I'd Rather Whine Than Resign!

The UN Building, with about 7 stories lopped off the top, in honor of John Bolton (click to enlarge)


Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the world of corporate government, where incompetence and inflexibility are directly proportional. You might want to keep the following links bookmarked for the next time you screw up at work and have the pink slip waved in your face.

Olmert: yeah, I killed hundreds of innocents, so what? I'm stayin'!

Wolfowitz: yeah, I handed out a mega-salary job to my main squeeze in clear violation of the rules of my organization, so what? I'm stayin'!

Gonzales: yeah, I might have fired some attorneys for purely political reasons, though I don't exactly recall--so what? I'm stayin'!

And now, our feature piece for today comes from Shady Acres Mike, who we haven't heard from in a while. Today he answers the question, "is a Bush veto of the $124B Iraq Supplemental automatic?"



It appears so. These guys seem to be highly out of touch. Keep in mind though that they do have at least a year to forge a political deal (if it gets to be more than that, no one will deal with them--it will become the next administration's headache). If they are able to foster a political deal they would look somewhat reasonable.

As for the loyal opposition, they cannot lose in the eyes of the reasonable American. Thank God that the forces of reason won both houses because the position the Dems are in now is only because of their ability to set a legislative and oversight agenda.

However, I am not optimistic that a political deal is in the offing. There is no military solution to being an occupying force in the midst of a civil war where neither warring party wants you there. So only a political solution remains. This administration has not done the hard work needed to lay down a path for such a deal. As a matter of fact, they seemed to have done just the opposite by refusing, at least publicly, to deal with the various factions whether inside or outside of Iraq. They have been defiant by taking a unilateral course. They believe that the US no longer needs to be a participant in history-making with others, but rather be THE history maker. It is this hubris that will make it difficult to cut a deal. In effect, they thought they could take a short cut. They initially tried to favor the Shia so that they would hold sway over the country. That backfired and they are still in the process of backing out of that strategy.

In the meantime, no real centralized body or association of various Sunni factions exists. Who represents the Sunnis? The Shia seem split down the middle between two main factions as well. At the same time, this administration has threatened the neighbors who continue to fuel the sectarian violence. No short term political solution looks likely. This will take time, patience, negotiations, and compromise -all things this administration either lacks or has shown no actual ability to afford.

I found myself in rare agreement with Donald Trump the other day. He recently stated that he sees Condi flying all over the world, meeting with many world leaders, but he never sees a deal. What, he asked, is the secretary of state supposed to do other than cut deals? Perhaps it is too late and they have gone too far to be trusted at the negotiating table for any major negotiation, including peace in Iraq. What a mess they have made. What a mess they will most probably be leaving to the next administration.

Have you seen the new poll results form NBC? The Bushies are so out of touch once again. Large majorities of Americans think there should be a timetable - by approximately a twenty percent margin. Only 22% of Americans think we are headed in the right direction as a country. Large majorities of Americans thinks that the surge is not working - again, by approximately a twenty percent margin. This is why anyone associated with the quagmire that is Iraq is being painted with the same brush. McCain has hit free fall, even Hillary is sliding. Obama and Giuliani who did not vote on the subject have risen in their place.

As for the neocons, the noose is tightening around these hoodlums and incompetents: Abramoff and 10 other K Street influence-peddling convictions with three more Congressman to come about to go down, Plamegate and the Libby conviction, Tillman and Lynch, politicizing the Justice and other departments, Katrina, with investigations on torture, spying on the public without warrants, and intelligence manipulation yet to come. It's going to be hard for anyone who supported this administration to survive once it all comes out. Thank God for checks and balances, thank God for karma, for justice, for true oversight, and for the rooster coming home to roost. And the far right are out of touch again, they are simply trying to stall and deceive by making false comparisons with other administrations and by changing the subject.

If property values continue to sink and the economy slows down on top of all of the above, the 30 year trend to the right may be about to be swing the other way. The right could lose the independent vote for a long time to come. Even without the economy taking a slide, rising energy costs, rising health costs, rising education costs, and continued reliance on big oil and foreign carbon based energy at the expense of the very environment we live in could cost the Republicans the middle class independent vote for a long time to come. And the right is out of touch again if they think that can rely on all their past bromides with which they ran America into the ground.

It's time for a new America. Lets see who will be ready to usher that in.

--Shady Acres Mike

Monday with McKenna: President Lab Rat

I have two links for everyone who watched the Bill Moyers special last Wednesday, Buying the War (viewable here). Moyers featured the work of two young journalists whose work went largely ignored by the MSM. These two journalists, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau, set out to critically examine the deceptions that were being advanced as truth, the lies that were packaged and bought by the rest of the media establishment. You can keep up on the work of these two men by adding their RSS feeds to your news reader:

Warren Strobel

Jonathan Landay

For another example of Landay's truth-seeking-missile approach to journalism, see this post of ours from January, 2006. And now, here's Terry, to explain what a lab rat and the leader of the free world have in common.



Is there anything left to say about Iraq? Troop surge or no, we’re getting nowhere fast! Surely, even the president knows this. Or does he?

It's easy to say that George Bush doesn’t know this, or much of anything – that he’s stupid. We’ve said it in this blog, and it’s a belief that has wide currency. But let’s get serious for a minute. It’s hard to imagine anyone being as stupid as George Bush would have to be to not understand what’s going on with the war.

But if he’s not stupid, then what? One alternative might be that he possesses a unique mix of arrogance, intellectual mediocrity, and stubbornness. In any case, even lab rats can change their behavior when their actions don’t yield results, and certainly George Bush is at least as smart as a lab rat – so he too can’t fail to recognize that however hard we try, we remain stuck in the same Iraqi quagmire.

So yes, George Bush knows.

If there is no chance of winning, then why does he urge America to pour more men and money onto the pile? And here, I must state for the record that it usually is not a good idea to speculate about anyone else’s motives. If someone does something, it’s best to judge the action by its results. With most people, failure begets change, but with George Bush and Iraq, failure begets nothing but a series of repeated failures*. So just this once, let’s try to find out what motivates the decider.

One reason to continue our war effort is that if we leave, Iraq will devolve into complete chaos (as if it hasn’t already). This is in fact one of George Bush’s public explanations for fighting on. It’s also John McCain’s (in McCain’s case, I think he’s in earnest). It could be true, but it’s hard to imagine an even more urgent level of chaos. Still, let’s accept that it is not an unreasonable point of view. But if that’s the concern, then why not begin a regional conference on Iraq’s future? To do so, the US would have to go hat in hand to the Iranians and Syrians, but it is we who are losing lives, not they. To the Democrats' credit, those who fear even more chaos do support a regional conference. But Bush and his allies do not.

If Bush doesn’t want a peace conference, what other reason could he have for staying the course? (Staying the course has suddenly disappeared from the Bush talking points, but that’s what the troop surge is - staying the course).

I believe the reason is pure (and malicious) politics. And here, please remember the old saw that politics stops at the water’s edge, that when it comes to foreign policy, we are Americans first. Republicans keep reminding us about this when Democrats bring up the War’s failure. But it turns out, in this case, Republicans are the worst offenders. Here is the plan: Bush knows he can’t win; he also fears the long-term political damage to the Republican cause, and especially to conservatism if the US leaves Iraq while he is in power. As much as the American people have given up on Iraq, when we leave, the final exit will remain as a stain upon whomever presides over the last days. (Remember the picture of our last days in Saigon). George Bush is stalling for time – hoping to push the sting of his defeat onto his likely Democratic successor. If anyone believes that politics stops at the water’s edge, nonsense. George Bush plans to sacrifice maybe 2000 more Americans lives and spend as much as $200 Billion for what amounts to a small political advantage for his party. Shame on him!

Of course, there is another reason to stay, and that is that Bush never intended for the US to leave Iraq. Iraq was to be the new permanent base for future US military operations in the Middle East (the defense of our vital interests, which are oil and Israel). This is the thesis of Chalmers Johnson, a renowned foreign policy specialist. His notion is simple (not simplistic): US power depends on massive amounts of fuel, which is to say, oil. It takes millions of gallons of jet fuel to provide the air supremacy that allows us to create shock and awe. And our navy also gulps millions of gallons of diesel fuel (think of how much oil it takes to keeps an aircraft carrier group in the Persian Gulf. With the US having been thrown out of Saudi Arabia, we decided to construct permanent air bases in Iraq (we keep saying that we aren’t doing this, but what we build there has every appearance of permanence). Read this article, written before the Iraq war started. It’s not all that Mr. Johnson has to say on the subject, but it’s a good start. You can also check out his Blowback piece.

Here at Daily revolution, we are often reminded that human folly is not new. If we are conversant with our art and history, we have a chance of avoiding the repetition of human tragedy. George Bush may be closest to Shakespeare’s King Lear. Like Lear, he is pretty much alone now – note how few defenders he has in Congress. Of course, the Bush presidency hasn’t quite devolved into madness, but who knows how the next 19 months will go?

*To all those who urge us to fight on, and remind us that America has fought much harder wars than Iraq; I agree. But if we look at our other difficult wars, in each case, the commander in chief made lots of changes AND admitted mistakes when they occurred. In our revolutionary war, George Washington started out being aggressive, but after a series of disasters in New York, he learned never to jeopardize his army – that his job was to preserve the army and buy time. During our civil war, Lincoln admitted the many failures in the Eastern theater, and as a result, he replaced generals regularly until after three years he put Grant in charge. In WW2, Roosevelt was frank about our early difficulties. He too replaced all the early commanders and by the end of the war, the senior commander in Europe was a man who was a mere colonel when the war started. Bush has neither admitted problems (till way too late) nor made effective changes (also till way too late).

--T. McKenna

A Soldier Rebuts His Tyrant Bosses

This article, by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, has been getting a lot of attention lately—particularly from lefty sites such as Truthout and Think Progress. It richly deserves all the attention it can get: it is a crisply written, orderly, and eminently sane exposure, from an officer who has served in Iraq, of all the managerial incompetence that has defined this war's corporate conduct.

My blogging partner Terry McKenna reminded me of something that helped to put Lt. Col. Yingling's message into context: before the war started, the Army held war games, which were meant to test the military's prevailing combat strategy against an enemy that lacked our resources and firepower. The commander of the "insurgency" in these tactical war games quit before they could conclude, because, once his forces started "winning," the Army told him to stop and play by its rules (Marquis of Queensbury, anyone?). Here's an excerpt; the whole expose—from August, 2002, mind you—is here:

The most elaborate war game the U.S. military has ever held was rigged so that it appeared to validate the modern, joint-service war-fighting concepts it was supposed to be testing, according to the retired Marine lieutenant general who commanded the game’s Opposing Force.
That general, Paul Van Riper, said he worries the United States will send troops into combat using doctrine and weapons systems based on false conclusions from the recently concluded Millennium Challenge 02. He was so frustrated with the rigged exercise that he said he quit midway through the game.

Monday with McKenna: Inside the Artist's Brain

Monday with McKenna today features a trip inside the mind of an artist, but first let's take a tour of the brain of neocon ignorance. The graphic here is the front page of this town's leading tabloid, a Rupert Murdoch property that lives to offend. And what can be more offensive than this cover insult to a man who's in the hospital, and was still listed in critical condition at the time this moronic Photoshop smut was created? And if Mr. Corzine was a good Bush Republican, do you think we'd have seen this? I think this crap makes Imus look like a choir boy by comparison. Kicking a man when he's down is one thing; kicking him when half the bones in his body have been broken and he's breathing through a tube...it's journalistic dementia.

And while I have you thinking about sick, psychotic institutions, check this out: the U.S. Army now has an insurance claims department. They examine claims arising from our military's incidental murders of innocent Iraqi civilians, and pay or deny based on the most randomly corrupt judgment imaginable. Read some of the examples from Greg Mitchell's column at E&P, and see whether your blood pressure hasn't gone up by a factor of two by the time you're done. Incidentally, it was the ACLU that got these files on military killings of civilians; so purchasing a membership would not be a waste of $35, if you ask me.


So this isn't just a troop surge, ladies and gentlemen; it's a bureaucracy surge. But according to Clueless from Crawford, the Dems are "handing victory to our enemies" because they refuse to fund this shit without a timeline for ending it all. Click the graphic for Stewart's roundup, which includes the "airing of the platitudes."

Ah, god, if there's anybody from Norway reading this: how's the job market there, and could I get a green card? Will it help me if I tell you that my kid's playing Grieg on the piano these days?

Never mind, let's all just escape from it for a few minutes, to go inside the mind of my artist co-blogger. So while I go onto my ISP's servers and delete a few thousand emails (for more on that, join us on Geek Wednesday), here's Monday with McKenna...



Where does artistic inspiration come from? And I don’t mean this to be an abstract question. If we are to discover the poetry within ourselves, we’ll need to know how to muster the force of artistic inspiration.

This week I’ll review inspiration from the initial flicker to the finished work of art. In my example, I’ll use inspiration from this past week. The finished work is also mine, though from a long time ago. And by the way, if I haven’t made it clear in past essays, I am a trained fine artist; so, while I earn my living in business, I still paint from time to time.

Artistic inspiration varies a little bit with the specific art involved. The same flicker may tickle the painter or poet, and both may pick up a notebook to memorialize their ideas, but then their courses diverge. The visual artist works with line and tone. If words are included at all, they supplement a sketch. On the other hand, the poet works exclusively with words. And we include a musician, who would compose by setting down notes on a staff.

This week, my inspiration came from the return of Spring. And despite our being solidly into April, Spring did not seem all that present for those of us in the New York City area. Our weather was cold and blustery, and as of this writing, we await a Nor’easter and possibly snow. Still, it was Spring that aroused me from my drowsy train ride home. My daily commute starts in dank Penn Station; we spend the first 10 minutes in a dark tunnel. After we emerge into the light, we pass through the dreary salt marsh known as the Jersey Meadows. Newark is our first city. As we move past, the towns get progressively smaller, the lawns get larger and the people whiter. My ride ends more than an hour later in suburban Morris County.

On a typical day, I read and slumber. Last Tuesday, I suddenly noticed a flicker of bright colors and movement. In the middle distance, on a playing field, a group of girls were arrayed in a circle practicing wheeling motions with their arms. They were led by an adult (their coach?) stationed in the center. I guessed they were junior high school girls, and were practicing cheerleading.


As I said, I was dozing, but the late-afternoon raking sunlight and the bright colors on the girls clothes sparked my interest, so I opened up my notebook and scrawled the following scribble.

The scene vanished before I finished. On the same ride home, I made a few more sketches for later use. But as far as getting a second shot at drawing the scene again, I was never able to. I had my pad and pencil at the ready the rest of the week, but the girls and their teacher never reappeared. Still, I had my inspiration.

But how do I turn a brief notion into a finished painting?

In the days of the “academy,” artists went to great lengths to reassemble a scene. They would dress models in the correct garb, and sometimes recreate an entire battlefield or similar large scale backdrop. Contemporary artists by and large shun such practices. For myself, I will make lots of preparatory sketches, but that’s as far as I go.

Then it’s on to the grunt work of artistic composition. And as much as the several arts differ each from the other, there remain lots of similarities. Painters cover their canvas once and then re-paint again and again. So too, writers make a first draft and rewrite obsessively. From what I’ve heard, Ernest Hemingway’s first drafts were remarkably pedestrian. Each draft tries to push closer to the original spark. Countless re-paintings or redrafts eventually reach a conclusion (or a stalemate, when a work is abandoned). The key is to be unafraid to destroy (tear up – paint over) your previous hard work, even if a particular passage seems a great success. Finish occurs when the work clicks.

Works that fail may be picked up again after months or years.

And that’s it. An obsessive process of rewriting or repainting until the work is done.

So… how do you keep reaction fresh when you’ve had a work of art in front of you for months?

For painters, we can re-assess several times a day. After each break, your return to the studio gives you a brief moment for a fresh reaction. But for writers of novels, re-engagement comes slowly. Nonetheless, the artistic quest remains the same: did I get what I was after? If not, keep trying.

The what you are after is much less solid matter. Unvoiced, the artist tries to keep it alive in mind’s eye while continuing to prune and refine. But the specific “what” is never explicitly stated. Eventually, a work is finished. Even then, you may give yourself a time off, and one more look. Did you get what you wanted? If yes, then you are done.


So… what about my finished work. This one was finished some 34 Springs ago after a month of daily painting. I no longer have my original studies, but I can remember what I saw and what I was after. It was late March, and I was home from art school (I was sick for about eight days… a rare experience for me). I passed a local park and watched two boys take turns with a basketball. I can’t say what it was about the scene inspired me, and the work changed a lot as I painted. After a month of painting, I stopped with the following entitled the Rites of Spring.

By the way, if you pay for Showtime, you ought to watch the new series: This American Life. In an episode entitled ‘God’s Close-Up’ a young Mormon painter is shown selecting his models, posing them in an elaborate crucifixion scene, and photographing the scene to use are reference for a finished work. The links won’t allow you to see all that much, but if you have access to Showtime, watch this interesting episode. The art itself is relentlessly pedestrian. And no, I don’t know the artists name, nor do I have a link for him.

—T. McKenna

Monday with McKenna: Philosophy vs. Punditry

We're going back to back with Terry McKenna to start the week. He'll be with us today and Tuesday. You may recall Terry's piece on McCain from a few weeks back. As Frank Rich observed Sunday, McCain's lies (the subject of Terry's piece) have finally caught up with him (and W.R. Pitt of Truthout also weighs in with a similar insight).

Being a philosophy graduate myself, I feel a particular resonance with Terry's theme today. So here comes Part 1 of Terry's reflections on philosophy and punditry.


It’s the day after Easter; what better day to consider man’s search for meaning? Sadly, our era no longer values such a search. In an earlier era, the philosopher Rene Descartes corresponded with nobility and was granted a pension by the king of France. Half a half century later, Isaac Newton was England’s man of the age. But today, if a bright high school student admitted an interest in the study of philosophy as their college major, surely he or she would be vigorously discouraged.

Philosophers seem as irrelevant as poets and goldsmiths, though perhaps not quite so irrelevant as alchemists. We’ve replaced philosophy with journalism, and replaced philosophers with opinion makers such as newspaper columnists and the like. If philosophers created works of permanent value, today’s columns and OP-ED pieces are mere ephemera. If likened to food, the works of Plato nourished generations of scholars, today’s writings are mere snack food; useful only to fill our flabby minds with empty calories.

This week was a good one for our bloviators. In addition to the Iraq war and Nancy Pelosi’s unscripted comments during her middle east trip, we had the resolution of Iran’s seizure of fifteen British sailors and marines.

I’m happy for the sailors. Though their professional rigor turns out to be less than impressive (come on, you guys gave up about three days!) still they came home alive and unharmed, and in the middle east, maybe that’s remarkable enough.

Fifteen sailors and marines and a minor border incident don’t mean much in the scheme of things, but you wouldn’t know it from all the noise in the news media. For the bloviating class, the past two weeks became just another opportunity to show off in print, on the radio, or on camera. Were their guesses on the mark? Thing happened so quickly that it’s easy to check. It turns out no one was right (except maybe Tony Blair when he attempted to cool the rhetoric). The end came much sooner than anticipated. And – although there may have been some behind the scenes bargaining - it doesn’t look like either side gave away much. It could be this simple: Iran recognized that it got as much mileage as it could and ended it. But look at the headlines from a sample of articles (I selected a screen shot of sample articles via Google). Note the breathless energy (click graphic to enlarge).

So, if our pundits are full of shit (and if you track almost any issue, you’ll see that they are) then whither the search for information at a deeper level?

Sadly, the search for a deeper understanding of current affairs is led by the self same bloviators who are so disappointing. I had the opportunity to hear one of them on two occasions this past week, John Bolton. If you don’t remember him, he’s the hardliner that Bush appointed as UN ambassador (in a recess appointment). Though he’s a bully, he is also considered a serious man. He has spent a lot of time in and around government working on international affairs - particularly arms control. At the risk of over simplifying his position, he is suspicious of attempts to sign treaties with rogue states that have no intention of doing what they promise. His bottom line is that negotiating with such states quickly morphs into an attempt to reform them, and such efforts are doomed to failure. He prefers instead a policy of regime change.

Regime change sounded good until we found out that regime change is only half the battle. And war itself is much more complicated than just sending out a bunch of smart bombs. With the disaster in Iraq, we are now faced with the recognition that war is a dirty business that almost never yields the desired outcome. The deeper lesson is that the US is not quite strong enough to remake the world on its own terms.

—T. McKenna

Tomorrow: Part 2

Monday with McKenna: The NeoCon Threat to Good Government

It's been a couple of weeks since we last heard from Mr. Terry McKenna, and I'm sure you've had more than your fill of my New Age nonsense. Therefore, without further prologue, Monday with McKenna:


This week my topic is the Bush Administration’s attack on America’s history of open and honest government. But first, and by way of introduction, a couple of brief comments.

George Bush continues to trumpet alternative fuel vehicles as an answer to our over-consumption of oil.

Comment: NO, asshole, we need to mandate fuel economy, not a switch to a different carbon based fuel source.*

George Bush, John McCain, Joe Lieberman and the rest of the war mongers believe that setting a date for withdrawal is announcing the date of our defeat.

Comment: We have already lost this one. Neither are we surrendering to Iraq – they didn’t conquer us: if we leave, we are just LEAVING.

BushCo and the Assault on Good Government

America at its heart has been a very successful experiment in self-government. There are lots of reasons for this, one being the entry of millions of energetic Europeans and Asians to a vast and under populated** land full of rich soil and mineral wealth. Another is the absence of a ruling class of petty nobles and landlords who in other societies have been empowered to exact rents and other restrictions upon commerce. Thus, citizens have been able to engage in commercial activity with much less interference than almost anywhere else. We expect our public officials to behave fairly, and for the most part - except when it involves contracts to provide goods or services to the government itself – they do. Building permits, licenses and all manner of government activities are carried out for the genuine public interest. Town engineers practice engineering in a professional manner; geological surveys are genuine; and our national weather service provides solid and sound weather information. By and large, American civil servants have no agenda but to provide service. (To Chomsky-ites, followers of Howard Zinn and old leftists who dote on America’s failures, you are right as far as it goes, but so what—in the scheme of things, America is as good as many and better than most. Fairer as a whole than nations like Russia, China or Zimbabwe, and not quite as fair as places like Sweden and Norway.)

Oh yes, to those who say we are a nation of laws and not men – hogwash! Just think of Iraq and its constitution. Or of the UN and its numerous covenants and protocols. Suffice it to say that it takes a lot more than a signed document to generate a civil society or to inspire good behavior.

Starting with the New Deal, Congress created agencies that took on various roles that conservatives claimed were properly left to the states or to the people. The Supreme Court also took on a more activist role to re-make America into the free land implied by our founding documents. When a conservative president was finally elected after a space of five decades (with the election of Ronald Reagan), conservatives decided to use the executive branch to destroy programs that they were unable to attack directly.

Thus, Reagan appointed James G Watt – an avowed opponent of federal conservation programs, to manage the Department of the Interior. Reaganites especially hated environmental laws, housing programs, the Department of Education and the enforcement of civil rights laws. But Reagan operated before the flowering of modern Right Wing think tanks, so his efforts were not as focused as those today.

Enter Bush II (Really Ronald Reagan II) and cadres of trained right wing professionals, each ready to speak the newspeak of corporate evasion and to hide their mission, which was to bend federal programs into supporting the right wing policy arm - actually, anti-policy arm, since the right wing has no real policy, just newspeak meant to build a consensus against policy. Gail Norton at the Department of the Interior was one example. She was a protégé of James G. Watt and built her career setting up what are known as astro turf groups*** with a fake environmental agenda. And think of the FDA. This formerly proud servant of public health was shaped into an instrument of conservative Christianity when it stalled the approval of the morning after pill.

In almost all spheres of activity, officials have switched from serving the American people to serving the president. Thus Treasury lied to the nation about the cost of the Bush tax cuts; and the Defense Department lied about the cost of the Iraq folly. And when they are not lying to us, the feds are simple nincompoops like Brownie.

So Alberto Gonzalez’s lies are not surprising. The entire executive is bathed in deceit.

But are we ready to conclude that the future is lost too? I don’t think so. At the local level, our civil servants still serve us honestly. And Democrats by and large believe in the government that they serve, but we won’t know how they will act until they win back the White House, which they surely will do in 2008.

And before I go, an expression of thanks to the hospitality of San Francisco and the surrounding towns within northern California. I just returned from a seven day trip to California, my first ever. Now I understand what led many of my generation to extend their stays in this strange but attractive land.

____________________


*If you think ethanol is a solution, then please read up about the cost of raising the corn necessary to produce it. The net energy yield is close to zero. And for those interested in sugar instead (especially as produced in Brazil) the yield and costs are better, but the bad news is, the Brazilians use slave indigenous labor to clear the Amazon jungle in order to get open land for sugar can.

**Yes, I know that North America was populated by millions of what used to be called Indians, but after the European settlements had been established, disease and warfare (especially disease) so shrunk the existing population that the later immigrants felt they were entering a virgin land.

***Astro Turf groups are funded by industry, or sometimes by wealthy right wing zealots (for example, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Move America Forward, and Focus on the Family). They are named to sound friendly, but beware, they have a mission and are to be feared.

—T. McKenna

Practicing Inner Elimination: The Way Beyond Guilt

Yesterday, we suggested that guilt is error's dark companion, and is responsible for most of the resistance to the admission of a mistake, especially from people who have made so many of them, like the members of the BushCo team.

Well, as luck would have it for us, Bush did issue an apology yesterday, on behalf of "the system."

"The system failed you and it failed our troops and we're going to fix it...I apologize for what they went through and we're going to fix the problem."

Apology accepted, Dub. Now, "fix the problem"—fire your VP, your AG, and your rap-dancing marketing director, and then leave office yourself. Then, all of you, get out of the public eye and work on expelling the demons that have driven you and our nation to this desperate point of geopolitical chaos, murder, domestic waste, and pervasive corruption. Get treatment for the disease that has so long afflicted you.



It all begins, as it can for many of us, with a recognition of the falsehood of guilt as a principle of human nature. As I say in The Tao of Hogwarts:

...is there anything, anywhere, in Nature that experiences guilt, except humans? Do animals or plants or rocks or stars or the earth itself feel guilt—do any of these things subject themselves to the punishments and the hideous self-torment of one who perceives himself as inherently flawed and poisoned by Nature with Sin? Or is guilt what makes us who we are—original, uniquely human, the Lords of the Earth and the fullness thereof? If guilt is what makes us special, what distinguishes us from all other forms of creation, then I would suggest that it is time to renounce the distinction and return to our pre-human evolutionary roots.

Fortunately, that last bit is quite unnecessary. We can, in fact, "fix the system," by committing ourselves to a program of "inner elimination." We all value good habits and practices of physical elimination, because we know that if we couldn't shit, pee, sweat, fart, or belch properly, toxins would build up in our bodies and make us very sick. But we often fail to apply the same principle to our minds. That's where the "inner No" comes in. Here is another excerpt from my book, which includes guidance on some basic principles of "inner elimination:"

Say an inner No to the validity of guilt as a principle of human nature. In a brief, daily meditation, ask for help from the hidden world and firmly, yet without bitterness or hatred, say the word "No" three times to the idea of guilt as a natural aspect of your being. Say a further No to any group ideology, pseudo-scientific theory, religious belief, or social doctrine that arises to your consciousness as a specifically intrusive source of the belief in guilt as a natural human trait. Ask the teaching Presence of the Cosmos and the helping cosmic energy of dispersion to dissolve the notion of guilt from within you. Finish each meditation with an expression of thanks to the cosmic energies that are thus clearing you of these destructive attachments and prejudices against your true nature. Many people have found this to be an extraordinarily restorative and cleansing exercise, and the best part of it is that it costs you almost no outer effort and only about two or three minutes out of each day.

Identify the areas in your life where you are bound by group affiliation, and sever the ties on the inner plane. In Hexagram 59 of the I Ching ("Dispersion"), Line 4 has this poem:

He dissolves his bond with his group.
Supreme good fortune.
Dispersion leads to accumulation.
This is something that ordinary men do not think of.
(from the Wilhelm/Baynes translation)


Let this insight lead you to reflect on the aspects of your life—work, national affiliation, an academic, social, religious, or other group allegiance, and even family life—that need to be examined for the limitations they may be imposing on your true nature and the fulfillment of your individual uniqueness as an independent moment within the Cosmic Consciousness. Many of us have spent much of our lives trying to live up to the group self-images projected upon us by collective ideologies—the obedient child, the good and sacrificing husband/wife/parent, the loyal, hardworking employee, the patriotic citizen of a particular nation. The fact is that children naturally behave as adults would like them to, when obedience is not beaten into them as an ideological imperative engraved on the stone of an institution's moral code; we are all of us more natural, loving, and enduring marriage partners when we are allowed to live independently, even as we maintain the inner connection with our beloved, free of the darkly threatening decree to "honor and obey" another; we become more loyal, supportive, and nurturing parents when we give up the lugubrious self-consciousness of "sacrificial duty" towards our children; we are more productive and creative workers when we are liberated from that obsessive and vaguely paranoid attachment to the institutional ethic of "hard work"; and we are far more beneficial to our community and our nation when we consider ourselves as citizens of the Cosmic Whole, rather than as parochially allied to some tribe, clan, or state and its prevailing ideology of the moment.

So consider which of the institutionally-programmed self-images of the collective ego are most limiting you in your inner growth as an individual, and work on releasing these bonds, in the knowledge that you are truly benefiting the natural family, community, business organization, and nation by doing so.

Be led to a more accurate and personally viable understanding of error and its place in our lives. In the I Ching, there is no direct mention of guilt, because, as we have discussed, guilt has no basis in cosmic reality. However, it is understood throughout the oracle's text that error is an aspect of the way of inner growth for humans, and so the I Ching speaks in many places of "remorse" or "regret." This, indeed, is how we are meant to understand the role of error in our lives. In contrast to what the collective ego and its ideologies would have us believe, there are no spots that won't wash out: our bodies, after all, are 75% water—the basic element of the baptismal ritual is already within us in abundance! So when you have said or done something which you regret, and that you recognize as an error, a temporary separation from your true nature, try the following steps in a brief meditation:

♦ Ask for help from the Cosmic realm in understanding the cause, nature, and the correct resolution of your mistake, and apologize to the Cosmos for the error, in a free and open inner expression of remorse that is unstained by guilt, self-blame, or bitterness.

♦ If it is an interpersonal issue that has occasioned your error, then apologize to the person you believe you have wronged, on the inner plane. Simply let your consciousness speak to that person and express your regret sincerely, as if they were right beside you in the room. This practice has a far greater transformative effect than most people would be willing to acknowledge, until they experience it for themselves.

♦ Finally, ask the Sage, the teaching energy of the Cosmic Consciousness, to guide you in understanding what, if anything, must be done, in addition to the above, to resolve the effect of your mistake and return you to harmony with the principle of Te, or Modesty. You may use the I Ching or other oracle, or simply attend to the messages you receive in meditations, in dreams, or through your own reflection. If you feel that any action or communication on the outer plane would be helpful in completing the resolution of your error, ask for help in learning the correct approach in this respect. And remember this: the capacity to say from your heart, "I am sorry" reveals an ability of such greatness as the leaders of the most powerful nations on earth completely lack. As with any meditation, finish by expressing your thanks to the Cosmos for its help in guiding you through this process of self-understanding amid an awareness of remorse.

If guilt, blame, and fear are severely troubling you, seek help from a professional. The guilt and self-blame that are engendered by our futile efforts to live up to the institutional ego's monumental self-images lie at the root of many depressive and anxiety disorders. We are not born to live in an inner state of slavery, ever fearful that we will be deemed insufficient to the self-images that cultural laws, moral codes, religious beliefs, and societal norms define for us and program into us. Your need for help is not a manifestation of something aberrant or weak in your true nature, but is rather a result of cultural conditioning. You can find a counselor, therapist, or other professional through talking to family and friends, or via professional organizations that offer referrals based on your needs and resources.

Meat in Rove's Market, Bush on the Bone...

I found this item in my daily email from Progress today (link with video here):

DAILY GRILL
"General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed humvee."
-- Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), 3/27/07, on how safe Iraq is because of President Bush's escalation

VERSUS
"I mean, in the hour since Sen. McCain's said this, I've spoken to military sources and there was laughter down the line. I mean, certainly the general travels in a humvee. There's multiple humvees around it, heavily armed."
-- CNN's Baghdad correspondent Michael Ware, 3/27/07

Mother Jones joins in on the grim fun with this quiz on the war, which is fairly challenging—I only rate at the "cable news TV pundit" level. And while you're there, subscribe, why don't ya? It's $10 for a whole year of some of the best research and journalism you can find out there.

And while we're having fun, our buddy Norm Jenson discovered this video and posted it to his outstanding blog. Creationism, evolution, and peanut butter. Hilarious stuff—Jon Stewart couldn't have come up with anything so raucously bizarre.

The best argument ever for vegetarianism: And what's President Meathead up to, you ask? Why, he's been speaking before the American Cattlemen's Association to talk foreign policy (now how could I make up any of this?). In an obvious swipe at his audience's competition, the pig farmers, the Meathead-in-Chief said, "the House and Senate bills have too much pork, too many conditions on our commanders and an artificial timetable for withdrawal. And I have made it clear for weeks if either version comes to my desk, I’m going to veto it."

And then came his old warhorse: “The best way to protect this country is to defeat the enemy overseas, so we don’t have to face them here at home.”

Now if I were a conservative pundit, I'd have been all over this one long ago. Check out the stats: every war we've ever fought on our own soil, we've won*. Overseas, we've won a few, lost two, and had a number of ties. So if I were a true conserva-hawk, I'd want to fight 'em over here! Bring 'em on!

But since I'm just a liberal blogger, I'll simply say that this is yet another example of the disconnect with reality so recurrently typical of this Prez. In fact, I'm working on a Mental Status Examination based on recent speeches and press conferences, which I'll be able to present next week sometime. So come back then to learn a little about psychiatry and the certifiable leader of the free world. Meanwhile, a word from Bob Herbert in today's Times:

The executive branch is under the control of a belligerent and often amateurish group that has hacked away at civil liberties and is adamant about pursuing a war that neither Congress nor the public wants.

_____________________

*"we," of course, refers to the armies led by the person or government of Washington. So Washington's army won the Rev War, and Abe's squad carried the day nearly a century later—albeit at the loss of virtually an entire generation of the country's male youth. We also won the war of 1812, beat back the Mexicans, and of course genocidally annihilated dem pesky Injuns. A proud domestic military history, indeed.

"War is Over, If You Want It"

The Collateral Damage Dance Troupe performs prior to the start of the UFPJ NYC Peace March on Sunday (click to enlarge)

Well, I looked around the American mass media for awhile today, just to see whether citizen protests mattered as news; apparently they do not—that is, on this side of the pond. But over in England, the BBC had it on their front page, here.



But our media wouldn't be interested in this past weekend's marches because, (a) aside from some verbal shit-slinging from a few disordered Bush supporters in Washington, there was no conflict, no violence; and (b) no star appeal. It appears as if either the weather or the limelight potential didn't suit the Hollywood peace glitterati or anyone else among the rich and famous this time around. Which, after all, is fine with most of us.

This was very much our march, our statement. There was no flowery rhetoric, no makeup trailer, not a speck of glamour, at the march I attended here in New York. Boy, it was great: old folks, young folks, baby strollers, toddlers, teenagers, gays and straights, Communists and Democrats (and, I suspect, a few Republicans), walking side by side. Nameless to the network media or the rest of the National Enquirer set. Just ordinary people; small but strong.

For those of you who don't live here, New York is not a glamour, culture, or fashion capitol for the vast majority of us who call the city home. Who can afford to do Sardi's or the Hard Rock or Tavern on the Green or Elaine's or Broadway? Nah, that stuff is for the wealthy minority and tourists who have probably saved for years to get tix to The Producers and a table at SPQR or Sparks. I've lived here 25 years, been to one Broadway show and little else besides. For us, New York is more about a sun-splashed afternoon on Strawberry Fields or a pedal boat on Prosect Park Lake or the top deck at Yankee Stadium (not lately, though) or a long walk on the Piers or a bike ride over the Brooklyn Bridge and up the West Side Promenade. Or a protest march in midtown. It's inexpensive, fun, refreshing, and gives you the chance to meet your real neighbors. But again, it's not exactly stuff for the Cindy Adams set, which is fine by us.

Favorite sign seen at the protest: "Hillary is Bush with Tits". Really, it was there.

Speaking of Hillary-with-a-penis, guess who might have noticed the protests this weekend in Washington, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, and elsewhere? Yep, you guessed it: why else did he whine to Congress today about getting his escalation funding bill passed? Think maybe he heard all those tens or hundreds of thousands of people yelling all weekend in the streets "no more money for war!"? Now he wants to play rough with the blue Congress, turn the screws on them a little, show them who's still boss.

Well, will they let him get away with it? Probably: Democratic majority or not, cojones are still decidedly in the minority on Capitol Hill.

Here's Bush's nod to reality in this moment: “There will be good days and bad days ahead as the security plan unfolds.”

Let's clarify for a minute what he's talking about, because when we normally talk about "bad days," it usually involves a deal at work not going through, or your kid getting an F in math, or a fight with the spouse or significant other...that sort of stuff. But when Dub talks "bad days," he's saying, "there will be hundreds, probably thousands more deaths...there will be massive amounts of human life and taxpayer treasure wasted in the carnage, soaked up by the desert sands...there will be more terrorists, more bodies, more widows, more orphans, more desolation." That, folks, is what we have to look forward to if Congress does the jelly-spine act again (we know the mass media will).

I would suggest that, whether or not you voted with your legs and your voice this past weekend, it's high time to:

get on the phone

write some letters

send some emails to the fat cats in DC and let them know what you voted for with your ballot last November.

And remember..."War is over, if you want it."

Monday with McKenna: Dissent is Developmental

Dissent is developmental: It's one of the guiding principles of this blog, and of many like it, that dissent makes government, corporations, and society in general more alive, more responsive to the people. Therefore, they are more popular and usually more profitable, whenever they give dissenters a free voice.

This is, to me, such a self-evident truth (to borrow an old phrase) that it always astonishes me to discover that many people can't understand it. Yet on Saturday in Washington, there were the wingnuts, insulting protesters and accusing them of treason—as they "guarded" national monuments threatened by defamatory rumors that almost certainly started from within their own disordered brains.

Fortunately, we had no such business here in New York on Sunday. Overall, it seemed a tad smaller than last April's; yet spirited and vibrant nonetheless. I walked the whole route and saw no signs of disorder or conflict—even the cops lining the route seemed relaxed. At the very end, two lonely counter-protesters held up a sign labeling the other 50,000 or so of us "left-wing protesters bent on demoralizing our troops."

I'll have more on the march and its meaning later this week, along with more pictures. But today is Monday with McKenna, always a celebration of dissent in itself. Today, he takes on the image of "straight-talking" John McCain, and finds little, if anything, of substance.


A public figure caught in a lie.  Don’t you just love when that happens?  This week, the news highlighted two more such public figures, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and former straight talker, John McCain. 
 
Mr. Gonzales was in the news in a big way until out of nowhere, the US released a transcript of terrorist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s testimony.  It seems that the good Shaikh has admitted complicity for nearly every terrorist act committed against US interests, as well as many more that he may only have imagined.  So this bit of manufactured news knocked Al Gonzales and his lies off the front page.  On the other hand, John McCain’s verbal misdeeds have garnered scant interest.  Still, his faltering presidential campaign is so desperate that it has resurrected the STRAIGHT TALK EXPRESS – a campaign bus decorated with that formerly apt slogan.  But this time, the bus’s incumbent is no longer quite the reporter’s friend that he was 7 years ago. 



It is easy to make light of Mr. Gonzales’ lies.  Who expected better from a person whose entire career has consisted of crafting false or exaggerated claims.  He is, after all, a lawyer. In his public role as the president’s counsel, we’ve all become familiar with Al Gonzales’s frozen grin (or is it a shit eating grin?).  And if Americans of ten years ago were once titillated by Bill Clinton’s Socratic dialogue over the meaning of “IS,” then we should now be in perpetual stitches over Al Gonzales’ tautological defense of our use of torture - first he defined torture out of existence, then he assured us that America doesn’t use torture… (because we’ve defined it out of existence!)  This grandchild of illegal immigrants achieved his American Dream when he became Attorney General; now it’s about to come an American nightmare.  If he survives in office, it will be as a shriveled and powerless figure.
 
The lies of John McCain are more troubling.  The son of an Admiral, and the grandson of another, success was his birthright.  He graduated from Annapolis, and began his naval career as a pilot.  Shot down during the Viet Nam war, he served honorably as a prisoner of war, inspiring his fellow prisoners, and gaining fame when his inspiring story became better known.  After leaving the Navy, he attained quick political success, and until recently was known as a maverick and gadfly.    
 
His troubles began after his 2000 campaign loss.  Having learned that honesty is not the best policy after all, he morphed into a strong Bush supporter, but at first he kept his independence.  As we got closer to the 2008 campaign, McCain has moved ever closer to the right wing ideologues he formerly inveighed against.    
 
Am I being too hard on John McCain?  He is hardly the first person to sell his soul for the big prize.  Ronald Reagan began his presidential bid in 1981 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, heart of the segregationist south.  And even John McCain’s STRAIGHT TALK EXPRESS faltered briefly in the 2000 primary season over the use of images of the confederate flag in Southern states.. 
 
But is McCain a liar? While Mr. Gonzales’ statements would probably meet anyone’s definition of lie, John McCain’s would not.  But McCain’s strange transition from giving open explanations to speaking political Newspeak is a sad one to his admirers.  Those on the right who are being persuaded to vote for him now, must somehow be made to think of McCain’s past as a lie.  The political moderates who have admired him must instead think of his current statements as untrue – and that if elected, that the old John McCain would emerge.  Thus the entire McCain campaign is embedded with deceit.  His new positions have been crafted carefully to hide the truth behind a political smokescreen.  Thus, from a big picture point of view, John McCain is lying.  His deceit started a few years ago, when he reversed course on the president’s tax cuts.  Now he can’t give a straight answer to a reporter’s simple question about HIV.
 
I recommend that you go and study his website. On a superficial basis it looks harmless enough, but when you delve into the articles, you see right wing poison.  Try the article “Addressing the Moral Concerns of Advanced Technology.”  Dealing with a number of issues, the article highlights McCain’s supposed concern about "fetal farming."   This is a straw man, raised to scare voters away from a sober consideration of the issue.  Stem cells were unknown except in theory as late as two decades ago.  We still know little about them, but research on embryonic stem cells seems the likeliest avenue to gain new knowledge, since the stem cell represents an embryonic state – before cells specialize.  We are lying to ourselves if we believe that by avoiding such research, we have preserved the least shred of human dignity for the thousands of embryos locked in cold storage.  If these cells have dignity, then how dare we consign them to eternal nothingness.  But they are not human life, only potential.  Until successfully implanted in a healthy uterus, they do not deserve the least legal protection.  But troglodytes on the political right have managed to sway a media too poorly educated in the sciences to understand that they are being spun. 
 
There you have it.  Two men and dreams either broken or about to break.  And you have to ask – especially with regard to John McCain: was it really, really worth it?
 
A note to a few of my young friends who read the blog and often point out the seeming extremity of my arguments. The blog is a polemic.  We present short arguments with an intense point of view.  Yes, I do gloss over a few of the details, and stretch my points for effect.  And yes, lawyers are not all liars (though I stand by my characterization of many of them).  And I’m still willing to hope that if elected, which I see as unlikely, the real John McCain will emerge.

—T. McKenna
_________________

Site Note: Our new banner graphic is a Photoshopped selection from some eclipse photography I found at APOD. I think it's cool, and anyway, the poor cat needs a break.

Now as this is my last free week before returning nose to corporate grindstone, there will be a content-fest here. More from the weekend protests; a fascinating look on Geek Wednesday at how a Microsoft exec bashes his company better than I could ever hope to; and some selections from a new book I'm working on about corporate America, its alternatives, and how we might go about tranforming the former through aligning ourselves with the latter. I suspect it's also going to be a fairly busy week in the news.

The Week Ahead at DR

Hey everybody, and a Happy Hangover Day to all you Irish who celebrated last night. I'm getting ready to go and join the protest march in Manhattan, as DR is a sponsor of the event (it's no big deal—you give UFPJ $50 and then help them get the word out in advance). So this week, we'll have photos and stories from the NYC march, as well as others around the country (if you have anything you'd like to share with the crass, post a link to the comments). It's all about keeping up the pressure on Power. You never know where the tipping point will come, nor how close you are to it; but if we just keep on pushing together, with the helping energy of truth behind us, then the moment will come when clarity and democracy are once again alive in this nation.

We'll also start turning a gaze on 2008, with a focus on what we need to do as voters to prevent another disastrous administration taking hold in Washington once the current lot of tyrants, sycophants, and all-round losers have been flushed away. One thing appears certain: the American mass media will not change in its obsession with slick, vapid imagery. So it's up to us to change for them, and show them the kind of vision that they have abandoned. Therefore, we'll start the week with a Terry McKenna piece on the reality behind Sen. John McCain's "Straight Talk Express".



After all, if you have to advertise yourself as a "straight talker" by painting it on the side of a bus, I'm already skeptical. I could just as easily promote myself as an intelligent fellow whose judgment and decisions can always be counted on, just because I scored well in that area on a personality quiz. In fact, here it is (New Hampshire, here I come):

What's Your Best Quality? Your Result: Intelligence   Your best quality is intelligence! People like you because you are smart and always make the right decision. Your intelligence also helps you handle tough situations.
Loving
Personality
Out-Going
Ambitious
Sense of Humor
What's Your Best Quality? Take More Quizzes

Friday Reflection: Crane's Reminder, and Our Purpose

Before we get to the Friday Reflection for today, I have some links to video material that you may find worth viewing.

The first is from a very familiar source, but it may not be what you expect. Jon Stewart, aside from being a very funny man and a trenchant social observer, has an extraordinary gift for interviewing (and believe me, it's a very rare skill in today's media). Check out this interview he has with former Clinton NSA chief Zbigniew Brzezinski. Also note ZB's ominous message of the moment. Let's hope the title of his book can serve as a guide to recovery as well as a reflection on a lost opportunity.

Next is a full-length documentary on two gritty British activists who took on Mickey D's—just click the graphic above to watch. I found it via Klassy's StumbleUpon page. It's pretty inspiring.

The last is an activist video site which you may be familiar with. It's featured in our Blogroll, and its teenage author is the topic of an excellent story in the current issue of Mother Jones. The webmistress in question is young Ava Lowery, and the site is Peace Takes Courage. If you haven't seen this young lady's marvelous videos, spend some time there and watch. Then remember—according to the MoJo reporter, this teenage girl from the heart of Dixie, along with her family, has been subjected to intimidation, abuse, and even death threats. So far, nothing has stopped her. This weekend, many of us will be continuing to make the restorative sounds of dissent thanks to the information and inspiration provided by people like Ava.



Our banner quote this week may have struck a vaguely familiar chord of resonance in many of you, even if you haven't read the book since you were in junior high school. The author is Stephen Crane, and the book is of course his classic, The Red Badge of Courage.

The men groaned. The luster faded from their eyes. Their smudged countenances now expressed a profound dejection. They moved their stiffened bodies slowly, and watched in sullen mood the frantic approach of the enemy. The slaves toiling in the temple of this god began to feel rebellion at his harsh tasks.

This is from the beginning of the book's very heart, where we discover how flight becomes the journey. It begins with a wild run from danger, which transforms gradually into a somber and regenerative retreat for the novel's protagonist, who only name is "the youth". Now I'm not sure of my facts here, because it's all coming from a distant memory (and at my age, memory for anything becomes a challenge); but I believe that the setting of the novel is one of the great blood baths of Lincoln's War, Chancellorsville. One of Crane's great accomplishments in this small novel was to accurately portray both the vast scope and the horror of that battle, with considerable historical authenticity.

But of more interest is the personal human dimension of the novel. Crane spends the first 50 or so pages portraying the fighting spirit of his characters—the cultural facade of courage. Then he reveals how easily that facade implodes; panic overtakes his warriors in a single moment:

A man near him, who up to this time had been working feverishly at his rifle, suddenly stopped and ran with howls. A lad whose face had borne an expression of exalted courage, the majesty of he who dares give his life, was, at an instant, smitten abject. He blanched like one who has come to the edge of a cliff at midnight and is suddenly made aware. There was a revelation. He, too, threw down his gun and fled. There was no shame in his face. He ran like a rabbit.

Perhaps back in some FOX studio, safe in the heart of the Union, some pundit or other might have described this turn in the battle as cowardice or "cutting and running." Well, that's exactly what Crane was describing: "cut and run" as in Nature overtaking social programming. He goes on throughout the rest of the book to reveal the intensity of the inner conflict between these forces—how disabling the institutional boulders of bravery and courage are to the human psyche. What terrible wars must be fought within the man who sees himself as departing from those rigid walls of cultural conditioning! What lifelong wounds are inflicted upon the soul of a man who is once condemned, by himself or others, as a coward, and what must be risked to redeem himself! This, added to the ordinary inner torment of war, breaks the human psyche into often unrecoverable and irreparable fragments. It is all happening right now.

The Iraq War has taken a psychological toll of unprecedented proportions. Stacy Bannerman focuses on this aspect of the war in a piece I found at Alternet:

Soldiers who have served -- or are serving -- in Iraq are killing themselves at higher percentages than in any other war where such figures have been tracked. According to a report recently released by the Defense Manpower Data Center, suicide accounted for over 25 percent of all noncombat Army deaths in Iraq in 2006.

Bannerman notes a similarly alarming set of statistics re. PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder:

"At least 30 percent of Iraq or Afghanistan [veterans] are diagnosed with PTSD, up from 16 percent to 18 percent in 2004," said Charlie Kennedy, PTSD program director and lead psychologist at the Stratton VA Medical Center. The number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans getting treatment for PTSD at VA hospitals and counseling centers increased 87 percent from September 2005 to June 2006, and they have a backlog of 400,000 cases, including veterans from previous wars. The most conservative estimates project that roughly 250,000 Iraq war veterans will struggle with PTSD.

These are truly alarming rates of psychiatric morbidity by any measure. But I am betting that neither Stephen Crane nor the subjects of his classic novel would have found them surprising. For like the Civil War, the Iraq War is a pointless conflict* marked by a continuous and escalating bloody mayhem in which friend and foe are often indistinguishable; and which has taken its toll limb by human limb, death by premature death.

Yesterday, the Senate failed again to commit itself to the will of the people. So more soldiers, more Iraqi civilians, will die or be maimed, physically and psychologically, by this insanity—unless we unite to tell these fat, lazy, licentious demagogues in Washington that we will not tolerate their weakness at a moment like this. That's what this weekend is all about: come and be heard.
_______________________

*The debate on the Civil War, which cost America half a million of its male youth, basically wiping out an entire generation, can be held at a more convenient time. In short, though, my position is that Lincoln could very easily have invited the South to go right ahead and secede, and then set up the appropriate blockades and trade barriers. There is obviously no way to tell, but my wager would be that the Confederate nation would not have lasted ten years on its own, and untold death and suffering would have been averted. Lincoln, at any rate, is not the demigod that is popularly sculpted in the marble and granite of our cultural conditioning programs. Nor, I suspect, would he be at all comfortable in the stone throne onto which he has been forced by the ideologues of our time.

We Are Small, Yet Strong

I was reading about the fellow who won the $200 million in the big Lotto jackpot last week, and it occurred to me that about 10,000 other people would have to win that same amount before they could pay for what's been spent on the Iraq War.

This is one big reason (there are many others) why this blog is sponsoring UFPJ's nationwide protest march this coming weekend. If you live in or near New York and plan to attend, post a comment if you'd like to meet someplace in the staging area between 35th and 39th Streets in Manhattan.

I'm going because I have a child who will grow up into the manufactured, profit-driven terror of our Halliburton era. I'm also going because there are tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people I will never know whose lives will be taken or ruined amid the perpetuation and escalation of this vortex of devastation fueled by the limitless avarice of a few old white demons and their advertising machinery.

We are small, yet strong. The fear that once froze us now has no room to cast its icy shroud, for the worst that can happen has already begun. The government of a nation conceived in liberty and equality has been overtaken by corporate tyrants and paranoid despots; the threat of a nuclear holocaust is intensifying amid the Cradle of Civilization; the Earth itself is under attack and responding in the only way it can, while Science—the god of the 20th century—freezes in horror at what it has made.

So there is no room for fear anymore. Neither is there room for the hero. The cult of heroism has contributed to the morass of death, corruption, and disorder that we now have. Activism, properly understood, is not about heroism; it is about working within one's natural abilities and influence, in the confidence that one's energy will attract its complement. Join us Sunday in New York or Washington or wherever you can get to, and you'll see what it's all about. Let this anniversary of the Iraq War be the last.

Uncle Dick's Dickensian Declaration

When it comes to following Uncle Dick around the world, nobody does it like Stewart and his roving reporter, John Oliver. Click the graphic and watch.

Meanwhile, the once-compliant lapdog mass media are suddenly starting to bark a little (or at least yip) over the White House's insistence on the "anonymity" of an "unnamed official" in Cheney's traveling party who referred to himself in the first person. Check out this quote:

"I've seen some reporting that says, `Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them.' That's not the way I work," the "senior administration official" said. "I don't know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn't know what I'm doing or isn't involved in it. But the idea that I'd go in and threaten someone is an invalid reading of the way I do business."

The media, of course, are up in arms over the fact that Dick clearly identified himself as the source by talking about himself. Fine, that's very insightful of you, reporters. But what you missed while your panties were in a twist over the obvious is that the man also revealed plenty about himself and this administration's operations in Iraq and elsewhere these past six years.

Note, for example, the last sentence from that quote: "...an invalid reading of the way I do business." Replace "I" with "Halliburton" and you've pretty much got the idea of how Dick and his assistant from Crawford, TX have been operating throughout the dark dawn of the 21st century. It's all about business. Not government, not democracy, and certainly not diplomacy: it's about business. That is, mergers, takeovers, corporate occupations, and above all, profit at any human or environmental cost. That's been the story of this Halliburton administration. The "unnamed official's" comment is a Dickensian declaration: "I am a man of business..."

But to every Scrooge there comes a Jacob Marley. Once again, this is the dawn of the 21st century; and every dawning begins with darkness. Tomorrow, we'll come back to the discussion of the burgeoning light, and from what direction it is coming. Fear not, however: the light is there.

Give Them Hell (and Geek Wednesday)

Before I let the cat out of the bag for Geek Wednesday, here's a question that many of us should be asking Congress as it continues to walllow...that is, I mean, conduct, its debate on the Iraq War: the biggest four-star cheese in the U.S. military says that there's no evidence of Iranian involvement in attacks on US troops. Now Gen. Pace is presumably an expert on military affairs, and might know a little more about what's really going on than a dyslexic political figurehead or his criminally psychotic VP. So...who ya gonna believe, Congress?

And let's say that the General is misinformed: after all, he does lack the advantage of having a golden earpiece exclusively tuned to the Voice of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior, Inc. What about it? Don't you end wars by negotiating with the enemy? Or is it remotely possible, would you say, that Gen. Pace's bosses don't really have an interest in ending the war? Could it be that Gen. Pace, being a soldier, sees all too clearly what the result would be of ramping this war up into a large-scale regional affair, with the possibility of nukes becoming involved? Could this be the General's motive for effectively spitting in the eye of his clueless Commanders-in-Chief?

Meanwhile, 75% of Americans (and 72% of Republicans!) openly support negotiation with Iran and Syria. Once again, we are at one of those turning point moments where we will have to enforce our common will, our common wisdom, on these ignorant tyrants who are ruling us. We will have to especially be all over Congress on this one, because like them or not, they represent our main chance at the restoration of democratic process here. We are in the midst of an escalation; we could be on the doorstep of an explosion whose devastation will threaten the lives of generations to come, including those of our kids now. Here's an idea; use Progress Report's tracking form to keep tabs on how your local Reps and Sens are leaning or voting on both issues, and give them hell. Call them, write them, stop them on the street next week when they're back home for their winter break. Just give them hell.

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Geek Wednesday

Hey you nutty people, it's pawprints time at Geek Wednesday. My human is busy trying to find a job, and you know how people can get whenever there's an economic crunch—first thing that gets downsized is the poor kitty's food, and I'm not interested in getting scaled down to 9-Lives anytime soon.

So what's going on in geekdom these days? Yeah, I know, the web is more cluttered than a 3-cat litter box with talk of DRM, now that both Steve and Bill are competing to sound the grassroots-iest note on DRM.

Not bad, but let's get real for a minute: is it possible that Norway put the fear of heavenly retribution into Steve's heart? Or that Uncle Bill is ready to take the DRM locks out of his brand new OS (see below)? Yeah, and the Japanese are going to slap some sanity into Dick Cheney's head. Oh, and I'm going on an all-vegan program starting tomorrow...

But, given some time and more of Uncle Bill's stumble-over-my-shoelaces act, Linux might just take command in the enterprise and a solid bite in the consumer area. In this series, e-Week columnist and uber-geek Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols puts a variant of Ubuntu Linux side-by-side on the same hardware with Vista, and comes to some interesting, though hardly surprising, conclusions. One of these, by the way, is, "an operating system -- any operating system -- is not the place for DRM." Guess which OS he's referring to?

Vaughan-Nichols reaches many of the same conclusions that we've already arrived at in our prior posts here—namely, that dedicated audio and video hardware equipped with plenty of its own juice (no borrowing system RAM allowed) is required to run Vista in either its midrange or advanced flavors; that most of us will have to lay out at least a grand to get the gear necessary to run Vista without going the upgrade route (which in Vista's case is instant heartburn); and in short, that for the expense now involved in going with Windows, you can actually save money on new hardware (and certainly on software) by taking Vaughan-Nichols' last recommendation:

I have to say that my last thought on both Vista and Linux is that if you really, really want the best possible graphics... get a Mac.

Now that laptop you see me peeking around above is the Intel-equipped MacBook, which costs around $1300 with a 2.0 GHz Core Duo 2 processor, 80GB hard drive, and 1GB of RAM. We reviewed it here, and after six weeks, we're still happy with it. The only thing we'd add is something that won't impact most people: if you're a longtime Mac user who still has a toe or two in OS9, you don't want an Intel machine yet, because the Intel Macs don't play at all with OS9 apps.

In fact, some veteran Mac users among you may want to keep a PPC machine around even after you've migrated to an Intel box. If you want to get a sweet deal on an old PPC machine but still get a robust warranty, try the TechRestore link at the top of the sidebar—they come highly recommended, and if you buy a machine through that link, you'll be helping us out, too. You could actually get a new Intel Mac AND a 1GHz PPC iBook for the price of a loaded Vista box that has everything it needs to get going and give you some hope of keeping going.

Incidentally, why is it that Vista can't reliably support an upgrade path? We hadn't even thought of that when we did our upgrade from Jaguar to Panther and then to Tiger on the Mac: it just worked. You stick the cd (or dvd, in the case of Tiger) into the drive, take a nap while it's installing, and then get back to your Mac geekery without a hiccup. But every discussion board and geek pundit we've read has warned against an XP to Vista upgrade, and recommended a "clean install" (that is, wipe the HD clean or install a new one, and then do your Vista installation). Hell, if you humans want to throw away your money, I've got one unemployed human and a distinct hatred of cheap cat food: you can toss away your bucks right here:

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And a final word about our stats: as you can see, 45% of our traffic still comes from IE (W3C released their most recent global usage stats today, here). Now I understand that a lot of you don't have any choice: you're at work or on somebody else's machine that only uses IE or sets it as the default browser. But for the rest of you, you'll need to make an effort to get yourself out of that IE dog pound. Firefox and Opera are still the best cross-platform alternatives (that is, you can run current versions of them in Mac, Linux, or Windows); and Safari is still the best choice on the Mac by itself.

And I don't want to hear anything out of you about you not being geeky enough or not having enough time to pick, install, and use a decent browser. How do you think lousy stuff gets to dominate the consumer marketplace everywhere? I'm betting you have time to compare brands when you're at Home Depot or the supermarket, and you carefully choose what is best, not necessarily what's right at hand or cheapest or that carries the most prominent advertising. Same with browsers and software: think of how  much you use it (I wish corporations did!), and how important it is to use what's safe, reliable, fast, and fun.

Firefox and Opera win easily on all those fronts over IE, so what do they lack? How about a few billion to spend on marketing? That's the only thing that distinguishes MS: massive amounts of $$$ to spend on advertising. Fools enough people to make them the monster in their industry. But it all comes back to the people who don't have enough time (or think they don't) to make sound purchasing or usage decisions. Bottom line is, it has nothing to do with geekdom, but with smart shopping, even if the products are "free" (IE is no more free than Vista is--you pay for it with the OS). You don't have to be a geek to make the right choice, you just need the information and the will to use it.

But advertisers today count on a lazy marketplace populated by consumers who imagine there's no time to decide freely, so why not just take what they're shouting about on TV the most and what's in the first aisle or in the window display (which is there by virtue of marketing $$$ as well). 

Back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, Betamax was clearly the better product for clarity of display and playability over its competitor in the home multimedia market; VHS won because corporations put marketing $$$ behind it. Back in the mid 90's, IBM's OS/2 Warp was obviously a better, more reliable, faster, more user-friendly OS. But NT and Win 95 won out because of...you got it, Gates's marketing $$$ (and IBM's laziness and stupidity--they had the cash but not the marketing acumen). Gates had already bought or beaten the rest of his competition, so he hired Mick Jagger, staged Windows-mania in the media and at the storefronts, and won on the back of money and manufactured hype. That's how monopolies are made: you buy out competitors and potential competitors, and then you let the marketing and hype machines drive the rest of them into the grave.

That, fortunately, won't happen to Firefox, nor to Linux, because people are waking up to the fact that they have choices; and that they can choose a better OS, a better browser, a better government, if they care to ignore the advertising and find the one that really works for them.

So let me finally get serious with you people for a minute, because many of you are good to us animals—that is, you treat us as equals. Here's some advice, from a cat who's been around the block and seen your good and bad sides:

Strip off the masks. Tear down the facade that the collective built over your heart. Dissolve the scales of conditioning that are covering your eyes. Feel freely the light that has glowed within you since before you were born, and let your heart and your brain work as one, with no image or inhibition to disguise or enshroud them. Let your true and total self be felt by all and touched by some; and you will dance on the skull of evil, transcend the ghost of death, and continually expose and dispel the shades of deceit.

And always remember: meditate every day with your favorite animal beside you. Good luck, people.

Monday with McKenna: Our Broken Government

First of all this week, congratulations to the Dixie Chicks. There is nothing like the inner reward of holding to truth, no matter what you hear around you; and fortunately there are outer rewards as well. It's just that in this culture, they are sometimes delayed.

Now you won't be hearing much out of us for a while about the contenders for '08—the phenomenon that Stewart has called "the clusterfuck". I tend to agree with Krugman that Edwards has some outstanding ideas that actually have some shape to them, unlike the nebulous Hillary rhetoric that otherwise prevails (incidentally, if you go way back to our January 2006 archives, you'll find a week's worth of posts from Terry that will sound a lot like what Edwards is now proposing, but that's OK—we'll allow that good minds can work in parallel, even if one of them has it out there a year ahead of the other). Meanwhile, Rich's points about Obama's promise are well taken. But it's too early, and right now we're looking the most earnestly for substance not from the '08 pack but from the heretofore pitiful collection of losers on Capitol Hill. They've got at least 8 years of lousy karma to flush away, and it had better happen fast. Perhaps, as Terry McKenna reminds us today, a glance backward will help to push these people out of the ideological mud they've been trapped in for so long. But as Terry adds below, this is no time to hold your breath or gamble the farm on that...


We have government that won’t govern. Is it poor design or do we just have the wrong players? Sadly, no one will say! In fact, almost no one among the governing elite even acknowledges that our so-called democracy is a failure. Most of our votes are meaningless and our legislatures unresponsive. Failure starts at the local level, but gets more pronounced as you move up the line - bad at the local level, worse at the state level, worse still in Washington.

A few examples

In New York State (where I work) this past week, the legislators reneged on a deal with the new governor, Eliot Spitzer. They had promised to select a new State Comptroller (the last one just pleaded guilty to malfeasance) from among a list picked out by a special panel. The panel chose three well qualified auditors but the legislators, seeing none of their own on the list, decided to abandon the quest for a qualified comptroller and instead selected Assemblyman Thomas P. DiNapoli. He has neither auditing nor management experience!

In my home state of New Jersey, the legislature was supposed to pass property tax reform. Our high property taxes are mostly dedicated to pay for public schools. The expected reform was an increase in state school funding matched with a proportionate decrease in local property taxes. An increase in the state income tax was also expected. What our legislators came up with instead was a plain old tax rebate, and one that goes to renters as well as property owners. Worse still, it starts decreasing for those with incomes above $100,000 – it stops altogether for those who earn more than $250,000. It’s not property tax reform.

In the national legislature, we have a charade over the Iraq war. Everyone agrees we need to debate the war – even right wing columnist David Brooks of the NY Times. If nothing else, we should start with a discussion about the president’s troop surge. We also need to discuss whether the US can risk leaving precipitately. Most opinion makers believe that if we leave quickly, Iraq will collapse in chaos. Folks like myself say its already mired in chaos so our leaving will do little. Perhaps we can get Iran, Syria and the Saudis to cooperate with a planned division into ethnic spheres of influence. Perhaps not, but if not, why stay! But so far, debate has been postponed by obstructionist Mitch McConnell, who is using legislative maneuvering to prevent anything other than a George Bush rhetorical victory. If not admitting the truth is a victory, then it’s a hollow one.

Was it always like this? Yes and no. Yes, politicians have been always been outsized egos fighting over turf. But what seems genuinely new today is the manner in which politicians communicate, and here, the changes have been profound.

Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell should look back to his political forebear, Everett Dirksen. A Republican Senator from Illinois, he was known for his smooth words, but also for his ability to compromise. Here is a famous line that he may never have uttered - “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money” … the quote may be specious (just check the internet). Still, I believe I saw and heard him say it in a sound byte excerpted on a long ago evening news broadcast. As a man whose party was out of power, Dirksen attempted to steer Republican votes toward progressive policies. He supported many New Deal programs, and was a strong supporter of the Civil Rights bill.

Forty Years ago, our politicians said what they believed, and based policy on those same beliefs. For example, Kennedy based his defense policy on something that turned out to be incorrect – a perceived “missile gap” between the US and the USSR. He was wrong, but at least he believed what he said, and set his course accordingly. He also was willing to re-shape policy as circumstances changed. Thus he reversed course in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile crisis. After that frightening episode, he realized that the threat of nuclear annihilation was more pressing that an imagined need for an ever bigger nuclear arsenal. Yes, he still thought there was a missile gap, but he decided that the gap was less important than the survival of the World.

With political speech currently stuck in competing agendas – and this counts for both Democrats and Republicans (think of Hillary Clinton) what do we do now? Damned if I know. I think we are in a real fix. Some of our biggest problems include: an abandoned urban poor, an exploding immigrant population – most of them illegal; then we have a health insurance / health care crisis, and over the next decade, we will have to come up with ever more cash to take care of the elderly and their medical care.

The Republicans are not ready to solve these problems – except by resorting to free markets; when the democrats speak at all, they stay at the level of platitudes – afraid of asking for compromise from the innumerable interest groups that form their party’s base.

--T. McKenna

A Strange Coincidence (and Friday Reflection)

Is there a lawyer in the house? Take a look at this video and see if it makes any sense to you.

Now don't get me wrong, I am positively delighted for Lt. Watada, who is a truly brave young man, because he follows his own truth rather than a pack of lies that his government attempts to force-feed him. I would argue that this young man's behavior in facing this trial shows the same level of courage as would have been demanded of him had he rolled over and gone to Iraq against his conscience and his inner truth.

Where I smell a rat is the summary declaration of mistrial over the judge's negation of a pre-trial stipulation of fact that he reviewed along with lawyers for the defense and prosecution, and that all three of these parties had already agreed upon. And now, if I'm interpeting the defense lawyer's statement correctly, he's saying there can be no retrial here because you can't have a Brooklyn do-over in a court of law.

So much for my admittedly poor understanding of the legalities here. Now, for some reality, which I think I'm a little better at discerning: can anyone else smell a massive retreat before what was quickly developing into a PR shit-dinner? Is it possible that this military judge was instructed by his bosses--maybe all the way back up to Uncle Dick and Curious George themselves--to somehow get this trial off the table and out of the media headlights?

Just a thought...you know, mere blogosphere speculation.

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For the Friday Reflection this week, we're presenting a potpourri of sorts (the banner quote is from one of my books, so nothing to get excited about there). There are some really fine social observers and political journalists out there, most of them on the periphery of the mainstream media. Let's hear from a few of them now.

We begin with one of my favorites, William Rivers Pitt of truthout.org. His latest piece is an examplary display of honesty, modesty, and some damned good writing. He freely admits to having been unhinged by a false, media-fueled bomb scare in Boston, and explains why his fear was so easily roused:

My fears were inspired by all the stuff I've been trying to telegraph to people for the last several years. This Iraq occupation, I've been arguing since the fall of 2002, will inspire more terrorism. A ten year old girl in Baghdad gets blown sideways out of her kitchen, a mother gets blasted in a sectarian street-battle in Fallujah, a father has menstrual blood smeared on his face in a cement cage in Abu Ghraib by leering US troops looking to humiliate those of his faith, a son gets shot by a US sniper in Najaf ... and the families of those people are going to pick up a gun and volunteer to die that they might kill.

Next is another writer I've cited many times here, Chris Hedges. He has a new book out with a title that may turn out to be more controversial than Jimmy Carter's. It's called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. If you've read many of the posts I've written here about the threat of fundamentalism, then you won't be surprised to hear that I think Hedges is right on target, especially with this:

The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based world to one of magic -- to fantastic visions of angels and miracles, to a childlike belief that God has a plan for them and Jesus will guide and protect them. This mythological worldview, one that has no use for science or dispassionate, honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long as you are right with Jesus, offers a lying world of consistency that addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true -- the very essence of the totalitarian state. It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement. And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens.

And finally, with tears leaking onto grizzled cheek, I present what I presume was Molly Ivins' last column. Somewhere in quantum space, she and Ann Richards are kicking up stardust, reminiscing, and reassuring us that this set of tyrants, like all before them, will fall before the will of a free people.

The war is George Bush's Monica Lewinsky. It is his undoing — the public playing out of his fatal flaws, and the reason his second term will come to naught. It is the product of this president's arrogance and insecurity, as surely as an affair with an intern was the reflection of Bill Clinton's needs and denial. But unlike the last president's foolish affair, which he paid for dearly, we pay for this one. The difference between sex and war is the difference between a mistake even his wife can come to laugh about, and one that is an abiding national tragedy.

The most recent demonstration of this is the president's proposed federal budget. A budget is a statement of priorities, as well as a guide to allocating limited funds. The priority of the Bush budget is unmistakable. It is to fight George Bush's losing war. It is not just costing us our reputation and prestige in the world, not just costing us in terms of thousands of American lives, lost and maimed. It is costing us our shirts and undermining our goals.

According to the president's budget proposal, deep cuts are required in healthcare, education, transportation and support for basic human needs to finance the war in Iraq. "Our priority is to protect the American people," President Bush said after a Cabinet meeting this week devoted to the FY 2008 budget.

Not exactly. Our priority is not to protect the American people, but the Iraqi people. Otherwise, Bush wouldn't be looking to save $100 billion from Medicare and Medicaid, and limit which children are eligible for the Children's Health Insurance Program, in order to come up with the $141 billion that is to be allocated for the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan next year — not to mention the total $623 billion for defense for 12 months.

Tell the kids who won't get health insurance that your priority is protecting them.

Tell the seniors who depend on Medicare and will have to pay more for prescription drugs that your priority is protecting them.

Tell the 1 million poor families who will lose the assistance they're now getting to purchase home heating oil that your priority is protecting them.

Who does George Bush think he's kidding?

How dumb does he think we are?

His priority is covering up his biggest mistake.

Bill Clinton lied about his mistake.

But George Bush is doing something even worse. He's robbing every American to pay the price for his.

Wars are expensive. You want to fight a war and, of course, not raise taxes to pay for it, but the money has to come from somewhere. It's coming from you and me, and going to Iraq. So it's not going to take care of sick kids and seniors, to educate young people, to fix the infrastructure of our own country. It's not going to fight the diseases that kill us. It's not going to local law enforcement, where the cut in federal support is estimated to be 75 percent even as crime is going up. It's going to try to stop the Sunnis and the Shiites from killing each other.

The Democrats will make a lot of noise about what's wrong with the budget and will probably succeed in resisting some of the cuts. But budgeting is a zero sum game. The end result will still be more debt and less money for services for the American people. The cost of continuing this travesty must be measured not only by what is happening there, but by what is not happening here.

The tragedy of the Clinton second term was not the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, but what the president might have accomplished had he and the Congress not been distracted and diverted by the mess of impeachment. But at least the country didn't get stuck with the tab. Our politics got destroyed, for a time, but we didn't. Government kept working. The budget was balanced, with a surplus. We didn't go into debt to pay his. George Bush's folly is far more costly because it defines our lives and future, as well as his.

Monday with McKenna: Art as Activism

As we noted in our week-ahead piece Saturday, the President is now calling for his puppet Maliki to show some spine or suffer the consequences. What consequences? The only consequences Maliki is probably worried about would come not from America but from his controller Mr. Al-Sadr, for if you show some spine to that guy, it's likely to be severed.

The fact is, Bush has not only run out of political and geopolitical capital; he's now as deeply in debt on that score as he's put the US Treasury over the past 6 years. So if you're looking for someone to show some spine, it's time to demand it from your new blue Congress. But as the Peace Team is pointing out, Reid and the Dems are already wavering. I recommend you use that link to remind them what you voted for last November.

Now onto Monday with McKenna, for the start of a detailed look at what art can do to further awaken the citizenry of our benighted nation.

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Art as Activism, Part 1: History's Lessons

With the War in Iraq a complete disaster, perhaps it’s time to consider Iraq in a completely different way – as fodder for future artworks. For as the saying goes, if you’ve got lemons, might as well make lemonade.

But does art still matter? Yes, at least art that reaches the mainstream. So called high art is another matter – current “serious” art has been consigned to the ivory tower of the modern university. Its relevance to contemporary life is unclear.

Popular art still has the capacity to shape the popular will. In the era before WW1, young men’s hearts were stirred in favor of patriotism by poems and prose that glorified war’s majestic violence; as a result, when WW1 broke out, large numbers of earnest young men eagerly joined the slaughter. In the aftermath of the carnage, the popular images of war turned from heroic fantasies to realistic notions of horrific and pointless violence. Post WW1 art reflected the darker mood, thus Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front (also an early popular sound movie). Post war German painters developed a particularly biting form of portraiture. The French in turn produced nihilistic DADA and then self absorbed Surrealism.

So in Iraq’s wake, we’ll require an art capable of grappling with Iraq’s lessons. But almost as important is the continual need to revamp our imagery in the face of an updated present. In the world before modern technology, images were rare and precious. Now they are not. Thus, when one can Google for a picture of a man being hung (just try Google images) the ancient images of death, like the "Dying Gaul" above, may have lost their power to stir emotions. For the student of Western art, this piece has long been studied for its prescient realism. But it also once moved viewers with its depiction of a noble warrior grappling with death. That lesson is gone.

To appreciate death today, we need images that can move the contemporary mind. This modern trend began with the art of the Civil War, as in the pictures of the dead of Antietam (here and here). Nobility has been replaced by meaninglessness, empty carnage on the scale of modern factory production. (The civil war era also produced images of glory, but these were hand-made images, and often seem stilted when viewed today; the photographs on the other hand have retained their power).

Shakespeare’s works have been updated continually since they were first performed. Updating is central to our being able to understand them. Not all contemporary producers go as quite so far as Richard Loncraine did with his 1995 movie of Richard III (this version took place in the 1930’s with very recognizable characters) – but in nearly all productions, changes are made to accommodate modern ears. Perhaps a future production of Macbeth will replace the witches with figures based upon Hannity and Colmes. And perhaps an updated Lady Macbeth will look like Condoleezza Rice - ever attempting to scrub away her sin.

So… what story will art hope to tell us about Iraq? Tomorrow, we'll attempt to find some answers.

--T. McKenna

Impeaching Failure

I feel that we are more truly led forward by our errors than by our triumphs, and that when we listen to the teaching voice of a mistake, while our error is still small, then there can be no such thing as failure. This, to me, is a matter of mere practicality: imagine if our government or our corporate entities were guided by such a message; imagine how things might be today if it were included in a constitution or a mission statement.

The first step in going beyond the bipolar realm of success and failure is to encourage a climate where error is recognized and exposed as early and as often as possible. This is to practice what the Karl Rove / FOX News crowd labels "negativity" or "treason." It used to be called "democracy." And I can't think of a better day to celebrate it.

To that end, then, here are two voices that have been pointing out our government's errors for two years and more: Eric Alterman and our own Terry McKenna. We begin with Dr. Alterman:

Bush is like a man who is dealt two kings in blackjack (after 9-11) when the dealer is showing a nine, doubles down instead of playing his winner hand, gets two twos, and continues to double down over and over and over until he loses his family's life savings and insurance policy. Kristol, Krauthammer, and Kaplan, et al, are like the Vegas floozies with fake boobs telling him what a big man he is the whole time, stroking his thighs while picking his pockets ... (Oh, and John "Maverick" McCain is the long-suffering wife ...)

(By the way, observe also how Alterman freely admits a technical error in his metaphor, thus illustrating my premise about error and failure).

And now, Terry McKenna, on last Wednesday night's pathetic presidential speech:

Was the speech worth the wait?

For weeks we have been hearing about it, and even if you never pay attention to politics, you cannot have missed the build up. Sadly for the president, the speech flopped. Within an hour of its conclusion, the community of talking heads pronounced its verdict: dead on arrival. (No, I did not pay attention to the Fox News folks so I might have missed the single source for positive comment.)

The response got even worse the next day. Two cabinet officers and a general went before Congress. Condoleezza Rice was manhandled by the Senate foreign relations committee. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and General Peter Pace were treated somewhat better over in the House, but the bottom line was that the president's message did not succeed.

This blog has made much of the corruption of political speech by corporate modes; this speech was a model of corporate distortion. Acting like a CEO in industry, George Bush delivered a version of the facts that made everything come together in support of his message. It is not that he was overly optimistic, he wasn't. Still the speech omitted any serious analysis of the president's failure – yes he said any failures were his, but then what? Bush's recommendations are just more of the same failed policy. Another instance of truth bending to the needs of a spin - marketing over content. The conclusion was especially ironic given the now discredited Mission Accomplished photo op. It is a tribute to his ability to mislead that George Bush was able to keep his eyes straight ahead and his mouth even when he delivered the following sentences … "Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship." Hmmm.

In the run up to the speech, cynics speculated that the president had two goals. The first was to make us forget the work of the Iraq Study Group. The second was to downsize the definition of success to something much less than victory, thus allowing the president to select some favorable event as the pretext to declare success and thus start his own version of cut and run. (They tried this once before, remember when Paul Bremmer turned over power to the so-called Iraqi government – the whole process was a sham and a failure.) The long delay between the release of the Baker-Hamilton report and the Wednesday speech did much to mute the ISG's original impact. The president did more harm by his willfully misrepresenting the conclusions made by the study group. Yes, just as the president reported, the Iraq Study Group did suggest that failure in Iraq would be a disaster, but (please read the executive summary) their report pointed to diplomacy as the key to resolution – the president did not mention this at all.

So, the Iraq Study Group's message is history. And victory has been downsized to god knows what. Rest assured, George will find a way to delay the denouement till the next president is in power.

It never fails to amuse me that Republicans continually refer to how much better the private sector performs than does government – and they may be right. If George Bush were a CEO in industry, his speech would have been the last straw. The board of directors would have asked for his resignation, or perhaps sworn out a complaint for malfeasance. With such being the case, you would guess that Republicans would try to reflect a higher standard of conduct. But no, as represented by Bush & Company, they have taken the low road.

There is a peculiar disconnect between the fairly measured tone of the speech and that of a "fact sheet" presented on the White House's website. It's an astonishing document. To begin with, it is a one-sided political instrument, meant to justify right wing aims. And in its details, it remains steadfastly true to the past three years of spin. It presents as its primary objective the defeat of Al-Qaeda (in Iraq!). As a corollary, Iraq remains the central front in the Global War On Terror. Wow!! You can't match the Bush administration for perfidy. It describes Iraq as governed by a freely elected government, with a permanent constitution and democratic institutions. Astonishing! Iraq is hardly governed at all; its people live in sectarian enclaves, protected by militias or gangs. Those who can, flee to Syria and Jordan. If Iraq represents the value of constitutional government, then I'd choose autocracy any day.

Still, the marketing plan failed. It reminds me of the launch of New Coke in the mid 1980's. It took less than 100 days for New Coke to fail. And it may have taken less than 100 hours for this marketing initiative to come a cropper.

So, what's next? In the few days since, the US political world has split into two camps, on one side we have George Bush and a few neo-cons – and both Joe Lieberman and John McCain; on the other side, we have EVERYONE else. As long as George Bush remains commander in chief, it's really his way or the highway.

So, if we leave Iraq, will "they" come over here? Not tomorrow. The Sunni's and Shiites will no doubt go at each other, and some manner of ethnic cleansing will continue. And in a few provinces, terrorist camps may flourish. But the Iraq war has already become a terrorist training ground. IED's were perfected in this war. It turns out, US battle tanks, though well armed for standard combat, have notable weak points that the terrorists NOW know how to exploit.)

Let's remember that Al-Qaeda's power is limited to single targets of opportunity. In the West, no two attacks have been the same. Western transportation security and police surveillance may be enough to prevent most harm, especially in the US. Europe has a little more to worry about, since they have an indigenous Muslim population of Al-Qaeda wanna-be's. But the war in Iraq remains irrelevant to managing this threat.

—T. McKenna

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Site Note:Tomorrow starts our tribute to the 30th anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd's Animals. Aside from the sound files of the music and the interviews with the band members we'll have, I think you'll find that this all fits rather nicely into our general themes here—the exposure of fundamentalism and the corporate presidency. So come back and check it out.

An Irrational Call for Help

The other day I wrote how ignorance can be as painful a torture as physical punishment.

Consider how we've been treated since the vast majority of us cast a vote against war and its escalation: we have been answered with disdain, with troop surge, with the broadening of the arc of destruction (into Somalia), and most of all, with ignorance. In this, we are one with the innocent people of Iraq, who risked their lives to go and vote, and were rewarded for their bravery with a puppet government ruled from behind the scenes by assassins and fundamentalist warlords. They, too, cast a vote for peace and were answered with war.

Is this what it means to practice democracy in the 21st century? A purple thumb, drowned in a sea of blood? Or a peaceful rising of the grassroots, watered with the pesticide of Roveian arrogance? Can a shred of light still flicker amid this implosive darkness?

I think it can. But we must give the new Democratic majority more than our signatures to petitions and letters to the editor, important as these things truly are. We must give them, and one another, our energy.

I have lived near 50 years on this planet, and cannot think of a moment of more urgency and transformative potential than this. Perhaps you have had the experience of being so bottomed out in your personal life—perhaps from a divorce, the loss of a job, a death in the family, or some other cataclysmic personal loss—of feeling that there was no fight left in you, not an ounce of resistance remaining. So you dropped it all; released what little was left and allowed yourself to be led, guided by forces that you had perhaps never accounted for, or even imagined. Maybe that was the time when things began to turn around, when you began to see a dawn amid the darkness.

If you've ever had such an experience, then you know where our nation, our world, is now. Ask, then, for it what you once received in your life: the ability to purge the last poison of arrogance, the final few drops of the congealed blood of destruction; to finally release its iron grip on the stone sword of rectitude and allow itself to be led by the pure energy of awareness, the light of peace.

For all the ranting and spouting and venting I do within this space, I truly have no answers—not for Congress, not for the President, not for the world. In the end, I have only questions, an unceasing examination of ego, and an urgent and desperate appeal of the heart to a universe whose living depth I have but superficially touched; whose breadth of time and space I have not traveled; whose endless life I cannot understand.

I can feel its presence, though, if but weakly, ephemerally; and so I call on it in the naked sincerity of humility to help us all, the creatures of this endangered and benighted Earth.

The Corporate Cold Shoulder

Maybe if you work for a company in corporate America, you'll understand what I'm talking about here: so often, workers will peel the skins off their backs to keep the company treadmill moving and productivity at least apparitionally positive. In return, they will be browbeaten, burdened with threats and suspicion, shafted at payday, bonus time, and the annual review, but most of all simply ignored.

If this sounds familiar to you, then you'll not be shocked to find that you are being treated exactly the same as a citizen of the United States of Corporate America. Tony Snow says that you and the remaining two-thirds of the American electorate are "out of touch" with the reality in Iraq. So it's time for a troop surge, some ten weeks after the American people had told this government, in the clearest possible terms, that they've had enough of this war and its endless escalation; and less than two weeks after our own nation's death toll had reached 3,000.

Next week will mark another milestone, the fifth anniversary of the opening of Camp Gitmo, Dick Cheney's personal torture laboratory, where all the other aberrations of justice and humanity that have marked this administration took root. The FBI has now released a horrifying report of what has gone on at Gitmo; and it resounds fairly exactly with what AI, HRW, the IRC, and other international NGOs have been telling us for years. Here's part of what our government did there, and repeated at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and uncounted other places around the world:

Captives at Guantánamo Bay were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor for 18 hours or more, urinating and defecating on themselves, an FBI report has revealed...Besides being shackled to the floor, detainees were subjected to extremes of temperature. One witness said he saw a barefoot detainee shaking with cold because the air conditioning had bought the temperature close to freezing.

This is what our government has been doing, even as it sent young men and women of our own to the most violent and horrible deaths and disfigurements imaginable; and as it prepares to continue to do tomorrow and next week, until we stop it. This is why I rise to disagree with all the Democrats who are saying that impeachment is the wrong direction to go. In fact, I don't see any other direction that will preserve this nation before its bespattered dignity is thoroughly corrupted and lost before the entire world.

In fact, our corporate analogy weakens only in the matter of the degree of the depravity involved. We corporate citizens have been treated worse than the lowest schlub in the company mailroom. We have been lied to, sneered at, taken for granted, economically stripped, driven, and most of all, ignored.

Will the new Congress change all that? Not unless we are all over them on it. Here are some options for making that happen:

Amnesty International's human rights pledge

Gold Star Families for Peace and the Walk for Change (today)

Code Pink's letter to Congress: Impeach Now

UFPJ's March (January 27)

If you know of anything else that's happening in your part of the world, by all means add it to the comments and I'll post it prominently here. The time to tear away the veil of corporate ignorance must be now.

I Think We're Not in Kansas Anymore

I was walking over the Brooklyn Bridge on Sunday, Christmas Eve, in what felt like 70-degree weather, actually working up a sweat on the long climb to the middle of the bridge. It suddenly occurred to me that this is probably one of the major problems with global warming: it's just too delightful, it feels too good. Now I doubt that anyone with their head screwed on straight will aver that it is remotely natural to have shirtsleeve weather on Xmas Eve, and I'm sure I am not the first person to have noticed this odd feature of global warming as an issue of public debate (and isn't it embarrassing that you still hear the word "debate" used in this sense?). Everyone can agree that things like war, poverty, terrorism, and the like are in no way enjoyable. But global warming is a pretty strange duck: we know it threatens the earth and our very future as a species upon it. Yet right now, on a day like Sunday, it feels great.

All the more reason, then, why we have to ask for more than accountability from our leaders, as a new Congress gets ready to start its 110th session. We must demand vision.

We'll have more to say about that point later, but first, Terry McKenna returns today with the somewhat refreshing thought that maybe the weakening of the Bush administration is a Christmas gift to all of us in this nation. Personally, I like the Wizard of Oz metaphor. I'm betting you can go through every blog on the Net and not see the ISG compared to Dorothy from Kansas. But thanks to Terry, that's exactly what you're about to get...

Is it just me, or does everyone recognize that the Bush presidency has suddenly faded away into irrelevance? It is very much like the demise of the Wicked Witch of the West in the movie version of the Wizard of Oz. You will remember that at the height of her power, the Witch is accidentally splashed with water and she melts away. In our real life drama, the president has been splashed with a little truth (about Iraq) and he too has begun to melt.

It was the Iraq Study Group that did it, and just like with Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, they didn’t mean to harm anyone. And no, it is not as if the Iraq Study Group has the solution to the war – they don’t. But their report broke open the opinion logjam that surrounded the war. And once the jam was cleared, suddenly a flood of ideas burst forth. After 3 years, those on the right are suddenly free to talk about the royal screw up which was our Iraq strategy – a forward assault with no plans for managing the postwar occupation. And those on the left are nearly unanimous in wanting OUT - nearly all of them except Hillary.

It was not the military’s fault that we lost Iraq - and yes, we did lose, it IS over. It is almost unfair to brand this a military loss, so let’s not. Let’s concede a successful short war followed by a failed reconstruction. This is not the first time the US has lost an endeavor after military success. Vietnam, for all of its failure, was fought well. We certainly won all the big engagements (like the Tet offensive). But like with Iraq now, Vietnam failed because we had a lousy local partner.

It turns out our chance to win peace in Iraq depended upon winning the so-called hearts and minds of the people. We had a brief window of opportunity, but now it’s long over. We tossed away the existing Baathist power structure and ended up with nothing.

If George Bush is irrelevant about Iraq, can he retain his relevance on other matters? I looked at the White House’s own press release for clues.

Here is an extract from the December 20th press briefing: “For Immediate Release, Office of the Press Secretary, December 20, 2006 - President Bush Signs the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006”

Bullet points (highly redacted):

• The Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006 will maintain key tax reforms, expand our commitment to renewable energy resources, make it easier for Americans to afford health insurance and open markets overseas for our farmers and small business owners.

• Our economy created 132,000 new jobs in November. We have added more than 7 million new jobs since August of 2003 -- more than Japan and the European Union combined.

• The unemployment rate has remained low at 4.5 percent. The latest figures show that real hourly wages increased 2.3 percent in the last year.

• To keep America competitive in the world economy, we must make sure our people have the skills they need for the jobs of the 21st century. Many of those jobs are going to require college, so we're extending the deductibility of tuition and higher education expenses to help more Americans go to college so we can compete.

• The bill will also extend vital provisions of the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act that I signed last year. The bill will keep in place key tax credits that we passed to help rebuild Gulf Coast communities that were devastated by the hurricanes that hit the region in 2005.

• This bill will help expand and diversify energy supplies. To encourage the development of new sources of energy, the bill will extend tax credits for investment in renewable electricity resources, including wind, solar, biomass and geothermal energy. It will encourage the development of clean coal technology and renewable fuels like ethanol. And it will help promote new energy efficient technologies that will allow us to do more with less. In other words, it encourages conservation.

Five years ago, these might have been enough to start a number of discussions, but now they didn’t even cause a small ripple in the press. It’s all old news. (And it’s stretching the truth to put together even these lame positive bullet points).

Since Bush’s presidency is irrelevant, it’s pointless to go though the bullet points in detail, but I will point out this. Tax deductions for college tuition will not make college affordable for the class of persons who typically DON’T attend college. If the deductions help anyone, they will allow persons to move up the college food chain just a little bit. So a person who commuted may be able to live on campus, or a work-study student may be able to cut back her hours.

Then there is energy. We have tax incentives, but NO POLICY. In Europe, energy savings devices are mandatory. But we continue to build monstrous houses that we heat and cool in the most wasteful manner - sometimes with forced hot air (the least efficient system possible). Then there are our still too large cars and heavy engines. The Europeans and Japanese spent the last 3 decades making more fuel-efficient engines. We instead squandered our creativity to deliver more horsepower.

--T. McKenna

The Time To Be "Firm As A Rock"

Here amid the Karl Rove parallel reality, we have been trained to detest truth. Or at least to genetically modify it, which to my mind is saying the same thing. Remember, for example, that ABC "docu-drama" about 9/11? Or any of the swift-boating campaigns against John Kerry, Max Cleland, and various others? Or the Pentagon's docu-drama on the death of Pat Tillman?

Well, John Rolfe of SI, one of those extraordinary sportswriters with a gravel-tipped pen, as it were, has exposed the sports version of this surreal trend in journalism. Rolfe has written a bristling article on a piece of "reality fiction" about Mickey Mantle, which is to be published by none other than Judy Regan of recent FOX / OJ infamy. It gets really fun when Rolfe offers a selection from his own "reality novel" on the late Yankees manager, Billy Martin. This scene is from a conversation the author has with #1 as the latter arrives back from Limbo:

Martin settled into a chair by the window and fished a cigar from his jacket pocket. "Mind if I smoke? I love a good cheroot, but St. Pete won't let you light up unless you go outside. Damned cosmic winds keep blowing your match out. I tried going down to the Other Place and your matches sure stay lit, but you can't hear yourself think from all the hammering and electric saws. Halliburton's building an extension on the place..."

"So why have you've come to tell me all your darkest secrets?"

"Good deed. Earn some brownie points. Figured you could use a hand, put the 'truth' in a novel, make heap big scratch. You got kids. I hear tuition's a killer these days."

"So is the price of a red Ferrari. Fess up."

"My brawlin' tough-guy stuff was just an act. It got out of control after the fight at my birthday party at the Copacabana in 1957. Hank Bauer just had to have that last goody bag and I stuck my nose in to stay tight with the team. After that, I had to keep fighting to save my jobs. Heck, I'm a sensitive guy at heart. I liked poetry, puppies, decorating cookies, barbershop quartets. Sheez. I even cried easy. Managed to keep a lid on it until I broke down in K.C. in '78...."

Read the rest of it here.

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I was thinking today about how difficult it is to avoid becoming an asshole when you work in corporate America. You know, when you swim in a toxic pool, the poison inevitably becomes a part of you. I am honestly more afraid of that than I am of losing my job and being materially impoverished. What is there left to lose after you lose your self, after you are assimilated?

Right there, in the Wintergarden of the World Financial Center in New York City, that fear took hold of me. So I did what I often do in such moments: I threw some coins. I used to worry about people watching and what they'd think, but I'm too old to care anymore.

I tossed Hexagram 16, "Enthusiasm" from the I Ching, with the second line changing. It taught me what I needed to know about holding to my true self amid corporate America, and I'm also hoping it may serve to teach all of us what we must do to help our country at a time when it is threatened to the core by a maniacal set of tyrants who are dragging us further into distant wars and global death.

Firm as a rock. Not a whole day. Perseverance brings good fortune.

Here's the commentary to that line, from Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog, in I Ching: The Oracle of the Cosmic Way:

"Firm as a rock" refers to the inner No that needs to be said to displays of ego...This line warns the person who is tempted to tolerate ego-behavior...[that] it is a form of magnificence (a false enthusiasm)..."Not a whole day" refers to saying the inner No at the first sign of ego's appearance. Depending on the circumstances, the No can also be an outer No...It is "No" to the other's transgression against oneself, or to his false expectations...If the person does not say the inner No when ideas are false, they enter the unconscious by default and become part of his inner program.

Perhaps you have occasionally had the feeling that someone is attacking you, though there is no obvious physical or even verbal threat in the vicinity. That's your true self with its radar fully extended, catching poisonous airwaves from someone or something. It happens in our work, family, and personal lives; I suspect it happens in a nation's life, as in right now.

But if you haven't ever experienced such moments, I won't try and convince you that the sensation is both as natural and as genuine as hunger or sexual desire. Nevertheless, I think that six weeks ago, the people of this nation had such a moment, and they are seeing the actualization of the deeply-felt threat that guided them to vote the way they did. "Troop surge" is an attack on every American who voted with his and her heart last month, and chose a candidate who promised an end to troop surges and continued sacrifice and precision bombing campaigns.

Troop surge is a casting of more poison into the pool in which we all swim; sacrifice is a Roveian marketing term for the death by impoverishment of a once-great nation; and there is no such thing as precision bombing. It is all a lie, an oxymoron. You can target a bomb to hit a particular building, perhaps, but you can't tell the bomb, "kill the bad guys inside but spare the lady walking past the building with her young children." Bombs are designed to cause collateral damage; that is their purpose. In other words, they are made to kill indiscriminately, just as Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have designed themselves to lie indiscriminately.

Now we know—most of us, anyway; and now something can be done. Be firm as a rock: don't let any corporation steal your true being; don't let any government steal your true nation, and sell it into a slavery of death. Be firm as a rock.

A Note to My Brainstem

Unless you're Bill O'Reilly, fighting pretend wars, or just tend to be depressed this time of year (quite understandable), the holidays are supposed to feature laughter and jollity. Nobody's better at that than our friends across the pond; so click the graphic and have a Merry Mithras laugh with Stephen Fry (of Harry Potter audiobook fame) and crew.

I can't claim to have known about this study while I was writing "God's Nose" over the weekend, but it's nice to know that my work can be topical, even though by accident.

Today, I happened to have a glance back at the DR archives, just to see what we were up to last year. I had actually forgotten the transit strike here in NYC, but that was the big event here one year ago. I can't recall what made me do the "Baghdad Bob and Crawford George" piece.

It's a holly-jolly season, after all: the roundball thugs are having their usual brawls; the battle over the O.J. / Fox debacle continues apace; and the latest statistics on violence in Iraq are...well...exactly what we all knew they would be.

So let me suggest, Bill-O, that the war is not on Xmas; it's just around it. Why this is so is anyone's guess, but my astrologer friend Eric Francis has a theory:

I recognize that the holidays are a difficult time of year for many, if not most, people -- myself included. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, it's also a somewhat frightening time of year, as the cave-person or primate part of our brains is indeed wondering where the Sun went and whether it will ever come back (note to brainstem, it will).

Perhaps the solstice time is, after all, a moment for giving the forebrain a well-earned rest and affording some primacy instead to nose, brainstem, and heart. This is a theme I found in Harry Potter's first solstice moment:

The cloak is a Christmas gift—one of the first of Harry's life, since he was never given any by the Dursleys—which comes to him from his dead father through his mentor, Dumbledore: the unsigned note which accompanies the cloak only says, "your father left this in my possession before he died. It is time it was returned to you. Use it well." The invisibility cloak is a magical (and therefore metaphorical) object of immense value and beauty: it is "fluid and silvery gray…strange to the touch, like water woven into material." Clearly, Mrs. Rowling is not writing this in a vacuum of invention: this is a metaphor of great historical depth and psychological meaning, particularly within the mythology of England and Ireland:

In the story Tochmarc Etaine (The Courtship of Etain), the god of the Otherworld, Midir, demands in compensation for the loss of an eye in a brawl, a chariot, a cloak, and the most beautiful maiden in Ireland as his bride…This was a cloak of invisibility (like Siegfried's tarnkappe in the Nibelungenlied) and of forgetfulness…The god Lug wore a similar cloak which enabled him to pass through the entire Irish army without being seen when he came to aid his son…To put on the cloak is to show that you have chosen Wisdom (the philosopher's cloak). (Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, pp. 205-206)

The invisibility cloak is an image of transformation, and not of self-obliteration, depersonalization, or disembodiment. For Harry, his body is still manifestly there—he can feel it, and so can others if they bump into him (indeed, this is part of the challenge in using the cloak). Whenever he wears the cloak over the course of the five stories, Harry's physical and intuitive senses seem to become more acute and penetrating: he becomes more open and alert to experience than when he is visible. The cloak's virtue is to take him to, and through, the experiences that will contribute to his inner growth—indeed, it is an active metaphor of the practices involved in the development of the true self. These include inner movements of one's total being—the intuitive, feeling, and spiritual capacities of our nature, that live and glow in quiescence beneath the often-repressive monarch known as intellect.

Harry discovers this the first time he uses the cloak: he goes to the library, thinking that this is where he "should" go, in order to obtain information. But he quickly discovers that he is being called beyond the realm of "should" and "ought," once he has put on this cloak—that he is being called to penetrate deeper regions of the psyche than he can reach through the symbols and instruments of intellect. This message is brought to him very quickly: the library is said to be "pitch-black and eerie"; the books "didn't tell him much," because they are written in "words in languages Harry couldn't understand." Finally, he comes to a book that screams into the night as soon as he opens it, and that drives him out of there, toward the place where a more potent image of self-discovery lies, which will engage his entire being. In his retreat from the images of intellect and the representatives of Authority (the caretaker Argus Filch and Professor Snape, who come looking for him), Harry encounters exactly what he needs to further his inner learning: the Mirror of Erised.

Troll in the Dungeon

Today's graphic is something I found all by itself on an Internet page. I think it's great, so if anyone knows the source that I can credit for it, let me know.

Anyway, it's a timely picture to show today, now that Dennis Kucinich has tossed his hat into the ring again. Could he beat Hillary? Like a rented mule. But Obama? Doesn't look like it. Doesn't matter: Kucinich's voice is one we need to hear plenty of in the 2008 campaign. Click that link and watch how he handles the Wolf-man, and I think you'll agree.

Medicine and politics 1: Funny, I never read any headlines about power-shifts when Dick Cheney's doctors were wondering whether the man's ticker would withstand the VP-stress. But today, power-shifting is all the rage in the media, because a Senator from South Dakota suffered a stroke. This is what happens when your media are themselves infected with that solipsistic corporate frigidity: the impulse becomes the product. Pretty sad stuff.

Medicine and politics 2: If I wrote a blog that somehow caused people to want to kill themselves, do you think I'd get off with putting a warning label in the header? (don't laugh—a guy named Goethe wrote a book called "Sorrows of Young Werther" that reportedly incited a wave of youthful suicides in the Europe of its day). Well, the drug companies are being told to put a warning label on certain anti-depressants that have a similar effect. The problem is that some docs are siding with the pharma companies on this one. This, by the way, is another demonstration of the urgent need for experts in the research methodology known as "naturalistic observation", which has been somewhat demonized in modern science as too New-Agey. Guess what—you can't design a double-blind, laboratory-style, randomized control study on this sort of thing. Not unless you don't mind much of your control group winding up dead, that is.

To my mind, this situation represents another call for a fresh look in this society at how we use medicines. I've written some thoughts on that point, with a focus on anti-depressants, here.

Medicine and politics 3: Circumcision is a good thing. It's front-page, headline news today, and until I've read the studies, I have only one comment. This doesn't change my view on the practice of slicing a newborn boy's Mr. Happy—it is one of the truly decadent and primitive practices left over from our evolutionary past that's still commonly done today. If the findings of this study are validated and circumcision is found to be a small component in preventing the spread of AIDS, then maybe it would help to educate young men on it and offer the option in the context of a voluntary program of adult circumcision, perhaps supported by government funding and with some sort of carrot tied to the scalpel (a tax break or even a small payment for young men submitting to it). The message could be, "hey tough guy, you handled getting that tongue-ring like a real trooper; now go get this done." But I'm still uncomfortable with even that: there are alternatives to managing the spread of AIDS that do not involve surgery, and I feel strongly that we have to get beyond this societal obsession with solving all problems with a knife, a pill, or a bomb.

But let me repeat one basic point about which there should be no debate: to do this to newborns does damage that we can't even measure yet. But I'm reminded of a story that Robert Bly told in Iron John: he said that during one of his men's seminars, he had passed around a sword through the group, and found that many of the men in the group cringed even at holding it. Well, I'd like to know how many of those guys had been circumcised long before they had any choice in the matter. If your dick had been sliced up when you were small and helpless, but acutely aware, wouldn't it be natural for you to cringe from knives for the rest of your life?

I thought I'd continue with my ruminations on the intersection of corporations and government, in light of the news that Bush is putting his finger far enough up his ass to check his own prostate, re. movement on a decision for the future in Iraq. Hmmm...I wonder if that's even possible...it would certainly be preferable to having it done to you. If any of our readers are urologists, let me know what you think.

So the Chimpster from Crawford, the Great Decider, can't make a decision, even though hundreds will likely die horrible deaths while he sits on the can over the holidays trying to figure out how to achieve "peace with honor," to use an old Nixonian bromide.

Well, if you work in corporate America, are you surprised? There's a TV commercial that I laugh at every time I hear its slogan: "moving at the speed of business." In corporate America, there is indeed a lot of busy-ness: people rushing around, clacking away at keyboards, buzzing impolitely on the telephone or the wireless set, scanning the Blackberry, oblivious of their surroundings. But how quickly do things really get done; how fast does accomplishment of the remotest stripe really happen in corporate America?

In my book, The Tao of Hogwarts, I discuss the true workings of the corporate body in the context of Ms. Rowling's metaphor of "the troll in the dungeon."

What’s big, ugly, smells really foul to anyone in their right senses, and can’t seem to move without stumbling or locking up in confusion? Well, if you work for a big corporation, you might have answered, “my department” or “the company I work for.” And you might be right.

In fact, you could take your pick: the mountain troll that corners Harry, Ron, and Hermione in a girls’ bathroom in Sorcerer’s Stone could be a metaphor on the monster of the modern corporation or the government. Since the government comes in for enough rough treatment from Mrs. Rowling in “The Ministry of Magic” (see Chapter 9), I prefer to think of the mountain troll as a massive corporation whose various parts can’t communicate or coordinate with one another. It stinks horribly, meaning that it’s offensive to people’s most basic and feeling-oriented senses: every time I read about another company downsizing (that is, ruining the lives of) its workers, I sense that same repulsive odor that Rowling’s children smell as they encounter the troll. The corporate troll solves every problem by trying to stomp it into oblivion or by trying to eat what’s in the way of its lumbering, juggernaut movement. But for all its vast physical size and the ungainly length of its various parts, it is only part-being: its intelligence is blunted by its massive, organizational-chart body, and therefore it can act only through domination—swinging the dull club of Power onto anything and anyone that comes within its myopic visual scope.

Finally, as in the story, the corporate troll is inevitably knocked out by the wooden immensity of its own size and force: how often do we see the company that yesterday was bludgeoning other smaller firms into bankruptcy or submission suddenly subjected to the same treatment by another, larger “troll”? Or worse still, consider the fate of some of the ugliest of corporate behemoths—those that fell under the weight of greed as well as incompetence. The trolls known as Enron, Worldcom, and their like, collapsed amid their corruption, poisoning an entire nation with the foul stench of their depravity, while leaving investors and customers robbed, broken, and destitute. Ron, Harry, and Hermione were lucky to escape the mountain troll with only a brief scare and the vague breath of its odor in their memories; the investors of the corporate trolls of Greed and Excess are often left with ruined lives and uncertain futures.

So as it is with our personal lives and relationships, seeing clearly the reality of the Bush administration and corporate America is all about looking beyond appearances. We have to stare past the superficial hubbub of activity and rhetoric and ask, "what's really being done?" The answer, for a culture so obsessed with action, will only be surprising for a moment: very little, if anything, gets done—and what does get done happens with a positively reptilian sloth. That goes back to the nature of the beast, the troll: its movement is all veneer, so when you seek substance or real accomplishment, there's nothing there. For all their jerky, compulsive activity, government and the corporate body are dead from the neck when it comes to results. That's because all that action lacks the guidance of the clarity born of reflection. Our banner quote author has plenty to say about that, and we will meet her tomorrow.

Inuit Goes Hawaii (and Geek Wednesday)

So Rummy went to Iraq one last time to meet with the troops. What did he say—"thanks for dying for me, and if you somehow survive, don't forget to check out my book tour"? Rummy also bravely faced the free press. You got it—Hannity. NewsHounds has the story and the capsule summary of the moment: "The state of American journalism may have reached a new low last night with Sean Hannity's softball interviews with Donald Rumsfeld recorded during their junket to Iraq."

Now over to the so-called left-wing media. I've weighed in with some opinion about gossip, here; and today in the Times, Richard Conniff gives a different opinion: gossip is natural and adaptive. Now you know why the mass media seems to be always striving for new lows of anti-journalism—why, it's natural and adaptive.

So maybe the guy's definition of gossip is different from mine; he appears to classify two people talking about a mutual friend's illness as gossip. I don't. But he's in the New York Times, and I'm in a dank corner of the blogosphere; case closed.

You youngs ones, are you looking for a great getaway destination for when you retire? Try Santa's place (for those of you without Times Select, it's also in the Nat-Geo for free): scientists predict it'll be all beaches and sea by 2040. According to the Times, this change is "partly" the result of global warming from greeenhouse gas emissions. Partly: let it not be said that the paper of record doesn't sweat the details. I wonder if Mr. Conniff would classify that as gossip.

Geek Wednesday

C-Net, still reeling from the tragic death of senior editor James Kim, has come out with a comprehensive review of the 109th Congress's tech legislation record, and it's not a fawning report by any stretch. Even in mourning, the geek press beats the MSM like a rented mule. What a bunch of pros these people at C-Net are. If you've never read it, check it out.

I've completed my first batch of reviews for the Webby Awards (in case you're wondering, this blog is not entered, because it costs $125 to throw one's hat into this ring). The best site I've seen so far is the United Nations Population Fund site, which features an excellent research tool on population trends and issues. This is worth noting, because population is or will be one of the two greatest issues and challenges to our survival as a species over the next century. Another good site I encountered in the Webby pile is Workplace Fairness's The Good, the Bad, the Wal-Mart, a truly balanced study of big box retail's underbelly.

Another great site I discovered today is the Digital Mozart Edition of the complete works. I also noted with some satisfaction that the site's host was groaning under the weight of the traffic raining down on it. 250 years old, and he still gets people excited...

For those of you who follow Geek Wednesday, you may know I've been having some serious trouble with Blogger Beta. Well, the geeks at Google appear to have been working on it; I've had no problems since the weekend. Give the boys from Stanford time, and they get it right. As for Microsoft, they had six friggin' years to upgrade their browser and I've been noticing that the popup blocker in IE 7 has been failing miserably. Yep, I checked the settings and everything—it's just failing, that's all. They can't even get a popup blocker on a browser to work, and they're asking me to put their new OS on my hard drive? Fugggedabbutit.

Meanwhile, for those of you who need some good bargain gear for the holidays, check out Powermax. You can get a refurb Intel MacBook for under $900. The Powermax refurbs come with the same warranty as Apple offers for new products, and with AppleCare (extended warranty) available as an upgrade. If you want a second Mac to haul around and don't care about having an Intel processor in it, you'll be able to get an iBook for less than $400 from these guys. Not bad.

I've also been looking at bargain notebook PCs lately, and haven't been able to pull the trigger. Here's what happened: my new company is so locked up in a bureaucratic paralysis of ineptitude when it comes to wiring new hires, that I've gone nearly two weeks without 9 to 5 connectivity (geeks, you have to empathize with this). That's right, no PC yet, and no access to a public or loaner machine either: it's hurry up and wait. So I figured I'd snap up a cheap Wintel laptop and at least have some appearance of computing normalcy on the job, even if I can't connect to their LAN. It's kind of difficult to work productively in IT without gear, you know.

So I looked at a sleek Gateway machine that was only $800 for an AMD Turion processor with 512MB of RAM. But then I checked my bank balance and asked myself why I'd buy a machine just to look like I belonged at a place that wasn't ready for me.

Well, then, you can imagine what happened: I turned the entire thing into an exercise in mindfulness. George Weinberg, the outstanding psychotherapist-writer, referred to this process as "the hunger ilusion." Even a temporary interruption of a longstanding habit can inspire growth, even transformation. So I had to begin by resisting the compulsion to hoist up my hard-earned for a second-string laptop: to do that, I finally realized, would be like the alcoholic who swears off Wild Turkey and then goes into the bathroom to drink the mouthwash. It was time to find out where the hunger illusion was leading me.

So I started off by spending some time in listening to others around me as they worked. After all, it's not as if I have any work to do there yet. The tapping of the keyboard—sometimes steady and smooth, sometimes disrupted by a silent pause or a sigh, followed by a frenetic clicking, crunching blur of activity—it was like listening to a mouth chewing something moist but hard. Close your eyes at your desk sometime, and just listen for a minute, and see what you make of it.

It reminded me that in the corporate setting, productivity is very much a solipsistic endeavor. It is as much impulse as it is awareness; consumption as it is delivery.

I also listened to how they spoke, these productive people in the office around me. Most of these folks are young, assertive, confident, and rapid in speech and manner. Many of them, to judge by their position, language, and demeanor, are most likely MBA's, or the equivalent. I heard the word "value" a lot, in terms like "value proposition" and "value exchange." I wondered whether these folks had really thought about value—what it is, or that there may be more to value than goods, services, or profit derived therefrom.

But corporations cannot learn this, for in spite of what the law may say, they are not people. But the real, individual people who work for the corporations and use their products and services, we can learn it and in turn teach it to the corporate person. We can show them what a person truly is, and what it is that a person values.

There's No 'C' in Team

What's the worst thing about corporate America? What does corporate America have most in common with our current government?

Got it in one: falsehood. Lies. Deceit. Both are fed by a culture of deceit, and both are ultimately false to themselves. In fact, throw in the mass media and you've got a holy trinity of deception.

We've tapped away at this theme in a variety of ways here at the blog, and tonight I'd like to offer an object example of the kind of Rovespeak you find in both government and corporations. It's a single word: team.

Athletic metaphor is, of course, inordinately popular in government, the military, and corporate America. If you're a corporate worker, think back over the past year and see if you can recall how many times you've seen or heard the word "team"—on cubicle walls, on promotional or motivational posters, or from the lips of CEOs and their ilk. To what extent do you think you are part of a corporate team?

The "team" metaphor is certainly ubiquitous in Washington: check out the results from a search I did at whitehouse.gov.

Let's examine the metaphor, back in its natural place. Does the shortstop pull rank on the catcher, or the linebacker on the safety? Does the center demand mute obedience from the point guard? Are World Series won and lost by Chief Executive 2nd basemen or presidential left fielders?

So there are coaches or managers on the bench, in the dugout, or on the sidelines, directing things, giving orders, and changing players. But are these "chiefs" in a corporate sense? Their authority is delimited; they cannot go onto the field except when play has stopped. Their pay sure is plenty less than that of nearly everyone out there on the field of play: in big league baseball, an old, steroid-drunk outfielder and an old, once-great pitcher can still draw $16M a year while their managers will be lucky to pull down a tenth of that—exactly the opposite of the corporate model, where the CEO makes about 300 times more than the working stiffs on his "team."

Try this experiment, sports fans: see if you can make a corporate-style org chart out of your favorite team. I'm betting you won't get very far. That's because when a team is out there on the field, there is no room for the rigid and punitive corporate structure that many of us are familiar with from our own jobs. The hierarchy is absent, and it must be, since any fixation over who's in charge or whose power is paramount on the field would instantly lose the game.

So examine now the old bromide that "there is no 'I' in 'team'." I would disagree: there are plenty of 'I's' in team; it's just that they point in the same direction, they flow toward similar goals. But a corporation is different: it tries to put a 'C' in team, as in Chief (Executive Officer, Information Officer, Operating Officer, etc.). I've written about that aspect of it elsewhere; the point here is that this obsession with position spills downward through the ranks, until you see the familiar battles, struggles, and competitions all the way down to the mail room.

The attempt to put a 'C' in team turns it into a tribe, a cult.

There's another point to this, which brings us back to our government. Putting the 'C' into team led to the Katrina debacle, the continuing morass in Iraq, and the swindling of the American middle class. Putting the 'C' into team led to the laughably ambivalent and ineffectual performance that the Iraq Study Group gave us (as Jon Stewart remarked in the video above, it's too late for a study group now—the test was three years ago). Frank Rich made this point with his usual eloquence on Sunday.

On a truly functional team, there is no "decider," only decisions. The fact that I called you off that fly ball on the last play doesn't mean you can't do the same on the next. There has been some tortuous effort in the MSM over the past month to single out a "decider" in the outcome of the recent elections: it was the "Clintonistas"; it was Howard Dean; it was the Democractic machine.

I would suggest that it was simply millions of "I's", lined up at polling places in states both red and blue; and that together, they made a team.

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Site Note: Sometime last week, we uploaded our 400th post here. Not bad for a couple of working stiff Irishmen with nothing to motivate them except white-hot anger and a steadily increasing community (or team) of visitors. My thanks go out to my partner Terry McKenna, all our occasional contributors, and most of all, to every person who stops by to read our content. I hope it's made a small difference for you, and we'll keep trying.

The Courage of Retreat (and Geek Wednesday)

Before we get to Geek Wednesday, a few notes on the war and the maniacs running it from the safe distance of half a world away (I recall the Roger Waters song, "The Bravery of Being Out of Range").

First, click the graphic to watch Stewart and Oliver in another gut-busting moment of insight. Stewart reveals Rumsfeld in the same corporate-speak that we were discussing yesterday; and Oliver beautifully tilts the rhetoric onto its tail, thereby exposing the depravity of the delusion that has fueled this insanity.

Next, Code Pink delivers this firm and clear message on the vapid reality of the Iraq Study Group (click the link to add your voice to theirs):

In the 1968 presidential campaign Richard Nixon promised to end the war in Vietnam, but would not tell anyone exactly he would do it. In as many words this came to be known as his "secret plan." Yet, after his election the war still dragged on for another five years with 20,000 more American deaths and 100,000 wounded.

Now along comes the Iraq Study Group supposedly with a plan for extricating ourselves from the strategic disaster in Iraq, if not the moral one. And let us be not deceived, their proposals will make no meaningful difference whatsoever in really bringing the troops home. John Murtha, who so far has only spoken out for redeployment (something short of immediate withdrawal), has said he believes they represent no actual change of policy. They are just kicking the can of casualties down the road and trying to fool us into thinking they might in fact leave.

Every military historian and tactician worth his salt knows that retreat takes more courage than does attack. Think of those moments in your own life where you had to step back rather than move aggressively forward: didn't it test every ounce of energy and resolve that you had? The ancient Chinese knew this very well—just read Sun Tzu, or the 33rd Hexagram of the I Ching:

RETREAT. Success. In what is small, perseverance furthers.

Conditions are such that the hostile forces favored by the time are advancing. In this case retreat is the right course, and it is not to be confused with flight. Flight means saving oneself under any circumstances, whereas retreat is a sign of strength.

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Geek Wednesday

Before we get to the goofy, meaningless stuff, our thoughts go out to the family of C-Net editor James Kim, and our hopes that he is found alive and safe. I have had abundant praise for the geek press in general, and the quality of C-Net's and Kim's work is what distinguishes the geek media and places it so far above the network MSM for the quality of its journalism and its unflinching adherence to the search for truth (if you'd like an example, just read their story on Bush's privacy oversight commission). Let's all hope that Mr. Kim is returned safe and sound to his family.


Can anyone tell me what exactly is wrong with Google these days? Have Page and Brin been spending time at Redmond, or is this what happens when your stock price goes over $500 per share? Whatever, Blogger Beta is a piece of Microsoft-style ordure: I've been struggling with failed uploads, vapid error messages, image corruption, and generally batty, turgid behavior on Blogger's part since I moved to the new beta version. We are currently working on a migration to Movable Type, which isn't as easy as you might think. We've got our own Nearly Redmond Nick on the case, so I am confident of a good result.

But I had kind of gotten used to Google beta that worked as well or better than Microsoft production releases, so I'm a little confused at the performance of Blogger these days. If you've had any wacky experiences with Blogger Beta, post them in the comments, and maybe the boys from Stanford will take note and shake a leg.

Ars Technica has a roundup of system upgrades and purchase possibilities, just in time for the holiday (oops, sorry BillO—I mean, Xmas) shopping season.
But it all may have been changed by the release of AMD's new 65nm chip. Keep an eye out in the next few weeks for PCs sporting this new processor. And as always, the thing to do in buying expensive tech gear is to wait until after the New Year for the best deals on the greatest gadgets.

Why does Apple shrink from surveys that show its products appeal to us older folks? Could it be that we live in a culture so obsessed with youth and its imitation that to be merely statistically associated with the over-50 set is an abomination? Get real, Steve: the baby-boomers constitute the prime market of the decade, and the one to come. Of course us oldsters favor Apple hardware and Mac OS X: we've lived long enough to tell the soil from the shit.

And let's not leave out our buddy Gates (no, not the one the Senate confirmed today for the post-Rummy Defense job): Vista is out and no one cares. One of the last things I did at my AIG desktop before I got booted out of there was to run the Vista upgrade advisor on a Dell 2.4 GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM and onboard Intel video, and I found out that Vista wouldn't play nicely. For one thing, I didn't have enough disk space on the box: Vista needs 15GB (compare that to 3 GB for Mac OS X Tiger), and Vista demands a video card with 128MB of VRAM and a dedicated sound card.

But surely the upgrade to Office 2007 is worth a play? Um...no—not according to geeks who know better.

Finally, I'm back in the saddle reviewing sites for the next Webby Awards. I'll be offering some impressions of this year's batch of sites in the coming weeks. The early returns are telling me that some things just don't change: Flash media continues to be overused, abused, and played into the ground on the web. Maybe they should have a category for "worst web design". There would be lots of candidates: PC World found 25 of them. I'll be picking some out of my Webby pile, and you're welcome to add your suggestions to the comments.