Sweet and Fitting

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori...
--Horace

(Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country...)

Watching Lewis Milestone's towering film masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front a couple days ago, I was immediately struck by how little the methods of manipulating young and naive adolescent males into pouring out their blood and sacrificing their lives on the altars of false gods have changed over the last 100 years.

As a newly-formed regiment of fresh cannon fodder marches past their classroom window to the blare of martial music, a fresh crop of 17- and 18-year-old high school seniors is regaled on the virtues of war by their professor, who ritually washes and anoints them for the god Mars's chopping block:

It is not for me to suggest that any of you should stand up and offer to defend his country. But I wonder if such a thing is going through your heads. I know that in one of the schools, the boys have risen up in the classroom and enlisted in a mass. If such a thing should happen here, you would not blame me for a feeling of pride. Perhaps some will say that you should not be allowed to go yet - that you have homes, mothers, fathers, that you should not be torn away by your fathers so forgetful of their fatherland...by your mothers so weak that they cannot send a son to defend the land which gave them birth. And after all, is a little experience such a bad thing for a boy? Is the honor of wearing a uniform something from which we should run? And if our young ladies glory in those who wear it, is that anything to be ashamed of?...To be foremost in battle is a virtue not to be despised. I believe it will be a quick war. There will be few losses. But if losses there must be, then let us remember the Latin phrase which must have come to the lips of many a Roman when he stood in battle in a foreign land:...Sweet and fitting it is to die for the Fatherland...

Look at present-day television commercials for our all-volunteer Army and Marine Corps and you'll see the same appeals to our current crop of young and defenseless American babies that German academics used in 1914 and 1915. Indeed, the pro-war propaganda manufactured by the current American regime is, if anything, cruder and more childish than what its predecessor war machines in 20th-century Germany used, and it's certainly not working as well. Recruitment numbers are down, and maybe the truth about modern warfare is finally starting to sink in.

When the protagonist veteran of "All Quiet," Paul Baumer (played by Lew Ayres) returns to his old classroom after a year of mud, blood, and terror in the Flemish trenches, the same professor who primed him for the killing fields asks him to deliver a few encouraging words to the new class of would-be victims, and is appalled by the truth he tells:

I heard you in here reciting that same old stuff, making more iron men, more young heroes. You still think it's beautiful and sweet to die for your country, don't you? We used to think you knew. The first bombardment taught us better. It's dirty and painful to die for your country. When it comes to dying for your country, it's better not to die at all. There are millions out there dying for their country, and what good is it?

Baumer might have added that it's also, by the same token, better not to kill at all. But in any modern society which finds itself in the grip of the spiritual and mental disease of war fever, such as Germany in 1914 and 1939, or the United States in 1964 and 2003, such talk inspires a degree of fear and hatred of which only the most profoundly blind, ignorant, and intensely overheated fanaticism is capable. Gunter Grass, the Nobel-winning German author who was drafted into the Waffen SS at 16 in 1944, describes how his unit dealt with a pacifist recruit in his recent memoir, "How I Spent the War:"

Every possible sort of punitive labor was imposed upon him, but nothing helped. He would work conscientiously for hours without a peep, emptying the latrine with a worm-infested bucket on a long stick—a punishment known as “honey-slinging” in soldiers’ slang—only to appear, freshly showered, at rifle drill shortly thereafter and refuse to wield the weapon once again. I can see it falling to the ground as if in slow motion...

Morning after morning, when we gathered for roll call and the drill instructor started passing out the weapons, the incorrigible insubordinate would let the one meant for him fall to the ground like the proverbial hot potato and immediately return to his ramrod position, hands pressed to trouser seams, eyes fixed on a distant point.

I cannot count the number of times he repeated his mantra, a catchphrase that has never left me: “We don’t do that.”

One day his locker was cleared out: private things, including religious pamphlets. Then he was gone—“transferred,” it was called. We did not ask where to. I did not ask. But we all knew. He had not been discharged as unfit for service; no, we whispered, “he has long been ripe for the concentration camp.”

And since we knew of the camp, Stutthof, only by hearsay, we thought Wedontdothat—which was what we called him in secret—was in good hands. “They’ll bring old Wedontdothat down a peg or two.”

Was it all as simple as that?

Did no one shed a tear?

Did everything go on as it had before?

I must say that I was, if not glad, then at least relieved when the boy disappeared. The storm of doubts about everything in which I’d had rock-solid faith died down, and the resulting calm in my head prevented any further thought from taking wing: mindlessness had filled the space.

Mindlessness certainly characterized American propaganda during the run up to the Iraq conflict, which trotted out the same sorts of lies and paranoid bluster Hitler used to justify going to war in 1939 to neutralize the Polish threat against Germany. But there are hopeful signs that the old war fever sales pitch isn't working like it used to. The majority of Americans has now turned against the war, which is encouraging, even though public opposition is apparently of no effect in altering the trajectory of our self-destruction. The supposed romance of dying gloriously and heroically for one's country may have finally worn thin, and the lesson of Wilfred Owen's poem -- the most famous of World War I -- may finally have taken root in our depraved and warsick modern world:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori

We need to note also that the rate of American deaths and total casualties in this war has been relatively low in comparison to earlier conflicts, but that the price paid by Iraqis for our insanity has been extremely high. And I shudder to think what the fate will be of a nation which murders innocent children in the most cowardly fashion, by dropping cluster bombs from 20,000 feet. If there is any justice in this universe, or anything approaching even a minimum balance, the price Americans will eventually pay for these crimes will be inconceivably high.

He Used to Have a Good Head on his Shoulders

The Book Judith isn't in the Bible. It's one of 
the apocrypha -- those almost biblical books of dubious authenticity or uncertain authorship. It's a sort of re-make of David and Goliath, that story in which somebody humble, but talented and fearless brings down somebody huge.

Nebudchadnezzar was the king of Assyria, a war machine masquerading as a country. He sent out this bigass army to conquer the world, and he said he would "couer the whole face of the earth with the feete of mine armie, and I will giue them for a spoil vnto them." By that he meant he would give the wealth of the conquered territories -- their gold, jewels, and sweet, light Arabian crude, to the men in his big army with a percentage for his financial backers.

"I shal gette all their oyle," he added somewhat lamely.

He also said that the people he conquered, from Patagonia all the way up to the North Pole, had to toss out their gods and worship him instead, or in lieu of that, adopt sincere beliefs in freedom, democracy, and the free market system, by which he meant markets controlled by him.

And he called his head general, Holofernes, the guy with the hard name to pronounce, and says, "For as I liue, and by the power of my kingdome, whatsoeuer I have spoken, that I will doe by my hand." 

So off goes Holofernes leading Nebuchadnezzar's humungous, ferocious, and very high-tech army, and lays seige to the town of Bethulia, which is on a hilltop and kind of the gateway to Judea. And rather than charge up that big hill, Holofernes wisely just cuts off the water supply, and the elders of Bethulia knew they were in deep kim-chee, and talked about giving up in five days.

Then comes Judith, a widow of the town and local major babe, and says "Cool it, fools, and grow some spines, hearts, and brains. If you had any faith you'd know that the supreme being -- what'shisname -- is gonna give us what we need to do what we gotta do."

So Judith, who's been walking around in a muu-muu and ashes on her head for four years takes a long bath, and rubs down with lavender and olive oil, lays on the henna, gets out her earrings -- the big brassy-looking hoops, and about a hundred bracelets, and puts on her homewrecker dress. Then when she's all fragrant and a banquet for the eyes, she takes her maid and goes down the hill to where the Assyrians are and says, "Which one of you guys is Holofernes?"

Up comes Holofernes, rising to the bait, as it were. "How ya doin', big boy?" says the irresistable babe, "I think I've got something you need -- uh, some information I mean."

Judith wasn't just hot looking, but was also smart as Henry Kissinger and just as devious too. She could spin a line of bullshit yards wide and miles long. And after a few hours with her, in the inimitable words of King James's translators and editors, "Olofernes tooke great delight in her, & dranke much more wine, then he had drunke at any time in one day, since he was borne."

Then, when Holofernes had passed out, Judith took his sword and cut his head off. She had her maid put it in their meat sack, and they departed inconspicuously in the wee, wee hours.

When she got home to her hilltop and showed the head to the boys in the city, they all grabbed their blunt instruments and went running down the hill and began to lay into the demoralized and leaderless other-people's-countries invaders. And they sent out messengers to all the other cities in Judea, so that when their guys joined in the fun, the Jews kicked those tough Assyrians all the way "past Damascus."

What's the lesson this fable is teaching us? I have no idea, other than make sure the sword is sharp for easier cutting. But I do know this: we tend to think of ourselves as the guys who have defeated various Assyrians over the years, since we're the good guys and the Assyrians are the bad guys. But the fact is, we've never defeated the Assyrians. We became the Assyrians.

Here's another: in the long run, the Assyrians always lose.

Paper Magic

It came as no surprise Friday when Fair Isaac Corp., the company responsible for determining how much "wealth" modern Americans possess in the form of their credit ratings, announced that starting in September its method of computing credit scores will include measures to neutralize the borrowers' practice called "piggybacking," according to a story by Brigitte Yuille at the website Bankrate.com.

Piggybacking is done by would-be borrowers with low credit scores, who "rent" space as authorized users on credit cards owned by people with excellent credit histories.

"Fair Isaac uses 22 pieces of data collected from the three major credit bureaus (Equifax [EFX], Experian [GUS], and TransUnion) to calculate a credit score -- 300 is the lowest, 850 the highest," is the succinct explanation of how the company does its crucial work in a November 28 Business Week magazine article. In recent years, shaky borrowers have been gaming the system in increasing numbers by piggybacking their names onto other people's credit cards, thus scamming the three major bureaus' data-collection systems by combining other people's payback histories with their own.

For example, when Alipio Estruch wanted to take on a $449,000 mortgage to buy a house near Fort Lauderdale earlier this year, he found his credit rating of 550 left disqualified him as a borrower. But after paying $1,800 cash to an internet-based company, Instantcreditbuilders.com (ICB), Estruch's name was added as an authorized borrower to the cards of several people with excellent credit histories. They were paid for the space on their cards, and for the $1,800 fee, Estruch boosted his credit rating to 715 overnight, qualifying him for the loan he wanted.

Piggybacking is a great deal for the cardholder renting the space as well. Some are making over $2,000 a month, getting paid between $100 and $150 a pop for each space they rent, usually on seldom-used cards. The rest of the (typical) $900 fee goes to the agency such as ICB who serves as the go-between for the would-be borrower and the reputable cardholder. Those borrowing on someone else's good credit history don't get any personal information, the full credit card numbers they're being added to, or the card expiration dates. Any sensitive information is protected by the agency, and the renters add the users' names themselves, with a phone call to credit card company.

It wasn't very long ago that people with borderline credit histories didn't have all that much trouble securing big real estate loans due to the expansion of the so-called "subprime" lending market. But now that production homebuilders are sitting on growing stocks of unsold houses, and the default rate among sub-prime borrowers whose homes are falling in value continues to rise, lenders have suddenly discovered that their "industry," as James Kunstler puts it, is "rife with irregularities in lending standards!" So the bogus lending practices of the recent past, such as the infamous "interest-only" loans for example, have now been replaced by bogus borrowing practices, such as piggybacking.

All this paper magic and manipulation of numbers only serves to underscore what a scam and a series of self-serving illusions the late capitalist American economy has become. The problem is that if the survival of even a remnant of the housing bubble, the one economic factor that has held up the economy for the last ten years, depends on the continued practices of paper magic of one sort or another.

Kunstler also points out that the housing bubble is collapsing at the same moment as the oil crisis of rising prices is setting in permanently. "These events will be happening simultaneously," he writes. "The housing industry, so-called, will never recover because the oil crisis spells the end of the suburban build out. The cycle is over. The big production homebuilders will go down and never come back."

This is why the end of "piggybacking," combined with the collapse of the "sub-prime" loan market and the rising price of oil, spells big trouble ahead for the U.S., at home as well as abroad.

Disasters of War

I just finished reading Gunter Grass's World War II memoir, "How I Spent the War" in the June 4 New Yorker. Thank God it's online, so people seeing this can read it for themselves.

I don't know how I managed to never read anything by Grass over the last 40-plus years. When I was at San Francisco State in the mid-60's I saw lots of students carrying copies of "The Tin Drum" around for some class or other, and isolated phrases about Grass like "the conscience of postwar Germany" bounce around in odd corners of my memory. That's a possibly true but incomplete description of Grass, who over the years, has carefully cultivated a prodigious mastery of the writer's craft. He's a better writer than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and like Solzhenitsyn has something very, very important to tell us.

Grass's melancholy tale of his induction into the Waffen SS at age 16, very late in the war (September, 1944), of his lucky and completely accidental survival of the collapse of the Reich, of the corpses hanging from trees, the irrelevance of bravery in the face of superior firepower, the sudden deflation of adolescent bravado and naivete under the avalanche of war's overpowering reality, conveys a tremendous sadness which I would imagine has increased rather than diminished with time. Every word of this extremely intimate and wholly subjective memoir is chosen to serve as an indictment of the futility and pointlessness of modern war.

Has there been a war in modern times that could not have been avoided? Has there been one that should not have been?

Grass's war was the same one my father, ten years older than the German author, got caught up in. Pop also entered the conflict late, arriving in France in February of 1945, and mostly dealt with thousands of confused, desperate, hungry refugees and families on the road, and axis soldiers, mostly German but also from various other countries, looking for someone to surrender to. His trip across France and Germany by boxcar and foot ended with his witnessing the opening of the Dachau death camp.

He returned home traumatized and demoralized, intimitaely acquainted, like Gunter Grass, with the depths of depravity to which the race is capable of sinking under the iron reality of war. He was angry, sometimes sullen, and somewhat unpredictable for a couple of years, but after a while he recovered. I guess he decided what he had gone through was worth it, that he, his country, and his comrades in arms had accomplished something.

But for survivors on the other side, the postwar held nothing but the lingering, bitter taste of disaster. Grass's accomplishment in describing Germany's collapse, and the pathetic final attempts of the Wehrmacht to defend itself, lies in his ability to deliver an emotionally overpowering work using bland and objective language. He simply lays out his experiences of the war's last days in the coolest deadpan, and the measured calm of his tone amplifies the devastating effect of the narrative.

The Crusades (continued)

Okay, so Senator McCain is on Bill O'Reilly's "No Spin Zone" on Fox News talking about the new immigration bill that's wending its way through Congress (or maybe not), and O'Reilly says, "But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have."

The white, Christian, male power structure?

The context of this remark was O'Reilly's contention that Congress needs to put a cap on the eventual number of immigrant workers we allow into the country, lest the white, Christian, male power structure find itself swamped by sheer numbers. And at the end, McCain (who supports the bill) says "I agree with you."

The "No Spin" Zone? What fantasy universe of the nonexistent past are these guys living in?

I'd like to find out what they're smoking, so I can be sure to avoid it.

Pirates of the Persian Gulf

Noting that a majority in Congress calls the new war funding bill "supporting the troops" while she calls it "stealing Iraq's oil," Truthout.org columnist Ann Wright* on Saturday made a couple of very serious accusations:

"If the Iraqi Parliament refuses to pass the (oil) privatization legislation (i.e., the new Iraqi oil law which would give control of most of the country's petroleum resource to foreign companies for the next 30 years), Congress will withhold US reconstruction funds that were promised to the Iraqis to rebuild what the United States has destroyed there," Wright said, and adds the further charge that "The privatization law (was) written by American oil company consultants hired by the Bush administration."

Unfortunately, Colonel Wright did not support her accusations with documentary evidence such as hyperlinks or citations. If these very serious charges were true, I wanted to find the evidence. Wright accused congressional Democrats and Republicans alike of shamelessly blackmailing the Iraqi people by shaking them down for their oil, their only source of wealth, and also of open and blatant premeditated acts of brazen piracy, larceny, and brigandage.

She's accusing the Democratic Party especially of betraying not only the American people who voted them into power, but of betraying the Iraqi people as well, by turning them over to Cheney the Pirate.

Her accusations, as it turns out, are 100 percent accurate. A CBS News story from last Friday, published in the wake of the the congressional vote on the war funding bill, notes that "Continued U.S. reconstruction aid would be conditioned on progress toward the so-called benchmarks." And we also know that the passage of the Iraqi oil giveaway law by the Iraqi parliament is one of the bill's "benchmarks," because, as Robert Naiman noted at the Huffington Post on March 14, "Representative Dennis Kucinich is asking for something to be removed from the supplemental - the 'benchmark' that requires the Iraqi government to pass a new oil law."

Proving the second of Wright's accusations -- that the proposed Iraqi oil law was "written by American oil company consultants hired by the Bush administration" -- is also a slam dunk. Having studied the Arabic version of the proposed law for purposes of making and publishing an English translation of it, the Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar notes that the Arabic of what was purported to be the original draft of the law looked "weak and translated. I have no doubt that the English version of the law is the original one, and that the Arabic one is nothing more than an edited translation of the English origin. The few changes in the content, between the Arabic and English versions show clearly that the Iraqi lawmakers who worked on the law did not change any of the parts that relates to foreign investments," Jarrar concludes.

He also identified the original source of the proposed new oil law by noting that the English version of the law which leaked in 2006 "shocked a number of specialists, like Erik Leaver from the institute for Policy Studies, because it had some exact text from a previously leaked seminar papers produced by a private contracting company called 'Bearing Point.'" In fact, the Virgina-based consulting firm BearingPoint, one of the world's largest, richest, and most powerful energy consultants, was hired by the Bush administration for no other purpose than to write the Iraqi oil law the American (especially Exxon) and European (B.P. and Shell) oil giants demanded of them.

The website Oil Change International reported the details of BearingPoint's Iraq contract: "BearingPoint, a Virginia based contractor is being paid $240m for its work in Iraq, winning an initial contract from the US Agency for International Development (USAid) within weeks of the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. A BearingPoint employee, based in the US embassy in Baghdad, was hired to advise the Iraqi Ministry of Oil on drawing up a new hydrocarbon law."

Apparently their advice consisted of writing the law, then handing it to the Iraqi parliament and the Oil Ministry, and threatening them with the withdrawal of reconstruction funds if they are unable to see the virtues of the new law.

Oil Change International adds that "BearingPoint employees gave $117,000 to the 2000 and 2004 Bush election campaigns, more than any other Iraq contractor."

This Iraq war is now demonstrably the most openly criminal and larcenous act of international pillage since the King of Belgium grabbed the Congo in 1876, with the sole intention of robbing those hapless Africans of their ivory and rubber. Oh yes, and he mentioned something about spreading Christianity and Democracy as well. Big deal. History doesn't repeat itself, but as Mark Twain said, "It rhymes."

Furthermore, the war and especially the latest war funding bill have laid bare the utter bankruptcy and moral depravity of the American political system, and of both major parties. Forget elections, folks, and forget about improving the American political system. The so-called system has degenerated into a simple dictatorship, and the only way it can be improved is out of existence.

When you have rats, you get a cat. When you're troubled by too many cats, you get a dog. If you've got dogs, find yourself a tyrannosaurus.

And if you've got Republicans and Democrats, and they're working together to promote international crime and mayhem on a cosmic scale, get yourself a Samuel Adams. Or a Tom Paine. Or a Robespierre. Or a Lenin. Or a Ho Chi Minh.

Hell, get all of 'em.

Democrites

No, Virginia, there is NOT an opposition party in this country. Yesterday's vote on war funding proves it.

Since a Democratic Congress was elected in November of '06, why is the war still going on?

Why is impeachment "off the table?"

If you really want to know the answer to that question, read this. But fair warning: don't read it unless you REALLY want to know.

If you're like the rest of us -- I mean the 70 percent or so of American adults who don't like things the way they are -- do yourself a favor and abandon all hope.

Hope is for saps and wimps. It's the friend of the tyrant and the sly, fat fascist. The rich capitalists in their mahogany boardrooms who have hijacked our political system (including the party of Democrites), and the perps running the machine which wages perpetual war for perpetual profit, will not relinquish power because we hope they will, or because the Democrites ask them nicely to give it up.

They have to be overthrown.

Dust Hides a Mirror -- Or Not, as the Case May Be

"We are what we think," the Buddha said, or something very similar, as those monosyllables are not only attributed to him, but are the opening words of the most basic text of Theravada Buddhism, The Dhammapada.

"All that we are arises with our thoughts," he continues, and then, "With our thoughts we make the world."

The Buddha was capable of great subtlety, but he never hid anything, and the Dhammapada's most important words come first, at the very beginning. How like him.

Is the Buddha saying that there is no such thing as objective reality, and that reality, to the extent that it exists at all, is purely subjective, and only found in our minds? Not at all. Any child knows there is an objective reality outside his own head, even if he or she doesn't realize that it can only be experienced "from the inside," as it were.

"Speak or act with an impure mind and trouble will follow you..." Siddhartha said next. There is a subtle implication here, (overtly stated in the second stanza*): look at the world with a purified mind and your senses will apprehend the world as it actually is, just as a spotless and true mirror reflects what is held in front of it.

Which brings us to why the U.S. is in so very much serious, serious trouble these days.

"Last week," Truthout.org columnist Dean Baker wrote yesterday, "I was struck to see a well-respected centrist foreign policy analyst discuss President Bush's 'surge' as a serious policy for bringing stability to Iraq. This sight was striking, because at this point it is very difficult to imagine the surge as a serious policy. It seems evident that the surge is a desperate gambit by a president who does not want to acknowledge the failure of his invasion, and instead is willing to see the deaths of thousands more US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians."

Baker is of course, pointing out the obvious, and at the same time laying bare one of the more frustrating and maddening tenets of mainstream American punditry: the tendency of "serious" political commentators to give solemn consideration to shit that every idiot knows is patently untrue. They do this only because the idiots in charge, who are more often than not so pathetic that they believe their own bullshit, are putting this utter nonsense forward as serious policy which has a chance of success.

We've learned nothing from the Iraq War. But nothing.

Dean Baker's whole essay is worth reading, and as you read keep in mind: "Speak or act with an impure mind and trouble will follow you as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart."

*We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with a pure mind
And happiness will follow you
As your shadow, unshakable.

Annals of Addiction

If I have any regular readers here (and I hope I have a few), I apologize for not having been around for a week. I've been dealing with the effects of quitting smoking, and while I've had plenty of time, I've had neither the energy nor the inclination for blogging.

It seems the unlovely combination of bronchitis and emphysema finally did what the simple desire not to smoke (and thus be cool, yogic, serene, organic, and wise) was unable to do -- make not smoking a pleasure. And even though I'm still alternately on edge and listless, it really feels good not to be sucking those toxins into my lungs and coughing them back out. Ugh.

In addition, I can't quite get over the feeling that on a mainly political blog there's not much to write about these days. We're stuck having to bear the current unbearable situation another 19 months, and there ain't a whole lot anybody can do about it, except maybe Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and they ain't doin' it.

But that's OK; we're not dead yet. The earth is still producing crops, and some of the bees are still alive. We haven't attacked Iran yet, and maybe we won't. And I'm still here and still breathing, although I'm not quite sure why or how.

The Pope and the Indians

Acting as if he were the latest incarnation of the dark and ominous priests who blessed the European conquests of the New World and the dismembering of its native cultures, Pope Benedict XVI declared while visiting Brazil yesterday that the Roman Catholic Church had purified America's natives, and that a revival of their religions would be a backward step.

The Church, the Pope added, had not imposed itself on the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Rather, he said, they had welcomed the arrival of European priests at the time of the conquest since they were "silently longing" for Christianity.

Indian leaders in Brazil and elsewhere reacted with outrage and disgust, and called the Pope's comments "arrogant and disrespectful." That's putting it mildly. This Pope, a former German cardinal, known as a serious scholar and accomplished theologian, has once again shown himself to be an ignorant and deluded fanatic who seems hell-bent on destroying what's left of the Church hierarchy's reputation.

Beginning with the gross and disgusting crimes against the Arawak people by Christopher Columbus, who was not particularly interested in converting them to Christianity, the European conquest of the Americas shifted into high gear with Hernan Cortez's Church-sanctioned invasion of Mexico shortly before 1520. By 1522, with his destruction of the Aztec Empire accomplished, Cortez began the systematic decapitation of native culture, replacing indigenous languages with Spanish and the MesoAmerican religions with Catholicism, whose cathedrals and churches soon became the central features of every city, town, and hamlet in New Spain.

An unintended but nevertheless useful consequence (in terms of easing the conquest) of the Europeans' arrival was the sudden unleashing of diseases against which the natives offered no acquired resistance. Some of these were brought by the Spanish themselves, and others by the animals or vermin that accompanied them. Unknown numbers, perhaps 90 percent, of the Indians died of these various pestilences.

By the time the aging Indian who called himself Juan Diego experienced his celebrated vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe in 1529, the conquest of Mexico was complete. But Juan Diego's Catholicism blended elements of the old Aztec religion with Roman orthodoxy; his Virgin incorporated elements of the Indian moon goddess Tonantzin. Fragments of the shattered Aztec culture remain embedded in Mexican Catholicism to this day, from its exuberant idolatry to the old native death cult preserved in its bleeding crucifixes.

The European conquest of the rest of what would become Latin America followed in quick succession, although the Portuguese reduction of Brazil's Indians was slower, less comprehensive, and continues down to the present day. Deep in the remaining rain forests of the Amazon basin, Indians are still being brutalized and torn from their old lifeways as more and more of their ancestral lands are "developed."

The conquest continues, and this is what made the Pope's ahistorical remarks yesterday so profoundly offensive. "We repudiate the Pope's comments," said Sandro Tuxa, a Catholic priest and Brazilian Indian who heads the movement of northeastern tribes. "To say the cultural decimation of our people represents a purification is offensive, and frankly, frightening."

The tragedy in all this is that Tuxa and thousands like him throughout the region are the voice of the Church at the grassroots, which is often doing necessary and courageous work among dispossessed people who have no other advocates. If the Church was an irrelevant artifact of the past from head to root, the Pope's profound stupidity wouldn't matter. But the roots are still viable, and apparently the Catholic Church is that most unusual of institutions, rotten mainly at the top.

Ecotopia? Or Armageddon?

Green has suddenly become the "in" color for this summer and the coming fall season, and while your neighbor's Toyota Prius may be black or silver, everybody knows that underneath it's as green as a gas-burning car can get. "Going green" is both a fashion statement and a serious crusade that proponents believe will save the planet, save the American economy, and restore people-friendly communities and lifestyles, free of the alienation and ugliness that characterizes so much of American life today.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford implies, but does not say directly, that the green movement we see all around us will be our salvation. In his May 2 article "The Hippies Were Right!" Morford cites "...energy-efficient light bulbs...organic foods going mainstream...chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target...saving the whales and protecting the dolphins and...yoga studios flourishing in every small town..." and adds, "Look around: we have entire industries devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology and an Oscar for 'An Inconvenient Truth' and even the soulless corporate monsters over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they really, really care about saving the environment..."

Morford seems to be saying that the Green Movement which began with the hippies in the late 60's will save the planet and the soul of America because the decision to go green is economically unavoidable. What "consumers" demand, Wal-Mart and Target must deliver, according to his cheery and optimistic analysis.

There are some, however, who think greenies like Morford are naive and shallow, and believe that instead of heading for a green renaissance, the U.S. and the rest of the industrialized world are on a collision course with economic collapse, environmental disaster, and a period of intensified warfare in which the most powerful countries fight to the death over the world's few remaining resources, especially oil. The most pessemistic and well-spoken representative of the "Armageddon" faction is James Howard Kunstler.

Kunstler believes "alternative" fuels, hybrid cars and the green movement generally are manifestations of self-indulgent, adolescent fantasies, and entirely inadequate as solutions to the disasters to come. In today's weekly essay at his blog Clusterfuck Nation, he predicts a catastrophic, sudden collapse of "the car-crazy infrastructure for everyday life, and all the activities supporting it, that most Americans now living regard as the natural and normal medium for human existence, as salt water is the natural and normal medium for squid. The public brings no critical reflection to being in it, and so its failure will eventually come as a deadly surprise -- as a red tide surprises the denizens of a tropical sea. When it occurs, the public will not be able to escape from their investments in this way of life. Some may feel swindled, but they will not lose their sense of having been entitled to a happier destiny, so the chances for the acting-out of massive political grievance are high.

"It's a tragic irony that we got so good at the advertising game," Kunstler continues, "...because in doing so we rigged a sub-system dedicated to reinforcing all our false entitlements. So when the dreadful moment of recognition comes that we can't possibly continue being a nation of happy motorists shuttling between the strip malls and subdivisions, the bewilderment will be monumental. Nobody will believe that it is happening, or have a clue how we got ourselves into such a fix."

Difficult as it may seem, I believe both Kunstler and Morford are right. The collapse Kunstler forecasts will certainly come, but not as suddenly or catastrophically as he predicts. Kenneth S. Deffeyes*, perhaps the world's best-qualified authority on the future of oil, tells us that "World oil production has ceased growing, and by the year 2019 production will be down to 90 percent of the peak level.**" This means that the catastrophe Kunstler sees coming for suburbia will be more like a slow slide than a sudden collapse. Year by year, the suburbs and strip mall complexes farthest away from the central cities will slowly die and be abandoned, but the process will be gradual and incremental, not sudden. The prices of gasoline and other fuels will follow the same pattern, gradually increasing from three, to four, to five dollars a gallon, rather than suddenly spiking to ten.

And as the present-day, unsustainable American lifestyle slowly dies, the green revolution Morford predicts will slowly but inexorably supplant and replace the petroleum-based, car-centered existence we've come to think of as normal.

But it won't be an easy transition, and Deffeyes believes that "On a fifteen-year time scale, I have no doubt that human ingenuity will find adequate energy sources with nice adjectives like 'renewable,' 'nonpolluting,' 'sustainable,' 'alternative,' 'organic,' and 'natural.' For the five-year time scale, we have a shortage of good adjectives. 'Diesel,' 'coal,' 'nuclear,' don't sound warm and fuzzy."

I believe we will be able to make the changes Morford sees in store, but it's going to be a bumpy ride. Get ready for a nuclear power plant next door to your organic vegetable patch.

*Kenneth S. Deffeyes is Professor Emeritus of geology at Princeton. Prior to becoming a university professor he spent 30 years in the oil business as an engineer, specializing in exploration and development.

**The quotes are from Deffeyes's book, "Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak," Hill and Wang, 2005, pages 7 and 8.

slap happy

I know you think you understand what I might have written here, or might not have written for that matter, but do you think you would or wouldn't feel the same way if you hadn't read or avoided reading these words? It's all according to what a person did or didn't do, I always say or sometimes don't.

However, I can assure you that every sentence I've ever written on this blog is true, except for this one. On the the other hand, it might or might not be the case that every sentence I've written here is a lie, except for this one of course.

The Nation of Slurbia

On Sunday evening I took a drive through the immense and rapidly-expanding Nation of Slurbia (suburban ready-made slums), which threatens to engulf the entirety of Southern California and many other large parts of the country.

Driving CA-79 through the eastern margin of what used to be the tiny town of Hemet, and then coasting down through Murietta, the casual tourist passes miles upon miles of closely-packed housing developments crammed behind noise walls, two-story "homes" which are badly built, egregiously overpriced, and utterly devoid of any sort of soul or persona.

These are truly the cities of the damned.

I was genuinely surprised to see most of these oversized vinyl-clad shelters being lived in. Why Slurbia continues to metastisize I can't really say. One would think that in the face of collaspsing real estate prices, the exploding default rate on so-called "sub-prime" housing loans, and record-high prices for gasoline and other petroleum products, building contractors would see the laser printing on the vinyl wall and abscond with their ill-gotten gains, leaving the Slurbian masses to ponder their fate, stuck with huge monthly payments on property which is declining in value, in a wasteland of monotonous and affectless beige developments flanked by strip malls stocked with plastic-and-glass boxes housing the "standard brands" -- Burger King, Pet Smart, Midas Muffler, Bank of America, etc. etc.

But the beginning of the end of Slurbia might not be far off. Writing on his once-weekly blog Clusterfuck Nation, Jim Kunstler noted a couple weeks ago that "The fiasco in real estate and mortgage lending seems finally to be breaking through the reality shield of the mainstream media. Last week, for example, NPR's nightly Marketplace show actually ran a segment saying that the production homebuilders were choking on unsold houses and that (as if NPR had just discovered this) the mortgage industry was rife with irregularities in lending standards!"

Kunstler has been the loudest, most pessemistic, most insistent, and most irrefutable Jeremiah of the apocalypse hidden in the modern American landscape, and he sees the carcinogenic growth of Slurbia as both the effect of a declining morality and regard for the future at the top of American society, and the cause of alienation and the fiscal disenfranchisement of the American public, or "the consumers" as we are sometimes insultingly designated by professional economists and the mainstream media.

I sometimes wonder if people stop to consider what they're actually getting for the typical $300,000 asking price they're asked pay back with varying rates of interest over a 35- or 40-year stretch. Not long ago these buyers assumed they were acquiring properties which could only appreciate in value, but that's certainly not true today.

Kunstler, who knows architecture, insists that they're chumps getting robbed. Commenting on current building practices, Kunstler says, "The design failures of (Slurbian housing) might be attributed to a loss of knowledge and a lack of attention to details, but I think a deeper explanation has to do with the diminishing returns of technology. We've never had more awesome power tools for workers in the building trades. We have compound miter saws, electric spline joiners, laser-guided tape measures, and many other nifty innovations, and we've never seen, in the aggregate, worse work done by so many carpenters. For most of them, apparently, getting a plain one-by-four door-surround to meet at a 45-degree miter without a quarter-inch gap is asking too much. In other words, we now have amazing tools and no skill. What you wonder is whether the latter is a function of the former. Is the work so bad because we expect the tools to have all the skill?

"Another issue is the choice of materials. As you march down the decades from the 1950s, the materials-of-choice for finishing the exterior are more and more materials not found in nature...After the 1980s, there is a distinct acceleration in the use of vinyl for practically everything. The vinyl clapboards, soffits, window-surrounds, et cetera, are often little more than stapled onto the house. And naturally they begin to sag and pull apart instantly. After twenty-odd years of that you end up with a house that looks like a birthday present wrapped by a five-year-old."

Current litigation is following the trajectory of rapid decline Kunstler chronicles. Currently, residents of a Desert Hot Springs slurb have formed a united front and brought a class-action suit against the builder of their project, because their "homes" are falling apart after two years of being lived in and subjected to the baking heat and gritty winds of a desert hilltop.

People tend to dismiss Kunstler because he's been predicting the decline and fall of Slurbia for years, during which time it has only continued to metastisize. But that decline and fall will come, and the rising costs of fuel will be the shot to the heart of this odious carcinogenic enterprise. Many residents of Hemet and Murietta commute to Los Angeles for work. As the price of gas reaches, then exceeds four dollars a gallon, the sustainability of more new suburbs, located further and further away from the center must certainly collapse, and the unfortunate residents of Slurbia will be forced to move to where the work is, and abandon the now nearly-worthless houses which they are still paying large mortgages for.

And what will be the ultimate fate of the beige subdivisions of Slurbia?

Karl Rove, Harriet Meiers, and the Just Is Department

When Debra Yang quit her job as the U.S. Attorney for the district which includes Los Angeles in October of 2006, the U.S. Attorneys scandal was still just a gas bubble in the swampy minds of Karl Rove and White House Counsel Harriet Miers. The eight attorneys whose firings would blow up into that celebrated scandal were not yet purged from the Justice Department and wouldn't be until December, long after Ms. Yang departed her job. Discussions of their eventual fate -- and Ms. Yang's -- were still only the subjects of internal White House e-mails and memoranda.

But recent articles in the mainstream press, most recently and most notably in the New York Times, question whether Debra Yang was privy to inside-the-White-House information, and quit her job because she knew she was about to be fired. Even more ominously, these articles ask whether Yang's current employer, the southern California law firm Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher, might have been secretly induced by someone in the White House to offer Debra Yang the $1.5 million signing bonus which helped finalize her decision to quit her job with the Justice Department and go to work in the private sector.

What makes these questions particularly explosive is the delicate legal standing of Riverside congressional Rep. Jerry Lewis, one of the most powerful Republicans in the House of Representatives and, until the change of majority leadership in January of this year, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

At the time of her departure from her U.S. Attorney position, Ms. Yang was investigating Lewis, focusing on his close ties with Brent Wilkes, the lobbyist implicated in the bribery of convicted and jailed San Diego Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham. Wilkes has contributed to Lewis's campaigns and at one time also employed a lobbying firm headed by one of Lewis's closest friends, Bill Lowery.

When she went to work for Gibson, Dunn, Debra Yang was already very familiar with that firm, because they represented Lewis in Yang's investigation of the congressman.

Yang is no fool, and has prudently recused herself from any direct involvement in Gibson, Dunn's defense efforts on Jerry Lewis's behalf. Instead she is, according to Adam Cohen of the New York Times, "co-leader of the Crisis Management Practice Group" and working closely "with Theodore Olson, who was President Bush’s solicitor general and his Supreme Court lawyer in Bush v. Gore."

Keeping the Story Alive

The questionable circumstances surrounding Debra Yang's departure from the Justice Department came to the New York Times's attention from two primary sources. One is the tireless bird-dogging of all aspects of the U.S. Attorney scandal by Josh Marshall, proprietor of the "Talking Points Memo" blog, and his writers and reporters at "TPM Muckraker." The Muckraker's Paul Kiel first broached the questions about Yang's post-election departure from Justice on March 4 of this year. The other source was the tenacity of California Senator Diane Feinstein's attention to this story (Feinstein serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee), and her repeatedly telling reporters throughout March that she had questions about the timing of Yang's departure from Justice, to which Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales and other witnesses were not providing satisfactory answers.

Feinstein wants to know whether Debra Yang was tipped off in advance that she was about to be fired. E-mails turned over to the Judiciary Committee reveal that White House Counsel Harriet Meiers and Kyle Sampson, the Justice Department underling delegated to wield the axe in the attorney firings, were frequently discussing whether Yang should be fired as early as September, 2006. Since Yang was a member of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee, a group Gonzales has called "a small group of U.S. attorneys that I consult on policy matters," she may very well have had inside information that her job was on the line.

Another possibility is that someone inside the White House, perhaps Karl Rove, who is now known to have instructed the spear carrier Gonzales to target any U.S. Attorneys who were investigating important Republican targets, finagled the Republican-connected Gibson, Dunn firm to get Debra Yang out of the way by offering her the rich financial incentive they eventually did proffer, and thereby monkey-wrench the Lewis investigation, which has gone cold since Yang's departure.

Yang has refused to make any extensive public comment on any of these possibilities, and is striving to maintain an extremely low profile. She says only that she is a single mother who is highly motivated by financial considerations, and that she left her job at Justice for purely personal reasons. She may not have known that she was about to be fired in December along with the eight attorneys who eventually met that fate. But it would have been impossible for her not to be aware of the highly partisan political connections of the firm she went to work for after leaving Justice.

This case raises too many unanswered questions to go away. Meanwhile, long-time congressman Jerry Lewis is amassing funds for his 2008 re-election bid, which, barring a miracle or a Justice Department investigation, will be successful. He was re-elected in 2006 virtually without opposition.

Politics and Porn

If you're planning to engage in either politics or commercial pornography, you'd be well advised not to use your real name.

I've noticed that Hillary Rodham Clinton has dropped the "Rodham." Too aristocratic sounding. These days you want something that will appeal to minorities.

Barack Obama. Barack Hussein Obama. Barack Bob Obama. Nguyen Jamal Singh Greyfeather Hinojosa.

If you want to be a porn star, you derive your screen name this way: name of first pet plus name of the first street you lived on.

My pornstar name is Ralph Glenaven. What's yours?

May Day -- Remembering Marx and Lennon

Memo to Karl Rove
Dear Karl: I understand you're a neocon, or so you call yourself. I was wondering if you're familiar with Groucho Marx's famous message to the Friar's Club? He sent them a wire saying "Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member." Just asking. He also said, "I never forget a face, but in your case I'd be glad to make an exception." Yours Sincerely...

Groucho Marx was a well-disguised subversive and anti-authoritarian, as is anybody who mocks and ridicules the powerful, the pompous, and the proud. On receiving a copy of Richard Nixon's book "Six Crises" from the man himself he wrote back, "From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it." Actually, that's not true. He wrote that to his friend S.J. Perelman regarding the latter's book, "Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge" (1929), but I enjoy indulging in political fantasy. It's a form of revolutionary idealism, and as Jawaharlal Nehru once said, "Today's idealist is tomorrow's realist."

Which brings us to John Lennon and his song "Imagine," the perfect song for this May Day, 2007. It's been sung by tons of people, many of whom have no idea what the song is actually saying, since its lyrics seem harmless at first glance, are set to a very pretty tune, and are frequently mistaken for an inane bit of liberal, bleeding-heart fluff, sort of like "Puff the Magic Dragon."

Imagine there's no countries,
It isn't hard to do;
Nothing to kill or die for...

This is the most radical sort of anarchism expressing itself in the sweetest, simplest, way. But it's up to us who have seen this world descend into the nightmare of perpetual war to do away with the fiction of "sovereignty," and to move on to a world where no country, such as England, or Rome, or the United States, is able to suffer under the delusion that she owns the world, and inflict enormous suffering on the the rest of humankind as a result of it.

Will there ever be a world where all people have the right to live with basic human dignity, without being threatened with bombs and death for being in the wrong country? You have to imagine it first for it to ever happen.

...And no religion too...

Lennon recognized that even worse threats to world peace and understanding than nationalist fanatics are the furious agents of the divine will, medieval relics like Pat Robertson and the Taliban mullahs, who invoke God's authority to justify their murderous rage against against the human race.

When God handed down the rules and laws to Moses on Sinai, an idea the Jews acquired from the earlier examples they saw in Mesopotamia and Egypt, people lived in preponderantly rural societies where 90 percent of the population were illiterate peasants or herdsman. They needed to be tended, shepherded, led.

It's a different world now. We all read, we all think, we all have hopes, aspirations, and dreams, especially the dream of peace for our families and loved ones. We no longer need the Daddy God and his agents of repression to tell us right from wrong. And there's no longer any profit in our hating each other because of lines that politicians drew on maps.

Lennon was not the first who had the right idea. "Man will never be free," said the pre-revolutionary encyclopedia editor Denis Diderot, "until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest," (a quote often misattributed to Voltaire).

That was another world, however. Humans living in this one won't be free until the last nationalistic war machine is monkey wrenched, capped, and disabled, the last nuclear bomb buried and the recipe forgotten, and the last medieval fanatic who makes a career of stoking the fires under those machines locked up for his or her (and our) own good.

You might say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Speech Suppression, Corporate Monopoly Style

The Postal Regulatory Commission is in the process of setting new periodicals mailing rates that threaten to put many small publications with limited resources out of business.

The new rates will impose a life-threatening strain on political publications of both the left and right, such as The Progressive, In These Times, and The National Review. These are the kinds of political advocacy magazines that target niche readerships and carry limited, inexpensive advertising.

At the same time, the new rates will favor mass-circulation, advertising-heavy magazines such as People and TV Guide.

The Postal Regulatory Commission is adopting the new rate plan at the behest of corporate giant Time-Warner, which is now engaged in a naked attempt to drive smaller competition out of the market and establish a monopoly on information in the U.S., as well as extending its overseas influence.

This was the most important story of the week of April 15-21, but it was buried by the electronic media's monotonic coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre.

End Run Around the First Amendment

A necessary periodicals postal rate hike has been coming for a long time. But earlier this year, the regulatory commission rejected a proposal from its own U.S. Postal Service which would have imposed an across-the-board rates raise of 11 percent plus change for everybody.

That plan was in keeping with the 215-year history of egalitarian postal rates in this country, envisioned by Madison and Jefferson as a means to promote democracy by encouraging the free flow of information and opinion, even unpopular information and opinion.

But the political appointees of the Bush regime now occupying the Postal Regulatory Commission chose instead to secretly adopt the scheme put forward by Time-Warner, according to University of Illinois professor Robert McChesney, quoted at the conservative website World Net Daily:

"Postal policy converted the free press clause in the First Amendment from an abstract principle into a living breathing reality for Americans. And it has served that role throughout our history.

"What the Post Office now proposes goes directly against 215 years of postal policy. Under the plan, smaller periodicals will be hit with a much larger increase than big magazines– as much as 30 percent. Some of the largest circulation magazines will face hikes of less than 10 percent."

What the Postal Regulatory Commission has done, McChesney goes on to explain, is to adopt a rate schedule, secretly, in the dead of night, with no congressional supervision or oversight, giving the best prices to the biggest publishers, allowing them to lock in their market position, eliminate all smaller competition, and cement their monopoly over the information sector.

The new rates will go into effect on July 15 of this year unless this juggernaut is stopped. And it needs to be.

Monopoly Capitalism in One Country, and the Suppression of Speech

The Time-Warner plan is a perfect example of speech suppression and thought control in a sophisticated and seemingly "free and open" society such as the United States. In April of this year, Noam Chomsky wrote of this sort of speech suppression and mind control: "In crude and brutal societies, the Party Line is publicly proclaimed and must be obeyed - or else. What you actually believe is your own business and of far less concern. In societies where the state has lost the capacity to control by force, the Party Line is simply presupposed; then, vigorous debate is encouraged within the limits imposed by unstated doctrinal orthodoxy. The cruder of the two systems leads, naturally enough, to disbelief; the sophisticated variant gives an impression of openness and freedom, and so far more effectively serves to instill the Party Line. It becomes beyond question, beyond thought itself, like the air we breathe."

It would be "crude and brutal" indeed to simply arrest the publishers and editors of left-wing and right-wing publications and throw them in jail. But the sophisticated technique of hitting them in the wallet, thus eliminating them from marketplace of ideas and leaving room for nothing but conventional thought, is the perfectly tailored technique of our friendly, eminently reasonable, back-slapping and smiling version of the thought police.

This isn't speech suppression, they'll tell you, it's just how the market works. And "the market," as we all know, is a non-ideological, perfectly objective force, which just coincidentally works to eliminate all but the most timid and conventional forms of speech and thought.

Why It's Not Going to Work

In 1520 the Vatican rounded up all the copies of Luther's "95 Theses" they could find and burned them in St. Peter's Square. They thought they had eliminated the heretical threat.

Too bad for them. The printing press had already been invented, and despite the Cardinals' best efforts, the new technology rendered their feeble attempt at old-fashioned speech and thought suppression impotent.

In a similar fashion, even if this disastrous postal rate change goes into effect in July and many smaller publications are put out of business, they won't stop publishing. Largely thanks to Time-Warner itself, the internet has already been invented, and all the publications that would suffer under this blatant instance of speech suppression by the corporate oligarchy and its bribed lackeys and sycophants in the regulatory agencies will simply continue publishing on the net, and deriving what advertising revenue they can from that source.

But there's no reason why it should go into effect. Visit http://action.freepress.net/campaign/postal today. Sign the letter and e-mail it to your congressperson, to the Postal Board of Governors, the Postal Regulatory Commission, and the Postmaster General. Make noise, raise hell, and don't take "no" for an answer.

It's your country. Take it back.

Old Bessie

George Tenet's book, "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the C.I.A." will be released on April 30.

Previews of the book emphasize its revelatory chapters and its provision of further proof (as if we needed any) that the country was deliberately lied into war in 2003. David Ignatius of the Washington Post, who apparently got an advance copy, writes that "George Tenet has been doing a slow burn ever since he left the CIA. He's been angrier and angrier as he saw himself being essentially made the fall guy on WMD in Iraq. And he's gonna come back saying he and his agency, the CIA, were pushed, again and again, by Cheney and Cheney's people to give him the answers that they wanted. And he's got chapter and verse on that."

So, Tenet is pissed about having been a tool.

Nobody made him do it.

Isn't it wonderful that guys like him game the system, climb the ladder to the top of the bureaucracy, dutifully follow orders, do and say what they're told, and then grow consciences after they've retired?

I guess under the rule of a military dictatorship, that's the way it has to be. The decider decides the rules for the wise ones and the fools, and everybody follows orders.

But keep in mind, the U.S. as a military dictatorship didn't start with Bush. He's just the most flagrant and obvious one so far.

The Emperor Lyndon Johnson liked to tell stories. The reporters found him very amusing and entertaining. Here's a story old down-home Lyndon, one of our emperors from 40 years ago, told about the problems of working with the dictator's private army, a.k.a. the C.I.A.

"Let me tell you about these intelligence guys," Johnson said, in his best "just folks" down-home twang. "When I was growing up in Texas we had a cow named Bessie. I'd get her in the stanchion, seat myself and squeeze out a pail of fresh milk. One day I'd worked hard and gotten a full pail of milk, but I wasn't paying attention, and old Bessie swung her shit-smeared tail through that bucket of milk. Now, you know, that's what these intelligence guys do. You work hard and get a good program or policy going, and they swing a shit-smeared tail through it."

Johnson said a mouthful about the U.S. and its foreign policy in modern times with that humble parable. When our leaders regard the truth as the equivalent of shit, it shows how deeply in trouble we are. And we've been in deep trouble for a long time before Bush and Cheney took us over the precipice.

Fast forward to 2003, and Tenet trying to tell Bush and Cheney that the truth is, Saddam is weaponless and defenceless. They tell him to shut up and say what they tell him to say. It'll all be in the book.

And of course, they already knew Saddam was weaponless and defenceless. Cowards and fascist liars like them would never attack someone capable of defending himself.

Freedom from war, freedom from fear, freedom from the insanity of military-industrial imperialism, these are things I've never known in my long life, and never will. But future generations will know them, provided they still have an earth to live on.

(Lyndon Johnson quoted by Chalmers Johnson in his book "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic," page 90.)

The Gypsy Fiddler's Song

(A song to be sung without teeth and played without a bow; a movie to be shot with eyes.)

Green leaves are on the trees, green as apples.
Millions of flowers are in the fields.
The dog days are fast approaching;
July is almost upon us.

The tyrant is in the people's palace;
He takes our sons and daughters
And sends them to the faraway desert,
There to leave pieces of themselves --
This one a leg,
This one an arm,
That one a hand and an eye.

Millions of green leaves are on the trees,
July is almost upon us.

Bush the tyrant is taking everything;
He has taken all the money.
He makes us work long overtimes for nothing,
Without even time for a cigarette
Or a slice of pizza.

July is almost upon us;
He has even taken the cool breezes.
In the end he will take even the light.

Millions of green leaves,
People are in the streets
Calling out the name of the criminal.
"Bush, you have ruined our country."

Where are the soldiers?
In front of the people's palace,
Threatening the people with guns and bayonets.
"We're your brothers and sisters," the people say,
"We're your parents, your grandparents,
"Your aunts and uncles -- join us."

The dog days are fast approaching;
July is almost upon us.
In July, the month of revolution, the people say
"The tyrant is finished."

"Come out you coward, and face your judgment."

Millions of green leaves are on the trees,
And in the field, a million flowers.

(Adapted from the Gypsy fiddler's song "Balada Conducatorolui" in "Latcho Drom.")

Numbers

The new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll came out today, and the numbers show that as time goes by more and more Americans are siding with the Democrats and turning away from Bush.

The numbers are astounding. And revealing.

56 Percent now say they want to see a firm date for withdrawing American troops from Iraq. 37 Percent say they're still with Bush. The numbers of Americans who believe victory in Iraq isn't possible is about the same as the number who want a withdrawal date.

The war is probably the biggest cause of the very sour mood in the country, with only 22 percent of Americans saying that the country is on the right track.

While Bush still has his hard-core, never-say-die adherents and echoes who believe every word he says, their numbers continue to shrink. In my 62-year life I've never seen this kind of disaffection and alienation from an American administration.

The depth of anger was somewhat similar under Nixon, but somehow the dissatisfaction didn't go as deep because people tended to think the problem was Nixon, not a systemic dysfunction. I'm not old enough to remember Truman's big slide in the public's estimation. And people's attitude toward Johnson tended to be less intense than their dislike of Bush. Americans didn't start really hating the Vietnam War in large numbers until long after Johnson was gohnson.

Americans now hate the Iraq War and hate Bush, and that's not going to change.

I don't know what's going to happen. Nobody does. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if George W. Bush doesn't finish his second term. Things are beginning to really heat up in the Democratic Congress. I think they're planning to take this administration apart piece by piece.

If that's what they do, it will be fun to watch. My only problem with all this is that it looks like many of us, once again, have been lulled into thinking that things will really change significantly when the Democrats assume full power. I believe we're collectively going to be extremely disappointed.

The Enemy

I visited the website belonging to an American soldier named Pat Dollard, who writes "Eventually, I learned the joys of killing" by way of introduction.

Scrolling down, I read a post by a Corporal Tyler Rock, partially titled "I Got a Message for That Douche Harry Reid." Rock tells us that "ramadi (sic) was once dubbed by everyone as the worst city in the world. but we have done such a great job here that all the families in the area have worked with us on driving out the insurgency and that we work directly with the IA and the IP’s. the city has been cleaned up so well that the IP’s do most of the patrols now and we go out with them to hand out candy and toys to the children."

I'm glad things are so peaceful in Ramadi.

Live blogging NPR...On a violent day in Iraq, House and Sentate negotiators have agreed on a withdrawal date, to be included in a bill President Bush has promised to veto, saying he will not accept a bill containing any "artificial timetable." He does not say whether he would accept a bill containing a natural or an organic timetable.

The timetable for withdrawal is non-binding. That means it's a suggestion, not a requirement. Bush will veto the bill anyway.

Nine members of the 82nd Airborne Division were killed yesterday in a car bomb attack on their base...

"I think the surge has failed," Rep. John Murtha said on CNN today. "I think there was no possibility that it was going to work."

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that in Ramadi yesterday, "Three suicide car bombers killed 20 people and wounded 35 others in the Iraqi insurgent stronghold of Ramadi..."

As the day wore on, Harry Reid and Dick Cheney traded insults over the airwaves. Cheney accused Reid and the Democrats of "defeatism." Reid replied, "I'm not going to get into a name-calling contest with somebody who has a nine percent approval rating."

Also today, the premier American Mideast expert, Juan Cole, wrote in the San Jose Mercury News that the anti-American Shi'ite leader Moktada al-Sadr "On Monday...pulled his six Cabinet ministers out of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and on the same day sponsored a demonstration 20,000 strong against a major provincial government. The previous week, he had brought hundreds of thousands of Iraqis into the streets of An-Najaf and other cities to protest Maliki's refusal to demand the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

"Can the Maliki government survive the defection of a major Shiite faction?" Cole asks.

Al-Sadr is quickly becoming the most powerful person in Iraq, Cole concludes.

As the war grinds on month after month, news of it begins blur in the mind, like the images seen in a kaleidoscope. Bush, Harry Reid, Moktada al-Sadr, the magnetic "Support Our Troops" ribbons on the backs of Ford Explorers, homicidal uniformed expeditionary cheerleaders for the Party Line on Iraq, the surreal, bulldog face of Cheney, the binding resolutions, the late, Chomsky-reading, two-times martyred football hero Pat Tillman, the non-binding resolutions, the stunned governments, the paralyzed legislatures, all blend together in a macabre spiral, the suicidal tailspin and death rattle of a doomed empire, unable to act to save itself, and heading irretrievably toward the rocks.

Is it possible to identify and point out who, exactly, brought us to this place? We need to find out who the enemy is. As a dispossessed Oklahoma farmer groaned in Grapes of Wrath, "Who are we supposed to shoot?"

Under the "V"

From the website of "Editor and Publisher": "The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear next Wednesday, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called 'Buying the War,' which marks the return of 'Bill Moyers Journal.' E&P was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week."

A couple of commenters on the E&P preview of Moyers's documentary drew the conclusion that the media, especially the electronic media, simply wrote an erroneous "first draft" of history. Such baloney.

If the electronic media are owned by the same corporations that own the warmongers in the White House, should we be surprised that they got together to cook up a batch of lies?

The "press" wasn't writing a "first draft" of anything. Moyers's documentary proves that they were regurgitating the bullshit the regime was feeding them, and they knew exactly what they were doing.

The Moyers expose reveals that of the 414 Iraq stories that ran on NBC, CBS, and ABC news in the six-month runup to the war, nearly all originated in PR handouts from the White House, Pentagon, or State Department.

NBC is owned by General Electric, CBS by Westinghouse Corp., ABC by Disney, and the White House by all of the above. I don't know why anybody is surprised that our corporate masters got their story straight when they needed to light a fire under the public, ever composed mostly of wide-eyed innocents, so as to boil them up into a sustained paroxysm of war fever.

There were a few dissenters. The Knight-Ridder newspaper chain did some commendable, genuinely investigative reporting during late 2002 and early 2003 (and if an independent, free press still exists at all in this country, you'll find it only in the "dead tree" media and on the blogs). NBC fired Phil Donahue after he objected to the network's orders that he couldn't have antiwar people on his show by themselves, and that he was required to have "two conservatives for every liberal." But mostly the corporate media simply did what they were ordered to do.

Welcome to Oceania.

Addressing the topics of mind control in modern societies, Noam Chomsky recently wrote that "In crude and brutal societies," (such as the old Soviet Union or North Korea today) "the Party Line is publicly proclaimed and must be obeyed - or else. What you actually believe is your own business and of far less concern." But the United States is not a crude and brutal society, and theoretically we enjoy "freedom of speech" and a "free press." Theoretically, we do not experience governmental mind control.

But in fact, we do experience it. The runup to the Iraq War is a perfect example of it. Chomsky explains, "In societies where the state has lost the capacity to control by force, the Party Line is simply presupposed; then, vigorous debate is encouraged within the limits imposed by unstated doctrinal orthodoxy. The cruder of the two systems leads, naturally enough, to disbelief; the sophisticated variant gives an impression of openness and freedom, and so far more effectively serves to instill the Party Line. It becomes beyond question, beyond thought itself, like the air we breathe." (Emphasis is mine.)

And who defines this "unstated doctrinal orthodoxy" of which Chomsky speaks? Who "imposes" the limits of acceptable political thought in a "free" society? Who delivers our "Party Line" to us?

Brian Williams does. And Chris Matthews. And Charlie Gibson. And Katie Couric. This is not an idle, reckless, or outlandish accusation I'm making here. If you want proof of what I'm saying, of what Chomsky is saying, Watch the Moyers documentary on Wednesday night and you'll see just how Americans were force fed their Party Line on Iraq.

The Toast of the Beltway

One of the things Alberto Gonzales took a lot of heat for at his Senate hearing yesterday was his willingness to function as Bush's water boy, rather than as an independent and self-sufficient prosecutor. I don't know why the senators felt that way. You don't get mad at a lump of ice for being cold.

If the Shrub were to appoint a truly independent and completely nonpartisan AG, he or she would have plenty to do at home, putting the administration under the anal-o-scope. Enough to keep him or her busy for the next year and 2/3 for sure.

As for yesterday's hearings, I didn't see any of them on the teevee, but I listened to analysis and an hour-long recap on NPR last night, and ended up almost feeling sorry for the little guy. I've sat through a lot of Senate hearings, including most of Watergate, and I've never seen anybody shot at from so many different sides or treated with such undisguised contempt. Ever.

You'd think Gonzales would bail on the job just to escape from the horrible situation he's in. With the grilling he got yesterday, he must have been sitting there shaking like a dog shitting peach pits.

New Kid in Town

The Pulitzer Prize for national journalism this year went to a 31-year-old Boston Globe reporter, Charlie Savage, for his 2006 series of articles on presidential signing statements.

Savage's eight detailed articles investigate the extent, the comprehensive scope, and the constitutional meaning of these statements, and how the Bush administration has used them to attempt to erect a dictatorship on the ruins of what used to be a constitutionally-mandated system of checks and balances.

In an article entitled "Cheney Aide is Screening Legislation," Savage describes how "The office of Vice President Dick Cheney routinely reviews pieces of legislation before they reach the president's desk, searching for provisions that Cheney believes would infringe on presidential power..."

At the Beliefnet.com U.S. politics discussion board, a poster known as Stardove brought up Rep. Dennis Kucinich's intention, revealed in a letter to his House colleagues, to file articles of impeachment against Vice-President Cheney effective immediately.

Savage's Cheney article shows why a Cheney impeachment is neither desirable nor optional, but mandatory if the Constitution still has any meaning and if the government our founders bequeathed to us is still in effect. Cheney took an oath to "uphold, protect, and defend" the Constitution, but he has deliberately and systematically violated that oath by doing everything within his power to subvert and destroy the system of checks and balances the Constitution requires.

Savage describes how Cheney, and his chief of staff David Addington, spend their days poring over the Constitution, thinking up a thousand reasons why it doesn't say what it says, and plotting new ways to increase executive power and establish a military dictatorship so powerful that it can never again be challenged.

In perhaps the most far-reaching article in the series, entitled "Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws", Savage quotes David Golove, a New York University law professor who has studied the Bush signing statements, and declares that "to the extent Bush is interpreting the Constitution in defiance of the Supreme Court's precedents, he threatens to 'overturn the existing structures of constitutional law.'"

Golove added later, "Bush has essentially said that 'We're the executive branch and we're going to carry this law out as we please, and if Congress wants to impeach us, go ahead and try it.'"

Cheney and Bush have thrown down the gauntlet. If Congress doesn't pick it up, we might as well carve the tombstone for our dear, departed republic.

Savage has done a thorough job of dissecting these high crimes, which are a matter of public record and are being committed out in the open, for the world to see.

I was glad to see the Pulitzer go to someone so young. Seymour Hersh turned 70 this year, and while he shows no signs of slowing down or retiring, I've been wondering where the new crop of young journalists who will fill the vacuum created by his eventual departure will come from. I'm sure this series of articles is just the beginning for Charlie Savage.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." Thank God we still have press freedom in this country. As long as we do, and as long as reporters like Savage continue to appear, there's still hope.

It remains to be seen whether the Democratic Congress will now do what the law requires of them and move forward on the articles of impeachment against Cheney. Over the last 50 years the executive branch, especially when under control of Republicans, has usurped power in many areas the Constitution reserves to the legislature. It hasn't helped that Congress has repeatedly and spinelessly rolled over and handed this power to them. Getting it back won't be easy, but it's undebatably necessary if we're to have a chance of taking our country back.

Culture of Death

A culture of war is a culture of death.

This country spends more money on war than anyone else in the world, by a lot. Half our Fed taxes go to pay for either the war machine or its endless wars.

The United States has been conquered and defeated by war. We exist for only two reasons: to war and to consume.

The war machine is a heartless robot with ten thousand muzzles, that has turned on us and enslaved us. It wakes us up in the morning and says, "Feed me, or I'll kill you. Our economy would collapse overnight if we were not either at war or actively preparing for it.

It's terrible to think about what's happened to us.