Philosopher's Stone - Vindicating Political Rationality Against the Neo-Con Leviathan

Desperately Crawling to the Surface

Eric, i think i may have told you in an email that i have just come closer than ever before to a nervous breakdown. I am sure there are many kinds of dispositions in intelligent people - i just happen to have landed the schizo-crackhead form of brainy-ness. I've been seeing a psychiatrist for nearly four months now. We don't talk about anything meaningful, but he is concerned to manage whatever symptoms of psychological breakdown i'm experiencing with useful meds, and that has helped to one degree or another.

Gillian flipped her shit in the last year. The abbreviated version is too disturbing to talk about right now, so i'll spare both of us. The short story is that she is no longer living with me and i've taken in new roommates. Evan is still around and much better to live with after two years. He'll be defending his dissertation soon.

I am stuck midway in dissertation - mainly due to psychological meltdown. I am supposed to call one of my committee members next week, and i'm looking forward to this because i have not found a way back to my old workhabits.

I am teaching primarily in Religious Studies now, doing Asian religion/philosophy and comparative philosophy east/west. Teaching my own class this summer has been a new challenge and i was in knots throughout but my evals were stellar and i got many nice personal letters from students attached to finals thanking me directly. This has been nice - but it hasn't totally broken my cycle of self-loathing.

My most immediate goal is to begin writing on a regular basis again, and that would include posting here. We'll see how it goes. Things with Bill are stellar as always - how did i ever manage to land such an interesting, compassionate philosophy professor? I could have ended up with any number of skinny, less than impressive dweebs. I have so many years invested in this amazing person that i often have to perform a reality check on myself, just to be sure i know what i've got. It takes a lot of effort to bear in mind that i am actually happy, i guess.

My van has broken down so many times, it's probably not worth the gunpowder it would take to blow it to hell as old man Blasch would say. But i do still have it. I also have now a 1991 Mercedes 190E which i bought for 4700 and love in a completely irrational way. I don't think i will ever go back to non-Mercedes automobiles, if i can help it. Three cheers for good old German anal-retentive engineering. I'm so proud that the tears are welling as i type...

My sister, Bill and I are going to see Dead Can Dance in Seattle in September. This will be phenomenal. I have been thinking of you and wondering about the chances of getting you to come out to visit - we can take a drive to the ocean and reflect over a bottle of wine.

Keeping in touch this time goddamnit - Lisa

Official Played Down Emissions' Links to Global Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
from today's New York Times:

"A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

"In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved.

"Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues. Before coming to the White House in 2001, he was the 'climate team leader' and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training.

"The documents were obtained by The New York Times from the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit legal-assistance group for government whistle-blowers. The project is representing Rick S. Piltz, who resigned in March after a decade working in the office that coordinates government climate research and issued the documents that Mr. Cooney edited.

"A White House spokeswoman, Michele St. Martin, said today that Mr. Cooney would not be made available to comment. 'We don't put Phil Cooney on the record,' she said. 'He's not a cleared spokesman.'

"Other White House officials said today that the changes made by Mr. Cooney were part of the normal interagency review that takes place on all documents related to global environmental change. 'All comments are reviewed, and some are accepted and some are rejected,' said Robert Hopkins, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He noted that one of the reports Mr. Cooney worked on, the administration's 10-year plan for climate research, was strongly endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences.

"And Myron Ebell, who has long campaigned against limits on greenhouse gases as director of climate policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian group, said such editing was necessary for 'consistency' in meshing programs with policy.

"But critics said that while all administrations routinely vet government reports, scientific content in such reports should be reviewed by the White House Science and Technology Office. Climate experts and representatives of environmental groups, when shown examples of the revisions, said they illustrated the significant if largely invisible influence of Mr. Cooney and other White House officials with ties to energy industries that have long fought greenhouse-gas restrictions. " [...]

Read the entire article here. (Requires a free, one-time registration)

A Radical in the White House

An excellent essay from today's New York Times

By Bob Herbert

"Last week - April 12, to be exact - was the 60th anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 'I have a terrific headache,' he said, before collapsing at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Ga. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on the 83rd day of his fourth term as president. His hold on the nation was such that most Americans, stunned by the announcement of his death that spring afternoon, reacted as though they had lost a close relative.

"That more wasn't made of this anniversary is not just a matter of time; it's a measure of the distance the U.S. has traveled from the egalitarian ideals championed by F.D.R. His goal was 'to make a country in which no one is left out.' That kind of thinking has long since been consigned to the political dumpster. We're now in the age of Bush, Cheney and DeLay, small men committed to the concentration of big bucks in the hands of the fortunate few.
To get a sense of just how radical Roosevelt was (compared with the politics of today), consider the State of the Union address he delivered from the White House on Jan. 11, 1944. He was already in declining health and, suffering from a cold, he gave the speech over the radio in the form of a fireside chat.

"After talking about the war, which was still being fought on two fronts, the president offered what should have been recognized immediately for what it was, nothing less than a blueprint for the future of the United States. It was the clearest statement I've ever seen of the kind of nation the U.S. could have become in the years between the end of World War II and now. Roosevelt referred to his proposals in that speech as 'a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race or creed.'

"Among these rights, he said, are:

"'The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.'

"'The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.'

"'The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.'

"'The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.'

"'The right of every family to a decent home.'

"'The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.'

"'The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.'

"'The right to a good education.'

"I mentioned this a few days ago to an acquaintance who is 30 years old. She said, 'Wow, I can't believe a president would say that.'" [...]

Read the entire essay here [require a free, one time registration].

Laurie Garrett's memo to Newsday colleagues 2/28/2005 11:47:08 AM

Dear Newsday Friends and Colleagues,

On March 8th -- International Women's Day -- my leave of absence from Newsday ends. I will not be returning to the paper, largely because my work at the Council on Foreign Relations has proven to be the most exciting challenge of my life. But you have been through so much pain and difficulty over the last year, all of which I monitored closely and with considerable concern, that I don't want to disappear from the Newsday scene without saying a few words. Indulge me.

Ever since the Chandler Family plucked Mark Willes from General Foods, placing him at the helm of Times Mirror with a mandate to destroy the institutions in ways that would boost dividends, journalism has suffered at Newsday. The pain of the last year actually began a decade ago: the sad arc of greed has finally hit bottom. The leaders of Times Mirror and Tribune have proven to be mirrors of a general trend in the media world: They serve their stockholders first, Wall St. second and somewhere far down the list comes service to newspaper readerships. In 1996 I personally confronted Willes on that point, and he publicly confirmed that the new regime was one in which even the number of newspapers sold was irrelevant, so long as stock returns continued to rise.

The deterioration we experienced at Newsday was hardly unique. All across America news organizations have been devoured by massive corporations, and allegiance to stockholders, the drive for higher share prices, and push for larger dividend returns trumps everything that the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions. Long gone are the days of fast-talking, whiskey-swilling Murray Kempton peers eloquently filling columns with daily dish on government scandals, mobsters and police corruption. The sort of in-your-face challenge that the Fourth Estate once posed for politicians has been replaced by mud-slinging, lies and, where it ought not be, timidity. When I started out in journalism the newsrooms were still full of old guys with blue collar backgrounds who got genuinely indignant when the Governor lied or somebody turned off the heat on a poor person's apartment in mid-January. They cussed and yelled their ways through the day, took an occasional sly snort from a bottle in the bottom drawer of their desk and bit into news stories like packs of wild dogs, never letting go until they'd found and told the truth. If they hadn't been reporters most of those guys would have been cops or firefighters. It was just that way.

Now the blue collar has been fully replaced by white ones in America's newsrooms, everybody has college degrees. The "His Girl Friday" romance of the newshound is gone. All too many journalists seem to mistake scandal mongering for tenacious investigation, and far too many aspire to make themselves the story. When I think back to the old fellows who were retiring when I first arrived at Newsday - guys (almost all of them were guys) who had cop brothers and fathers working union jobs - I suspect most of them would be disgusted by what passes today for journalism. Theirs was not a perfect world --- too white, too male, seen through a haze of cigarette smoke and Scotch - but it was an honest one rooted in mid-20th Century American working class values.

Honesty and tenacity (and for that matter, the working class) seem to have taken backseats to the sort of "snappy news", sensationalism, scandal-for-the-sake of scandal crap that sells. This is not a uniquely Tribune or even newspaper industry problem: this is true from the Atlanta mixing rooms of CNN to Sulzberger's offices in Times Square. Profits: that's what it's all about now. But you just can't realize annual profit returns of more than 30 percent by methodically laying out the truth in a dignified, accessible manner. And it's damned tough to find that truth every day with a mere skeleton crew of reporters and editors.

This is terrible for democracy. I have been in 47 states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had on the national psyche. I have found America a place of great and confused fearfulness, in which cynically placed bits of misinformation (e.g. Cheney's, "If John Kerry had been President during the Cold War we would have had thermonuclear war.") fall on ears that absorb all, without filtration or fact-checking. Leading journalists have tried to defend their mission, pointing to the paucity of accurate, edited coverage found in blogs, internet sites, Fox-TV and talk radio. They argue that good old-fashioned newspaper editing is the key to providing America with credible information, forming the basis for wise voting and enlightened governance. But their claims have been undermined by Jayson Blair's blatant fabrications, Judy Miller's bogus weapons of mass destruction coverage, the media's inaccurate and inappropriate convictions of Wen Ho Lee, Richard Jewell and Steven Hatfill, CBS' failure to smell a con job regarding Bush's Texas Air Guard career and, sadly, so on.

What does it mean when even journalists consider comedian John [sic] -- "This is a fake news show, People!" -- Stewart one of the most reliable sources of "news"?

It would be easy to descend into despair, not only about the state of journalism, but the future of American democracy. But giving up is not an option. There is too much at stake.

I would remind my Newsday colleagues that during the bleak period that commenced with the appointment of Willes, and persists today, some great journalism has been done at the paper. A tiny, dedicated team of foreign correspondents has literally risked their lives to bring readers fresh, often ground-breaking news from the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East. Newsday readers are on top of details about the sorry state of fiscal governance in Nassau County, scandals in Suffolk County, Bloomberg's plans for the west side of Manhattan, and the sad state of politics in Albany. We still have some of the best film and performing arts criticism in the country, an aggressive photo department, tough sports columnists, under-utilized specialty and investigative reporters and a savvy business section.

So what is to be done?

I have no idea what Tribune corporate leaders in Chicago have up their sleeves for Newsday, the LA Times, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune and the other media outlets under their control. Despite rumors that are rife in the newsrooms, you are also in the dark. And you should remember that. During times of hardship as extreme as those we have experienced at Newsday it is easy to become paralyzed by rumors, unable to think clearly about the work at hand. After all, people have lost their jobs, and some were removed from the building by armed guards, with only moments' notice. Every Newsday employee is justified in his or her concern about just how lean Chicago plans to make the newspaper machine.

But rumors only feed fear, and personal fear is rarely stimulus for good journalism. Now is the time to think in imaginative ways. Salon and Slate have both gone into the black; in nations like Ukraine and South Africa courageous new forms of journalism are arising; some of the blogs that clog the internet are actually quite good and manage to keep politicians on their toes. Opportunities for quality journalism are still there, though you may need to scratch new surfaces, open locked doors and nudge a few reticent editors to find them. On a fundamental level, your readers desperately need for you to try, over and over again, to tell the stories, dig the dirt and bring them the news.

Les Payne has often correctly pointed out that Newsday's problems have never been rooted in the institution's journalism: Rather, they have been business issues. We have never been accused of fostering a Jayson Blair, a bozo who accepted $250,000 from the Bush Administration to write flattering stories, an investigative reporting team that relied on a single source for a series that smeared the life of an innocent man, acted as a conduit for the Department of Defense for weapons of mass destruction disinformation, or any of the other ghastly violations of the public trust that have recently transpired. Newsday's honor has, by its own accounts, been besmirched by a series of lies committed on the business/ advertising/ circulation side of the company. (And few news organizations have covered on its pages their own shortcomings as closely as has Newsday.) All of us have been forced to pay a price for those grievous actions. But nobody has charged that Newsday's journalistic enterprise has failed to abide by the highest ethical standards.

Newsday has always had more talent than it knew how to use. So go ahead, Talent: Show them your stuff. I'll be reading. (March 8th may be my last day as a Newsday employee, but it won't mark the end of my readership.)

I thank each and every one of you who have been my friends and colleagues since I joined Newsday in 1988. I hope that we will stay in touch over coming years. Make me regret leaving, Guys: Turn Newsday into a kick ass paper that I will be begging to return to.

Bye for now,Laurie Garrett


Wherefore, L. Blasch?

Wow, I got an email from someone who actually reads this Blog, and he asked me what has become of my Blogging compatriot, Ms. Blasch. The answer, from my end, is: I haven't a clue! My email has lately not been going through to her email address, so I just don't know.

Hunter S. Thompson: Dead?

Or just testing?

Hunger for Dictatorship
War to export democracy may wreck our own
by Scott McConnell of The American Conservative

[...]"One of the biggest right-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for the mass destruction of Arab cities. Letters that come to this magazine from the pro-war Right leave no doubt that their writers would welcome the jailing of dissidents. And of course it's not just us. When USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote a column suggesting that American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose and demanding that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs anything that existed during the Cold War. 'It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth-not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself.'"[...]

Entire essay available here.

Bill Moyers: There is No Tomorrow

Bill Moyers Published January 30, 2005

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true -- one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index.

That's right -- the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the "Left Behind" series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its "biblical lands," legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon.

As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.

I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man." A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed -- an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 -- just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter Heaven and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer -- "The Road to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming apocalypse.

As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election -- 231 legislators in total and more since the election -- are backed by the religious right.

Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought.

And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"

Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, "America's Providential History." You'll find there these words: "The secular or socialist has a limited-resource mentality and views the world as a pie ... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece." However, "[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's earth ... while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people."

No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.
It is hard for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you think of the market?"I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."

I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe that -- it's just that I read the news and connect the dots.
I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration:

• That wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to judge beforehand whether actions might damage natural resources.

• That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, sport-utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.

• That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.

• That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting, coal-fired power plants and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies.

• That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.

I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend $9 million -- $2 million of it from the administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council -- to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.
I read all this in the news.

I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends at the International Policy Network, which is supported by Exxon Mobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is "a myth, sea levels are not rising" [and] scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are "an embarrassment."

I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.

I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer -- pictures of my grandchildren. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do." And then I am stopped short by the thought: "That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world."

And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice?
What has happened to our moral imagination?

On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?" And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"

I see it feelingly.

The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free -- not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma -- the science of the heart ... the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you.
Believe me, it does.

Bill Moyers was host until recently of the weekly public affairs series "NOW with Bill Moyers" on PBS. This article is adapted from AlterNet, where it first appeared. The text is taken from Moyers' remarks upon receiving the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

© Copyright 2005 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5211218.html

Johnny Carson: 1926-2005

He represented to me possibly the last time there was any class to a late night host. Nobody was better with guests from "regular America." One of few people in the celebrity world I can honestly say I admired for his work. And while the newspaper cartoons tomorrow will probably all contain the gates of heaven saying, "Heeeeeere's Johnny," eh, well, why not? Good on ye, Johnny Carson.

U.S. and Torture: What is it Going to Take for Americans to Act?

The American use of torture against its enemies, in amount, degree, and widespread use, has been coming to light ever so slowly, and not in the television news media. This today from The New York Times's Frank Rich:

"But a not-so-funny thing happened to the Graner case on its way to trial. Since the early bombshells from Abu Ghraib last year, the torture story has all but vanished from television, even as there have been continued revelations in the major newspapers and magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair. If a story isn't on TV in America, it doesn't exist in our culture.

"The latest chapter unfolding in Texas during that pre-inaugural week in January was broadcast on the evening news almost exclusively in brief, mechanical summary, when it was broadcast at all. But it's not as if it lacked drama; it was 'Judgment at Nuremberg' turned upside down. Specialist Graner's defense lawyer, Guy Womack, explained it this way in his closing courtroom statement: 'In Nuremberg, it was the generals being prosecuted. We were going after the order-givers. Here the government is going after the order-takers.' As T. R. Reid reported in The Washington Post, the trial's judge, Col. James L. Pohl of the Army, 'refused to allow witnesses to discuss which officers were aware of events in cellblock One-Alpha, or what orders they had given.' While Mr. Womack's client, the ringleader of the abuses seen in the Abu Ghraib photographs, deserved everything that was coming to him and then some, there have yet to be any criminal charges leveled against any of the prison's officers, let alone anyone higher up in the chain of command." [...]

Please do yourself a favor and read the entire piece here. [Requires a free, one time registration]

Aside: I find it absolutely uncanny that the History Channel is running its grand guignol "The French Revolution" doco at this time. Tune in, and consider what form of "National Razor" might be necessary in our own country some day.

U.S. and Them: Sources Indicate We're Already Well Underway in Iran

In the current (24 & 31 January) issue of The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, in an engrossing and troubling article, asserts that President Bush, before his re-election, signed a series of executive orders authorizing secret groups and Special Forces units to begin (or continue, depending on who you hear) covert operations "in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia" (Hersh 41). Donald Rumsfeld is enabled to control the operations "off the books--free from legal restrictions" (41). Hersh reports that in his interviews he has been told that the next target is Iran.

Of course, this raises myriad questions, and, sadly, most Americans won't even care. Can they be persauded to care? Perhaps. But this issue is thorny to be sure. One thing, however, that is not thorny, is that the Bush camp is dead wrong in its tactics. With a demoralized military that more and more makes its lack of faith in Rumsfeld known, an attrocious and unforgivable national debt, an ever unashamedly fascist regime isolating our country from sensible international diplomacy and reasoned discourse, and with more than a passing presidential belief that he somehow represents biblical prophecy, future days do not look bright.

The problem with a potential U.S. invasion of Iran is manifold, but let's begin with some basics: even if we buy in to the assumption that the youthful majority of Iranians want some form of democracy rather than the mullahs currently dictating so much Iranian policy and fabrication (that Iran has been less than upfront about its various nuclear practices is not generally in question), the United States can hardly put forth a solid plan for progress there anymore than it could[n't] in the sorrowful quagmire that is now Iraq. We proved we didn't grasp what it is to be an Iraqi; how can we assert an understanding of the Iranian mindset (even if most Americans see only "Arabs")? Do the youth of Iran suddenly love us in ways their parents and grandparents did not when we were helping their brutal dictator, the Shah, get out of the country ready to overthrow him? Do the youth of Iran love us in ways that will show swift, measurable, and democratic results should we "Iraq them"? And how many Farsi translaters do we have, even if they are gay or lesbian?

Whoops! Sorry About That Bombing!

Yeah, well, what can I say? We sure goofed on that one! But you can bet that the dickweed responsible for this will find the right guy we need to fire for it, I-tell-you-what! You know, you have to admit, we took the high road and owned up to our mistake right away and have, by now, paid at least a few cable-TV pundits to say, "Amen for that," on our behalf.

Let me be absolutely clear on this matter: When the United States of America accidentally bombs the wrong place, we admit it! We are God-fearing Christians, after all. I've dispatched Condi and Turd Blossom to put our best face on this, and they're suiting up as I write this. Depending on who you listen to, either four or five or fourteen or no people were killed in this s.n.a.f.u., but none of them were Americans or, you know, British, heh, so rest easy, America. We're in charge up in here. We're still fighting the good fight.

As you were!
--GW

Jobless Claims Surge

From Reuters today, by Andrea Hopkins

[...] "The number of Americans filing first-time claims for state unemployment insurance aid rose 43,000 to 364,000 in the week ended Jan. 1, up from a revised 321,000 in the previous week, the Labor Department said.

"It was the largest one-week gain in nearly three years and far surpassed Wall Street expectations for a rise to 331,000 from the originally reported 326,000 in the prior week." [...]

Entire article available here.

Even if the Feds find ways to poo poo this data (as they have already) as some sort of holiday blip, I have a hard time seeing a surge of this degree as a blip, and I doubt those unfortunate 364,000 first time unemployment insurance seekers feel like blips. One thing many of my former students had a tough time understanding (and many people in general) in regard to unemployment figures is that the numbers refer to first time unemployment insurance seekers, not folks who have had to file a second or third time. As of Monday at 5pm, I joined these ranks after my dot com laid off five of us. I hadn't seen it coming. I had my own office, business cards, keys, and company passwords. The company did not make as much money during the holiday season as it had hoped, and our positions were eliminated in a cost-saving measure. Hello, 2005.

I am in the process of being reflective this week, attempting to see beyond this. I haven't been destroyed by a tsunami; I have a roof over my head; I have a pretty good support network and a great therapist...the Jayhawks remain undefeated, etc. My supervisor, who was also laid off, just had colon cancer surgery, so my thoughts and support are certainly with her. I've been told by the CEO that if the company is able to get back on its feet financially he will readily meet with me about rehiring. I really liked my job, but I have to move forward in whatever way I can. I'm giving myself this week, and then I will hit the paperwork that so many of my fellow Americans are also having to do this time of year. By now I should be an expert at it.

Susan Sontag: 1933-2004

A remarkable thinker.

Judy Miller's War
by Alexander Cockburn
Dissident Voice
August 19, 2003

Lay all Judith Miller's New York Times stories end to end, from late 2001 to June 2003 and you get a desolate picture of a reporter with an agenda, both manipulating and being manipulated by US government officials, Iraqi exiles and defectors, an entire Noah's Ark of scam-artists.

And while Miller, either under her own single by-line or with NYT colleagues, was touting the bioterror threat, her book Germs, co-authored with Times-men Steven Engelberg and William Broad was in the bookstores and climbing the best seller lists. The same day that Miller opened an envelope of white powder (which turned out to be harmless) at her desk at the New York Times, her book was #6 on the New York Times best seller list. The following week (October 21, 2001), it reached #2. By October 28, --at the height of her scare-mongering campaign--it was up to #1. If we were cynical...

We don't have full 20/20 hindsight yet, but we do know for certain that all the sensational disclosures in Miller's major stories between late 2001 and early summer, 2003, promoted disingenuous lies. There were no secret biolabs under Saddam's palaces; no nuclear factories across Iraq secretly working at full tilt. A huge percentage of what Miller wrote was garbage, garbage that powered the Bush administration's propaganda drive towards invasion.

What does that make Miller? She was a witting cheer-leader for war. She knew what she was doing.

And what does Miller's performance make the New York Times? Didn't any senior editors at the New York Times or even the boss, A.O. Sulzberger, ask themselves whether it was appropriate to have a trio of Times reporters touting their book Germs on tv and radio, while simultaneously running stories in the New York Times headlining the risks of biowar and thus creating just the sort of public alarm beneficial to the sales of their book. Isn't that the sort of conflict of interest prosecutors have been hounding Wall Street punters for?

The knives are certainly out for Miller. Leaked internal email traffic disclosed Miller's self-confessed reliance on Ahmad Chalabi, a leading Iraqi exile with every motive to produce imaginative defectors eager to testify about Saddam's biowar, chemical and nuclear arsenal. In late June Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post ran a long story about Miller's ability in recent months to make the US Army jump, merely by threatening to go straight to Rumsfeld.

It was funny, but again, the conflicts of interest put the New York Times in a terrible light. Here was Miller, with a contract to write a new book on the post-invasion search for "weapons of mass destruction", lodged in the Army unit charged with that search, fiercely insisting that the unit prolong its futile hunt, while simultaneously working hand in glove with Chalabi. Journalists have to do some complex dance steps to get good stories, but a few red flags should have gone up on that one.

A brisk, selective timeline:

December 20, 2001, Headline, "Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites For Chemical and Nuclear Arms".

Miller rolls out a new Iraqi defector, in the ripe tradition of her favorite, Khidir Hamza, the utter fraud who called himself Saddam's Bombmaker.

Story:

"An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago.

"The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, gave details of the projects he said he worked on for President Saddam Hussein's government in an extensive interview last week in Bangkok. The interview with Mr. Saeed was arranged by the Iraqi National Congress, the main Iraqi opposition group, which seeks the overthrow of Mr. Hussein.

"If verified, Mr. Saeed's allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction."

Notice the sedate phrase "if verified". It never was verified. But the story served its purpose.

September 7, 2002: Headline: "US says Hussein intensifies quest for a-bomb parts".

This one was by Miller and Michael Gordon, promoting the aluminum tube nonsense: "In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium." All lies of course. Miller and Gordon emphasize "Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals".

Another of Miller's defectors takes a bow:

"Speaking on the condition that neither he nor the country in which he was interviewed be identified, Ahmed al-Shemri, his pseudonym, said Iraq had continued developing, producing and storing chemical agents at many mobile and fixed secret sites throughout the country, many of them underground.

"All of Iraq is one large storage facility," said Mr. Shemri. Asked about his allegations, American officials said they believed these reports were accurate."

A final bit of brazen chicanery from Gordon and Miller:

"Iraq denied the existence of a germ warfare program entirely until 1995, when United Nations inspectors forced Baghdad to acknowledge it had such an effort. Then, after insisting that it had never weaponized bacteria or filled warheads, it again belatedly acknowledged having done so after Hussein Kamel, Mr. Hussein's brother-in-law, defected to Jordan with evidence about the scale of the germ warfare program."

What Gordon and Miller leave out (or lacked the enterprise or desire to find out) is that Hussein Kamel told UN Inspectors that he had destroyed all Iraq's WMDs, on Saddam Hussein's orders.

September 13, 2002, headline: "White House Lists Iraq Steps To Build Banned Weapons".

Miller and Gordon again, taking at face value the administration's claims that it was "the intelligence agencies' unanimous view that the type of [aluminum] tubes that Iraq has been seeking are used to make such centrifuges."

If nothing else this shows what rotten reporters Miller and Gordon are, because it now turns out the intelligence analysts across Washington were deeply divided on precisely this issue.

September 18, 2002: "Verification Is Difficult at Best, Say the Experts, and Maybe Impossible".

This is Miller helping the War Party lay down a preemptive barrage against the UN Inspectors: "verifying Iraq's assertions that it has abandoned weapons of mass destruction, or finding evidence that it has not done so, may not be feasible, according to officials and former weapons inspectors"

A cameo appearance by Khidhir Hamza reporting his supposed knowledge that "Iraq was now at the 'pilot plant' stage of nuclear production and within two to three years of mass producing centrifuges to enrich uranium for a bomb."

December 3, 2002, a Miller Special, murky with unidentified informants: "C.I.A. Hunts Iraq Tie to Soviet Smallpox".

Classic Miller: "The C.I.A. is investigating an informant's accusation that Iraq obtained a particularly virulent strain of smallpox from a Russian scientist who worked in a smallpox lab in Moscow during Soviet times"

January 24, 2003:"Defectors Bolster U.S. Case Against Iraq, Officials Say".

Another Miller onslaught on the UN inspectors:

"Former Iraqi scientists, military officers and contractors have provided American intelligence agencies with a portrait of Saddam Hussein's secret programs to develop and conceal chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that is starkly at odds with the findings so far of the United Nations weapons inspectors."

Al-Haideri is still in play: "Intelligence officials said that some of the most valuable information has come from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a contractor who fled Iraq in the summer of 2001. He later told American officials that chemical and biological weapons laboratories were hidden beneath hospitals and inside presidential palaces. Mr. Haideri was relocated anonymously to a small town in Virginia."

We'll leave al-Haideri in well-earned retirement and Miller heading towards her supreme triumph of April 20, 2003, relaying the allegations of chemical and bio-weapon dumps made by an unnamed Iraqi scientist she'd never met.

Alexander Cockburn is coeditor of The Politics of Anti-Semitism, and the author of The Golden Age is In Us (Verso, 1995) and 5 Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond (Verso, 2000) with Jeffrey St. Clair. Cockburn and St. Clair are the editors of CounterPunch, where this article first appeared.

Jailing Judith Miller – One Step Toward Liberating the Press

I made up my mind last week to seek out journalistic assessments of Judith Miller’s journalism. Knowing little about her professional career at the New York Times, I cannot understand why so many people associated with the industry see her as an heroic figure. What little I know of Judith Miller leads me to see her as one of those glaring examples which gives the lie to the assertion that the Times is a left-wing rag.

Judith Miller is the paradigmatic example of a courtesan press which has traded a constitutional mandate to function with integrity for a chance to be in the inner-sanctum of corporate media who transcribe official doctrine as it is delivered from the White House. She was largely responsible for the public relations blitz before the Iraq war, in which Chalabi and his band of exiled but powerful conspirators claimed to be able to establish the truth about Iraq’s developing WMD programs and other violations of international expectations. Miller published Chalabi’s disinformation as if it were fact, a project for which she was even sent on assignment to Iraq to work on, where she alienated everyone she would work with, with her arrogance and aggressiveness and allegiance to the project of making the Bush view of Iraq into a reality. These “factual” reports from disreputable sources were in turn used by the administration during press briefings and in public statements as “factual evidence” of the existence of WMD programs and capacities. So you see, she was hooked up with the exile community desperate to regain political and economic control of Iraq, she published their spew of manufactured rumors designed in cooperation with the Bush administration to function as justification for a war effort that could not have been sold any other way. She is a propaganda lackey and a newsprint whore.

While the New York Times issued its mea culpa, Judith Miller remained arrogantly unwilling to acknowledge the way in which she compromised her craft in order to allow one branch of government to bypass the constitutional process of declaring war and the international rules intended to prevent wars of aggression. She was taken to task on none of these things.

Finally, however, Judith Miller broke the law and committed a felony offense by revealing the name of an undercover CIA agent, leaked to her and select others by a White House official intent on bullying Joe Wilson – a critic of the Bush Iraq policy and the individual who exposed the yellowcake scam – into silence. Now, Judith Miller is faced with an investigation into her role in cooperating with the White House to compromise national security by outing an agent who happened to be married to an outspoken member of their opposition.

I saw Judith Miller and a host of others with legal and journalistic perspectives on her situation on C-SPAN, although I caught very little of it and didn’t see her defend herself entirely. However, here is her argument as I understand it.

P1: The press has a Constitutional responsibility to report political developments which are kept from public view and thus would not be known to the public otherwise.

P2: A significant aspect of the press’ ability to perform its Constitutional role depends on the right of the journalist to make use of anonymous sources.

P3: By being forced to choose between revealing the source of the leak or going to jail, Miller’s case exemplifies an unconstitutional restriction on the freedom of the press.

P4: The press must have immunity from such legal investigations in order to perform their constitutional function of providing a check on State secrecy in the public interest.

C: Judith Miller should not be forced to reveal her source, nor should she go to jail, nor should she be the focus of a legal probe into a felony offense.

How any of the lawyers and journalists at the table managed to keep a straight face, I cannot say. And yet, while Miller tried desperately to hammer in the third nail on the cross of her own martyrdom, they quibbled over the history of constitutional interpretation and alternative explanations for why Miller is a target. The whole affair might have just as well been a public relations event staged by the White House, for all the cross-examination Miller received. In fact, she was unanimously declared the hero of the journalists and her martyrdom celebrated as professional integrity.

Here is the case for sending Judith Miller to jail for refusing to reveal her sources as a defense of the Constitutional provision for a free press.

P1: There is a distinction between a free press that monitors the state on behalf of its citizens and a press that is corporate-owned and cooperates with political factions on behalf of advancing one agenda over another.

P2: The press does not have a constitutional right to print any information whether true or false without being responsible for the credibility of the information.

P3: The press has the responsibility to check the power of the state against the citizens by monitoring the state and passing along news information to its readers. This does not equal a right to commit what would otherwise be considered a felony offense on the basis of journalistic privilege.

P4: In the case of corporate media in collusion to publish disinformation about potential threats to national security, there is a clear violation of the constitutional provision for the ‘freedom’ of the press, and we are left with a propaganda mechanism.

P5: In the event that an individual representative or association of the media industry performs a propaganda function on behalf of the state, they are legally accountable for their activities. In the case of a national security violation, the individual or association has committed a crime, and stands without constitutional immunity.

P6: In the event that the representative of the media refuses to cooperate with the inquiry into felony activity, he or she stands in contempt of court and must accept the consequences that obtain with any attempt to obstruct the judicial process. Jail time may be recommended.

C: By publishing propaganda on behalf of an administration deliberately deceiving the public about the reasons for war and its implications, Judith Miller compromised her Constitutional responsibility to check the power of the state. She participated in a politically-motivated felony that compromised national security. She can claim no journalistic privilege and cannot be held above the law as a defense of this privilege.

To this Miller responds, "we are only as good as our sources." Bullshit. From one side of her mouth, she has tried to invoke the privilege of immunity based on a responsibility to expose governmental impropriety. Out of the other side of her mouth, she foists responsibility for the journalistic process onto somebody else, and explicitly acknowledged the role of the courtesan press in reporting the official Bush administration "talking points" uncritically, without investigation into their credibility. She is just the mouthpeice, you see, and not accountable for what she does in the name of the public interest.

But here’s the part that really violates my sense of moral justice and political integrity: Judith Miller passionately portrays herself as the victim, who must unfairly sacrifice her life so that her profession is not compromised. Her self-pity and indignation are offensive to the principled tradition of American civil disobedience. Put aside for one moment the question of whether she is or is not guilty of committing a felony. The philosophy of civil disobedience describes rule-breaking as the process of rule-testing in consequentialist terms, including the role of legal punishment for disobedience to laws which are possibly unjust. So, Thoreau accepts jail in exchange for refusing to send taxes to support the war with Mexico, and he says that the place for free individuals living under state tyranny is in jail. Unjust laws do not get changed unless there is meaningful resistance, and such resistance may overwhelm the institutions designed to deal with such matters and force a revision of the law. If Judith Miller really believed in her innocence, accepting jail time to preserve her journalistic integrity might not be as traumatic as it clearly is for her. She is instead on the brink of tears, more worried about herself and trying to prove that she should not be accountable for a crime having been committed, all the while unconcerned with the well-being of the agent and possibly agents she endangered. She is even less worried about the hypocrisy of claiming journalistic immunity for compromising national security, while collaborating on a propaganda campaign to pass off the neo-cons’ war as necessary in the name of national security.

She claims the press will fail its obligation to the public if she is not protected by immunity for journalists to report freely what they learn from unnamed sources. She ignores the fact that the press DID fail when it published a public relations campaign concocted by the exiled Iraqi corporate class and the Bush administration as factual proof of an immanent threat to national security. The time for the press to make good on its Constitutional responsibility to check the power of the state came when this administration used all means at its disposal to pull us into a war which was illegal nationally and internationally, and instead she aided and abetted this covert neo-conservative plot by turning herself into an instrument of propaganda.

She should resign her post at the NYT, and she should go to jail if she continues to refuse to reveal the name of the leaker. If all such propagandists who commit felonies and violate the public trust provided for by the constitution were held to account, perhaps we might come closer to realizing the freedom of the press in practice.

ELECTION 2004: Bush Inauguration Heralds the Return of Savage Capitalism


The 2004 election has been a traumatic experience for those who have invested their passions in opposing the Bush administration. Curiously, it is something that I anticipated strictly intellectually as one possible outcome among many, but even at the time I knew that I wouldn’t be able to fully understand how jarring and numbing a Bush victory would be until it actually happened. The effect of this election on thinking citizens who generally oppose the insane, cutthroat policies and methodology of the Neo-Conservatives and their corporate and religious allies is much like the depressed hush that fell over the country after 9/11. Instantly Bush was given an institutional mandate to do as he pleased, no matter how drastic and radical the implications. We were supposed to shut up, and this was evidenced by the fact that, once the left and its allies began to speak out against the war, the patriot act, tax cuts for the wealthy and job losses for the working poor, underfunding of social programs, etc., we were told any number of things by those who prefer to see crises as political blank checks rather than problems that require the democratic process for clarification and resolution. In all, these injunctions were really nothing more than less than polite demands for our complicitous silence:

1) We’re at war – the president is the commander in chief. He has the right and responsibility to lead.
2) We’ve just come through a recession, you can’t expect us to meet some ideal policy standard when we face so many challenges all at once.
3) If you criticize the president, you do so in front of our enemies. Any sign of division or weakness will invite more attacks.

And so on and so forth. But the voices of resistance grew, came together and in the spring of 2004 it looked like we had a serious chance of throwing the rascals out. We realized that half the country was fed up with the corporate whoring, the reckless warmongering in the interest of the market rather than national security, the false adolescent machismo, the unwillingness to allow multiple perspectives on our approach to our problems and our understanding of the common good.

I think it is impossible to tell who would have won the state of Ohio this year if there had been voting resources available in African-American and heavily democratic districts, as there were in Republican and rural districts. Statistically, democratic districts were more likely to fail to provide access to the voting procedure (in numbers of ways) than their republican/conservative counterpart districts. What the Bush administration learned from the 2000 election was to WAIT to certify election results until it was clear that enough folks had been prevented from casting ballots; thus there would be no troublesome ghost of Katharine Harris to contend with.

Bush was quick to interpret the results as an automatic mandate, in which he accumulated what he refers to ask “political capital” for the spending. This response was unnerving and insulting, because it was a ruthless attempt to exert hermeneutic control over the democratic process. Bush gave the executive finger to the possibility of a democratic debate about the election's significance and implications. The other, more accurate view of the Bush victory is that he obtained a slight statistical majority overall, which may well account for nothing when voting irregularities factor in. In other words, Bush was quick to describe the democratic decision-making process in overly-abstracted terms borrow from classical liberal economic theory to deny a more unsettling reality. In one sense, this election must be seen as being wholly arbitrary from the perspective of popular sovereignty. We have not given Bush a mandate, and the homo economicus model of political power is inappropriate if it is to represent the workings of a democracy.

In another, more interesting sense, the election was NOT arbitrary if viewed from the perspective of state capitalism. When I was in my early twenties, I began reading Marx. I didn’t have a sophisticated view of historical materialism and I imagine I seemed rather ideological at times. I also did not understand that the decline of communism was not the proof of capitalism’s superiority but represented a transition point in its development as a single, irrational and deeply conflicted world system. Marx’s view of the dialectical relationship between the state and the economy seemed one dimensional to many of the people I talked with. In the decade or so since then, I have seen this so-called naïve and implausible view of liberal democracy as state capitalism crystallize in real-world economic and political developments. Much of it has been Machiavellian: so autocratic. I am disturbed by the increasingly quasi-fascist actions of right-wing politicians and the right-wing political culture. Fascism assimilates a corporate ideology and rule by the rich with cultural backlash. This unholy sort of allegiance between the powerbroker organizations of old, rotting ruling classes is ironic and powerful. In effect, the classes most negatively impacted by the centralization of economic and political resources can be made to scream for their own disenfranchisement if it comes with the opportunity to legislate social morality to others whom they shun as sinful or lewd or whatever.

In part, this is depressing because the culture of right-wing social politics is not consistent. Thus, people enforce biases through political choices that do not represent a thorough, thoughtful – and most importantly coherent - approach to political problems and values. As Howard Dean notes, the working poor who are harmed in real terms by the policies of the Republican party will vote for them anyway, as an expression of their views on abortion, guns, god and gays. For example, conservatives want to protect the sanctity of marriage by preventing gays and lesbians from marrying. But conservatives generally believe that marriage has a positive effect on people and is worth encouraging on a widespread level. In fact, if conservatives really believed in marriage, they would be having a sophisticated debate with themselves and with those on the left about whether it is appropriate to ENCOURAGE marriage in the gay and lesbian community – people whom they have objected to historically on the basis of promiscuity and lack of personal commitment to relationships. But the anti-gay marriage impulse isn’t about marriage, it’s about preventing the implications of gay marriage: that there is somehow something “okay” about gay sex. Republican ideology capitalizes on the fact that we are a homophobic culture, and deeply unhappy with what we perceive as being forced to tolerate the open practice of same-sex relationships.

Anti-abortion groups are another excellent example. At a time when conservatives could barely show less concern for the long-term well-being of future generations, they insist not only that abortion be made inaccessible through lack of education and funding, but that birth control education be restricted as well. How to make sense of this? The right is not pro-life, they are pro-birth. They don’t value life in any coherent way, but they want to make sure that it is impossible for people to experience the enlarged sphere of choice that resulted from the sexual revolution without having to pay the price, to experience sexual freedom without consequences. It is inherently an attempt to control the sexual autonomy of women according to a puritan morality of punishment. Forcing pro-birth policies on the nation without regard for the social complexity of reproduction in general gives the lie to the Orwellian term “culture of life.” Reasserting puritannical control over sexuality is the right-wing Scarlet Letter. In both the cases of abortion and gay marriage, the rhetorical religiosity of valuing life and marriage is a shallow disguise for a regressive, backward-looking social morality that is anti-sex.

The religious right is problematic for these reasons. What is clear, however, is that this group is politically organized and controlled from above. The Robertsons, Reeds and Roves have shown how effectively one political viewpoint can be instilled from the pulpit, eventually trickling down to the election booth. Catholics are told they should not vote for any candidate who endorses pro-choice policies. They are NOT told they should not vote for any candidate who endorses the death penalty, the war (which the Pope condemns) or the flagrant refusal to heed the commandments of the sermon on the mount, in which Jesus tells his followers to care for and put first those who are at the mercy of the powerful and the wealthy. The major media portray the right as having cornered the market on the sphere of values, and the left – even when they are given an opportunity to exploit failures of the right – never manage to do much to dismantle this distorted political disposition. In large measure, this occurs because they share the most basic problems of the Republican party (endemic to a two-party system of rule by elites), and because they have allowed the Republicans to define the terms of all the relevant debates.

So, to cash out my reflections on the 2004 election, I find myself and everyone around me in a sort of deep depression because the political life of the United States is irrational and undemocratic. It is demoralizing enough to know that the political process is thoroughly corrupted by right-wing corporate jackals and democrats who have sold out to said jackals for a comparative sliver-share of the loot. It is more demoralizing to know that this could not have happened so seamlessly unless their was enough complicity in the electorate, such that more people would vote to reinstate an administration who would proceed to strip them of their sovereignty, their economic security, the protections of the law and the welfare state.

I saw this coming months and months ago. I knew that the Bush administration had every reason to be scared shitless no matter WHAT democrat they ended up facing, but I could not underestimate their Orwellian skill promoting doublethink, or their institutional willingness to suppress the vote. I had the sense that this election was a test of sorts. For one thing, it was a test whether we had any democratic legitimacy: whether an active, informed citizenry could make use of the political franchise to clarify their problems, their interests, their commitments, hold the administration accountable to these, and kick the rascals out if necessary. If we failed at this, I worried about the consequences for the next four years. This branch of the radical right came into office improbably, via a swindle. If they remain, they will rework the political, legal and economic structures so as to consolidate their hold on power. Before the election, I became depressed because there were as many reasons to think Bush would win as there were to think Kerry outperformed him.

Woody Allen often has his most autobiographical characters pivot on the axis of the personal and political domains. Each is a refuge from the other. When politics become irrational, interpersonal relationships are more significant. When our private lives are imploding, we turn our attention toward the problems of society and the world in general. Personally, I cannot separate these things, and I think this unavoidable fusion is something Woody intends us to explore. I shut myself off to the part of my life that is wrapped up in politics and economics and all such things, and focused entirely on my private life. I’m in love and my relationship with Bill is more and more serious as the months go by. This is the first time I have written in months.

John Bellamy Foster told me that he stopped reading Marx when the Vietnam war started because he was depressed about it. He began reading Schopenhauer for the abstract philosophical concern with the suffering human condition and its solution. I asked him why he came back to Marxism and he said he had no choice – his friends began dying in the war. I think this is what will happen to many of us who opposed Bush in the last election.

Think of what we will witness in the next few years. The war will not cease because the occupation will be complicated by the process of nation-building. We will be asked to keep paying more and more, while a military stretched thin will be presented with the imperative to engage Iran, possibly Syria, and North Korea as new threats, this time REALLY equipped with weapons of mass destruction. China’s economy will grow as the European Union solidifies itself, the euro will replace the dollar as the dominant currency. The prospect of investing in the United States will be less appealing when investors finally acknowledge us as a debtor nation, no longer the dominant economic power, with a looming constellation of social crises just ahead. The last vestiges of the New Deal will be stripped at a time when our population is growing older, sicker and poorer. Legal protections for citizens against industry will be restricted, while restrictions on corporate activity will be loosened. Coffers for social services (once understood as the public good and thus a political responsibility) will be raided to finance tax cuts (those nasty obstacles to limitless accumulation of capital), and to encourage business growth according to the “risk-reward” model, just another name for trickle down economics. The world will call on us to answer for our disproportionate pollution, consumption of resources and capitalist war-mongering at a time when human crises have global proportions. I could go on and on.

Ultimately, I am pulled out of my depressed state about a second Bush term by my ambivalence about liberal democracy as state capitalism, especially at a time when capitalism has outlasted communism to become the dominant, totalizing world-system. The right-wing represents the most anti-democratic aspects of our political and economic culture and institutions. Rather than expand political power by diffusing it to the electorate, they consolidate it in the institutions of elite power. The bourgeoisie manages the state, and the employed classes bear the cost of their goal of amassing limitless wealth. In order to privatize social security, one-third of the current resources going into the system will be handed over to Wall Street investors in the name of “personal accounts.” In order to finance the diversion, there will be massive benefit cuts. This will not work out well as we collectively approach sickness and old age. Nevertheless, the Bush administration will put its courtesan congress and media apparatus to work to enact the required legislation and conduct a corresponding media blitz of disinformation of world-historical proportions. They may well get away with it. But even the political ideology of right-wing culture is not immune from the confrontation between the policies of this administration and our most deeply held beliefs about the responsibility of the state to support the public good.

The Bush administration is hard at work to define the public good in the most narrow terms possible: as the process of wealth creation by private ownership and the promise of capital accumulation. A very von Hayek way of looking at a sustainable, well-organized society. But we have lived for seven decades with the New Deal. We may not be politically adept enough to recognize the way in which it has been systematically dismantled, but we’ll feel the consequences of losing it. And when this happens, people will not accept massive tax cuts for the rich so easily when they no longer have enough money to survive and must think of their eventual retirement. They will not accept massive war budgets when social programs begin disappearing. Treating corporations as if they are the mechanism of meeting the interest of the public will not cohere with the abject disregard the right will show for the public good in practice. They will not, I truly believe, accept the strategy of feeding the sparrows through the horses.

In fact, I think they know this. I don’t think they’re deluded, they’re too effective at implementing their goals to be delusional. They are morally depraved, but their cunning Machiavellian cynicism is the product of an institutional learning process that has shaped their psychology. I believe that the elite classes (and there are many, often battling one another for political and economic supremacy but generally sharing the same anti-democratic worldview) are consolidating power in various ways, with the knowledge that the conflicts of the future will revolve around struggles for basic resources, at the international as well as the domestic level. Those homeland security dollars are being used under our very noses to eradicate all forms of dissent, to widen the institutional barriers between the public who believes it is entitled to the democratic franchise, and the brokers of power.

As Hitler rose to power in Germany, the leftist intellectuals of the Frankfurt School had to seriously question why the economic life of society had become regressive in the face of historically unprecedented means for liberation. One problem they identified was the development of mechanisms to address the social function of the economy. So, working classes would accept the reality of wealth disparity if, for example, they were paid enough to survive and retained certain other benefits. This is the capitalism we are all vaguely familiar with – the New Deal form of liberal democracy that staves off the crises of capitalism by addressing, if meagerly, the negative costs this economic form passes on to society. Before, under the Victorian era of robber barons and starving paupers, the position of the rich was far less comfortable, because savage capitalism provokes social unrest.

The New Deal may well be a thing of the past, and we seem to be beginning a transition back to the Victorian-era distribution pattern of absolute affluence and absolute poverty. But this model isn’t sustainable and will collapse eventually. This time, the affluent classes appear to be willing to allow the conflicts inherent in the model to crystallize into protracted, irreducible human crises rather than give up a measure of wealth to keep the crises at bay. But the New Deal model wasn’t alleviating the basic contradictions between wealth and power, it was allowing them to persist as we gradually became more and more overextended. As the crises unfold, the public’s affinity for right-wing ideology will collide with its material conditions and the deep faith in democracy inherited from a history which has never made good on the democratic promise. This may be the only way of culling our conservative fellow citizens out of the social morality which masks the excesses of conservative politics and economics. American adolescence is a national phenomenon – and the tribulations of adolescent psychology are rooted in the subject whose limitations indicate that a pre-existing social contract must be fleshed out and understood in order for one to be truly autonomous and responsible. It may require a drunken fratboy driving the country into a ditch before there is a general realization that right-wing political ideology is bunk. But we must realize it is bunk if we want to reinvigorate a healthy democratic culture. This is why, by the way, Howard Dean is the future of the Democratic party, if they are wise enough to realize it and principled enough to practice accordingly. The democrats will never win if they pass themselves off to us as sharing the political culture of the Republicans. The Republican ideology is too firmly allied, institutionally and psychologically, in the political platform of the right. Instead of selling out to it, it should be broken by exploiting its weaknesses in the face of real-world problems.

If Bush has his way, a system in decline will decline at an exponential rate. We may yet have some say in determining how things look on the other side. But to do this, we need to work together to bring intellectual, political and economic pressures on the system. We need not just to organize but to practice sustained, active resistance. I don’t know yet what resistance will develop out of our collective disappointment with the failure of our democracy and the inability of our economy to perform the social function we would have it perform. We may find that soon the Bush administration has one muther of a fight on its hands. Even Nixon could be made to resign, and if the current Republican leadership is as ruthless in their efforts to purge dissent as he was, they may loose whatever political capital they believe they have. So, while we are collectively grieving and managing our depression, let’s not forget to look for the development of organized resistance and begin to work actively for that end. History, social well-being and democracy are on our side – we need to start fighting in earnest for a “structural transformation of the public sphere.”

A Nice Email Going Around

This has been making the rounds in various forms:

Dear President:Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from you and understand why you would propose and support a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage. As you said, "in the eyes of God marriage is based between a man and a woman." I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination... End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Laws and how to follow them:1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanness - Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2. clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?

6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination - Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there 'degrees' of abomination?

7. Lev. 21: 20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?

8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though Lev. 19:27 expressly forbids this. How should they die?

9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev. 24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Period of Mourning Over

Actually, it has been more like a period of rage and disbelief (even though I didn't like Kerry/Edwards), but I am back in whatever condition. And Lisa, what are you up to? I noticed you had a script draft up here for less than a day and then it disappeared, so I know you still breathe . . .

I am not moving to Canada, I have decided. I would rather stay here and be as much of an irritant as I possibly can be. My current focus is going to be on the untennability (is that a word?) of mixing religion and legislation, something practically no one in the state of Montana seems to think is problematic. And I'm not stopping with the fabulous array of confrontational bumper stickers I've purchased lately, either.

On the home front, I have a new obstacle, and his name is Roy, age: 2 months. Roy is a ruddy, male, Abyssinian jerk I got last weekend in Laramie, Wyoming. He's not a fan of road trips. And he is a freaking handful, although he's cute and cuddly when he wants to be.

Good things on the horizon: the title story of my MFA thesis finally comes out in print in The Flint Hills Review before the end of the year, and I got tickets to the Scissor Sisters' Seattle concert for late January (catch them on Saturday Night Live tonight!).

The mountains are lovely, and the ski bums are stoned and preoccupied.

More soon.

SIGH

At the University of Michigan last week, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh was asked why so many Americans remain loyal to the president. He replied: “One thing you have to face up to is the fact that there are roughly 70 million people in America who do not believe in evolution — and those are Bush supporters.”
~~~~~~~~
Let's hope this doesn't portend a Bush win.

Tonight on the CBS Evening News Bob Sheaffer said the biggest force in this election will likely be young people: "They all have cell phones, and it's nearly impossible to poll them."

God and Sex

From today's The New York Times

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: October 23, 2004

"So when God made homosexuals who fall deeply, achingly in love with each other, did he goof?

"That seems implicit in the measures opposing gay marriage on the ballots of 11 states. All may pass; Oregon is the only state where the outcome seems uncertain.

"Over the last couple of months, I've been researching the question of how the Bible regards homosexuality. Social liberals tend to be uncomfortable with religious arguments, but that is the ground on which political battles are often decided in America - as when a Texas governor, Miriam 'Ma' Ferguson, barred the teaching of foreign languages about 80 years ago, saying, 'If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for us.'

"I think it's presumptuous of conservatives to assume that God is on their side. But since Americans are twice as likely to believe in the Devil as in evolution, I also think it's stupid of liberals to forfeit the religious field.

"Some scholars, like Daniel Helminiak, author of What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality, argue that the Bible is not anti-gay. I don't really buy that.

"It's true that the story of Sodom is treated by both modern scholars and by ancient Ezekiel as about hospitality, rather than homosexuality. In Sodom, Lot puts up two male strangers for the night. When a lustful mob demands they be handed over, Lot offers his two virgin daughters instead. After some further unpleasantness, God destroys Sodom. As Mark Jordan notes in The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, it was only in the 11th century that theologians began to condemn homosexuality as sodomy.

"In fact, the most obvious lesson from Sodom is that when you're attacked by an angry mob, the holy thing to do is to offer up your virgin daughters." [...]

Read the entire essay here. [Requires a free, one-time registration]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Unfortunate Tide of CA-96 in Montana and Beyond

I woke up to the bleating of my cell phone today. It was Tina, a woman with whom I worked a few months back in an attempt to peruade Montana voters exiting polling places to not sign petitions by the religious right in support of proposed Montana State Constitutional Amendment 96--writing into our state Constitution a ban on homosexual marriage when homosexual marriage is already illegal here. Tina is to be on the radio today at 12:30 to discuss her anti CA-96 stance. It's a brave move in Bozeman, and in Montana in general, where she can surely expect a wave of phoned-in hatred. CA-96 is very likely to pass.

Fewer people outside of Montana know that our state's Constitution was written (entirely re-written, actually) in 1972. That's right. And before you assume that this must mean our state Constitution is already a wreck I tell you it is anything but; I would argue that it is one of the most lyrical and forward-thinking state Constitutions in the whole of the United States (there is an excellent documentary on its creation available from Montana PBS)--it includes some of the first language of committed environmental protection and respect for the essential human rights of its citizenry, not just a select few. And therein lies my anger with the hysterical, narrow-minded, morally righteous proponents of CA-96: the idea that a state Constitution should encompass exclusionary clauses it has no need to include, thereby rendering a document meant to lay down protection for all a sudden moral finger of judgment (on taxpaying citizens!).

Just why it is that there seems to be this dovetailing of moral righteousness and narrow fields of vision at this time in our history is not hard to figure out, so I don't feel the need to wax on about that.

The Bozeman Daily Chronicle not only came out [pun intended] against CA-96 this week, it also rather shockingly endorsed Sen. John Kerry's bid for president. And this is a conservative newspaper (not, however, if you listen to the hysterical Republican crowd in town, mind you). Will it sway the squeakiest wheels? Likely not. For voting in 2004 appears to rely less and less on good sense, fair play, and what is best for the state and more and more on polarizations and moral civil war. No longer can we agree to disagree: the religious right has made it clear--not only are you either with us or against us; if you are against us you are (and should be, they feel) GOING TO HELL.

Fine with some. I've certainly been directed toward the fiery pits a time or two since moving here. But I have this concern about just how much of a state, just how much of a country we'll have left at this rate. Don't take this sentiment for an assumption of doom, but there is this slippery slope about which we should all be worried, isn't there?

The notions that I grew up thinking were obvious--that this country's forefathers were fleeing religious oppression, that Americans should be free to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that the religious beliefs of a group must not dictate the religious beliefs of all and must not be the basis for legislation--are now so utterly wrongly called into question that feeling ill at ease is not so hard to fathom. But what to do? I try to imagine a Kerry victory and am saddened and frustrated at the extra time it will take just to attempt to heal the wounds in this country salted by our present regime. Time that could have been better spent ethically addressing foreign policy as well as domestic issues that do not divide but empower all of us--Americans and citizens of the world. We have at present a regime put into place by the courts that has allowed the Peter Pan of Unaccountability to bloat our national ego when we should most be ashamed. It will take an army of patient, far-sighted ADULTS to clean up this mess.

But we must.

Which brings me back to CA-96 and similar initaitives across this country. In what way or ways has any LGBT couple ever threatened heterosexual marriage if not by the fear engendered in those with narrow fields of vision and experience? It really is that simple. But Americans also seem terrified of admitting the obvious--and the rest of the world sees it so plainly--Americans are dumb. That, too, is also that simple. I just want to know what they're really afraid of.

As I stroll down Main Street, I can tell you, I am thinking more and more about approaching heterosexual couples for the expressed purpose of threatening the sanctity of their relationships, especially as God loves them in such special ways, and I, as an agent of the devil, would not otherwise be doing my duty.

We need some internal diplomacy just as we need some time for mess-cleaning and healing as a nation. As my mother rightly commented whenever I had to clean my room as a child--it has to get a little worse before it gets better. Hold your nerve, America.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Lisa!

I emailed that Bush photo to you some time ago as well as a short piece from Salon about the flap. Believe it or not I have a close friend who works at a very conservative paper in D.C., and that is the person who sent the photo to me the same day you inquired.

I am trying to stay optimistic for our country these days.

Two weeks ago or a bit more I broke up with the guy I'd been dating, which was not easy but which I recognized had to be done for myself. I took a bit of a break from going out on the town, and I think that has helped a great deal. I am becoming a believer in good karma, too.

I have met a wonderful guy who, for a change, is older than me by just a little bit. We shall see where it goes, but I am absolutely smitten and have spent the past week just embarrassingly happy. I send all good vibes your way, too! Smooch!

ERIC!

So Derrida has passed away - i expect pretentious Continental philosophy departments all over the US to shut down for a week in honor of his death... I suppose my only resentment with Derrida himself (versus the people who merely try to SPEAK about him) concerns his book about Marx. Historical Materialism was not his bag, which is too bad because his philosophy could have used a heavy dose of it.

anyway, do me a favor and find the photo of Bush bending over, taken from behind at the first debate. It looks as though he has a rectangular box under his jacket - suggesting he was wired and receiving "help" from someone. This would explain why he said "Now let me finish" when no one was interrupting him and he still had plenty of time to finish his comment. Let's see if we can post it here. Kisses!

Jacques Derrida: 1930-2004

I have mixed emotions about this but may write more later. In the meantime, a piece on his life and work and death from The New York Times today. (Requires a free, one time registration)

E.L. DOCTOROW WRITES ON BUSH

I fault this President for not knowing what death is.He does not suffer the death of our twenty one year olds who wanted to be what they could be.On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die.He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this President does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.

They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and father or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life.... they come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is no permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq. How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsterswho have fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.

Yet this President knew it would be difficult forAmericans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mindfor only one thing --- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything.

You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of he chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills --- it is amazing for how many people inthis country this President does not feel. But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class. And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.

But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over he world most of the time. But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people thatAmerica was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.

The President we get is the country we get. With each President the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleablenational soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail: How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this President? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME

I think astrology is for the willfully weak, but i have never managed to come across one of those "if today is your birthday" horoscopes. I found one, it seems to be good enough for government work. (repost from last year)

Happy Birthday, Libra! Intelligent and capable, you can become a brilliant shining star, provided you're able to get started and stay the course. Preparation and attention to detail are likely to be of paramount importance to you, but may also get out of hand. Because you have an exacting eye, you feel compelled to make revisions in existing situations. This could continue until a deadline occurs or others simply lose patience and leave. Decision-making is often an intricate tarantella that leaves you and those nearest you emotionally and physically exhausted. Your good taste helps you recognize real value, beauty and talent when you see it. But since you don't always trust your instincts, every possibility must be processed through your complex maze of consciousness. Relationships are a major challenge, probably because you're very restless. Because of your edgy, often nervous sensibility, you don't do well in predictable, routine-infested settings. You feel like Mount Aetna on a bad day. A rebel who masquerades as a team player or average Joe, you may leave jobs, relationships, or locales very abruptly. As soon as you feel more like a captive than a free agent, a powerful urge to wander takes over. In an ideal scenario, you'd have others in your life when you wanted or needed them. You don't like giving up your autonomy for the sake of a relationship - although many of you are able to manage this for a period of time. Competitive and farsighted, you're the proverbial hare in a sea of turtles. You may have difficulty being patient with others' slow drip mentality, particularly since your brain is exceptionally active. Unlike most Librans, you're not necessarily looking for a lifetime mate or long term career. You know yourself better than that. Most of the time, the people in your immediate perimeter reflect your current state of mind - not necessarily a long-term commitment. You will not tolerate authority figures without occasionally throwing globs of dust in their eyes. No one tells you what to do - and if they do, you're gone. Many of you had a decidedly un-Leave It To Beaver childhood, as a result. If parents or teachers clamped down, you generally retaliated. Since you are so bright and capable, it seems logical that you would achieve success and stability. If you're able to discipline yourself and accept the boring along with the exciting, you are very likely to find yourself on top. But if almost paralyzing perfectionism, self doubt, or extreme restlessness prevails, you may find yourself "starting over" again and again. Like all Librans, you must drink lots of water, hydrate your skin and hair, and eat simple, healthy food. Fad diets and fasts create short-term results and inevitable disappointment. Born today are Tom Sizemore, Andrew "Dice" Clay, Bryant Gumbel, Erika Eleniak, Anita Ekberg, Patricia Hodge, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ian McShane, Emily Lloyd, Jean-Luc Ponty, Mike Post, Jill Whelan, Lech Walesa, Cervantes, Madeline Kahn, Stanley Kramer, Horatio Nelson, Les Claypool, Sebastian Coe, Manuel Fernandez, Chris Mims, Derrick Oden, Mike Pinera, Dave Silvestri, Steve Tesich, Gene Autry, Enrico Fermi, and Natasha Gregson Wagner.

Yes, I Think Michael Moore is Generally a Nitwit, But He's Our Nitwit

9/22/04

Dear Mr. Bush,
I am so confused. Where exactly do you stand on the issue of Iraq? You, yourDad, Rummy, Condi, Colin, and Wolfie -- you have all changed your minds somany times, I am out of breath just trying to keep up with you!Which of these 10 positions that you, your family and your cabinet havetaken over the years represents your CURRENT thinking:1983-88: WE LOVE SADDAM. On December 19, 1983, Donald Rumsfeld was sent byyour dad and Mr. Reagan to go and have a friendly meeting with SaddamHussein, the dictator of Iraq. Rummy looked so happy in the picture. Justtwelve days after this visit, Saddam gassed thousands of Iranian troops.Your dad and Rummy seemed pretty happy with the results because The Donald R went back to have another chummy hang-out with Saddams right-hand man,Tariq Aziz, just four months later. All of this resulted in the U.S.providing credits and loans to Iraq that enabled Saddam to buy billions ofdollars worth of weapons and chemical agents. The Washington Post reportedthat your dad and Reagan let it be known to their Arab allies that theReagan/Bush administration wanted Iraq to win its war with Iran and anyonewho helped Saddam accomplish this was a friend of ours.1990: WE HATE SADDAM. In 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait, your dad and hisdefense secretary, Dick Cheney, decided they didn't like Saddam anymore sothey attacked Iraq and returned Kuwait to its rightful dictators.1991: WE WANT SADDAM TO LIVE. After the war, your dad and Cheney and ColinPowell told the Shiites to rise up against Saddam and we would support them.So they rose up. But then we changed our minds. When the Shiites rose upagainst Saddam, the Bush inner circle changed its mind and decided NOT tohelp the Shiites. Thus, they were massacred by Saddam.1998: WE WANT SADDAM TO DIE. In 1998, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others, aspart of the Project for the New American Century, wrote an open letter toPresident Clinton insisting he invade and topple Saddam Hussein.2000: WE DON'T BELIEVE IN WAR AND NATION BUILDING. Just three years later,during your debate with Al Gore in the 2000 election, when asked by themoderator Jim Lehrer where you stood when it came to using force for regimechange, you turned out to be a downright pacifist:I--I would take the use of force very seriously. I would be guarded in myapproach. I don't think we can be all things to all people in the world. Ithink we've got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The vicepresident [Al Gore] and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. Hebelieves in nation building. I--I would be very careful about using ourtroops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fightand win war and, therefore, prevent war from happening in the first place.And so I take my--I take my--my responsibility seriously. --October 3, 20002001 (early): WE DON'T BELIEVE SADDAM IS A THREAT. When you took office in2001, you sent your Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and your NationalSecurity Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, in front of the cameras to assure theAmerican people they need not worry about Saddam Hussein. Here is what theysaid:Powell: We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly belooking at those sanctions to make sure that they have directed that purpose That purpose is every bit as important now as it was 10 years ago when webegan it. And frankly, they have worked. He has not developed anysignificant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He isunable to project conventional power against his neighbors. --February 24,2001Rice: But in terms of Saddam Hussein being there, let's remember that hiscountry is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of hiscountry. We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have notbeen rebuilt. --July 29, 20012001 (late): WE BELIEVE SADDAM IS GOING TO KILL US! Just a few months later,in the hours and days after the 9/11 tragedy, you had no interest in goingafter Osama bin Laden. You wanted only to bomb Iraq and kill Saddam and youthen told all of America we were under imminent threat because weapons ofmass destruction were coming our way. You led the American people to believethat Saddam had something to do with Osama and 9/11. Without the UN'ssanction, you broke international law and invaded Iraq.2003: WE DONT BELIEVE SADDAM IS GOING TO KILL US. After no WMDs were found,you changed your mind about why you said we needed to invade, coming up witha brand new after-the-fact reason -- we started this war so we could haveregime change, liberate Iraq and give the Iraqis democracy!2003: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! Yes, everyone saw you say it -- in costume, noless!2004: OOPS. MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED! Now you call the Iraq invasion acatastrophic "success"; that's what you called it this month. Over a thousand U.S. soldiers have died, Iraq is in a state of total chaos where no one issafe, and you have no clue how to get us out of there.Mr. Bush, please tell us -- when will you change your mind again?I know you hate the words "flip" and "flop, so I won't use them both on youIn fact, I'll use just one: Flop. That is what you are. A huge, colossalflop. The war is a flop, your advisors and the "intelligence"; they gave you is a flop, and now we are all a flop to the rest of the world. Flop. Flop.Flop.And you have the audacity to criticize John Kerry with what you call themany "positions"; he has taken on Iraq. By my count, he has taken only one: He believed you. That was his position. You told him and the rest of congressthat Saddam had WMDs. So he -- and the vast majority of Americans, eventhose who didn't vote for you -- believed you. You see, Americans, like JohnKerry, want to live in a country where they can believe their President.That was the one, single position John Kerry took. He didn't support the war he supported YOU. And YOU let him and this great country down. And that iswhy tens of millions can't wait to get to the polls on Election Day -- toremove a major, catastrophic flop from our dear, beloved White House -- tostop all the flipping you and your men have done, flipping us and the restof the world off.
We can't take another minute of it.
Yours,
Michael Moore

So glad you're back, Sweetie!

My recent life in a nutshell version: I've been dating a nice, sort of geeky guy named Greg for a couple of months now. We're planning on taking an international trip together in February when we can both get some time off--either Egypt, Malta, or Argentina. We'll see. I was in Moscow, ID about a month ago, visiting a friend, and I got a big tattoo on my belly and right side including the Kansas state motto on it, of which I'm quite proud. In November I will be driving down to Laramie, WY to greet and take home an Abyssinian kitten, a male, who was just born this week at his cattery. No ideas on names yet, so if you think of any let me know. I hope all is well enough where you are, Bill and Evan and pets and children and garden and home. I hope there has been positive growth on all of those fronts.

I had a bad dream last night: that if things for the Bush campaign get dicey enough, there will be another 9/11-type event on US soil such that the current regime will then demand to stay in power "because it must." I hate how extra-cynical these days are making me.

Stourley - i am back. Needless to say, i had no internet for three months and i was working over 60 hours per week. So much for my summer. I just got access back today, which took forever because they sent me a new modem and everything was all fuckered up, so to speak. But i'm back and i'll be here regularly from now on.
kisses!
lisa

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091804X.shtml

Scamming the Media, Parlock Style By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t Perspective
Friday 17 September 2004

(Do take a look at the story link so you can view the pictures that really make this piece compelling)

Meet Phil Parlock. Parlock is a family man and a staunch Republican. Parlock has a very sad story to tell about how rotten Kerry supporters are. You see, they made his little girl cry.

Parlock was at a rally on Thursday to greet Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards, who was on a swing through West Virginia and Ohio. Parlock brought his three children and a Bush/Cheney sign to show support for his beloved President. According to him, a Kerry-supporting union guy wearing an IUPAT shirt ripped up the Bush sign his little girl was carrying, making her cry.

Terrible, right? A sign that our national politics have descended into these kind of brutish tactics, right? An embarrassing incident for the Kerry campaign, right? The media certainly thinks so, and has dutifully reported on the incident.

For the third time.

A report from the Charleston Daily Mail, August 27, 1996:
"The Huntington man said he was knocked to the ground by a Clinton supporter when he tried to display a sign that read 'Remember Vince Foster,' the deputy White House counsel who committed suicide in a Washington, D.C., park. His death has become the subject of much debate among Clinton opponents...Parlock said some of the crowd tried to make other anti-Clinton demonstrators feel unwelcome. He estimated that about 150 Dole supporters attended the rally, but their signs couldn't be seen for most of the rally."

A report from the Charleston Daily Mail, October 28, 2000:
"Phil Parlock didn't expect to need all 12 of the Bush-Cheney signs he and his son Louis smuggled in their socks and pockets into the rally for Vice President Al Gore. But each time they raised a sign, someone would grab it out of their hands, the two Huntington residents said. And sometimes it got physical. 'I expected some people to take our signs,' said Louis, 12. 'But I did not expect people to practically attack us.' The two said they didn't go to the Friday morning rally to start trouble."

For the third Presidential election in a row, poor Phil Parlock has been abused by terrible Democrats while trying to support the Republican candidate, and while trying to introduce his children to the art of retail politics. Is this just a string of bad luck for Phil?

I doubt it. It seems a great deal more certain that Mr. Parlock is a serial disruptor who has managed to convince the easily-duped mainstream media on three separate occasions that he was attacked by Democrats. Only a truly hard-core fanatic would pull a stunt like this, and Parlock certainly appears to fit the bill.

Note the fact that he was holding a "Remember Vince Foster" sign at the first incident in 1996. Parlock, it seems, is of that particular fringe school of thought which believes Hillary Clinton had Foster whacked as a part of her grandiose evil scheming. Believers in this particular conspiracy theory are not known for their balanced view of American politics. They see the Clinton family as a pack of remorseless murderers, and therefore feel compelled to do whatever they can to thwart them.

It appears we have a clever fellow here who has convinced the same Charleston newspaper three different times that he was victimized by Democrats at rallies. He does not seem to have any problem with involving his own children in the game, and may have even gone so far as to have one of his sons play the role of 'Democrat Attacker.'

This would be funny, in a sad sort of way, but for two things.

First, this is how campaigns get mired in utterly mindless trivialities. Instead of discussing the upswell of catastrophic violence in Iraq, we get to hear about poor Phil and his crying daughter. There are important matters to discuss, matters central to the future of the country, but media tricks like this blow the whole show off-track. That's bad.

The second reason this isn't so funny happened two weeks ago. A gathering of Republicans at the local GOP headquarters got a nasty scare when someone fired a bullet at the building. About two dozen people were there to watch the Republican Convention in New York when a single shot hit the window.

Dee Delancy of WCHS news in Charleston reported on the incident, and interviewed several people who were there. One of them was Phil Parlock, who said, "I think this is definitely, definitely an act that was by an extremist kind of thing."

Parlock was there.

This could all be a series of strange coincidences. Parlock could simply be an unlucky guy who always seems to be around when Democrats do something wretched, who took abuse in 1996, 2000 and 2004 for supporting Republicans, who happened to have the same newspaper on hand to report his story each time, and who also happened to be on the scene of a shooting incident that made Democrats look like frightening would-be assassins.

This could be a series of coincidences, but someone should take a long look at this fellow regardless. Manufacturing a few sign-ripping incidents isn't a terribly big deal. But he appears to be hell-bent on making Democrats look like thugs, and there has been a shooting incident involving him on top of everything else. The media, which may well have been repeatedly scammed by Parlock, might want to do some further checking.

Author's note: The manner in which this story came to light is a lesson in modern journalism. The mainstream fellows simply reported the Parlock perspective, but it was an intrepid band of online newshounds - bloggers Rising Hegemon and Atrios, who picked up on the work of one Rezmutt, member of the forums at DemocraticUnderground.com - who pieced together the strange coincidences surrounding these Parlock incidents. Once upon a time, stories like this would get missed. The internet has created a whole new phenomenon. If the mainstream media wants to avoid being embarrassed, they might want to think about paying attention to this brave new world of investigative journalism.

Journalism Under Fire
A speech by Bill Moyers

from TomPaine.com

Thank you for inviting me to share this occasion with you. Three months from now I will be retiring from active journalism and I cannot imagine a better turn into the home stretch than this morning with you.

My life in journalism began 54 years ago, on my 16th birthday, in the summer before my junior year in high school, when I went to work as a cub reporter for the Marshall News Messenger in the East Texas town of 20,000 where I had grown up. Early on, I got one of those lucky breaks that define a life’s course. Some of the old timers were sick or on vacation and Spencer Jones, the managing editor, assigned me to help cover the Housewives' Rebellion. Fifteen women in town refused to pay the Social Security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They argued that social security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that—here’s my favorite part—“requiring us to collect (the tax) is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage.” They hired a lawyer—Martin Dies, the former Congressman notorious for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities—but to no avail. The women wound up holding their noses and paying the tax. In the meantime the Associated Press had picked up our coverage and turned the rebellion into a national story. One day after it was all over, the managing editor called me over and pointed to the ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a “Notice to the Editor” citing one Bill Moyers and the News Messenger for the reporting we had done on the rebellion. I was hooked.

Looking back on that experience and all that followed, I often think of what Joseph Lelyveld told aspiring young journalists when he was executive editor of the New York Times . “You can never know how a life in journalism will turn out,” he said. “Decide that you want to be a scholar, a lawyer, or a doctor…and your path to the grave is pretty well laid out before you. Decide that you want to enter our rather less reputable line of work and you set off on a route that can sometimes seem to be nothing but diversions, switchbacks and a life of surprises…with the constant temptation to keep reinventing yourself.”

So I have. My path led me on to graduate school, a detour through seminary, then to LBJ’s side in Washington, and, from there, through circumstances so convulted I still haven’t figured them out, back to journalism, first at Newsday and then the big leap from print to television, to PBS and CBS and back again—just one more of those vagrant journalistic souls who, intoxicated with the moment is always looking for the next high: the lead not yet written, the picture not yet taken, the story not yet told.

It took me awhile after I left government to get my footing back in journalism. I had to learn all over again that what’s important for the journalist is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality. I’ve seen plenty of reality. Journalism took me to famine and revolution in Africa and to war in Central America; it took me to the bedside of the dying and delivery rooms of the newborn. It took me into the lives of inner-city families in Newark and working-class families in Milwaukee struggling to find their place in the new global economy. CBS News paid me richly to put in my two cents worth on just about anything that happened on a given day. As a documentary journalist I’ve explored everything from the power of money in politics to how to make a poem. I’ve investigated the abuse of power in the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals and the unanswered questions of 9/11. I’ve delved into the “Mystery of Chi” in Chinese traditional medicine as well as the miracle that empowered a one-time slave trader to write the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Journalism has been a continuing course in adult education—my own; other people paid the tuition and travel, and I’ve never really had to grow up and get a day job. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I’ve enjoyed the company of colleagues as good as they come, who kept inspiring me to try harder.

They helped me relearn another of journalism’s basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. Unless you’re willing to fight and refight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you’ve got it right, and then take hit after unfair hit accusing you of “bias,” or, these days, even a point of view, there’s no use even trying. You have to love it, and I do. I remember what Izzy Stone said about this. For years he was America’s premier independent journalist, bringing down on his head the sustained wrath of the high and mighty for publishing in his little four-page I.F. Stone’s Weekly the government’s lies and contradictions culled from the government’s own official documents. No matter how much they pummeled him, Izzy Stone said: “I have so much fun I ought to be arrested.”

That’s how I felt 25 five years ago when my colleague Sherry Jones and I produced the first documentary ever about the purchase of government favors by political action committees. When we unfurled across the Capitol grounds yard after yard of computer printouts listing campaign contributions to every member of Congress, there was a loud outcry, including from several politicians who had been allies just a few years earlier when I worked at the White House.

I loved it, too, when Sherry and I connected the dots behind the Iran-Contra scandal. That documentary sent the right-wing posse in Washington running indignantly to congressional supporters of public television who accused PBS of committing— horrors!— journalism right on the air.

While everyone else was all over the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio, Sherry and I took after Washington’s other scandal of the time— the unbridled and illegal fundraising by Democrats in the campaign of 1996. This time it was Democrats who wanted me arrested.

But taking on political scandal is nothing compared to what can happen if you raise questions about corporate power in Washington. When my colleagues and I started looking into the subject of pesticides and food for a Frontline documentary, my producer Marty Koughan learned that industry was attempting behind closed doors to dilute the findings of a National Academy of Sciences study on the effects of pesticide residues on children. Before we finished the documentary, the industry somehow purloined a copy of our draft script—we still aren’t certain how—and mounted a sophisticated and expensive campaign to discredit our broadcast before it aired. Television reviewers and editorial page editors were flooded in advance with pro-industry propaganda. There was a whispering campaign. A Washington Post columnist took a dig at the broadcast on the morning of the day it aired—without even having seen it—and later confessed to me that the dirt had been supplied by a top lobbyist for the chemical industry. Some public television managers across the country were so unnerved by the blitz of dis-information they received from the industry that before the documentary had even aired, they protested to PBS with letters prepared by the industry.

Here’s what most perplexed us: Eight days before the broadcast, the American Cancer Society—an organization that in no way figured in our story—sent to its three thousand local chapters a “critique” of the unfinished documentary claiming, wrongly, that it exaggerated the dangers of pesticides in food. We were puzzled. Why was the American Cancer Society taking the unusual step of criticizing a documentary that it had not seen, that had not aired, and that did not claim what the society alleged? An enterprising reporter in town named Sheila Kaplan looked into these questions for Legal Times and discovered that a public relations firm, which had worked for several chemical companies, also did pro bono work for the American Cancer Society. The firm was able to cash in some of the goodwill from that “charitable” work to persuade the compliant communications staff at the Society to distribute some harsh talking points about the documentary— talking points that had been supplied by, but not attributed to, the public relations firm.

Others also used the American Cancer Society’s good name in efforts to tarnish the journalism before it aired; including right-wing front groups who railed against what they called “junk science on PBS” and demanded Congress pull the plug on public television. PBS stood firm. The documentary aired, the journalism held up, and the National Academy of Sciences felt liberated to release the study that the industry had tried to demean.

They never give up. Sherry and I spent more than a year working on another documentary called Trade Secrets , based on revelations—found in the industry’s archives—that big chemical companies had deliberately withheld from workers and consumers damaging information about toxic chemicals in their products. These internal industry documents are a fact. They exist. They are not a matter of opinion or point of view. And they portrayed deep and pervasive corruption in a major American industry, revealing that we live under a regulatory system designed by the industry itself. If the public and government regulators had known over the years what the industry was keeping secret about the health risks of its products, America’s laws and regulations governing chemical manufacturing would have been far more protective of human health than they were.

Hoping to keep us from airing those secrets, the industry hired a public relations firm in Washington noted for using private detectives and former CIA, FBI, and drug enforcement officers to conduct investigations for corporations. One of the company’s founders was on record as saying that sometimes corporations need to resort to unconventional resources, including “using deceit”, to defend themselves. Given the scurrilous underground campaign that was conducted to smear our journalism, his comments were an understatement. Not only was there the vicious campaign directed at me personally, but once again pressure was brought to bear on PBS through industry allies in Congress. PBS stood firm, the documentary aired, and a year later the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Trade Secrets an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism.

I’ve gone on like this not to regale you with old war tales but to get to a story that is the one thing I hope you might remember from our time together this morning. John Henry Faulk told me this story. Most of you are too young to remember John Henry—a wonderful raconteur, entertainer, and a popular host on CBS Radio back when radio was in its prime. But those were days of paranoia and red-baiting—the McCarthy era—and the right-wing sleaze merchants went to work on John Henry with outlandish accusations that he was a communist. A fearful CBS refused to rehire him and John Henry went home to Texas to live out his days. He won a famous libel suit against his accusers and wrote a classic book about those events and the meaning of the First Amendment. In an interview I did with him shortly before his death a dozen years ago, John Henry told the story of how he and friend Boots Cooper were playing in the chicken house when they were about 12 years old. They spied a chicken snake in the top tier of nests, so close it looked like a boa constrictor. As John Henry told it to me, “All the frontier courage drained out our heels—actually it trickled down our overall legs—and Boots and I made a new door through the henhouse wall.” His momma came out and, learning what the fuss was about, said to Boots and John Henry: “Don’t you know chicken snakes are harmless? They can’t hurt you.” And Boots, rubbing his forehead and behind at the same time, said, “Yes, Mrs. Faulk, I know that, but they can scare you so bad, it’ll cause you to hurt yourself.” John Henry Faulk told me that’s a lesson he never forgot. It’s a good one for any journalist to tuck away and call on when journalism is under fire.

Our job remains essentially the same: to gather, weigh, organize, analyze and present information people need to know in order to make sense of the world. You will hear it said this is not a professional task—John Carroll of the Los Angeles Times recently reminded us there are “no qualification tests, no boards to censure misconduct, no universally accepted set of standards.” Maybe so. But I think that what makes journalism a profession is the deep ethical imperative of which the public is aware only when we violate it—think Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Jim Kelly. Ed Wasserman, once an editor himself and now teaching at Washington and Lee University, says that journalism “is an ethical practice because it tells people what matters and helps them determine what they should do about it.” So good newsrooms “are marinated in ethical conversations…What should this lead say? What I should I tell that source?” We practice this craft inside “concentric rings of duty and obligations: Obligations to sources, our colleagues, our bosses, our readers, our profession, and our community”—and we function under a system of values “in which we try to understand and reconcile strong competing claims.” Our obligation is to sift patiently and fairly through untidy realities, measure the claims of affected people, and present honestly the best available approximation of the truth—and this, says Ed Wasserman, is an ethical practice.

It’s never been easy, and it’s getting harder. For more reasons then you can shake a stick at.

One is the sheer magnitude of the issues we need to report and analyze. My friend Bill McKibben enjoys a conspicuous place in my pantheon of journalistic heroes for his pioneer work in writing about the environment; his bestseller The End of Nature carried on where Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring left off. Recently in Mother Jones, Bill described how the problems we cover—conventional, manageable problems, like budget shortfalls, pollution, crime—may be about to convert to chaotic, unpredictable situations. He puts it this way: If you don’t have a job, “that’s a problem, and unemployment is a problem, and they can both be managed: You learn a new skill, the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates to spur the economy. But millions of skilled, well-paying jobs disappearing to Bangalore is a situation; it’s not clear what, if anything, the system can do to turn it around.” Perhaps the most unmanageable of all problems, Bill McKibben writes, is the accelerating deterioration of the environment. While the present administration has committed a thousand acts of vandalism against our air, water, forests and deserts, were we to change managers, Bill argues, some of that damage would abate. What won’t go away, he continues, are the perils with huge momentum—the greenhouse effect, for instance. Scientists have been warning us about it since the 1980s. But now the melt of the Arctic seems to be releasing so much freshwater into the North Atlantic that even the Pentagon is alarmed that a weakening Gulf Stream could yield abrupt—and overwhelming—changes, the kind of climate change that threatens civilization. How do we journalists get a handle on something of that enormity?

Or on ideology. One of the biggest changes in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. How do we fathom and explain the mindset of violent exhibitionists and extremists who blow to smithereens hundreds of children and teachers of Middle School Number One in Beslan, Russia? Or the radical utopianism of martyrs who crash hijacked planes into the World Trade Center? How do we explain the possibility that a close election in November could turn on several million good and decent citizens who believe in the Rapture Index? That’s what I said—the Rapture Index; Google it and you will understand why the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the "Left Behind" series that have earned multi-millions of dollars for their co-authors, who, earlier this year, completed a triumphant tour of the Bible Belt whose buckle holds in place George W. Bush’s armor of the Lord. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the l9th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative millions of people believe to be literally true.

According to this narrative, Jesus will return to earth only when certain conditions are met: when Israel has been established as a state; when Israel then occupies the rest of its “biblical lands;” when the third temple has been rebuilt on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosques; and, then, when legions of the Antichrist attack Israel. This will trigger a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon during which all the Jews who have not converted will be burned. Then the Messiah returns to earth. The Rapture occurs once the big battle begins. True believers ”will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation which follow."

I’m not making this up. We’re reported on these people for our weekly broadcast on PBS, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you that they feel called to help bring the Rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That’s why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It’s why they have staged confrontations at the old temple site in Jerusalem. It’s why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the 9th chapter of the Book of Revelations where four angels “which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released “to slay the third part of men.’ As the British writer George Monbiot has pointed out, for these people, the Middle East is not a foreign policy issue, it’s a biblical scenario, a matter of personal belief. A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed; if there’s a conflagration there, they come out winners on the far side of tribulation, inside the pearly gates, in celestial splendor, supping on ambrosia to the accompaniment of harps plucked by angels.

One estimate puts these people at about 15 percent of the electorate. Most are likely to vote Republican; they are part of the core of George W. Bush’s base support. He knows who they are and what they want. When the president asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, more than one hundred thousand angry Christian fundamentalists barraged the White House with e-mails, and Mr. Bush never mentioned the matter again. Not coincidentally, the administration recently put itself solidly behind Ariel Sharon’s expansions of settlements on the West Banks. In George Monbiot’s analysis, the president stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli expansion into the West Bank than he stands to lose by restraining it. “He would be mad to listen to these people, but he would also be mad not to.” No wonder Karl Rove walks around the West Wing whistling “Onward Christian Soldiers.” He knows how many votes he is likely to get from these pious folk who believe that the Rapture Index now stands at 144—just one point below the critical threshold at which point the prophecy is fulfilled, the whole thing blows, the sky is filled with floating naked bodies, and the true believers wind up at the right hand of God. With no regret for those left behind. (See George Monbiot. The Guardian, April 20th, 2004 .)

I know, I know: You think I am bonkers. You think Ann Coulter is right to aim her bony knee at my groin and that O’Reilly should get a Peabody for barfing all over me for saying there’s more to American politics than meets the Foxy eye. But this is just the point: Journalists who try to tell these stories, connect these dots, and examine these links are demeaned, disparaged and dismissed. This is the very kind of story that illustrates the challenge journalists face in a world driven by ideologies that are stoutly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. Ideologues—religious, political, or editorial ideologues—embrace a world view that cannot be changed because they admit no evidence to the contrary. And Don Quixote on Rocinante tilting at windmills had an easier time of it than a journalist on a laptop tilting with facts at the world’s fundamentalist belief systems.

For one thing, you’ll get in trouble with the public. The Chicago Tribune recently conducted a national poll in which about half of those surveyed said there should be been some kind of press restraint on reporting about the prison abuse scandal in Iraq; I suggest those people don’t want the facts to disturb their belief system about American exceptionalism. The poll also found that five or six of every 10 Americans “would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, especially if it is found unpatriotic.” No wonder scoundrels find refuge in patriotism; it offers them immunity from criticism.

If raging ideologies are difficult to penetrate, so is secrecy. Secrecy is hardly a new or surprising story. But we are witnessing new barriers imposed to public access to information and a rapid mutation of America’s political culture in favor of the secret rule of government. I urge you to read the special report, Keeping Secrets, published recently by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (for a copy send an e-mail to publications@knightfdn.org). You will find laid out there what the editors call a “zeal for secrecy” pulsating through government at every level, shutting off the flow of information from sources such as routine hospital reports to what one United States senator calls the “single greatest rollback of the Freedom of Information Act in history.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I digress here to say that I was present when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act on July 4, 1966. In language that was almost lyrical, he said he was signing it “with a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society in which the people’s right to know is cherished and guarded.” But as his press secretary at the time, I knew something that few others did: LBJ had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of FOIA, hated the thought of journalists rummaging in government closets, hated them challenging the official review of realty. He dug in his heels and even threatened to pocket-veto the bill after it reached the White House. Only the tenacity of a congressman named John Moss got the bill passed at all, and that was after a 12-year battle against his elders in Congress, who blinked every time the sun shined in the dark corridors of power. They managed to cripple the bill Moss had drafted, and even then, only some last-minute calls to LBJ from a handful of newspaper editors overcame the president’s reluctance. He signed “the f------ thing,” as he called it, and then set out to claim credit for it.

But never has there been an administration like the one in power today—so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and, in defiance of the Constitution, from their representatives in Congress. The litany is long: The president’s chief of staff orders a review that leads to at least 6000 documents being pulled from government websites. The Defense Department bans photos of military caskets being returned to the U.S. To hide the influence of Kenneth Lay, Enron, and other energy moguls, the vice president stonewalls his energy task force records with the help of his duck-hunting pal on the Supreme Court. The CIA adds a new question to its standard employee polygraph exam, asking, “Do you have friends in the media?” There have been more than 1200 presumably terrorist-related arrests and 750 people deported, and no one outside the government knows their names, or how many court docket entries have been erased or never entered. Secret federal court hearings have been held with no public record of when or where or who is being tried.

Secrecy is contagious. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has announced that “certain security information included in the reactor oversight process” will no longer be publicly available, and no longer be updated on the agency’s website.

New controls are being imposed on space surveillance data once found on NASA’s website.

The FCC has now restricted public access to reports of telecommunications disruption because the Department of Homeland Security says communications outages could provide “a roadmap for terrorists.”

One of the authors of the ASNE report, Pete Weitzel, former managing editor of The Miami Herald and now coordinator for the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, describes how Section 214 of the Homeland Security Act makes it possible for a company to tell Homeland Security about an eroding chemical tank on the bank of a river, but DHS could not disclose this information publicly or, for that matter, even report it to the Environmental Protection Agency. And if there were a spill and people were injured, the information given DHS could not be used in court!

Secrecy is contagious—and scandalous. The Washington Post reports that nearly 600 times in recent years, a judicial committee acting in private has stripped information from reports intended to alert the public to conflicts of interest involving federal judges.

Secrecy is contagious, scandalous—and toxic. According to the ASNE report, curtains are falling at the state and local levels, too. The tiny south Alabama town of Notasulga decided to allow citizens to see records only one hour a month. It had to rescind the decision, but now you have to make a request in writing, make an appointment and state a reason for wanting to see any document. The state legislature in Florida has adopted 14 new exemptions to its sunshine and public record laws. Over the objections of law enforcement officials and Freedom of Information advocates, they passed a new law prohibiting police from making lists of gun owners even as it sets a fine of $5 million for violation.

Secrecy is contagious, scandalous, toxic—and costly. Pete Weitzel estimates that the price tag for secrecy today is more than $5 billion annually (I have seen other estimates up to $6.5 billion a year.)

This “zeal for secrecy” I am talking about—and I have barely touched the surface—adds up to a victory for the terrorists. When they plunged those hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon three years ago this morning, they were out to hijack our Gross National Psychology. If they could fill our psyche with fear—as if the imagination of each one of us were Afghanistan and they were the Taliban—they could deprive us of the trust and confidence required for a free society to work. They could prevent us from ever again believing in a safe, decent or just world and from working to bring it about. By pillaging and plundering our peace of mind they could panic us into abandoning those unique freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of the press—that constitute the ability of democracy to self-correct and turn the ship of state before it hits the iceberg.

I thought of this last week during the Republican National Convention here in New York—thought of the terrorists as enablers of democracy’s self-immolation. My office is on the west side of Manhattan, two blocks from Madison Square Garden. From where I sit I could see snipers on the roof. Helicopters overhead. Barricades at every street corner. Lines of police stretching down the avenues. Unmarked vans. Flatbed trucks. Looking out his own window, the writer Nick Turse (TomDispatch.com 9/8/04 ) saw what I saw and more. Special Forces brandishing automatic rifles. Rolls of orange plastic netting. Dragnets. Pre-emptive arrests of peaceful protesters. Cages for detainees. And he caught sight of what he calls “the ultimate blending of corporatism and the police state—the Fuji blimp—now emblazoned with a second logo: NYPD.” A spy-in-the sky, outfitted “with the latest in video-surveillance equipment, loaned free of charge to the police all week long.” Nick Turse saw these things and sees in them, as do I, “The Rise of the Homeland Security State.”

Will we be cowed by it? Will we investigate and expose its excesses? Will we ask hard questions of the people who run it? The answers are not clear. As deplorable as was the betrayal of their craft by Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and Jim Kelly, the greater offense was the seduction of mainstream media into helping the government dupe the public to support a war to disarm a dictator who was already disarmed. Now we are buying into the very paradigm of a “war on terror” that our government—with staggering banality, soaring hubris, and stunning bravado—employs to elicit public acquiescence while offering no criterion of success or failure, no knowledge of the cost, and no measure of democratic accountability. I am reminded of the answer the veteran journalist Richard Reeves gave when asked by a college student to define “real news.” “Real news,” said Richard Reeves “is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms.” I am reminded of that line from the news photographer in Tom Stoppard’s play Night and Day : “People do terrible things to each other, but its worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.”

I have become a nuisance on this issue—if not a fanatic—because I grew up in the South, where, for so long, truthtellers were driven from the pulpit, the classroom and the newsroom; it took a bloody civil war to drive home the truth of slavery, and still it took another hundred of years of cruel segregation and oppression before the people freed by that war finally achieved equal rights under the law. Not only did I grow up in the South, which had paid such a high price for denial, but I served in the Johnson White House during the early escalation of the Vietnam War. We circled the wagons and grew intolerant of news that did not confirm to the official view of reality, with tragic consequences for America and Vietnam. Few days pass now that I do not remind myself that the greatest moments in the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state, but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.

That’s why I have also become a nuisance, if not a fanatic, on the perils of media consolidation. My eyes were opened wide by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which led to my first documentary on the subject, called Free Speech for Sale . On our current weekly broadcast we’ve gone back to the subject more than 30 times. I was astonished when the coupling of Time Warner and AOL—the biggest corporate merger of all time—brought an avalanche of gee-whiz coverage from a media intoxicated by uncritical enthusiasm. Not many people heard the quiet voice of the cultural critic Todd Gitlin pointing out that the merger was not motivated by any impulse to improve news reporting, magazine journalism or the quality of public discourse. Its purpose was to boost the customer base, the shareholders’ stock and the personal wealth of top executives. Not only was this brave new combination, in Gitlin’s words, “unlikely to arrest the slickening of news coverage, its pulverization into ever more streamlined and simple-minded snippers, its love affair with celebrities and show business, “the deal is likely to accelerate those trends, since the bottom line “usually abhors whatever is more demanding and complex, slower, more prone to ideas, more challenging to complacency.”

Sure enough, as merger as followed merger, journalism has been driven further down the hierarchy of values in the huge conglomerates that dominate what we see, read and hear. And to feed the profit margins journalism has been directed to other priorities than “the news we need to know to keep our freedoms.” One study reports that the number of crime stories on the network news tripled over six years. Another reports that in 55 markets in 35 states, local news was dominated by crime and violence, triviality and celebrity. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, reporting on the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, on the ABC, CBS, and NBC Nightly news programs, and on Time and Newsweek , showed that from 1977 to 1997, the number of stories about government dropped from one in three to one in five, while the number of stories about celebrities rose from one in every 50 stories to one in every 14. What difference does it make? Well, it's government that can pick our pockets, slap us into jail, run a highway through our backyard or send us to war. Knowing what government does is “the news we need to keep our freedoms.”

Ed Wasserman, among others, has looked closely at the impact on journalism of this growing conglomeration of ownership. He recently wrote: “You would think that having a mightier media would strengthen their ability to assert their independence, to chart their own course, to behave in an adversarial way toward the state.” Instead “they fold in a stiff breeze”—as Viacom, one of the richest media companies in the history of thought, did when it “couldn’t even go ahead and run a dim-witted movie” on Ronald Reagan because the current president’s political arm objected to anything that would interfere with the ludicrous drive to canonize Reagan and put him on Mount Rushmore. Wasserman acknowledges, as I do, that there is some world-class journalism being done all over the country today, but he went on to speak of “a palpable sense of decline, of rot, of a loss of spine, determination, gutlessness” that pervades our craft. Journalism and the news business, he concludes, aren’t playing well together. Media owners have businesses to run, and “these media-owning corporations have enormous interests of their own that impinge on an ever-widening swath of public policy” —hugely important things, ranging from campaign finance reform (who ends up with those millions of dollars spent on advertising?) to broadcast deregulation and antitrust policy, to virtually everything related to the Internet, intellectual property, globalization and free trade, even to minimum wage, affirmative action and environmental policy. “This doesn’t mean media shill mindlessly for their owners, any more than their reporters are stealth operatives for pet causes,” but it does mean that in this era, when its broader and broader economic entanglements make media more dependent on state largesse, “the news business finds itself at war with journalism.”

Look at what’s happening to newspapers. A study by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America reports that two-thirds of today’s newspaper markets are monopolies. I urge you to read a new book—Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering (published as part of the Project on the State of the American Newspaper under the auspices of the Pew Charitable Trust)—by a passel of people who love journalism: the former managing editor of the New York Times, Gene Roberts; the dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, Thomas Kunkel; the veteran reporter and editor, Charles Layton, as well as contributors such as Ken Auletta, Geneva Overholser, and Roy Reed. They find that a generation of relentless corporatization has diminished the amount of real news available to the consumer. They write of small hometown dailies being bought and sold like hog futures; of chains, once content to grow one property at a time, now devouring other chains whole; of chains effectively ceding whole regions of the country to one another, minimizing competition; of money pouring into the business from interests with little knowledge and even less concern about the special obligations newspapers have to democracy. They point as one example to the paper in Oshkosh, Wis., with a circulation of 23,500, which prided itself on being in hometown hands since the Andrew Johnson administration. In 1998, it was sold not once but twice, within the space of two months. Two years later it was sold again: four owners in less than three years. In New Jersey, the Gannett Chain bought the Asbury Park Press , then sent in a publisher who slashed 55 people from the staff and cut the space for news, and who was rewarded by being named Gannett’s manager of the year. Roberts and team come to the sobering conclusion that the real momentum of consolidation is just beginning—that it won’t be long now before America is reduced to half a dozen major print conglomerates.

They illustrate the consequences with one story after another. In Cumberland, Md., the police reporter had so many duties piled upon him that he no longer had time to go to the police station for the daily reports. But management had a cost-saving solution: Put a fax machine in the police station and let the cops send over the news they thought the paper should have. (“Any police brutality today, officer?” “No, if there is, we’ll fax a report of it over to you.”) On a larger scale, the book describes a wholesale retreat in coverage of key departments and agencies in Washington. At the Social Security Administration, whose activities literally affect every American, only the New York Times was maintaining a full-time reporter. And incredibly, there were no full-time reporters at the Interior Department, which controls millions of acres of public land and oversees everything from the National Park Service to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

There’s more: According to the non-partisan Project for Excellence in Journalism, newspapers have 2,200 fewer employees than in 1990. The number of full-time radio news employees dropped by 44 percent between 1994 and 2000. And the number of television network foreign bureaus is down by half. Except for “60 Minutes” on CBS, the network prime time newsmagazines “in no way could be said to cover major news of the day.” Furthermore, the report finds that 68 percent of the news on cable news channels was “repetitious accounts of previously reported stories without any new information.”

Out across the country there’s a virtual blackout of local public affairs. The Alliance for Better Campaigns studied 45 stations in six cities in one week in October 2003. Out of 7,560 hours of programming analyzed, only 13 were devoted to local public affairs—less than one-half of one percent of local programming nationwide.

A profound transformation is happening here. The framers of our nation never envisioned these huge media giants; never imagined what could happen if big government, big publishing and big broadcasters ever saw eye to eye in putting the public’s need for news second to their own interests—and to the ideology of free-market economics.

Nor could they have foreseen the rise of a quasi-official partisan press serving as a mighty megaphone for the regime in power. Stretching from Washington think tanks funded by corporations to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s far-flung empire of tabloid journalism to the nattering know-nothings of talk radio, a ceaseless conveyor belt—often taking its cues from daily talking points supplied by the Republican National Committee—moves mountains of the official party line into the public discourse. But that’s not their only mission. They wage war on anyone who does not subscribe to the propaganda, heaping scorn on what they call “old-school journalism.” One of them, a blogger, was recently quoted in Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard comparing journalism with brain surgery. “A bunch of amateurs, no matter how smart and enthusiastic, could never outperform professional neurosurgeons, because they lack the specialized training and experience necessary for that field. But what qualifications, exactly, does it take to be a journalist? What can they do that we can’t? Nothing.”

The debate over who and isn’t a journalist is worth having, although we don’t have time for it now. You can read a good account of the latest round in that debate in the September 26 Boston Globe, where Tom Rosenthiel reports on the Democratic Convention’s efforts to decide “which scribes, bloggers, on-air correspondents and on-air correspondents and off-air producers and camera crews” would have press credentials and access to the action. Bloggers were awarded credentials for the first time, and, I, for one, was glad to see it. I’ve just finished reading Dan Gillmor’s new book, We the Media, and recommend it heartily to you. Gilmore is a national columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and writes a daily weblog for SiliconValley.com. He argues persuasively that Big Media is losing its monopoly on the news, thanks to the Internet – that “citizen journalists” of all stripes, in their independent, unfiltered reports, are transforming the news from a lecture to a conversation. He’s on to something. In one sense we are discovering all over again the feisty spirit of our earliest days as a nation when the republic and a free press were growing up together. It took no great amount of capital and credit—just a few hundred dollars—to start a paper then. There were well over a thousand of them by 1840. They were passionate and pugnacious and often deeply prejudiced; some spoke for Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers, bigots, jingoes, and land-grabbers. But some called to the better angels of our nature—Tom Paine, for one, the penniless immigrant from England, who, in 1776 –just before joining Washington’s army—published the hard-hitting pamphlet Common Sense , with its uncompromising case for American independence. It became our first best-seller because Paine was possessed of an unwavering determination to reach ordinary people—to “make those that can scarcely read understand” and “to put into language as plain as the alphabet” the idea that they mattered and could stand up for their rights.

So the Internet may indeed engage us in a new conversation of democracy. Even as it does, you and I will in no way be relieved from wrestling with what it means ethically to be a professional journalist. I believe Tom Rosenthiel got it right in that Boston Globe article when he said that the proper question is not whether you call yourself a journalist but whether your own work constitutes journalism. And what is that? I like his answer: “A journalist tries to get the facts right,” tries to get “as close as possible to the verifiable truth”—not to help one side win or lose but “to inspire public discussion.” Neutrality, he concludes, is not a core principle of journalism, “but the commitment to facts, to public consideration, and to independence from faction, is.”

I don’t want to claim too much for our craft; because we journalists are human, our work is shot through with the stain of fallibility that taints the species. But I don’t want to claim too little for our craft, either. That’s why I am troubled by the comments of the former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon. Simon rose to national prominence with his book Homicide, about the year he spent in Baltimore’s homicide unit. That book inspired an NBC series for which Simon wrote several episodes and then another book and an HBO series called "The Wire," also set in Baltimore. In the current edition of the libertarian magazine Reason, Simon says he has become increasingly cynical “about the ability of daily journalism to affect any kind of meaningful change….One of the sad things about contemporary journalism is that it actually matters very little.’

Perhaps.

But Francisco Ortiz Franco thought it mattered. The crusading reporter co-founded a weekly magazine in Tijuana whose motto is “Free like the Wind.” He was relentless in exposing the incestuous connections between wealthy elites in Baja, Calif. and its most corrupt law enforcement agencies and with the most violent of drag cartels. Several months ago, Francisco Ortiz Franco died sitting at the wheel of his car outside a local clinic—shot four times while his two children, aged eight and l0, looked on from the back seat. As his blood was being hosed off the pavement, more than l00 of his fellow Mexican reporters and editors marched quietly through the streets, holding their pens defiantly high in the air. They believe journalism matters.

Manic Saha thought journalism mattered. He was a correspondent with the daily New Age in Bangladesh, as well as a contributor to the BBC’s Bengali-language service. Saha was known for his bold reporting on criminal gangs, drug traffickers, and Maoist insurgents and had kept it up despite a series of death threats. Earlier this year, as Saha was heading home from the local press club, assailants stopped his rickshaw and threw a bomb at him. When the bomb exploded he was decapitated. Manik Saha died because journalism matters.

Jose Carlos Araujo thought journalism mattered. The host of a call-in talk show in northeastern Brazil, Araujo regularly denounced death squads and well-known local figures involved in murders. On April 24 of this year, outside his home, at 7:30 in the morning, he was ambushed and shot to death. Because journalism matters.

Aiyathurai Nadesan thought journalism mattered. A newspaper reporter in Sri Lanka, he had been harassed and threatened for criticizing the government and security forces. During one interrogation, he was told to stop writing about the army. He didn’t. On the morning of May 3l, near a Hindu temple, he was shot to death—because journalism matters.

I could go on: The editor-in-chief of the only independent newspaper in the industrial Russian city of Togliatti, shot to death after reporting on local corruption; his successor stabbed to death 18 months later; a dozen journalists in all, killed in Russia over the last five years and none of their murderers brought to justice.

Cuba’s fledgling independent press has been decimated by the arrest and long-term imprisonment of 29 journalists in a crackdown last year; they are being held in solitary confinement, subjected to psychological torture, surviving on rotten and foul-smelling food. Why? Because Fidel Castro knows journalism matters.

The totalitarian regime of Turkmenistan believes journalism matters—so much so that all newspapers, radio and television stations have been placed under strict state control. About the only independent information the people get is reporting broadcast from abroad by Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty. A stringer for that service, based in the Turkmenistan capital, was detained and injected multiple times with an unknown substance. In the Ukraine, Dmitry Shkuropat, a correspondent for the independent weekly Iskra, who had been working on a story about government corruption, was beaten in the middle of the day on a main street in the city of Zaporozhy and taped interviews for his pending story were taken. The director of Iskra told the Committee to Protect Journalists (to whom I am indebted for these examples) said that the newspaper often receives intimidating phone calls from local business and political authorities after publishing critical articles, but he refused to identify the callers, saying he feared retaliation. Obviously, in the Ukraine journalism matters.

We have it so easy here in this country. America is a utopia for journalists. Don Hewitt, the creator of "60 Minutes," told me a couple of years ago that “the 1990s were a terrible time for journalism in this country but a wonderful time for journalists; we’re living like Jack Welch,” he said, referring to the then CEO of General Electric. Perhaps that is why we weren’t asking tough questions of Jack Welch. Because we have it so easy in America, we tend to go easy on America—so easy that maybe Simon’s right; compared to entertainment and propaganda, maybe journalism doesn’t matter.

But I approach the end of my own long run believing more strongly than ever that the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inextricably joined. The late Martha Gellhorn, who spent half a century reporting on war and politicians—and observing journalists, too—eventually lost her faith that journalism could, by itself, change the world. But the act of keeping the record straight is valuable in itself, she said. “Serious, careful, honest journalism is essential, not because it is a guiding light but because it is a form of honorable behavior, involving the reporter and the reader.” I second that. I believe democracy requires “a sacred contract” between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.

No Time for "Liberal Weenies": Formerly Interesting Filmmaker's Forthcoming Movie the Centerpiece of Frighteningly Right-Wing Night at New Film Festival

Movie Review: The Great Raid
Directed by John Dahl; starring Joseph Feinnes, Connie Nielson, Benjamin Bratt
Miramax: scheduled for release early 2005

Bozeman, MT--I must sheepishly admit I was quite looking forward to the advent of what initially seemed to be a legitimate film festival in our fair mountain town. Indeed, the HatcH Festival--thrown together in an amazing 90 days if the hype is to be believed--has garnered its share of novelty glitz, largely from homegrown or local celebs such as Peter Fonda, Jeff Bridges, Margot Kidder, and the evidently now utterly irrelevant John Dahl. I was even game to drop fifty bucks for two tickets to see the world premiere of Dahl's forthcoming movie, the astonishingly offensive WWII White Powerfest that is The Great Raid.

Dahl's promising early directorial efforts, such as the noirish Red Rock West and the biting The Last Seduction, displayed a gift for tongue-in-cheek social commentary and clever genre skewering. Those flicks worked as well as they did because they placed a certain degree of trust in the audience and didn't hit you over the head with easy explanations. The characters didn't have to state stock reasons for why their characters behaved the ways in which they did, although the psychology was there in a flinch, a stare, a strut. The characters may have been of their respective genres, but, with large thanks to some great casting, unusual degrees of complexity were gradually revealed in the principle players' parts (Lara Flynn-Boyle, Linda Fiorentino, even Nicholas Cage before his career became embarrassing). Dahl began to catch some deserved buzz as a master tweaker of the B-movie thriller.

Then he made Rounders, a boring, forgettable gambling movie that, but for the great Famke Janssen, did absolutely nothing for anyone involved.

And then he made Joyride.

And now we have (finally?) ensured the truth of Swimming with Sharks vis-a-vis the dollar over the art with Dahl's lamentable The Great Raid.

Let's get the plot out of the way: Inherently GOOD White American Soldiers held captive in a Japanese-controlled internment camp in the Phillipines near the end of WWII, led by a convincingly wan, malaria-addled Joseph Feinnes (Shakespeare in Love) are treated horribly. Meanwhile, Feinnes's love, a decidedly miscast Connie Nielson (Gladiator) schleps as a "Lithuanian" nurse in a Phillipines hospital, nicking meds that are then smuggled to the Inherently GOOD White American POWs via some Byzantine collection of bumbling Phillipinos on the DL (except that they are all easily caught and dispatched like so many ants on a sidewalk--all except, of course, for the Good White Chick). Meanwhilemeanwhile, A troop of Inherently GOOD White American Soldiers led by the oddly vacant Benjamin Bratt (Law & Order, Julia Roberts) are on a mission to rescue the POWs. Which they eventually do, and with a lot of explosions.

At nearly three hours, the movie was evidently filmed in real time.

Based on a true story, which is admirable, The Great Raid cares nothing for character development largely because the story of the movie, the mythos of it, is just too large for the movie it is. So what we get is empty hagiography whose goal is to stroke American egos into believing that they are still, I guess, The Great Generation. The film is as subtle and insightful as a bludgeon. The bombastic score never lets the audience have to wonder what to feel, so at least GW Bush will be happy about that.

Nielson catwalks through the movie emmanating a very strange sort of glamor--the kind of straight-from-the-40's-and-50's glamour that was prescribed for every lone female in a male war flick. She exudes "I Am In A Hollywood Movie" even while being tortured by Japanese intelligence forces. Perhaps this is what Dahl was going for--tackling another genre (this time aping it). At least Tora! Tora! Tora! had Jerry Fogel (rimshot!--but only for folks in KC).

Sans anything interesting to say, what is one to take from such a film? A lesson? If the premiere night's audience was any indication, that lesson must be that Japs Still Suck; Thank God We're In Montana. Hate the Other! And while we're on the subject--were there really no black people anywhere in this area at this time during the War? You won't see one anywhere in the movie. Something for which, I suppose, any black actor will remain eternally grateful.

By the end of the film I was left sick to my stomach, and not because I was moved by the heroism on screen. First, I felt: At least Leni Riefenstahl had a striking aesthetic vision. Second, I felt: What a disgraceful way to make a profit.

And my dis-ease was hightened by the after-flick reactions and stage commentaries. There was a standing ovation (oh--and the audience ws asked to sing the national anthem before the flick began). The director came out and said that Miramax was trepidatious about allowing him to premiere this movie here in Bozeman (in hindsight, I can completely understand why the movie did premiere here--it preaches to the converted).

A man who plays the "Patton"-like role in the film, an asshat Montanan, was on hand to say brilliant things like how important it is for us to realize that Montana is "real America," while icky places like New York and California are the home of "the Liberal Weenies" who "don't know anything about real America." There was applause. It's so nice to know that Good, Real (White, Xian) Americans live where I live, and I appreciated the geography lesson, because I really believed that NY and CA were actually part of this country! Imagine my surprise. It was around this time I leaned over to my date and mentioned having to get the hell out of there. And we did.

On the sidewalks of Main Street and at the Robin Bar down the street:

Grumblings that Jeff Bridges didn't show for the movie because he is, in fact, one of those Liberal Weenies.

A legit star--who I was going to name but won't because I hear that those Non-American Liberal Weenies like to sue everybody with their Jewish lawyers--did tell me, with drink in hand, that s/he was at the premiere and thought "that movie was crap." I wanted to hug him/her.

Much self-congratulatory hyperbole was to be had throughout the festival, but that is the way of the industry, I know. How nice that the Liberal Weenies are sharing it with Real America.

How Many Deaths Will It Take?

By BOB HERBERT
from The New York Times

Published: September 10, 2004

"It was Vietnam all over again - the heartbreaking head shots captioned with good old American names:

"Jose Casanova, Donald J. Cline Jr., Sheldon R. Hawk Eagle, Alyssa R. Peterson.

"Eventually there'll be a fine memorial to honor the young Americans whose lives were sacrificed for no good reason in Iraq. Yesterday, under the headline 'The Roster of the Dead,' The New York Times ran photos of the first thousand or so who were killed.

"They were sent off by a president who ran and hid when he was a young man and his country was at war. They fought bravely and died honorably. But as in Vietnam, no amount of valor or heroism can conceal the fact that they were sent off under false pretenses to fight a war that is unwinnable.

"How many thousands more will have to die before we acknowledge that President Bush's obsession with Iraq and Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for the United States?" [...]

Read the entire, amazing essay here. (Requires a free, one-time registration)