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Sleep is hard to find
when, looking back, you see you've
never been awake.
No
Utopia...W H A T ' S . A . S W E E T H E A R T . L I K E . Y O U .
....D O I N ' . I N . A . D U M P . L I K E . T H I S ?
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Sunday July 6, 2008...........................................................................................................
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Sad irony
8:19 am |
I recently received an email that sums up, in an almost tragic-comic way, the confusion and cluelessness of Americans about the war in Iraq.
The message tells the sad tale of a mother who's lost her son in a war trumped up by oil men. A mother who, in her deep desire to pay tribute to him and his fallen comrads, drives around in a vehicle covered with air-brushed images of the stars and stripes, flag-draped coffins filling C-10s, soaring jets, tanks, and helicopters. These scenes completely cover the body of a gas-hog SUV —a Hummer.
The poignancy of her situation is clear and understandable. The death of a child is heart-wrenching for most parents. And her desire to give her son's death a meaningful context is also obvious. But the irony of her memorial being rendered on the sides of a vehicle which is a symbol for the war's real rational should be equally as clear. That it's not is another indication of how out of whack some people still are about the reasons for this woman's son's death and the deaths of over 3000 other young Americans.
Finally SUV sails are way off, and it might be karma that American car manufacturers are getting creamed by foreign competitors for their stupidity. Sometimes it takes a hard blow to the wallet to see reality starkly. The launching if a pre-emptive war of choice didn't seem to do the trick, the adoption of torture techniques to interrogate the possibly-not-guilty meant little, the mounting death toll of American service personnel seemed to have little effect, the growing animosity of the rest of the world toward the USA failed to make a dent, but now that gas has topped $4.00 + a galllon, we're all upset. But unfortunately, even with all of that, some of us still don't get it. It's a sad commentary on who we are.
Ironies may be both sad a cruel. And maybe I'm being nit-picky, but images plastered on the skin of a gas-guzzling SUV to memorialize men who've died in a war fought because we're a nation addicted to oil (which, until now, has been unwilling to change its ways) somehow seems an unfitting monument —even if it's one created by a devastated mother.
Pod person
7:50 am |
Where's the fire in the belly? Where's the heart of the mantra for change? Oh, the mantra may still be there, but where's its heart? Where's its soul? Obama has disappeared down the chute of ambition and been replaced by a pod person.
Caving on the FISA bill has so far been the worst of it, but the general drift to samedom is definitely there. Though the differences between Obama and McCain remain huge, you can't help but have the feeling that the drift of the US further into politics of ditto will not abate with an Obama presidency.
Several years ago the fear crept up my spine that, having studied the presidency of the anti-democratic George Bush, its aggression and arrogance and the impunity with which it's been carried off, the amazing ease with which he's gotten away with it, all future presidents would simply embrace its notions of power and carry them forward. I continued to hope otherwise, but I have the stinking suspicion that Barak Obama, in his position on the FISA bill, is doing just that: heading off down the trail blazed by his corrupt predecessor.
If we were hoping for a return to American democracy after Bush, it may not happen. The truth may be, Yes we can't. It may take another revolution.
Maybe I'm wrong. God, I hope I'm wrong.
Saturday June 28, 2008.
Smearsville and Manchurian Candidates
12:25 pm |
In a WaPo article today Matthew Mosk examines the anatomy of a smear; specifically the one that portrays Barak Obama as a closet Muslim. Or, as someone suggested, a Muslim Manchurian Candidate.
But, if we're talking about Manchurian Candidates (that is, sleeper enemies nefariously slipped into the democratic process by ruthless self-interested entities to take it over and run it into the ground), George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Carl Rove fit that profile pretty well.
They may not be radical Islamists, but they sure know how to implode a Republic.
Anyway, the article by Mosk traces the origins of a lie-ladened email; specifically, the one about how Obama is not really a Christian, but is a Muslim.
Bullshit is what was found.
What Are We, Romericans?
8:04 am |
Michelle Obama said she had never in her adult life been proud
of her country until the 2008 presidential campaign. I knew what she meant.
With just a simple google you can find info about the near-genocide of native Americans (to make room for white Europeans to build a nation), and the reliance upon slavery to grease the wheels of our fledgling economy, to our history of racial discrimination and the non-enfranchisement of women.
With all of that, any patriotic, butmodestly honest American might have similar feelings. We may have things to be proud of, but these are not some of them.
What Michelle Obama was expressing was her pride that the nation had risen above much of our history by the mere fact of her husband's candidacy.
Aren't we all please by that —notwithstanding the attacks of those who are practiced in the high art of smear?
Meanwhile, I've never been as ashamed of my country as I have since it became clear that the idea of torturing humans was something the nation appears to find acceptable.
It's obviously more acceptable that $4.00 gas. There's lots of outrage in the news about the price of crude, but precious little about the crudeness of torture.
Bob Herbert, in his NYT column today is right when he says that torture, for most of us, is very abstract.
When was the last time, for instance, that you saw someone forced to stand naked in a stress position for hours on end. And how long ago did any of us perform our last electrocution?
If these things happened within sight of the checkout counter of the local supermarket maybe they would have more excited our compassion. But with the brutality occuring conveniently out of sight, in remote prisons such as Guantanamo, or others in Afgahnistan and who knows where else(?), it's hard to imagine what torture actually is –and hard to believe how it brutalizes both the tortured and the torturer.
Yet all of us feel the acute, personal pinch and pain of expensive oil. Ouch.
For certain of the religious among us it must be a tough trick to juggle their conscience in one hand and what they're willing to accept as required for "security" in the other.
For them a potent image of torture is central to their faith's iconography. Crucifixion.
Many of them are pained to think of the brutal scourging and killing of Jesus at the hands of the Romans, as if it happened yesterday.
But the same people are silent about the immediate torturing of men (some of them beaten, tortured, and simply released), Tourture probably taking place as we speak –at the hands of Americans.
Bob Herbert:
For most Americans, torture is something remote, abstract, reprehensible, but in the eyes of some, perhaps necessary ...
Reality offers something much different. We saw the hideous photos from Abu Ghraib. And now the Nobel Prize-winning organization Physicians for Human Rights has released a report, called “Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” that puts an appropriately horrifying face on a practice that is so fundamentally evil that it cannot co-exist with the idea of a just and humane society.
The report profiles 11 detainees who were tortured while in U.S. custody and then released ...without ever having been charged with a crime or told why they were detained. All ...were badly beaten. One was sodomized with a broomstick ... and forced by his interrogators to howl like a dog while a soldier urinated on him.
He fainted, the report said, “after a soldier stepped on his genitals.”
Officials at Physicians for Human Rights said extensive medical and psychological examinations were conducted — and in two cases prior medical records were consulted — to help corroborate the testimony of the detainees. The organization has a long and credible history of documenting such abuses...
The detainees ... were abused at facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Three said they had been subjected to electric shocks. One said he was stabbed in the cheek with a screwdriver and hit in the head and in the jaw with a rifle.
For a nation that testifies to be overwhelmingly "Christian" and which "believes in God" to the tune of 90%, this ok-with-torture attitude seems not just odd but schizophrenic.
They say Jesus said, "Whatever you do to the least of these you do to me."
They didn't say he added, "Unless they're terror detainees."
So what are we now, Romericans?
Saturday June 25, 2008.
Love and hate
10:59 am |
I get a lot of emails that run the gamut from brilliant to banal. I get fuzzy teddy bears saying corny things. And I get a lot that share the wisdom of kids.
Given the national political dialog and our attitudes in the international sphere, this quote from a six-year-old named Nikka is more than apt. As a matter of fact, it's apt even if Nikka didn't really say it.
If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate.
With thoughts like that Nikka may grow up to be crucified.
Pot and Cancer
9:58 am |
Here's another example of the supremacy of ideology over science. It will probably come as no suprise to anyone that the government has been supressing research regarding the beneficial qualities of marijuana.
Yup, it's true. And it's been supressing for a long time.
Life through a micro-mesh Bible strainer
8:15 am |
Now that his rebuke of Sponge Bob Square Pants is part of religious history, James Dobson is after Barak Obama. This is not surprising. It was bound to happen. Dobson's world view is so narrow not much fits within its confines. And Obama, having the temerity to have his own views about what he finds in the Bible, was certain to piss Dobson off.
Here' some of what Obama said in a speech that Dobson doesn't like:
This is a legitimate question, there being more Christian sects in America than there are cereal picks in a grocer's aisle. Whose indeed?
But Dobson thinks, Dobson's, of course.
Should we expect any more from a guy who sifts his thoughts through a micro-mesh Bible stainer even before he has them –a guy who discards a huge portion of god's diverse creation as corrupt based (ultimately) on his own judgement as to what is good and what is bad? I'd sooner expect truthfulness from Dick Cheney.
Via HuffingtonPost
Saturday June 21, 2008.
Old story, new story
2:08 am |
English professor and writer Charles Johnson, in an article at The American Scholar, winds up with this observation about the back-story of black Americans:
At the moment a black American is the Democratic nominee to be President of the United States, Johnson's essay on the "end of the Black American Narrative", has some heft.
Thursday June 18, 2008
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Free to see the forest and the trees
9:04 pm |
Somewhere along the line John McCain forgot how our system of government is supposed to work. The man's a little confused -and no, it has nothing to do with his age, it's more about being a Republican who's drooling to be president. Drooling to be president is, first, not too attractive; and, second, it makes you say stupid things.
The senator, fretting recently about the Supreme Court's decision to honor the constitution regarding the treatment of alleged perpetrators of terror, complained that judges and courts are not accountable to voters. He said this as if it were some bizarre, anti-democratic conspiracy hatched by liberals. The idea, however, goes back to the founders themselves.
The concept's pretty simple, and logical. If the courts, like the other two branches of government, were as subject to the short-term whims of voters, no one would be safe from the whims of wing-nut politicians who pop into the system at intervals to whip things into a lather. Crack-pots like Tom Delay and Dick Cheney could write all sorts of laws to reflect their self-serving notions of human relations and we'd have no recourse. The courts, being somewhat insulated from the fickleness of voters (who one minute want to be free people in a just society, and the next want a Papa President with fangs to keep them safe no matter what), are free to act rationally -and legally- over time. They can exercise prudence and judgment rather than hop on whatever jingoist band-wagon happens to be picking up steam in any given decade. Courts are designed to take a long view. They're free to see the forest and the trees.
Upon hearing of the Supreme Court's decision, McCain at first said "I don't agree, but let's move on." He should have left it at that. But next day, after a night with his political advisors, we got McCain's second reaction. From the senator's retake we now know that would-be president McCain has a pretty shallow understanding of the role of the courts in a Democracy.
The guy they like to call "maverick" (as if that's what he is), quotes Chief Justice Roberts' dissent to the ruling about Guantanamo prisoners. Like the supreme Supreme, McCain also complained judges are unaccountable to voters. Thank God!
But as writer S.Kadidal says at the Huffington Post, "That is precisely why they are well-situated to … hold the executive branch accountable for its abuses and incompetence. Measures that are popular with voters - including … the notion of detaining foreigners without legal rights or judicial review - often leave us less safe than we would have been without them"
The constitution was not conceived to grant its rights and privileges as if we lived in Utopia. Poet Wislawa Szymborska fills us in on that long dreamed-of place in her poem of the same name. She says that Utopia is an "island where all becomes clear", where "the tree of understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple, sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It". In Utopia, the poet says, there is the "Valley of Obviously" over which towers the mount of "Unshakeable Confidence" whose peak "offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things."
But, says Szymborska (big but): "For all its charms, the island is uninhabited, /and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches / turn without exception to the sea. / As if all you can do here is leave and plunge, never to return, into the depths. / Into unfathomable life."
In other words, life ain't so neat and tidy. Utopia might be a wonderful place, but those who were smart and brave enough to set the foundation of our nation never, for an instant, thought we lived there, or ever could. They were too realistic for that. That's why they wrote the Constitution.The constitution was not created for the good times when everything is brimming with justice and very cool. It's not for the times everyone agrees; when strife is distant, and the wolf is not at the door. Who needs a constitution when everything's A-OK? You need a constitution when everything is not A-OK, when people don't agree, when the wolf is not just at the door but in the bedroom eating grandma. That's when you need laws and firm guiding principles to keep the predators in suits from feasting on the riff-raff.
But John McCain, of all people, fails to apprehend this simple idea --McCain the man who spent tortured years in a prison with no recourse. Maybe, in his lust for power, he just forgot. He wouldn't be the first.
If any government, on the authority of just one man -a president even- can imprison people, keep them confined, and torture them(!) without even an opportunity to suggest he got the wrong guy, forget about the price of gas, you and your kids have got a much bigger problem than that to keep yourselves occupied in the immediate future. Not all enemies come from without.
Thursday June13, 2008.
...
Bush McCain McBush BuCain CaBush McCush McBain McSame
12:59 am |
How low are you willing to go in the "war on terror"?
12:16 am |
How low is the average American willing to go to sell their soul? What price is too great for"safety"? How much can one get for a safe soul these days?
Anyway, over at Low Road, Tiger Red, fills us in on our prison ships, and things like that. The home of the brave and the land of the free with –prison ships. Doesn't this seem just a little dissonant?
What's your soul worth on the market today?
I'm voting Republican because the idea of America is old-hat and dangerous
12:05 am |
Here are the best and only reasons to vote Republican. There's a slew of them, so take your pick. Or choose them all and really show how much you hate the idea of America.
Monday June 9, 2008..
More right than Wright
10:40 am |
It’s painful to watch politicians jump through religious hoops. But American politics requires a certain nimbleness in metaphysical matters. In many ways our past was light years ahead of our present in that the brains that laid the foundation of American democracy did not tangle themselves in myth to the extreme we do now.
Listening to Barack Obama carefully pick his way through press questions about his religious life and beliefs following his resignation from his troublesome church made me wonder how an average person would handle such an inquisition. How many Catholics dumped their church after the revelations of sexual abuse of children by priests, and the conspiracy of bishops to ship pedophiles to other dioceses?
How many evangelicals have renounced their memberships upon discovering the Jimmy Swaggart's and Jim Bakkers in their midst. How would they have handled questions about their continued attendance at services in spite of such news?
How many Jews abandon their synagogs rather than live with the story of King David arranging the death of his lover’s husband. And how many Muslims are putting distance between themselves and their Koran at the news of suicide bombers and decapitations in the name of Mohammed?
But in American politics all candidates have to negotiate minefields of irrationality with the agility of thirteen year-old gymnasts twisting and bouncing their way across a mat. In a society split into smithereens of creeds and religious philosophies some sect is bound to find offense at something.
You can’t sprint through a briar patch without coming out with wounds. Yet this is exactly what we expect of our politicians. Not only are they responsible for what they do or say, they’re responsible for what their pastors do and say. They’re responsible for what their fellow congregants do and say. And they’re responsible to what their scriptures say even though the range of what they say runs the gamut from “Love thy neighbor” to “Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”It’s hard to keep up with the contradictions, yet we expect presidential contenders to do so and yet remain rational enough not to send up a nuclear strike to unilaterally obliterate Amalek’s entire family down to his last donkey. It’s a magic circus out there!
Having been badly stung already by the antics of Reverend Wright and rebuked for them not only by the hypocritically corrupt surrogates from the Bush administration, media hacks such as the chronically hysterical Bill O’Rielly, but by his Democratic opponent as well, Barak Obama carefully tip-toed through his explanations. Who could blame him? In a press conference called to explain why he’d left his church, Obama chose his words so as not to hear them later, skewed and tape-looped back-to-back on FOX “News”, through an entire 24 hour news cycle.
What an American religious litmus test means in politics is that we create controversy where none need exist. And we encourage lies. Personally, I think we’d be better off if politicians were areligious; at least I could trust them more. I wouldn’t think they were twisting their philosophy and going to church to comply with the nation’s split religious personality and its demand for “faith” —as if religious faith was the same thing as faith in God, or goodness, or truth.
It’s hard to make a religious critique in a room full proselytizers, but being critical of religion is as legitimate and necessary in a
democracy as being critical of anything else. Hypersensitivity to religion can get us into trouble. It may create a climate for tortured positioning, and it often leads us (under divine authority) to twist the truth to fit our creeds. By demanding religious credentials from our politicians we often sell ourselves short.
As founder James Madison said in 1774 in a letter to William Bradford, "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect."
In finally splitting with his church I think Barak Obama has helped to further fit his mind for “noble enterprise” and “expanded prospects”. I hope when he and his wife do find another church to nurture their professed faith in Christ it will be one more in tune with his hope for a less divisive society and politics —one more right than Wright.
Wednesday June 6, 2008..
Crossing Demographics
10:40 am |
Gene Robinson in his WaPo column asks us to stop and consider what the Obama campaign has done and overcome.
The obstacles between Barak Obama and his goal of becoming the Democratic nominee for president were truly formidable. The nation's history of racism and the perceived invincibility of the Clinton machine were daunting enough to have made the present outcome seem impossible. But it was not impossible.
As Robinson says:
It has not been a mean feat. And it was not carried out with the meanness we've come to expect of our politics. This was the thing most gratifying about Obama's method. Even during the Rev. Wright events he was able to come away without diving into the mud himself. In fact he faced the challenge by elevating the discourse rather than wallowing in it.
Besides Barak Obama's commitment to change the way he would run his campaign, its success was also measured by the inspiration he brought to it and how that inspiration drew in supporters from across the country's demographics.
At the Huffington Post, writer Al Giordano had, until the advent of Obama's campaign, resigned himself to the splintering of America into smaller and smaller factions. He observes:
The American home had become a bunker. People gathered around the TV, then the TiVo and the computer screen, and when they did briefly emerge from their bomb shelters it was to sterile office and workplace environments, where they are subordinate, or to socialize or worship generally with people very demographically similar to themselves.
Worse, the bunkers themselves have become echo chambers and, by and large, dysfunctional and disempowering places, in which all the injustices of the world are compressed and internalized, often with violent and despairing results on the individuals inside them.
But Giordano marvels at the cross-demographic happenings of the past few months and, among other things, points out two developments as most significant. He says:
and
A critical mass of progressive Americans are learning political discipline again.
Summing up Giordano says:
Wednesday June 4, 2008.
Mushroom Salvation
9:55 pm |
Here's a fascinating talk about the almost magic mushroom.
Via
We invent and tell these tall tales to learn from them, but some people never learn. Some get so hung up in the finger pointing at the moon they never see the moon.
In this tradition Senator McPander, (old enough to know better) ran a recent ad that dissed reality. In clips from a speech we see him, an old soldier-shaman, picking through tea leaves and the innards of an ox prophesying (without a hint as to how he’d pull it off) that by the end of his 1st term, the middle-east would be stabilized, nuclear terror would be reduced, border security would be strengthened, energy independence advanced, wasteful spending reformed, health-care choice delivered, and economic confidence restored —and all this with an elephant on his back.Bada-boom! mission accomplished, 2013. I’m stunned Mr. Maverick didn’t throw in that we’d finally be getting all those flowers we were promised from Iraqis when we invaded in 2001. But there’s been a lot of blood and bouquets gone under the bridge since then. We were never told those flowers would be for thousands of funerals.
It’s as if McPander is so eager to celebrate his own mission-accomplished he’s doing it even before he’s elected. But the senator, for all his experience, doesn’t seem to have learned that mission-accomplished celebrations are a lot easier to accomplish than actual missions accomplished. Anybody can throw a war-party, but somebody responsible has to come in and clean up the mess.
In his odd trance-like speech McPander murmured: In 2013, at the end of my term “The Iraq War has been won … Iraq is a functioning democracy … al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated …
Abracadabra.
“Osama bin Laden has been captured or killed … there's been no major terrorist attack in the U.S. … Iran and North Korea have renounced nuclear weapon … the size of the Army and Marine Corps has been significantly increased and are now better equipped…”
Alakhazam!
“… in 2013 there's been a substantial increase in veterans' benefits … the genocide in Darfur has been stopped … the United States has experienced several years of robust economic growth … Americans again have confidence in their economic future …the world food crisis has ended…”
Hocus pocus.
McPander spins his yarn as if believes in the same voodoo wreck-o-nomics that’s been hexing us for oh, too long. We don’t need a shaman, we need an emergency operation by someone who can distinguish between scalpel and a magic wand. A different shade of “stay the course” just doesn’t cut it. We need a new way of thinking –of visioning.
Well like to think that age and experience confer wisdom. It’s comforting. But sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Think of some old codgers you might know who haven’t grown an emotional or intellectual inch in all their long lives. And think of the Rumsfelds and Cheneys who cobbled together the mighty disaster we call Iraq.
What’s more youth does not necessarily signal the lack of insight, ability, cleverness, understanding, or wisdom. In fact Albert Einstein was twenty-six when he published the General Theory of Relativity and thirty-six when he proposed the Special Theory. And by age twelve Mozart had written numbers of sonatas, concertos, symphonies, and an opera. John Kennedy was elected president at age forty-four. At age thirty-three Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. And it’s written that Jesus was in his early thirties when he delivered the Sermon on the Mount and inadvertently started one of the world’s great religions.
And age clearly does not signal wisdom or understanding. At age 100 Senator Strom Thurmond had still not renounced his earlier racist views. Past James Hagee, at age sixty-six was calling the Catholic Church the “Great Whore” and insisting Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment of New Orleans for its sinful ways. And The Rev.Pat Robertson was sixty-eight when he claimed the acceptance of homosexuality could result in hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, terrorist bombings and possibly a meteor.
Abandoning wisdom McPander was against the Bush tax cuts before he was for them, was against torture before he was for it, wants to continue a war that is going nowhere, embraces the policies .
Oh yeah, following the same course our debt to China will go poof, our puppet Shah will arise from the dead, we’ll find a ten-trillion-barrel sea of oil under Jersey City, all greenhouse carbon will disappear from the atmosphere, dead zones will vanish from the seas, there’ll be a chicken in every pot and a Hummer in every garage, corporations will care more about people than obscene profits, fundamentalists will finally shut up and listen to Jesus, and we’ll have invented a time machine to take us back to Florida in 2000 and redo the last eight years so we won’t even need McPander’s fantastic rhetorical phantoms!
We have to be smarter than we’ve been. We cannot fall into the fake hope that doing what we’ve done these last 30 or 40 years is working. Look where it’s gotten us. As Dr. Phil would say, “Has that been working for you?”
Previous Posts 05 / 17 / 08
Video :
Starry Starry Night by Don McLean, with paintings of Vincent van Gogh
