lawyer Acheson and Soldier Marshall are creating a militarized economy and state that leaves those two bumblers Stalin and Mao far behind in the dust, staring skyward at our B-29s soon to start darkening their red skies. Peter, you have made me poetic.”
Save it for the Journal.”
“They would never use a word of it. We’re not supposed to give the game away, ever. But, to be fair to my editors, they believe what they write even though it’s always wrong, as the masters of our new nation intend it should be.”
“Militarized Keynesianism,” Peter said, as the change for five dollars was brought him.
“Not a bad phrase.” Billy was in a good mood.
“So you don’t think that in this new world order there is room for World War Three?”
“Who knows? We do keep pushing the Russians. And it’s possible that one day they’ll really push back. But I doubt it. They had their chance over Berlin only to discover that our airlift worked. Next month they’ll accept our terms. No more airlift and we win again, for now Then Congress will start implementing National Security Council order number twenty-something-or-other and you’ll see every last Republican—penny-pinchers to a man—voting in the name of national defense for the biggest amount of government spending the world has ever seen. We are now inventing mega-socialism in order to protect the free world.”
“It sounds more like reinventing fascism.”
“Mussolini wasn’t from Missouri.” Billy put out his cigar. “Not only is industry going to be supported by the federal government but the universities, too.”
“How?”
“Huge federal grants to higher learning to find new scientific ways of defending freedom. Also, new ways to silence the so-called humanities. We’re even planning to set up independent journals and newspapers all around the world to counteract reactionary, un—American papers like yours. Our periodicals will be known as ‘liberal,’ of course, in the Americans for Demonic Action sense. At last true benign socialism.”
“What was wrong with socialism before?”
“It was Russian and they were far too poor and dim-witted to do anything with so noble a concept. They also wanted to look after the education and so on of their people. That’s not for us. Ever. What’s good for General Motors….”
“Is good for General Electric. Yes. I understand you, Billy.” And Peter thought that now, finally, he did.
At the door to the Brass Rail, they parted. Billy’s last words were, “I’m fairly sure Clay’s going to run against my ex-father-in-law next year. I hope Diana doesn’t take it too hard. Ruthlessness is part of Clay’s charm. He’s going to be president, you know If not by 1960, ‘64.... Read his book.”
“I have. Fire over Luzon..
“No. No. That’s Harold Griffiths’ great gushing tribute. Read Clay’s Vision for America:’
“I haven’t seen it.”
“That’s because I haven’t finished writing it.”
Billy stumped down Seventh Avenue towards Times Square. Peter went back into the Brass Rail and rang Latouche and canceled their meeting. Apparently, the movie star John Garfield was being fired from a film because he had known communists in his youth. Peter said that he would do what he could, which was very little. As he hung up he wondered if the bill for a militarized state, based on keeping the citizens in a constant state of panic, might prove, in the end, more devastating than World War Three, which so many, so excitedly, predicted was at hand.
_____________________________________________________________________
“At this moment, probably the strongest ideology in the world is nationalism. This atmosphere is not favorable to bringing about a world without war.” —Norman Thomas [American communist of last century.]
“It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.” —Authur C. Clarke [science fiction writer of last century.]
“Unh? What’s that Clarke fellow mean? And who’s them Vidal and Thomas guys? Sound like comoonists to me!” —George Bush [American presidential bumbler of current century.]
Saturday, February 26, 2005
LIKE BUSH SAYS: THE GRAPES OF WRATH IS A COMMUNIST MOVIE.
Never mind that the book “The Grapes of Wrath” was based on was written by one of America’s few Nobel Prize winners. Hitler and Stalin didn’t appreciate their nation’s greatest writers either. Fascists like Hitler and Stalin just have never appreciated the Hollywood or literate crowd of their day. Doesn’t that hatred in current America sound familiar?
America is really into another age of repression, but what is most worrisome about this repressive period is that the media is voluntarily censoring itself. Power, prestige and money are corrupting way too many of these sissies in the media. Those who don’t kiss the royal Bushass have lost all courage to present the truth to the liars in office. They’re mindless wimps who don’t know what makes America great, and that’s certainly not anything that Bush has done for us. Under Bush, we’ve lost a lot of stature. To the world at large, we’re kind of like Germany as viewed by conquered Poles during World War Two. Eric Alterman calls a bushbaby a bushbaby in his column below:
[Open quote.]
column | Posted February 10, 2005
THE LIBERAL MEDIA by Eric Alterman
Better Red Than Dead?
The United States government is currently run by a group of people for whom verifiable truth holds no particular privilege over ideologically inspired nonsense. For members of the mainstream media, trying to maintain a sense of self-importance and solemnity and to keep the wing nuts from crowing for more scalps, this requires a series of stratagems to keep up the scripted charade, no matter how foolish it makes them look or feel while doing so.
The easiest of these stratagems is simply to stack the coverage with political partisans and give them free rein to spout GOP propaganda. That's what the cable news networks do, as Media Matters for America demonstrated. Consistent with cable inauguration coverage, for example, MSNBC offered viewers of its State of the Union commentary eleven right-wing pundits and just two Democrats or liberals in response.
A second technique is more often deployed on network television, where such naked partisanship is frowned upon, but executives are, if anything, even more worried about appearing unsympathetic to the red-state, red-meat offerings of George W. Bush. This is to ignore the substance and focus on the spectacle, the "feelings" and the atmosphere. CBS's Bob Schieffer, on his best post-Dan Rather behavior, for instance, marveled, "One of the best-delivered speeches that I have heard President Bush make. He was confident, he was direct, he drove his points home."
On ABC, Cokie Roberts found herself enthralled with a faux-dramatic--and most likely fully staged--embrace between an Iraqi woman seated next to Laura Bush and the mother of a soldier who died for Bush's folly in Falluja, gushing, "To have that completely spontaneous hug was something that leaves you with goose bumps." Tim Russert--who, like so many Democratic pols who transition to media megabucks, is committed to proving his bona fides by kowtowing to Republicans at every opportunity--professed, "You can feel...in this town" that Democratic "nerves are frayed." Russert was reacting to a rare display of Democratic spirit during the speech--booing when Bush sought to mislead the country into dismantling the most successful government program ever attempted in America: Social Security. To Russert and much of the permanent Washington establishment, the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat--or at least one who's willing to act that way.
The standard for this kind of contentless coverage is set, per usual, by the reporting of the New York Times. If the lead reporter of the newspaper of record can ditch the substance part, well then, so can everybody else. Reporter Todd Purdum marveled at Bush's "penchant for thinking big, or speaking grandly." He then referred to Bush's "first State of the Union address three years ago...he stunned the world with his denunciation of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an 'axis of evil,' and his warning that he would 'not wait on events while dangers gather.'" Purdum failed to note what was obvious to any "reality based" observer: that the "axis" idea was logically incoherent, and the arguments vis-Ã -vis Iraq were based on evidence later deemed imaginary. Instead, Purdum explained that Bush "has long since proved both the extent, and the limits, of his ability to match his actions to his words," which is an awfully nice way of saying that the man is full of it.
Times editors might have taken a lesson from the Boston Globe, a paper with whom they share a common owner, which provided a presidential "fact check" demonstrating Bush's willingness to mislead the nation in the service of his ideological obsessions. In the Knight Ridder newspapers--a chain whose coverage of the leadup to war, by the way, puts to shame that of almost every other paper, particularly that of the Times's credulous correspondent Judith Miller--Kevin G. Hall had the honor and honesty to report that the President was seeking to destroy Social Security on the basis of calculations that were transparently phony. He wrote, "President Bush's warning that Social Security faces a looming financial crisis is based on the assumption that the U.S. economy will grow by only 1.8 percent each year, on average, for most of the next 75 years. Since 1950, the U.S. economy has grown, on average, by 3.5 percent per year." However, he noted, "If the economy continued to grow over the next 50 years at a rate anywhere near the past pace, Social Security wouldn't face a financial crisis, though it would require small adjustments to balance its income and costs." (Perhaps this is the kind of reporting of which the oh-so-smart folks at ABC's The Note complain, "Can we stop reading those repetitive, boring, and incomplete journalistic Q&A's on how private accounts would work, blah blah blah, how the system is currently funded, blah blah blah, what the President is proposing, blah blah blah?")
Of course, journalism is by definition a process of selection and omission, so it can be a little unfair to single out what reporters failed to report about Bush's speech. But the unhappy fact is that almost everything this Administration tries to sell to Americans is snake oil, and the mere act of reporting it without comment implicates the media in the fundamental dishonesty that is this President's modus operandi. When he says "freedom," he means the freedom of the United States and its allies to jail and torture anyone they choose. When he says "liberty," he means the liberty of other governments to profess to share the alleged aims of US foreign policy and then--like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Egypt--jail and silence all critics without inconvenient criticism from the United States. (If you play the game right, you can even provide weapons to anti-American terrorists and fund anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda on behalf of the terrorists, all the while remaining a close friend of Bush & Co.)
This is apparently what NBC's Andrea Mitchell had in mind when she spoke of the Administration's "democracy agenda that Condi Rice is going to be bringing to Europe and the Middle East." Or perhaps she meant an American invasion of Iran; or the destruction of Social Security. It's hard to know in a post-truth society what anything means anymore, except more nonsense and lies, dutifully reported.
[Close quote.]
________________________________________________________________________
“I have seen the truth and it doesn’t make sense.” —Unknown author. [Depending on which way one squints and his tolerance for irony, the author of that statement could or could not be George Bush, senior or junior. It could even be Dan Quail!]
Never mind that the book “The Grapes of Wrath” was based on was written by one of America’s few Nobel Prize winners. Hitler and Stalin didn’t appreciate their nation’s greatest writers either. Fascists like Hitler and Stalin just have never appreciated the Hollywood or literate crowd of their day. Doesn’t that hatred in current America sound familiar?
America is really into another age of repression, but what is most worrisome about this repressive period is that the media is voluntarily censoring itself. Power, prestige and money are corrupting way too many of these sissies in the media. Those who don’t kiss the royal Bushass have lost all courage to present the truth to the liars in office. They’re mindless wimps who don’t know what makes America great, and that’s certainly not anything that Bush has done for us. Under Bush, we’ve lost a lot of stature. To the world at large, we’re kind of like Germany as viewed by conquered Poles during World War Two. Eric Alterman calls a bushbaby a bushbaby in his column below:
[Open quote.]
column | Posted February 10, 2005
THE LIBERAL MEDIA by Eric Alterman
Better Red Than Dead?
The United States government is currently run by a group of people for whom verifiable truth holds no particular privilege over ideologically inspired nonsense. For members of the mainstream media, trying to maintain a sense of self-importance and solemnity and to keep the wing nuts from crowing for more scalps, this requires a series of stratagems to keep up the scripted charade, no matter how foolish it makes them look or feel while doing so.
The easiest of these stratagems is simply to stack the coverage with political partisans and give them free rein to spout GOP propaganda. That's what the cable news networks do, as Media Matters for America demonstrated. Consistent with cable inauguration coverage, for example, MSNBC offered viewers of its State of the Union commentary eleven right-wing pundits and just two Democrats or liberals in response.
A second technique is more often deployed on network television, where such naked partisanship is frowned upon, but executives are, if anything, even more worried about appearing unsympathetic to the red-state, red-meat offerings of George W. Bush. This is to ignore the substance and focus on the spectacle, the "feelings" and the atmosphere. CBS's Bob Schieffer, on his best post-Dan Rather behavior, for instance, marveled, "One of the best-delivered speeches that I have heard President Bush make. He was confident, he was direct, he drove his points home."
On ABC, Cokie Roberts found herself enthralled with a faux-dramatic--and most likely fully staged--embrace between an Iraqi woman seated next to Laura Bush and the mother of a soldier who died for Bush's folly in Falluja, gushing, "To have that completely spontaneous hug was something that leaves you with goose bumps." Tim Russert--who, like so many Democratic pols who transition to media megabucks, is committed to proving his bona fides by kowtowing to Republicans at every opportunity--professed, "You can feel...in this town" that Democratic "nerves are frayed." Russert was reacting to a rare display of Democratic spirit during the speech--booing when Bush sought to mislead the country into dismantling the most successful government program ever attempted in America: Social Security. To Russert and much of the permanent Washington establishment, the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat--or at least one who's willing to act that way.
The standard for this kind of contentless coverage is set, per usual, by the reporting of the New York Times. If the lead reporter of the newspaper of record can ditch the substance part, well then, so can everybody else. Reporter Todd Purdum marveled at Bush's "penchant for thinking big, or speaking grandly." He then referred to Bush's "first State of the Union address three years ago...he stunned the world with his denunciation of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an 'axis of evil,' and his warning that he would 'not wait on events while dangers gather.'" Purdum failed to note what was obvious to any "reality based" observer: that the "axis" idea was logically incoherent, and the arguments vis-Ã -vis Iraq were based on evidence later deemed imaginary. Instead, Purdum explained that Bush "has long since proved both the extent, and the limits, of his ability to match his actions to his words," which is an awfully nice way of saying that the man is full of it.
Times editors might have taken a lesson from the Boston Globe, a paper with whom they share a common owner, which provided a presidential "fact check" demonstrating Bush's willingness to mislead the nation in the service of his ideological obsessions. In the Knight Ridder newspapers--a chain whose coverage of the leadup to war, by the way, puts to shame that of almost every other paper, particularly that of the Times's credulous correspondent Judith Miller--Kevin G. Hall had the honor and honesty to report that the President was seeking to destroy Social Security on the basis of calculations that were transparently phony. He wrote, "President Bush's warning that Social Security faces a looming financial crisis is based on the assumption that the U.S. economy will grow by only 1.8 percent each year, on average, for most of the next 75 years. Since 1950, the U.S. economy has grown, on average, by 3.5 percent per year." However, he noted, "If the economy continued to grow over the next 50 years at a rate anywhere near the past pace, Social Security wouldn't face a financial crisis, though it would require small adjustments to balance its income and costs." (Perhaps this is the kind of reporting of which the oh-so-smart folks at ABC's The Note complain, "Can we stop reading those repetitive, boring, and incomplete journalistic Q&A's on how private accounts would work, blah blah blah, how the system is currently funded, blah blah blah, what the President is proposing, blah blah blah?")
Of course, journalism is by definition a process of selection and omission, so it can be a little unfair to single out what reporters failed to report about Bush's speech. But the unhappy fact is that almost everything this Administration tries to sell to Americans is snake oil, and the mere act of reporting it without comment implicates the media in the fundamental dishonesty that is this President's modus operandi. When he says "freedom," he means the freedom of the United States and its allies to jail and torture anyone they choose. When he says "liberty," he means the liberty of other governments to profess to share the alleged aims of US foreign policy and then--like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Egypt--jail and silence all critics without inconvenient criticism from the United States. (If you play the game right, you can even provide weapons to anti-American terrorists and fund anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda on behalf of the terrorists, all the while remaining a close friend of Bush & Co.)
This is apparently what NBC's Andrea Mitchell had in mind when she spoke of the Administration's "democracy agenda that Condi Rice is going to be bringing to Europe and the Middle East." Or perhaps she meant an American invasion of Iran; or the destruction of Social Security. It's hard to know in a post-truth society what anything means anymore, except more nonsense and lies, dutifully reported.
[Close quote.]
________________________________________________________________________
“I have seen the truth and it doesn’t make sense.” —Unknown author. [Depending on which way one squints and his tolerance for irony, the author of that statement could or could not be George Bush, senior or junior. It could even be Dan Quail!]
Friday, February 25, 2005
THE DRUNK OUT OF NOWHERE or
IF THERE WERE A GOD, HE’D WORK IN STRANGE WAYS.
You are standing on the small concrete porch in front of Sutton Hall on the campus of Eastern Washington University in the state of Washington. The sun’s low in the western sky, a wonderful end to a gently warm day when out of nowhere he walks up the front walk, freshly shaved, newly washed short sleeve shirt and khaki pants. The low sun shining in his face hi-lights his thin features. There’s an aura of scrubbed newness about him that is quite strange. Something’s not quite right. He approaches close and in a timid voice says, “Is there some club here I heard about? An AA club?”
Immediately you know what he’s all about. You’re one too, but you’re sober, have been for a few years, and you think it’s wildly coincidental that out of all the people in this small Washington town and on this campus he’s walked right up to you to ask. AA members have a tendency to conflate coincidence with the will of a power greater than themselves, and you’re no different.
In a small town like Cheney, of course there’s no club, just a living room that a religious group lets drying out drunks use to meet once a week. The Konoinia House. He tells you he’s fresh out of detox, just released, and he’s thumbing his way to Seattle, all the way across the state. He tells you a lame story about someone over there who’ll put him up, if he can just get over there. His plan sounds desperate and unsound. Nothing about the story makes sense. Nothing’s clear or firm or quite put together right. You expect him to hit you up for a couple of bucks. You’ve heard stories of wet drunks who go from club to club only to finance their drinking binges.
He hasn’t eaten all day he tells you, and so you make some calls to scrape a little money together from friends of Bill (all poor because they’re going to college), and then you take him down to a local restaurant to buy him dinner. He only want’s soup and coffee. He tells you he can’t keep anything else down. Up close beside him... now you see how bad off he is. The soup spoon shakes so badly that most of the chicken noodle spills before he gets it to his mouth. Coffee splatters into the saucer when he tries to lift the cup to his lips.
This guy is barely detoxed. He’s just been sobered up and put back on the street. He’s sober less than a couple of days, you guess. He won’t be specific about anything. You can only guess.
You take everything in and you mention “fear”. He says, “Yeah.” You ask him what he’s afraid of. He says, and his voice breaks with trembling, “Everything.” Coffee shakes out of his cup all over the counter. You recognize the feeling.
You’re not sure how you can help this man. There’re no facilities for drunks in Cheney, you're pretty broke, and he seems to be so far gone that he needs care, so you offer to get him a room overnight at Sutton Hall if you can get permission. You plan to look for advice from other recovering drunks the next day.
Fortunately, veterans rent Sutton Hall from the school (it’s shortly after Vietnam) and manage their own affairs. Some of this is because the school really is glad to keep the vets separate from the youngsters, specially the hot bodied young women. Marijuana and alcohol float freely around Sutton so there’s tolerance for this one more forlorn drunk for just one night. There are lots of empty rooms... you can get him a room for a few bucks, no trouble.
You drop some singles through the office door slot and lead him upstairs three flights to a small, dirty room in the old building. Your footsteps echo in the wood stairwell and squeak on the linoleum. You get him a set of sheets from your room and make a bed for him. You notice how uneasy he is. In fact you guess he doesn’t want to stay, but he sits down on a leatherette chair and glumly watches you make his bed which is actually a spring supported bunk bed like you might find on a military base. He’s getting ever more silent. A bad sign, you think. He’s lost. About like a five or six year old away from home for the first time.
“Come on.” You lead him from the room and walk him down and around the corner to show him your room, very close to his. You say, “I’ll be right here all night. If you want anything come see me. I don’t care what time it is.” You’re trying to put his mind at ease, stop the terror you know he feels. “I’ll leave my door ajar.”
Then you lead him back to the room you’ve given him. His silence increases. You imagine he’s not even hearing you anymore. He’s somewhere lost inside himself and standing in the middle of the small room, staring defensively at the bunk as you leave the room.
In your room you try to watch TV on the small black and white set you bought at Goodwill, but you’re uneasy about leaving the man alone. After less than twenty minutes, you walk back to his room on the squeaky linoleum floor. His door’s open. He’s gone. In the middle of his clean white sheet is a tiny puddle that looks like coffee grounds. Is it vomit? Has he crapped his pants, bleeding from his asshole? Blood coming out of an asshole looks like coffee grounds, you think you’ve heard.
You go in search of your man. Outside first, and up and down the street in the dark outside the building, but you know you aren’t going to drive all the streets of Cheney, looking for him. If he’s gone he’s gone. He could be anywhere. He might even be crashed in the bushes around the admin. building across the street.
Back in the vet’s dorm, in the TV room on the first floor, you ask a few vets if they’ve seen him. “Nope!” Okay, you’ve done your duty, you tell yourself as you trudge the stairs back up to your room.
At the top of the stairs on the third floor, you hear a door slam, and out of a corner room comes your man on crazily lurching legs. He’s shoeless and supports himself against the wall. The linoleum’s slippery under his stockinged feet. He’s drunk as a skunk, and he’s only been out of your sight for thirty or forty minutes. You’ve heard of this phenomenon. A “low bottom” drunk loses all capacity to resist the effects of alcohol. It’s one more of the long term effects of alcoholism, like a wet brain. One drink can get an alcoholic madly drunk.
“Hey, what happened to you?” you ask.
“I’m fuckin’ drunk,” he slurs.
“I can see that.” You make a broad joke which passes over his head. He’s definitely one of us, you tell yourself.
Okay, that’s that. Like a good alcoholic your man has reconnoitered and achieved his mission to find a drink in strange territory. You lead him back to the room you got for him. You suggest he go to bed and sleep it off as you take a seat on a chair near the door.
Suddenly, he’s on his knees before you and, with hands in folded prayer position, pleading with you. “Please. Please. I don’ wanna stay here. Please. Please.” He’s terrified of being inside this room, terrified! You don’t know why.
He continues begging, and you give in real quick. His insanity is scaring even you. He’s loud. You can hear his voice echoing along the corridors of the third floor. This is worse and more irrational than you’ve encountered in your brief sobriety on any twelve step call to a drunk in distress.
He can’t put on his own shoes so you sit him on the bed while you put on and tie his shoes for him, then you take him down the stairs, supporting his stumbling steps all the way down. He can’t walk, really, on his own.
You get him into your Pinto around the corner from the front door of Sutton Hall, and ask him where he wants to go, what he wants to do. He says take him to the Interstate. He’s got to thumb. He’s got to get to Seattle. Got to.
Interstate 90 is about five miles from Cheney at Four Lakes, Washington, so you drive him there and pull off to the side of the road. It’s dark, the westbound entrance to the interchange is a few yards ahead. At a distance, somewhat below your line of sight, an occasional headlight flashes by on the interstate.
“You can’t thumb tonight. You won’t get a ride.”
He tells you he’ll sleep by the highway tonight and start in the morning.
“In the weeds? By the road?”
He mumbles something. Finally, you let go. You release the drunk and let him go. You turn him over to whatever fate has in store for him. You pull out your last bill, a fiver, and hand it to him. “Here. This’s all I got.”
He mumbles again. You imagine it’s a thank you. He opens the Pinto door and staggers out. He’s already standing better. You wonder why so quick. Was everything an act? Does he know he’s acting or is it all real terror and fundamental demoralization?
Anyhow... your man, your mark for good deeds, staggers away into the weed fields beside the highway. In the dark his form disappears fast, like a ghost, leaving you there with your thoughts. You can’t quite believe he’d rather sleep under the stars in the weeds beside the road than in a secure room, but you don’t know what has happened to him in small rooms in his life, in his youth, in his childhood. You don’t know anything at all, you decide, about his life. You U-turn your blue Pinto and head back to Cheney. You watch a little black and white TV then, on your knees, thank your lucky stars you’ve come this far before flying toward a sober sleep. As consciousness slips away, you hear yourself think you hope your own luck continues. They tell you that what you’ve just done helps towards staying lucky when it comes to alcohol.
IF THERE WERE A GOD, HE’D WORK IN STRANGE WAYS.
You are standing on the small concrete porch in front of Sutton Hall on the campus of Eastern Washington University in the state of Washington. The sun’s low in the western sky, a wonderful end to a gently warm day when out of nowhere he walks up the front walk, freshly shaved, newly washed short sleeve shirt and khaki pants. The low sun shining in his face hi-lights his thin features. There’s an aura of scrubbed newness about him that is quite strange. Something’s not quite right. He approaches close and in a timid voice says, “Is there some club here I heard about? An AA club?”
Immediately you know what he’s all about. You’re one too, but you’re sober, have been for a few years, and you think it’s wildly coincidental that out of all the people in this small Washington town and on this campus he’s walked right up to you to ask. AA members have a tendency to conflate coincidence with the will of a power greater than themselves, and you’re no different.
In a small town like Cheney, of course there’s no club, just a living room that a religious group lets drying out drunks use to meet once a week. The Konoinia House. He tells you he’s fresh out of detox, just released, and he’s thumbing his way to Seattle, all the way across the state. He tells you a lame story about someone over there who’ll put him up, if he can just get over there. His plan sounds desperate and unsound. Nothing about the story makes sense. Nothing’s clear or firm or quite put together right. You expect him to hit you up for a couple of bucks. You’ve heard stories of wet drunks who go from club to club only to finance their drinking binges.
He hasn’t eaten all day he tells you, and so you make some calls to scrape a little money together from friends of Bill (all poor because they’re going to college), and then you take him down to a local restaurant to buy him dinner. He only want’s soup and coffee. He tells you he can’t keep anything else down. Up close beside him... now you see how bad off he is. The soup spoon shakes so badly that most of the chicken noodle spills before he gets it to his mouth. Coffee splatters into the saucer when he tries to lift the cup to his lips.
This guy is barely detoxed. He’s just been sobered up and put back on the street. He’s sober less than a couple of days, you guess. He won’t be specific about anything. You can only guess.
You take everything in and you mention “fear”. He says, “Yeah.” You ask him what he’s afraid of. He says, and his voice breaks with trembling, “Everything.” Coffee shakes out of his cup all over the counter. You recognize the feeling.
You’re not sure how you can help this man. There’re no facilities for drunks in Cheney, you're pretty broke, and he seems to be so far gone that he needs care, so you offer to get him a room overnight at Sutton Hall if you can get permission. You plan to look for advice from other recovering drunks the next day.
Fortunately, veterans rent Sutton Hall from the school (it’s shortly after Vietnam) and manage their own affairs. Some of this is because the school really is glad to keep the vets separate from the youngsters, specially the hot bodied young women. Marijuana and alcohol float freely around Sutton so there’s tolerance for this one more forlorn drunk for just one night. There are lots of empty rooms... you can get him a room for a few bucks, no trouble.
You drop some singles through the office door slot and lead him upstairs three flights to a small, dirty room in the old building. Your footsteps echo in the wood stairwell and squeak on the linoleum. You get him a set of sheets from your room and make a bed for him. You notice how uneasy he is. In fact you guess he doesn’t want to stay, but he sits down on a leatherette chair and glumly watches you make his bed which is actually a spring supported bunk bed like you might find on a military base. He’s getting ever more silent. A bad sign, you think. He’s lost. About like a five or six year old away from home for the first time.
“Come on.” You lead him from the room and walk him down and around the corner to show him your room, very close to his. You say, “I’ll be right here all night. If you want anything come see me. I don’t care what time it is.” You’re trying to put his mind at ease, stop the terror you know he feels. “I’ll leave my door ajar.”
Then you lead him back to the room you’ve given him. His silence increases. You imagine he’s not even hearing you anymore. He’s somewhere lost inside himself and standing in the middle of the small room, staring defensively at the bunk as you leave the room.
In your room you try to watch TV on the small black and white set you bought at Goodwill, but you’re uneasy about leaving the man alone. After less than twenty minutes, you walk back to his room on the squeaky linoleum floor. His door’s open. He’s gone. In the middle of his clean white sheet is a tiny puddle that looks like coffee grounds. Is it vomit? Has he crapped his pants, bleeding from his asshole? Blood coming out of an asshole looks like coffee grounds, you think you’ve heard.
You go in search of your man. Outside first, and up and down the street in the dark outside the building, but you know you aren’t going to drive all the streets of Cheney, looking for him. If he’s gone he’s gone. He could be anywhere. He might even be crashed in the bushes around the admin. building across the street.
Back in the vet’s dorm, in the TV room on the first floor, you ask a few vets if they’ve seen him. “Nope!” Okay, you’ve done your duty, you tell yourself as you trudge the stairs back up to your room.
At the top of the stairs on the third floor, you hear a door slam, and out of a corner room comes your man on crazily lurching legs. He’s shoeless and supports himself against the wall. The linoleum’s slippery under his stockinged feet. He’s drunk as a skunk, and he’s only been out of your sight for thirty or forty minutes. You’ve heard of this phenomenon. A “low bottom” drunk loses all capacity to resist the effects of alcohol. It’s one more of the long term effects of alcoholism, like a wet brain. One drink can get an alcoholic madly drunk.
“Hey, what happened to you?” you ask.
“I’m fuckin’ drunk,” he slurs.
“I can see that.” You make a broad joke which passes over his head. He’s definitely one of us, you tell yourself.
Okay, that’s that. Like a good alcoholic your man has reconnoitered and achieved his mission to find a drink in strange territory. You lead him back to the room you got for him. You suggest he go to bed and sleep it off as you take a seat on a chair near the door.
Suddenly, he’s on his knees before you and, with hands in folded prayer position, pleading with you. “Please. Please. I don’ wanna stay here. Please. Please.” He’s terrified of being inside this room, terrified! You don’t know why.
He continues begging, and you give in real quick. His insanity is scaring even you. He’s loud. You can hear his voice echoing along the corridors of the third floor. This is worse and more irrational than you’ve encountered in your brief sobriety on any twelve step call to a drunk in distress.
He can’t put on his own shoes so you sit him on the bed while you put on and tie his shoes for him, then you take him down the stairs, supporting his stumbling steps all the way down. He can’t walk, really, on his own.
You get him into your Pinto around the corner from the front door of Sutton Hall, and ask him where he wants to go, what he wants to do. He says take him to the Interstate. He’s got to thumb. He’s got to get to Seattle. Got to.
Interstate 90 is about five miles from Cheney at Four Lakes, Washington, so you drive him there and pull off to the side of the road. It’s dark, the westbound entrance to the interchange is a few yards ahead. At a distance, somewhat below your line of sight, an occasional headlight flashes by on the interstate.
“You can’t thumb tonight. You won’t get a ride.”
He tells you he’ll sleep by the highway tonight and start in the morning.
“In the weeds? By the road?”
He mumbles something. Finally, you let go. You release the drunk and let him go. You turn him over to whatever fate has in store for him. You pull out your last bill, a fiver, and hand it to him. “Here. This’s all I got.”
He mumbles again. You imagine it’s a thank you. He opens the Pinto door and staggers out. He’s already standing better. You wonder why so quick. Was everything an act? Does he know he’s acting or is it all real terror and fundamental demoralization?
Anyhow... your man, your mark for good deeds, staggers away into the weed fields beside the highway. In the dark his form disappears fast, like a ghost, leaving you there with your thoughts. You can’t quite believe he’d rather sleep under the stars in the weeds beside the road than in a secure room, but you don’t know what has happened to him in small rooms in his life, in his youth, in his childhood. You don’t know anything at all, you decide, about his life. You U-turn your blue Pinto and head back to Cheney. You watch a little black and white TV then, on your knees, thank your lucky stars you’ve come this far before flying toward a sober sleep. As consciousness slips away, you hear yourself think you hope your own luck continues. They tell you that what you’ve just done helps towards staying lucky when it comes to alcohol.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
BUSH’S PINOCHIO NOSE ON COLLISION COURSE WITH SPACE ALIENS
Bush is so full of lies about budget matters and war matters that I don’t know why he’s not impeached. CBS got rid of its rush to judgment employees, yet Bush and his whole lying crew remain at the helm of our titanic ship of state. Will his devoted followers ever get wise? In a recent Inland Northwest, INLANDER, a once upon a time conservative writer exposes more of the holes in George’s Iraqi underwear:
[Open quote.]
Mission Accomplished 2?
by Arianna Huffington
Quick, before the conventional wisdom hardens, it needs to be said: The Iraqi elections were not the second coming of the Constitutional Convention. The media have made it sound like last Sunday was a combination of 1776, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prague Spring, the Ukraine's Orange Revolution, Filipino "People Power," Tiananmen Square and Super Bowl Sunday — all rolled into one.
It's impossible not to be moved by the stories coming out of Iraq: voters braving bombings and mortar blasts to cast ballots; multiethnic crowds singing and dancing outside polling places; election workers, undeterred by power outages, counting ballots by the glow of oil lamps; teary-eyed women in traditional Islamic garb proudly holding up their purple ink-stained fingers — literally giving the finger to butcher knife-wielding murderers.
It was a great moment. A Kodak moment. And unlike the other Kodak moments from this war — think Saddam's tumbling statue and Jessica Lynch's "rescue" — this one was not created by the image masters at Karl Rove Productions.
But this Kodak moment, however moving, should not erase all that came before, leaving us unprepared for all that may come after it.
I'm sorry to kill the White House's buzz — and the press corps' contact high — but the triumphalist fog rolling across the land has all the makings of another "Mission Accomplished" moment.
Forgive me for trotting out Santayana's shopworn dictum that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it but, for God's sake, people, can't we even remember last week?
So amid all the talk of turning points, historic days and defining moments, let us steadfastly refuse to drink from the River Lethe that brought forgetfulness and oblivion to my ancient ancestors.
Let's not forget that for all the president's soaring rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy, free elections were the administration's fallback position, more Plan D than guiding principle. We were initially going to install Ahmed Chalabi as our man in Baghdad, remember? Then that shifted to the abruptly foreshortened reign of "Bremer of Arabia." The White House only consented to holding open elections after Grand Ayatollah Sistani sent his followers into the streets to demand them — and even then Bush refused to allow the elections until after our presidential campaign was done.
And the election doesn't change that.
Let's not forget that despite the hoopla, this was a legitimate democratic election in name only. Actually, not even in name, since most of the candidates on the ballot had less name recognition than your average candidate for dogcatcher. That's because they were too afraid to hold rallies or give speeches. In fact, many were so anxious about being killed that they fought to keep their names from being made public.
And the election doesn't change that.
Let's not forget that many Iraqi voters turned out to send a defiant message not just to the insurgents but to President Bush as well. Many of those purple fingers were raised in our direction. According to a poll taken by our own government, a jaw-dropping 92 percent of Iraqis view the U.S.-led forces in Iraq as "occupiers" while only 2 percent see them as "liberators."
And the election doesn't change that.
Let's not forget that the war in Iraq has made America less safe than it was before the invasion. According to an exhaustive report released last month by the CIA's National Intelligence Council, Iraq has become a breeding ground for the next generation of "professionalized" Islamic terrorists. Foreign terrorists are now honing their deadly skills against U.S. troops — skills they will eventually take with them to other countries, including ours. Iraq has also drained tens of billions of dollars in resources that might otherwise have gone to really fighting terror.
And the election doesn't change that.
Let's not forget the lack of progress we've made in the reconstruction of Iraq. The people there still lack such basics as gas and kerosene. Indeed, Iraqis often wait in miles-long lines just to buy gas. The country is producing less electricity than before the war — roughly half of current demand. There are food shortages; the cost of staple items like rice and bread is soaring. According to UNICEF, nearly 1 in 10 Iraqi children is suffering the effects of chronic diarrhea caused by unsafe water — a situation responsible for 70 percent of children's deaths in Iraq.
And the election doesn't change that.
Let's not forget the blistering new report from the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, which finds that the U.S. occupation government that ruled Iraq before last June's transfer of sovereignty has been unable to account for nearly $9 billion, overseeing a reconstruction process "open to fraud, kickbacks and misappropriation of funds."
And the election doesn't change that.
Let's not forget that we still don't have an exit strategy for Iraq. The closest the president has come is saying that we'll be able to bring our troops home when, as he put it, "this rising democracy can eventually take responsibility for its own security" — "eventually" being the operative word. Although the administration claims more than 120,000 Iraqi security forces have been trained, other estimates put the number closer to 14,000, with less than 5,000 of them ready for battle. Last summer, the White House predicted Iraqi forces would be fully trained by spring 2005; their latest estimate is summer 2006.
And the election doesn't change that.
And let's never forget this administration's real goal in Iraq, as laid out by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their fellow neocon members of the Project for the New American Century back in 1998. Long before Bush landed on freedom and democracy as the 2005 buzzwords, they already had their eyes on the Iraqi prize: the second-largest oil reserves in the world, and a permanent home for U.S. bases in the Middle East.
This is still the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the election, as heartwarming as it was, doesn't change any of that.
Publication date in Inlander: 2/10/05
[Close quote.]
__________________________________________________
“Nice guys finish last, but we get to sleep in.” —Evan Davis
Bush is so full of lies about budget matters and war matters that I don’t know why he’s not impeached. CBS got rid of its rush to judgment employees, yet Bush and his whole lying crew remain at the helm of our titanic ship of state. Will his devoted followers ever get wise? In a recent Inland Northwest, INLANDER, a once upon a time conservative writer exposes more of the holes in George’s Iraqi underwear:
[Open quote.]
Mission Accomplished 2?
by Arianna Huffington
Quick, before the conventional wisdom hardens, it needs to be said: The Iraqi elections were not the second coming of the Constitutional Convention. The media have made it sound like last Sunday was a combination of 1776, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prague Spring, the Ukraine's Orange Revolution, Filipino "People Power," Tiananmen Square and Super Bowl Sunday — all rolled into one.
It's impossible not to be moved by the stories coming out of Iraq: voters braving bombings and mortar blasts to cast ballots; multiethnic crowds singing and dancing outside polling places; election workers, undeterred by power outages, counting ballots by the glow of oil lamps; teary-eyed women in traditional Islamic garb proudly holding up their purple ink-stained fingers — literally giving the finger to butcher knife-wielding murderers.
It was a great moment. A Kodak moment. And unlike the other Kodak moments from this war — think Saddam's tumbling statue and Jessica Lynch's "rescue" — this one was not created by the image masters at Karl Rove Productions.
But this Kodak moment, however moving, should not erase all that came before, leaving us unprepared for all that may come after it.
I'm sorry to kill the White House's buzz — and the press corps' contact high — but the triumphalist fog rolling across the land has all the makings of another "Mission Accomplished" moment.
Forgive me for trotting out Santayana's shopworn dictum that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it but, for God's sake, people, can't we even remember last week?
So amid all the talk of turning points, historic days and defining moments, let us steadfastly refuse to drink from the River Lethe that brought forgetfulness and oblivion to my ancient ancestors.
Let's not forget that for all the president's soaring rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy, free elections were the administration's fallback position, more Plan D than guiding principle. We were initially going to install Ahmed Chalabi as our man in Baghdad, remember? Then that shifted to the abruptly foreshortened reign of "Bremer of Arabia." The White House only consented to holding open elections after Grand Ayatollah Sistani sent his followers into the streets to demand them — and even then Bush refused to allow the elections until after our presidential campaign was done.
And the election doesn't change that.
Let's not forget that despite the hoopla, this was a legitimate democratic election in name only. Actually, not even in name, since most of the candidates on the ballot had less name recognition than your average candidate for dogcatcher. That's because they were too afraid to hold rallies or give speeches. In fact, many were so anxious about being killed that they fought to keep their names from being made public.
And the election doesn't change that.
Let's not forget that many Iraqi voters turned out to send a defiant message not just to the insurgents but to President Bush as well. Many of those purple fingers were raised in our direction. According to a poll taken by our own government, a jaw-dropping 92 percent of Iraqis view the U.S.-led forces in Iraq as "occupiers" while only 2 percent see them as "liberators."
And the election doesn't change that.
Let's not forget that the war in Iraq has made America less safe than it was before the invasion. According to an exhaustive report released last month by the CIA's National Intelligence Council, Iraq has become a breeding ground for the next generation of "professionalized" Islamic terrorists. Foreign terrorists are now honing their deadly skills against U.S. troops — skills they will eventually take with them to other countries, including ours. Iraq has also drained tens of billions of dollars in resources that might otherwise have gone to really fighting terror.
And the election doesn't change that.
Let's not forget the lack of progress we've made in the reconstruction of Iraq. The people there still lack such basics as gas and kerosene. Indeed, Iraqis often wait in miles-long lines just to buy gas. The country is producing less electricity than before the war — roughly half of current demand. There are food shortages; the cost of staple items like rice and bread is soaring. According to UNICEF, nearly 1 in 10 Iraqi children is suffering the effects of chronic diarrhea caused by unsafe water — a situation responsible for 70 percent of children's deaths in Iraq.
And the election doesn't change that.
Let's not forget the blistering new report from the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, which finds that the U.S. occupation government that ruled Iraq before last June's transfer of sovereignty has been unable to account for nearly $9 billion, overseeing a reconstruction process "open to fraud, kickbacks and misappropriation of funds."
And the election doesn't change that.
Let's not forget that we still don't have an exit strategy for Iraq. The closest the president has come is saying that we'll be able to bring our troops home when, as he put it, "this rising democracy can eventually take responsibility for its own security" — "eventually" being the operative word. Although the administration claims more than 120,000 Iraqi security forces have been trained, other estimates put the number closer to 14,000, with less than 5,000 of them ready for battle. Last summer, the White House predicted Iraqi forces would be fully trained by spring 2005; their latest estimate is summer 2006.
And the election doesn't change that.
And let's never forget this administration's real goal in Iraq, as laid out by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their fellow neocon members of the Project for the New American Century back in 1998. Long before Bush landed on freedom and democracy as the 2005 buzzwords, they already had their eyes on the Iraqi prize: the second-largest oil reserves in the world, and a permanent home for U.S. bases in the Middle East.
This is still the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the election, as heartwarming as it was, doesn't change any of that.
Publication date in Inlander: 2/10/05
[Close quote.]
__________________________________________________
“Nice guys finish last, but we get to sleep in.” —Evan Davis
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
SOCIAL SECURITY! IN DEBT TO THE CHINESE?
THE NATION magazine is always full of informative bits of information that the neocons don’t want the average American to know about. And here’s one that you may find hard to believe:
“But here is the really funny thing about the personal/private accounts debate. Not only are they not personal accounts, they're not private accounts either. They are in fact US government loans. (Bear with me now, because this will only hurt for a moment.) You see, your payroll taxes will still be used to cover the benefits of current retirees, but under Bush's scheme the government will place a certain "diverted" amount into an account in your name. It sounds like a personal retirement account, but it's not. It's a loan. Because if your account does really well (above 3 percent), when you retire the government will deduct the money it lent you (plus 3 percent interest) from your monthly Social Security check leaving you with almost the same amount you would have received under the current system. If your account does really poorly (below 3 percent), you are out of luck. According to Congressional Budget Office, the expected average return will be 3.3 percent, so the net gain will be zero.
“… our largest single loan officer will likely be the Central Bank of China. And who runs China's Central Bank, China, and the Chinese people with an iron fist? Why, it's our old friends, the democracy-loving, freedom-marching Chinese Communist Party. So Bush's personal retirement accounts=private retirement accounts=US government loans=US government borrowing=Chinese government lending=Chinese Communist Party loans.”
Want to read more about these private accounts, specially to see that they’ll actually be in the hands of the Chinese government? Read this.
A DICTIONARY FOR INTERPRETING REPUBLICAN DOUBLESPEAK
THE NATION magazine is collecting together a dictionary of definitions for words as the Republican Party has been using them lately. Eventually, it’ll become an honest to goodness book, a dictionary. For those who can’t make any sense out of what those nuts in the White House are talking about, here’s a sample of the help that’ll be coming your way soon.
ACCOUNTABILITY, n. Buck? What buck? (Martin Richard, Belgrade, MT)
BIPARTISANSHIP, adj. When Democrats compromise. (Justin Rezzonico, Keene, NH)
CHECKS & BALANCES, pl. n. An antiquated concept of the Founding Fathers that impedes autocratic efficiency; see also REFORM. (Robert B. Fuld, Unionville, CT)
FOX NEWS, n. Faux news. (Justin Rezzonico, Keena, NH)
GOD, n. Senior presidential advisor. (Martin Richard, Belgrade, MT)
NONPARTISAN JUDICIAL NOMINEE, n. An active member of the Federalist Society. (Mark Hatch-Miller, Brooklyn, NY)
OWNERSHIP SOCIETY, n. 1) A society where you're on your own. (John Read, Owings Mills, MD); 2) A society where one-half of society owns the other half. (Anne Galvan Klousia, Corvallis, OR); 3) The euphemism used by robber barons and their political lackeys to promote or justify the extreme concentration of wealth into the hands of a powerful few. Synonyms: PLUTOCRACY, CORPORATE FEUDALISM. (Ken Stump, Seattle, WA)
SOCIAL SECURITY, n. Broker security. (Bruce Clendenin, Dallas, TX)
SPREADING PEACE, v. Preemptive war. (Bruce Hawkins, Silver Springs, MD)
STAY THE COURSE, v. To relentlessly pursue a disastrous policy regardless of how far conditions deteriorate. Antonym: "To cut and run." (Aja Starke, New York, NY)
TORTURER, n. 1) White House Counsel. 2) Attorney General. (Martin Richard, Belgrade, MT)
________________________________________________________________________
“When I was young the dead sea was still alive.” —George Burns
THE NATION magazine is always full of informative bits of information that the neocons don’t want the average American to know about. And here’s one that you may find hard to believe:
“But here is the really funny thing about the personal/private accounts debate. Not only are they not personal accounts, they're not private accounts either. They are in fact US government loans. (Bear with me now, because this will only hurt for a moment.) You see, your payroll taxes will still be used to cover the benefits of current retirees, but under Bush's scheme the government will place a certain "diverted" amount into an account in your name. It sounds like a personal retirement account, but it's not. It's a loan. Because if your account does really well (above 3 percent), when you retire the government will deduct the money it lent you (plus 3 percent interest) from your monthly Social Security check leaving you with almost the same amount you would have received under the current system. If your account does really poorly (below 3 percent), you are out of luck. According to Congressional Budget Office, the expected average return will be 3.3 percent, so the net gain will be zero.
“… our largest single loan officer will likely be the Central Bank of China. And who runs China's Central Bank, China, and the Chinese people with an iron fist? Why, it's our old friends, the democracy-loving, freedom-marching Chinese Communist Party. So Bush's personal retirement accounts=private retirement accounts=US government loans=US government borrowing=Chinese government lending=Chinese Communist Party loans.”
Want to read more about these private accounts, specially to see that they’ll actually be in the hands of the Chinese government? Read this.
A DICTIONARY FOR INTERPRETING REPUBLICAN DOUBLESPEAK
THE NATION magazine is collecting together a dictionary of definitions for words as the Republican Party has been using them lately. Eventually, it’ll become an honest to goodness book, a dictionary. For those who can’t make any sense out of what those nuts in the White House are talking about, here’s a sample of the help that’ll be coming your way soon.
ACCOUNTABILITY, n. Buck? What buck? (Martin Richard, Belgrade, MT)
BIPARTISANSHIP, adj. When Democrats compromise. (Justin Rezzonico, Keene, NH)
CHECKS & BALANCES, pl. n. An antiquated concept of the Founding Fathers that impedes autocratic efficiency; see also REFORM. (Robert B. Fuld, Unionville, CT)
FOX NEWS, n. Faux news. (Justin Rezzonico, Keena, NH)
GOD, n. Senior presidential advisor. (Martin Richard, Belgrade, MT)
NONPARTISAN JUDICIAL NOMINEE, n. An active member of the Federalist Society. (Mark Hatch-Miller, Brooklyn, NY)
OWNERSHIP SOCIETY, n. 1) A society where you're on your own. (John Read, Owings Mills, MD); 2) A society where one-half of society owns the other half. (Anne Galvan Klousia, Corvallis, OR); 3) The euphemism used by robber barons and their political lackeys to promote or justify the extreme concentration of wealth into the hands of a powerful few. Synonyms: PLUTOCRACY, CORPORATE FEUDALISM. (Ken Stump, Seattle, WA)
SOCIAL SECURITY, n. Broker security. (Bruce Clendenin, Dallas, TX)
SPREADING PEACE, v. Preemptive war. (Bruce Hawkins, Silver Springs, MD)
STAY THE COURSE, v. To relentlessly pursue a disastrous policy regardless of how far conditions deteriorate. Antonym: "To cut and run." (Aja Starke, New York, NY)
TORTURER, n. 1) White House Counsel. 2) Attorney General. (Martin Richard, Belgrade, MT)
________________________________________________________________________
“When I was young the dead sea was still alive.” —George Burns
Monday, February 21, 2005
EVIL IS AS EVIL SEES or WHAT’S A “PERSONALITY EXPERT” BUT ?
Can you believe this story? What good will name calling do in the scientific effort to understand people who seem to have no capacity to feel compassion for the suffering of others, which is what happens when presidents launch wars which kill untold numbers of innocent victims and homicidal criminals who torture their victims while killing them? Bush loves to use the word, “evil” to describe people in other lands who resist his illegal invasion of their country by his fiat. Is Bush more innocent because he doesn’t do the blowing up and rending of flesh in person whereas homicidal persons who also cut up and eat their victims do it on the spot? Dr. Stone needs to wake up and smell the beefsteak.
[Open quote.]
Dr. Michael H. Stone, a personality expert at Columbia University, favors use of the term "evil"…. He is now working on a book urging the profession not to shrink from thinking in terms of evil when appraising certain offenders, even if the E-word cannot be used as part of an official examination or diagnosis….
[But some scientists can arise above their need to moralize behavior in order to better understand it.]
"Evil is endemic, it's constant, it is a potential in all of us. Just about everyone has committed evil acts," said Dr. Robert I. Simon, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School and the author of "Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream."
Dr. Simon considers the notion of evil to be of no use to forensic psychiatry, in part because evil is ultimately in the eye of the beholder, shaped by political and cultural as well as religious values. The terrorists on Sept. 11 thought that they were serving God, he argues; those who kill people at abortion clinics also claim to be doing so. If the issue is history's most transcendent savages, on the other hand, most people agree that Hitler and Pol Pot would qualify.
"When you start talking about evil, psychiatrists don't know anything more about it than anyone else," Dr. Simon said. "Our opinions might carry more weight, under the patina or authority of the profession, but the point is, you can call someone evil and so can I. So what? What does it add?"
[Close quote.]
I’M A REAL DOG
Yesterday, I caught myself picking on Mertie’s dog Chichi for no good reason at all. I don’t mean I kicked or physically abused him. But truth is, Mertie and I had an argument the previous night, and she said something that made me feel read badly about myself. This seldom happens between us, but it did this one time….
Anyhow, the next day I found myself calling ChiChi some names in a shaming voice (as if he understood them) and just generally getting a kick out of the shamed dog look he so easily adopts. Later in the day, I recalled my action, then I recalled my own shame with Mertie’s words the previous night, then I saw that I got pleasure out of seeing shame in ChiChi’s demeanor. Then I saw what I an ass I can be, but more valuably, I caught myself being the animal I am and my need to lord it over other animals to make them bow to my power. Over and over, I’m reminded what evolution has given me to work with, and, again, I’m amazed that others can’t catch themselves in their animal lives as I can catch myself.
I think I’ve learned a valuable lesson here.
ODDLY ENDS
At the Salvation Army a couple of days back, I bought “Rio Grande”, the Ford/Wayne flick. Now I got two of the Ford/Wayne cavalry trilogy . “Fort Apache” and it. Next I need to get “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”. I hate what John Wayne stood for and what he did to fellow actors in the black listing days, but when I was a child, I loved his simplistic movies.
I hope at least a few Americans understand the difference between Martin Scorcese’s “Raging Bull” and George Bush’s “Waging Bull” performances.
How powerful is this god fellow that he needs so many hustlers out there in TV land and in the world and on radio to make sure we all think he exists? If he’s so damn powerful, why doesn’t he just get up off his lazy ass one morning and take a walk around the world up there across the skies of the globe?
___________________________________________________________________
“I’m as pure as the driven slush.” —Tallulah Bankhead
Can you believe this story? What good will name calling do in the scientific effort to understand people who seem to have no capacity to feel compassion for the suffering of others, which is what happens when presidents launch wars which kill untold numbers of innocent victims and homicidal criminals who torture their victims while killing them? Bush loves to use the word, “evil” to describe people in other lands who resist his illegal invasion of their country by his fiat. Is Bush more innocent because he doesn’t do the blowing up and rending of flesh in person whereas homicidal persons who also cut up and eat their victims do it on the spot? Dr. Stone needs to wake up and smell the beefsteak.
[Open quote.]
Dr. Michael H. Stone, a personality expert at Columbia University, favors use of the term "evil"…. He is now working on a book urging the profession not to shrink from thinking in terms of evil when appraising certain offenders, even if the E-word cannot be used as part of an official examination or diagnosis….
[But some scientists can arise above their need to moralize behavior in order to better understand it.]
"Evil is endemic, it's constant, it is a potential in all of us. Just about everyone has committed evil acts," said Dr. Robert I. Simon, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School and the author of "Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream."
Dr. Simon considers the notion of evil to be of no use to forensic psychiatry, in part because evil is ultimately in the eye of the beholder, shaped by political and cultural as well as religious values. The terrorists on Sept. 11 thought that they were serving God, he argues; those who kill people at abortion clinics also claim to be doing so. If the issue is history's most transcendent savages, on the other hand, most people agree that Hitler and Pol Pot would qualify.
"When you start talking about evil, psychiatrists don't know anything more about it than anyone else," Dr. Simon said. "Our opinions might carry more weight, under the patina or authority of the profession, but the point is, you can call someone evil and so can I. So what? What does it add?"
[Close quote.]
I’M A REAL DOG
Yesterday, I caught myself picking on Mertie’s dog Chichi for no good reason at all. I don’t mean I kicked or physically abused him. But truth is, Mertie and I had an argument the previous night, and she said something that made me feel read badly about myself. This seldom happens between us, but it did this one time….
Anyhow, the next day I found myself calling ChiChi some names in a shaming voice (as if he understood them) and just generally getting a kick out of the shamed dog look he so easily adopts. Later in the day, I recalled my action, then I recalled my own shame with Mertie’s words the previous night, then I saw that I got pleasure out of seeing shame in ChiChi’s demeanor. Then I saw what I an ass I can be, but more valuably, I caught myself being the animal I am and my need to lord it over other animals to make them bow to my power. Over and over, I’m reminded what evolution has given me to work with, and, again, I’m amazed that others can’t catch themselves in their animal lives as I can catch myself.
I think I’ve learned a valuable lesson here.
ODDLY ENDS
At the Salvation Army a couple of days back, I bought “Rio Grande”, the Ford/Wayne flick. Now I got two of the Ford/Wayne cavalry trilogy . “Fort Apache” and it. Next I need to get “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”. I hate what John Wayne stood for and what he did to fellow actors in the black listing days, but when I was a child, I loved his simplistic movies.
I hope at least a few Americans understand the difference between Martin Scorcese’s “Raging Bull” and George Bush’s “Waging Bull” performances.
How powerful is this god fellow that he needs so many hustlers out there in TV land and in the world and on radio to make sure we all think he exists? If he’s so damn powerful, why doesn’t he just get up off his lazy ass one morning and take a walk around the world up there across the skies of the globe?
___________________________________________________________________
“I’m as pure as the driven slush.” —Tallulah Bankhead
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