Evil cannot hear the voice of inner truth because it is
deafened by the noise of its manufactured conflicts. This inner deafness of evil is a function of its fundamental lack of reality-—it is a distortion of
nature, a parallel, artificial construction with no inherent substance. (from The Tao of Hogwarts)
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
"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:
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.
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.
While our mass media wet themselves in a grim hysteria over a "mastermind" who has "confessed" to every evil act conceived or committed over the past 20 years or so (and just at a time when the wraps are coming off one of the more impeachable offenses of this administration, the political firings of US attorneys ordered straight from the White House); we are preparing for another weekend of dissent to further the prospects for peace.
We should first remind ourselves of what we mean when we talk about peace; we should be very clear about what many of us will be marching for this weekend. Peace is not a negative: it is not the mere absence of war; nor is it the annihilation of one's enemies.
Peace is not silence; it is not the stagnation of mute conformity. Peace is a dance—action from a center; it is the ground upon which you stand as you push the boundaries of belief and possibility. Peace is the oxygen that gives democratic dissent its breath.
For example: China is not at war. But are the Chinese people then living in peace? If you lived there today and attempted to connect to this blog, or if you typed "Falun Gong" into a search engine, you would be hunted down and thrown into a cell where you might rot for years, if not your entire life. Is that peace?
In our own country, if you have the wrong color skin or lack a certain educational pedigree, your chances of being unemployed, ruined, and disenfranchised by your society are more than doubled, compared to the rest of your fellow citizens, even as government officials appear on television to mouth the lie of equality. You can now be detained and held without charge, trial, or the right to an attorney on the suspicion that you are an "enemy combatant," at any time the government thinks you are a hindrance to its juggernaut movement.
So, are we at peace? I would submit that if the President tomorrow ordered the immediate return of every single American soldier in Iraq, we would still not be at peace. We lost our peace when we lost our will for dissent. We relinquished peace when we mutely accepted the bland and stereotyped fearmongering of newsmen and talking heads in a television box.
The silence of conformity is the most violent and destructive form of war. It is what made the Nazi holocaust, the Stalinist purges, and all the other depredations of humanity of the last century possible. As long as we conform, we are under the most insidious and dangerous attack imaginable; as long as we are silent, we will never be at peace.
______________
Once again, if you're planning to be in New York for Sunday's march and would like to meet up, post a comment.
Here's a telling snippet from Monday's White House press briefing; the discussion is about the latest in the long train of the incompetencies and oversights of tyranny, the Reed Army Hospital scandal—you might call it the military's version of Katrina-FEMA:
MR. SNOW: ...So we take a very exhaustive look at this. It is very important to figure out what's wrong, and get it fixed. And the President is committed to that. Q But the President hasn't said in any way, shape, or form, this is my responsibility, this is on me? MR. SNOW: Okay, well, I'll take the rhetorical flourish under advisement.
In other words, the admission of failure, even of simple error, is still, to this administration, beneath one's lorgnette to even discuss. Anyone who suggests that it might help for the powerful to start admitting to their mistakes is lightly accused of engaging in "rhetorical flourishes." It has gone so far past the point of revulsion that I can no longer come up with an appropriate rhetorical flourish of disgust to do it all justice. So we may leave it there, I suppose, but with a reminder that what follows below is all related to the sacrifices that these soldiers of ours have made, only to be treated little better than POWs in an enemy camp once they come home wounded from their service. _____________________
Introduction: check here for the results of the latest worldwide poll on public perception of various nations. Israel, Iran, and the U.S. rank #1, 2, and 3 for "most negative image." This may help to explain much of what follows.
I live in a true melting-pot style neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. On my block, there are Chinese, Italians, Poles, Russians, and of course, Arabs. Most of the folks here are, in fact, Palestinian or Lebanese. The memory of 9/11 is still painfully fresh here, because we unwittingly harbored one of the terrorists, about a block and a half from where I am sitting now.
I forget the guy's name, but I remember recognizing his face when someone showed me a grainy picture of him in the Daily News, about a week after the attacks. He had lived among us for months, and no one was the wiser. FBI-looking types were here for a long time after that—maybe they still come around now, though more furtively and in fewer numbers than they did 5 and a half years ago.
This is to introduce what is to follow this week, so that you know how we came to our little book of the month selection here. One day, a few weeks back, a Lebanese fellow I know from the neighborhood handed me a book. I'm not going to identify him except to note that, like many of his countrymen here in Kensington, he has a deep personal history in the Mideast and its conflicts; and he is one of the most patriotic, as in pro-American, people that I know.
So he handed me a book and said, "Brian, if you want to know what's truly going on over there—you know, in the Mideast—please read this man's book. This is the most accurate account of what's happened there and what's going on now that I've seen." I've been reading bits and pieces from this book—Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, but have been hesitant to write about it, because as much as I respect my Lebanese friend, I thought maybe he was pursuing a private agenda. Then something else happened.
Another friend came by one evening to pick up his daughter, who had been playing with my kid that day. He's Jewish, and he saw the book lying on my desk. "Ah, you're reading Carter's new book? I haven't read it myself, but I hear it's very accurate historically and has a lot to teach us about what's going on there."
I asked him if he found the imputation that Israel engages in apartheid, or is headed in that direction, offensive.
"No, not at all," he said. "After all, Israel is a country with a government and politicians who are trying to gain and hold power—you think they care what Americans think of them? Jimmy Carter has always stood firmly for Israel's right to exist; he just doesn't think they should dominate the region."
Indeed, as I came near the end of the book, I found Carter's list of "key requirements" for peace. Bullet point A of these reads as follows:
The security of Israel must be guaranteed. The Arabs must acknowledge openly and specifically that Israel is a reality and has a right to exist in peace, behind secure and recognized borders, and with a firm Arab pledge to terminate any further acts of violence against the legally constituted nation of Israel.
So why was this guy attacked as he was for this book? One FOX News pundit openly accused Carter of plagiarizing "his" maps! And an entire chorus of others called Carter's book "shameful" and an "attack against Israel". Those were the reasonably civil voices raised against this book; I won't even bother to cite what has been heard from many others since last December.
But one criticism I can't find of Carter's book is any fault with its history. More than half the book, I'd say, is a recounting of the history relating to the current nexus of conflict as it exists now (Carter was writing in 2006, amid the most recent occupation of Lebanon). Of course, since Carter himself was at the center of much of this history, as President during the talks that led to the Camp David accords, his accuracy is hardly surprising, though it is noteworthy.
I have discovered through personal experience that people who have the clearest view of the past tend to be right about the present and even the future. So overall, I found Carter's book to be just as my Lebanese friend had predicted—a lucid, balanced, and passionate plea for sanity and diplomacy before it becomes too late for peace to have a chance. Indeed, I found none of the supposed over-the-top hatchet job on Israel that the mass media (most of whom probably hadn't read it) reported. If anything, Carter is especially harsh on—guess who—the American government, as in this:
All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel's right to live in peace...The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories.
We'll have more on Jimmy Carter's book later this week. Meanwhile, if you have thoughts on the matter, even if it's to call me a friend of the terrorists (I've heard it before), by all means post a comment.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm betting that if you had enough eyes or time to read the 30 million or so blogs there are out on the world wide web, you'd never find another offering like what you're getting today from my blogging partner here at DR. I'll just say that Mr. McKenna discovered a parallel in last week's news that reaches a little beyond the pale of weird. Before we find out what that is, first a few site notes:
Monkeys at Photoshop: another President's Day, another banner. And yes, the pdf download of Tao of Hogwarts is gone. The book's now for sale (see below). You can blame it all on American Express for slipping me the pink last month. In case you want to register a complaint, their CEO is Mr. Kenneth Chenault, and he makes around $20M a year. At the rate they were paying me, it would take me about 300 years to make that much dough. Or put another way, Amex could afford to keep me and 149 other employees if Mr. Chenault settled for $10M a year instead of $20M. Now tell me there's nothing wrong with corporate America.
Another book for sale: Anyway, The Tao of Hogwarts is now for sale. You can click the graphic in yesterday's post or find the link in the sidebar to order a copy of this or any of my other three books. For real, they're pretty good, or else I wouldn't be selling them. By the way, for Geek Wednesday this week we'll have a review of the site that offers this brand of self-publishing, Lulu.com. You may be surprised.
The petition on Iraq: The form at the top of the sidebar can be completed without leaving the page. If you think it's worth 30 seconds of your time to sign it, I'd encourage you to do so.
And now, Terry McKenna arrives to climb out on a limb where there may not be any tree...
And as you lose control You'll reap the harvest you have sown. And as the fear grows The bad blood slows and turns to stone. —Roger Waters/Pink Floyd, "Dogs"
This week’s theme comes from an old saying. Although we are no longer an agricultural people, the phrase about planting retains its currency. Most of us have heard it and probably used it too. Thus, the concept is embedded in our culture. It goes back to the Hebrew Bible, to the Book of Job: “Even as I have seen they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same.” The idea may be universal: it certainly exists in Buddhist and Hindu culture – for what else is Karma, but reaping what you sow? Of course, Karma has its own baggage – reincarnation is part of it, but if you focus on the kernel of the idea, you can see the similarity.
That we look back to old sayings for useful truths is one of this blog’s recurring themes. For how can we move forward unless we allow ourselves to benefit from the ideas and experiences of past? The set of shared ideas and experiences, along with our shared artistic heritage, forms our cultural heritage. By culture, I’m thinking in the broadest terms; much more than ladies in evening gowns at a Kennedy Center gala. More too than our great museums and universities. Our culture does not reside in any one place or even in all of them, but rather in all of us, within our shared consciousness. So our cultural institutions (the museums, concert halls and universities) are but a small part of our culture. Our culture is our comic books and our movies. So yes, it includes Shakespeare but also King Kong and our folk tales. It includes the Bible and Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, but also the shared memory of tricky Dick (Nixon) and the Amazing Mets.
We reflexively recall elements from our shared culture to help us understand the present. Think of how we understand Iraq. Most of us have never been soldiers, and fewer still have fired a shot in anger, so we look to memorials of soldiering in order to better grasp the soldier’s sacrifice – perhaps we’ve been to Gettysburg, and reflected on Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s 20th Maine, and their bravery at Little Round Top. Maybe we’ve seen Mia Linn’s groundbreaking Viet Nam War National Memorial. Thus we can appreciate the sacrifice of our current day soldiers. On the other hand, despite the sacrifice, the Iraq war turns out to have been an exercise in folly, and our understanding that it is so, and of what to do next, is shaped by the simple admonition used by gamblers not to throw good money after bad. Yes, gambler’s phrases too are part of our cultural heritage.
So who will we examine this week, in terms of reaping and sowing?
I picked an unlikely pair of Texans: Anna Nicole Smith (really Vickie Lynn Marshall nee Hogan) and George W Bush (this time examined for his Iran policy). An odd couple at first blush, but maybe not so odd when you think about it. Ms. Smith was a pneumatic concoction of our current day celebrity culture; a dissolute stripper pretending to the glamour of a movie star. That she slurred her words like a drug addict, and that her weight ballooned and fell, did nothing to diminish her peculiar fame.
Then there is George Bush. A pretend Texan, he was raised there, but to wealthy New England parents. His education was eastern and patrician (Phillips Academy and Yale). He summered in Maine in a family compound (it takes an awful lot of inherited wealth before one gets a family compound – we don’t have one, do you?). So where did this scion of eastern wealth come up with his down home accent? I’ve listened to other Texans, and selected one for demonstration purposes. Writer Mary Karr is no patrician. Raised in a troubled household by a bright but disturbed alcoholic mother, she is a modern poet and memoirist, and she speaks just fine. Listen to her voice on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air program, and then contemplate the fraud which is George Bush’s country manner.
So what bad seed did Anna Nicole Smith sow? Born to a 16 year old mother and 20 year old father, she was raised by her grandmother and a collection of aunts (the father didn’t stay long). Anna herself dropped out of school with at best an eighth grade education, and moved on to a career in places like Wal-Mart and Red Lobster. She found her calling in stripping. It’s impossible to know what she expected out of her chosen field, but at best, a stripper is a user of men, who is herself used. Embedding in a world of alcoholics and drug users, her early death is no surprise. Her demise is a sad morale tale of misbegotten dreams.
Unlike Anna Nicole Smith, George Bush arrived at his Iran policy by an act of intention. Yes, he did inherit a long history of bad policy; thus, from Eisenhower, he inherited the legacy of our interference in Iranian affairs (starting with the coup against Mossadegh); from Nixon and Carter, he inherited the legacy of our strong support for the brutal Shah (very similar to Reagan’s support for Iraq’s brutal Saddam Hussein). Also from Reagan came the legacy of our blind eye toward Sunni extremism – we and our Saudi surrogates armed various warriors against the Soviets in Afghanistan; and we encouraged Saudi support for Madrassas around the world, especially in Pakistan.
But even with such a bad inheritance, George Bush was given a golden opportunity to reverse course. When the September 11, 2001 tragedy happened, alone among Muslim peoples, the Iranians showed widespread and sincere sympathy for our loss. And surprisingly, their government did not suppress their demonstration. Thus we had an ideal opportunity for our president to come back to Iran with a gracious expression of respect and mutuality. But nothing came of it, and by the winter’s State of the Union speech, Bush damned Iran as being part of an axis of evil.
Who knows what we will reap with Iran. Fortunately, history is still waiting for our final answer, but with George Bush in the White House, it does not look good.
A final note about the much ballyhooed EFP’s (Explosively Formed Projectiles). These supposed Iran weapons have been described in breathless terms as nearly invincible tank busters, able to shoot hot copper through 2 feet of tank armor. On the other hand, when we are shown pictures of what they have destroyed, mostly we see mere Humvees, not Abrams Tanks. Of course, George Bush is like the boy who cried wolf, so pretty much no one believes him anymore.
Friday Reflection: Activism in the Open Source Society
Our banner quote for this week is from Emerson's 1841 essay "Spiritual Laws". 125 years after his death, Emerson has a lot to teach us about living a decent human life amid a culture of corporatism and fundamentalist government. Here is another paragraph from Spiritual Laws, in which he recommends what I have described as "the open source society":
We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs intermeddle, and have things in our own way, until the sacrifices and virtues of society are odious. Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural ways of arriving at the same ends at which these aim, but do not arrive. Why should all virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give dollars? It is very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do not think any good will come of it. We have not dollars; merchants have; let them give them. Farmers will give corn; poets will sing; women will sew; laborers will lend a hand; the children will bring flowers. And why drag this dead weight of a Sunday-school over the whole Christendom? It is natural and beautiful that childhood should inquire, and maturity should teach; but it is time enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew, and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.
Nor should citizens of a supposedly free nation be "shut up against their will." To that end, we have the activist arm of the open source society. Today, United for Peace and Justice is calling for our help in questioning and reversing the "mechanical action" which Emerson so eloquently exposed. UFPJ's recommendations are generally along the lines that we endorsed in Wednesday's post; but deserve restatement:
TODAY, call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. You can get the name of your local Reps here. Tell them you want redeployment, not escalation; diplomacy with Iran, not saber-rattling; and an end to funding any escalation of this madness. UFPJ further recommends that you ask your Rep to email you a transcript of his/her's 5-minute statement from the debate.
NEXT: sign the online petition or download this pdf petitionthat has been prepared by UFPJ. Print it out and get as many signatures on it as you can. Take it to your local church, tavern, workplace, or wherever you congregate with others, and ask folks to sign. It shouldn't be that hard. Then get it in the hands of your Rep.
NEXT: as we mentioned Wednesday, make a real pest of yourself when your Rep comes home for his/her winter break next week. Some of them are planning to hold meetings anyway: here's a list of some. Remind these people how much is riding on their once showing a little backbone to these tyrants: it's the future that's on the line here. Your future, your childrens' future, and the future of people in Iraq, Iran, and America whose lives are hanging in the balance.
FINALLY: one month from now, there's another anniversary coming up. UFPJ has already scheduled nationwide protests, marches, and other events to ensure that the 4th anniversary of this war is the last.
As UFPJ says, "We are in the midst of a nationwide peace surge." Make yourself a part of it. After all, as Emerson reminds us (in "Self-Reliance"):
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
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.
"We are the people who run this county. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to stop this war. Raise hell."—Molly Ivins
Molly Ivins was given a memorial service, and her name is already passing out of the headlines. I assume she'd prefer it that way: fame was never her god, but often the victim of her knife-edged humor. And sentimentality was always repulsive to her. Those of us who love her work will remember her after the mass media and the powerful whom she regularly harried have all forgotten. Here are a few links that are worth attention to any who admired this lady's prescient political insight, humor, and relentless pursuit of truth.
Krugman wrote a very fine piece to Molly's memory, which deserves quotation:
Molly never lost sight of two eternal truths: rulers lie, and the times when people are most afraid to challenge authority are also the times when it’s most important to do just that. And the fact that she remembered these truths explains something I haven’t seen pointed out in any of the tributes: her extraordinary prescience on the central political issue of our time.
And NPR has this page, which includes audio and text files of Ivins at her best.
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Now, to Part 2 of Terry McKenna's piece about activism, art, and Iraq.
So… what story will art hope to tell us about Iraq? By art, I’m including both works now considered “serious” or high art, and popular works; thus movies (even TV like Saturday Night Live and the Daily Show) but also Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw.
First, some background: The following three works demonstrate the change in meaning that occurs as time removes the original audience and replaces it with new viewers. The artist who produced the first two works lived in mid 16th century Flanders. He produced a number of politically sensitive drawings and asked his wife to destroy them upon his death.. The artist, Peter Bruegel, is one whose works I admire more than almost all other western painters. Even so, some of what his contemporaries saw is missing for me.
Contrast both with the following photograph. It’s well known, but from a technical standpoint, perhaps no better made than hundreds of equally contemporary images. But in terms of the story it tells – and my ability to grasp the story, it stands out as a remarkable image.
It took almost two decades for the US to begin to write the story of the Viet Nam War. Hopefully we won’t wait as long to deal with our present tragedy.
Let's imagine it as a drama: It could very well begin with a secret conspiracy between the president and his close advisors (including a Darth Vader like Dick Cheney). They might be seen hatching a plan to mislead Congress into giving the president authority to go to war. The public pretense is that by threatening war, the US will force Saddam Hussein to agree to allow weapons inspections. But it turns out the inspections are also just a gambit; the president and his men want to go to war regardless, so when the inspectors are about to reveal the absence of WMD’s – the president tells the inspectors to back off, and he goes to war anyway.
Act one would probably include the aerial bombing campaign and end with the capture of Baghdad.
Most plays are three act affairs, though the Iraq war may surely deserve something on the scale of Wagner – or Homer. Still in a standard play, the middle act (Act 2) could start after the president’s Mission Accomplished speech. In such a play, I’d end Act 2 with the destruction the Al-Askari Mosque.
If you were looking for a traditional heroic ending, you could conclude Act 3 with last Fall’s Democratic victory. On the other hand, if you wanted an existential drama, surely there are facts enough to create a plot line as troubling as Camus’ The Stranger.
—T. McKenna
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Tomorrow, for Geek Wednesday, we'll have more Webby Award nominees featured, along with more on Ubutnu Linux and my latest tangle with IE 7 and a report on its injured master, Uncle Bill. So geek out with us tomorrow here at Daily rEv.
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.
Forward March: Before we get to the Friday Reflection, UFPJ is having another get-together on the mall in Washington. It's going to be a balmy 50 degrees in the capitol tomorrow (here in New York, it's 8 right now), so if you've had enough northern cold and more than enough southern tyranny, this may be the place to go. Other protests will be going on all over the nation: check here to find one in your area. Whether or not you're marching, be sure to sign the online petition for peace.
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Back when I had an agent marketing my book, The Tao of Hogwarts, we received a polite refusal from one publisher whose editor remarked, "if he could make it like Benjamin Hoff's Tao of Pooh, we'd be very interested in this book..."
Yeah, I thought, and I'd like to look like Brad Pitt or have Bill Gates' income or Steve Jobs' marketing acumen. But unfortunately, I am just Brian, a Very Small Author of a Very Minor Blog, and no amount of wishing or imitation will change that. Therefore, you will continue to find The Tao of Hogwarts available in the banner above as a pdf download, free to all who wish to read it.
After all, people with a gift like Benjamin Hoff's don't come along like cars on a rush hour freeway. What Hoff delivers is a mind teeming with imagination and a liberal insight that has been curiously overlooked by left wing pundits who might find a well of topical insight in Hoff's books. His assessment of Bush pere's Gulf War I is positively prescient in its insight. Here's a sampling from The Te of Piglet, which was published 15 years ago as the bestselling sequel to his mega-bestselling The Tao of Pooh:
...it is not exactly Progress for our nation to have moved from the enlightened era of President John F. Kennedy into an era of scandal-ridden administrations run by Special Interests' Candidates seemingly bent on dismantling our democracy and desroying the nation's land, air, and water in the process, while wrapping themselves in the starry flag of Patriotism. For years now, intelligent, concerned activists have been Out, and self-centered, ignoramous conservatives have been In. And that is not what we'd call the Way of a Healthy Society.
Why these people are called Conservatives is beyond our understanding, as they never seem to conserve anything. They don't conserve natural resources. They use them up as quickly as possible. They don't conserve morality and the family, despite much self-righteous boasting to the contrary—boasting that falls rather flat when it comes from those who amass money through commercial enterprises that make a mockery of moral values and put impoverished families, widows, and orphans into the street. They certainly don't conserve money. Not taxpayer money, anyway. It would appear that about the only things they do conserve are the very things the human race ought to have discarded long ago: narrow-mindedness, intolerance, coldheartedness, bigotry, machismo, and greed.
How can such powerful, brutally organized corporate forces be overcome? Shall we start up an army? Set up a barricade? Make weapons of our own to counter the WMD worship-cult that the tyrants have set up?
No, that is not it. Hoff reminds us instead that our greatest strength is in our supposed weakness: we have to be small, together. This is a theme that I mention in Tao of Hogwarts, where I quote from Te of Piglet:
We find that the children themselves, when faced with something monumental or gargantuan, are able to overcome the disparity in size through speed, grace, and the lightness of being that comes from being free of the ponderous burden of ego. Thus, the children can overcome the troll of Book One; Harry is able to outwit the dragon in the first task of the "triwizard tournament" of Book Four; he is helped by a bird (Fawkes the Phoenix) in overcoming the enormous basilisk of Book Two; and Hermione's tiny "time turner" of Book Three brings deliverance to two unjustly condemned beings (Buckbeak the hippogriff and Sirius Black, Harry's godfather). It is as Benjamin Hoff describes in one of his two extraordinary books on the "Tao" of another well-known work of English children's literature:
To the typical mind of the West, Bigger is Better: The large man is a better fighter than the little man, the huge corporation is superior to the small company, the adult is wiser than the child. The Taoist attitude is: Not so.... As we are told in school, the dinosaurs were the most successful creatures on earth—for a while. But geographic and climatic changes eliminated them because they couldn't Adapt, and couldn't compete with the smaller, faster creatures that superceded them. Their most plentiful descendants alive today, scientists tell us, are birds—small, adaptable, and mobile. (pp. 191-193).
Lao Tzu applied the same common sense logic in his poetic advice to the leaders of nations:
Small and great are mutually fulfilling: Set them into opposition, And you have made your first and final error.
Therefore, let your nation follow Nature’s way: If it is big, let its actions be small. If it is small, it is already complete, So it need not strive for greatness. (from Chapter 61 of the Tao Te Ching)
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Tomorrow, we'll see, all around the nation and the world, an illustration of this principle of the strength of the small: millions of small bodies will stand and march; countless voices will be raised in the face of Power. Make yours one of them: if there's an event you can attend, go and let off some steam. You can also be heard by your legislators or by the media. As Hoff, Lao Tzu, the I Ching, and many other wise observers throughout history have reminded us, there is success through the small.
You got to be crazy, gotta have a real need Gotta sleep on your toes, and when you're on the street You got to be able to pick out the easy meat with your eyes closed And then moving in silently, down wind and out of sight You gotta strike when the moment is right without thinking.
And after a while, you can work on points for style Like the club tie, and the firm handshake A certain look in the eye, and an easy smile You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to So that when they turn their backs on you You'll get the chance to put the knife in.
Dogs: if this music doesn't raise the hairs on your neck, best see if your head's still attached. It's one of the more moving, shattering songs that PF created over the course of their decade of creative maturity. Waters' metaphor is savagely poignant: the corporate hound, in a career of backstabbing, life-sucking, money-hungry depredation, finds that his blood has congealed--calcified with the weight of his accumulated crimes--and it drags him down to inner death, drowns him in the pool of his own poison.
Guitarist David Gilmour, one of the purest musicians of our era, is also at his heart-stopping, inspiring best on this track, in which he combines acoustic and electric sequences in music that raises Waters' verse to a level of sublimity that is rarely touched in modern music.
There are amazing discoveries to be made throughout this album: Gilmour performs further wonders in his solos on Pigs and Sheep, and even the tiny snippets that open and close the album (Pigs on the Wing) are moving in their irony--parodies of the top-40 love songs that were (and are) the radio rage while PF continued their practice of creating long, carefully constructed pieces of music that could be explored rather than merely enjoyed.
Animals, on the whole, is perhaps the last great collaboration of these outstanding artists (and I include Wright and Mason there, whose contributions throughout the PF era have been generally underestimated). True, there is some great music on The Wall, but by that time Waters and his runaway ego had taken over the band, and it was no more the seamless unit that changed the history of music with Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and Animals.
Personally, I wish they'd included Dick Parry on the recording sessions (he did accompany the band on the Animals tour). Parry is the saxophonist whose sound had become so central to the PF aura in Dark Side and Wish You Were Here. Yet even without him, Animals is one of the high points in the entire history of modern recorded music.
Click the graphic above and listen to the first few minutes of Dogs, and then remember, there's more after that. When most musicians are wrapping up a song, the Floyd are just getting warm.
Yet in the context of the themes of our blog here, the reason we honor Pink Floyd is for their message as well as their artistry. Isn't it cool to hear a band sing of things other than a wounded heart and a hardened cock? Isn't it refreshing to hear musicians with a sense for politics and social awareness? Well, back when the Dixie Chicks were twinkles in their Daddies' eyes, the Floyd were out there, singing a relentless lyric of truth to power.
As the planet heats up, we move a few steps closer to nuclear winter. In a week where the UN informed us that over 34,000 innocents were murdered in Iraq last year; when a vile new term entered public discourse ("troop surge"); when further evidence was piled onto what we already know about the rush to planetary genocide known as global warming; then perhaps it is time we had more artists like Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright to inspire us, entertain us, and rigorously remind us of who we are and where we are headed. The scientists have done their best in their own way, and today they were joined by Stephen Hawking:
"Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no nuclear weapons have been used in war, though the world has come uncomfortably close to disaster on more than one occasion," Prof Hawking said. "But for good luck, we would all be dead.
"As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and a period of unprecedented climate change, scientists have a special responsibility once again to inform the public and advise leaders about the perils that humanity faces.
"We foresee great perils if governments and society do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and prevent further climate change."
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:
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.
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...."
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.
"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, an
The Collateral Damage Dance Troupe performs prior to the start of the UFPJ NYC Peace March on Sunday (click to enlarge)
