Larry the Swamp Cooler Guy

Larry the Swamp Cooler Guy is the kind of neighbor most of us dread. He shows up unbidden and unannounced at various hours of the day and night, invites himself in, and then becomes a free-flowing fountain of unsolicited advice.

"You really need to get a canopy for this place."

"Why don't you get a water pik? You'd really feel a lot better if you'd clean your mouth with one two or three times a day."

"You shouldn't be eating that. You need more vitamin B12."

He also volunteers to "help you with that," which for a person as allergic to home repairs and renovations as me is vaguely threatening.

But I'm glad to have Larry as a friend. He's annoying at times, but for someone as lonely as I've been for the last few months, it's a relief to have regular human contact, even from a noodge who won't take "no" for an answer. He's tactless, but he really just wants to help. Limited intelligence, unlimited heart, and definitely an unlimited capacity for repetition.

"You know, you really need a canopy for this place. Why doncha let me help you with that? If you just go down and by the parts we need, I could put it up for you in no time."

"Larry, I already told you (five times in the last fifteen minutes) I don't want a canopy like that."

However, others who know Larry have sternly warned me: "Don't let him 'help you with that.'"

Forearmed, I was ready, when the electric motor driving my prehistoric swamp cooler burned out yesterday, to resist his relentless insistence, once he got wind of the problem, to "Let me get up there and take a look at it." I'd already determined to rid myself of that ancient, rusty artifact which has been clanking and wheezing on my roof since I moved in here over a year ago. I'd arranged for a contractor friend of mine to install a new one on Saturday, which I planned to buy first thing this morning.

But first thing this morning there was Larry the Swamp Cooler Guy at the door, demanding almost angrily to be allowed to inspect my ancient Egyptian prototype of a cooler. What could I do? I folded, and within minutes he had removed the dead motor and its auxiliary parts and sent me off to Home Depot to buy replacements.

"I'm gonna save you hundreds of dollars," was both his stern admonition and modus operandi.

And good to his word, Larry and I -- but mostly Larry -- had the machine back on line by three in the afternoon, after a second trip to the hardware store and an instructive joint effort in reconstructing the motor assembly. He's more facile with tools and machine parts than I am, but because of a learning disability he's not always able to visualize how things are supposed to go together, which I happen to be pretty good at.

So now I can stay in my tin shack again because my cooler's working, and much better and more quietly than before, I might add. But more importantly, Larry the Swamp Cooler Guy taught me something about who I am and where I'm living. I'm no longer a man of means with extensive resources, who satisfies his infrastructural requirements by hiring self-effacing and polite temporary Mexican servants to haul away the old one and install a new one. Many of the people in this trailer park are poor, or at least, like me, not rich, and we get along by repairing things and helping each other and jury rigging life's paraphernalia. Financially, materially, and ecologically, it's the only way of getting by that makes sense.

So thank you, Larry. But I gotta tell you, I still don't want that hard canopy. Sheesh.

By the way, for those readers who don't know what a swamp cooler is, a.k.a. air cooler, desert cooler, evaporative cooler, and poor man's air conditioning, see this article at Wikipedia, and click on the illustrative diagram about halfway down the page for a bigger view. The machine is really beautiful in its functional simplicity, and it only eats about one-third the electricity an air conditioner does.

Horselover Fat

In 1974 the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick went crazy after having a vision at least partially brought on by an injection of sodium pentathol he had taken to undergo a dental procedure. Thereafter he worked under the signature "Horselover Fat" (Philip means "lover of horses" in Greek, and dick, in German, means "fat"), although the books of his last eight years include interpolations by Philip K. Dick, who criticizes Fat's philosophy and personal shortcomings.

Dick's descent into insanity was no accident or Act of God, however, because he was working hard at going nuts when he finally went there in 1974. He wrote a large number of amphetamine-fueled novels in the sixties and seventies, one of which ("The Man in the High Castle") won a Hugo Award in 1963. It was included along with three others among his best books in a just-published prestigious Library of America volume, signaling that the science-fiction pulp author has now been accepted into the hushed cloisters of "great literature."

The New Yorker's editors assigned Adam Gopnik to review the new book and recap Dick's life and career, which is probably what motivated me to buy the book within hours of receiving this week's issue. Gopnik is a marvelously disciplined writer and critic whose concision, clarity, and economy insure that no reader could possibly ever misunderstand him. His comprehension of Dick's central philosophy, repeated throughout the early novels and then articulated incoherently at the end, is surpassed only by his highly concentrated and accurate synopses of it.

In Dick's most famous novels, Gopnik writes, "the future (is) like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick’s future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized élite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life."

Philip Dick had no pretensions of being a great writer. His prose is boilerplate narrative, characterized by a pedestrian technique and stock characters suitable to the lowbrow genre he labored in. What makes his work valuable and timeless is his philosophy and acute perception of the eternal human condition, his recognition that there is no hope, and that technological miracles, past, present, and future, have done nothing to alter the fundamentals of existence. As Gopnik explains it, "No matter what things may come, they will be exploited, merchandised, and routinized by the force of human weakness."

History is Merciless

The study of history, unlike the studies of philosophy or religion, has no idealized aspect or aspirations of transcendence. It's simply a dispassionate catalogue of the errors, disasters, and follies of the human race, punctuated at times with traces of integrity, or nobility, or acts of compassion. The truths told by Philip K. Dick resonate with me because I already knew them, having learned them 20 years ago in the history classes taught by Dr. Will Jacobs at the University of Alaska in Anchorage.

Jacobs used to point out that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (before 1914), nearly all historians, theologians, and philsophers alike believed that the human race was on the verge of creating a second Garden of Eden, this one to encompass the entire earth, due to the tremendous burst of creativity unleashed by advances in science and technology. Then came the two world wars with their incomprehensible slaughter and, in the case of the second war, unprecedented mass murder, and history's more perceptive observers recognized that advances in science and technology had unleashed at least as much destructive force as they had creative energy.

Likewise, there is a thread running through all modern history (from the 17th century on), Jacobs taught, that explains poverty, crime, and all forms of human degradation and misery as resulting from the greed, ignorance, and violence of corrupt institutions. Voltaire railed against the corruption of the Church and the animal greed and cupidity of Europe's aristocrats, and was convinced that if those institutions were abolished a utopian society must be the necessary result. Karl Marx was absolutely convinced that when capitalism was suprseded by communism, as it inevitably would be, the only possible outcome would be a human race at last free to bask in the warmth of its own fundamental goodness. Voltaire and Marx may not have had much in common, but they agreed that human nature was basically good.

"What's obvious, when we look at the holocaust and firebombing and nuclear warfare of World War II," Jacobs said, "is that the problem is not with corrupt institutions, but with us."

"We have met the enemy and it is us," said Walt Kelly's Pogo Possum.

I would disagree with my teacher only so far as to argue that corrupt institutions are a part of the problem, but that those institutions are an inevitable product of human nature. This was Philip K. Dick's core realization, and in his work, Gopnik says, "the social arrangement of power is always that of a brute oligarchic minority forcing its will on a numbed population, with amusements the daily meal and brutality the implicit threat; for all that has changed technologically, that fatal pattern has never really altered. The future will be like the present, he had once known, and now he saw that the past was like the future, too."

"The surest sign of the madness of the world," Gopnik says, paraphrasing Dick's central message, "is the violence that we accept as normal." All ruling classes, past, present, and future, rely at bottom on violence or the threat of violence to maintain and expand their authority, and the empire has always been, and will always be with us.

How to Steal an Election

California Republicans have hatched a plan which, if successful, might enable them to hijack the presidential election of 2008.

In mid-July of this year, quietly and without fanfare, one of the state's most powerful Republican lawyers filed a ballot initiative that will, if it passes, divide California's electoral votes, awarding all but two of them to the winner of the popular vote in each Congressional district.

Currently, California's 55 electoral votes (one for each of the 53 Congressional districts; one for each of the two U.S. Senators) go to the winner of the popular vote statewide, as is currently the practice in every other state except Maine and Nebraska. Republicans have long been aware that this state's huge bloc of electoral votes totals more than one-fifth of the 270 necessary for a candidate to be elected.

The attorney who filed the initiative, Thomas Hiltachk, is a legal expert described by Jonathon Alter in a Newsweek article as one "who specializes in ballot referenda that try to fool people in the titles and fine print," has placed the measure on the June, 2008 California primary ballot, which occurs four months after the state's presidential primary (now moved up to February 5), and for which a light turnout is expected.

In his lead "Talk of the Town" column in the August 6 New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg characterized the June 3 California primary as "...a few scattered contests for legislative nominations, but the only statewide items on the ballot will be initiatives," many of which will never make it onto the ballot for lack of signatures, or because of legal language problems, and so forth. But, Hertzberg explains, "Initiative No. 07-0032 -- the Presidential Election Reform Act -- is different. It's serious. Its backers have access to serious money. And it could pass."

The Republican strategy is this: suppose the 2008 presidential race, say, between Clinton and Giuliani, is close in both popular and electoral votes. In 2004, George W. Bush lost California and its 55 electoral votes, but he won the popular vote in 22 of the state's 53 Congressional districts. So "The bottom line" of this so-called Election Reform Act, Hertzberg says, "is that the initiative, if passed, would spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes -- votes that it wouldn't get under the rules prevailing in every other sizable state in the Union." And those 20 hijacked votes might just be enough to throw a closely-contested national election into the Republican column.

The initiative is sponsored by Californians for Equal Representation, a false-façade non-organization whose mailing address is the offices of Hiltachk's law firm, which represents the California Republican Party. Hiltachk is also Arnold Schwarzenegger's personal lawyer for election matters, and he has been the motive force behind many well-funded ballot initiatives in the past, including the recall that catapulted Schwarzenegger into the governor's mansion.

Both Hertzberg and Alter point out that the same sort of subterfuge, only from the other side, is occurring in North Carolina, where the Democratic-controlled legislature wants to divide the state's electors in the same manner outlined in Hiltachk's California initiative. However the stakes are much smaller there. North Carolina casts 15 electoral votes altogether, and Alter notes that only three or four electoral votes are at stake.

He adds that "At least in North Carolina it's clearly constitutional. Article II, Section I of the U.S. Constitution stipulates that the selection of electors is up to state legislatures 'in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,'"
a criterion the California Republicans' "Election Reform Act" doesn't satisfy, thus placing it on shaky legal ground.

Initiative 07-0032, dangerous and destabilizing as it is, has attracted little notice among the voting public so far, although it has drawn the attention of more acute pundits such as Hertzberg and Alter. Most voters tend not to pay much attention to technical issues, especially those tinged with legal complexity, such as the arcane workings of the electoral college. Maybe California's voters will wake up when the t.v. ads start running, and they're alerted to the very real danger this underhanded and misnamed measure poses.

The so-called Election Reform Act would only be fair if every other state changed its rules in the same way, and everyone awarded electoral votes by Congressional district. "If California does what No. 07-0032 calls for while everybody else is still going with winner take all by state," Hendrik Hertzberg observes, "the real-world result will be to give Party B (in this case the Republicans) an unearned, Ohio-size gift of electoral votes."

It's now clear that Karl Rove's "permanent Republican majority" was a fantasy, but as the national election of 2000 clearly showed, the party of Bush and DeLay doesn't necessarily need a majority as long as it is able to grasp the levers of power one way or another. We've seen ample demonstrations in the past of Republicans' willingness to do literally anything to exploit, gain, and hang onto political advantage.

The California Republican party is now clearly planning to steal the presidential election of 2008, and only an informed, aware, and intelligent electorate in the state where this plot is quietly gestating will be able to stop them.

Jehosephat Jones

Jehosephat Jones was rotund, porcine, oily, and lugubrious. He had numerous bare, fleshy appendages emanating from his voluminous rotundity, and his mode of locomotion was rather that of an invertebrate crustacean with circumlocutionary tendencies.

He was altogether a dreadful creature, more to be feared than sympathized with.

Goff's Bomb

Stan Goff is a sometime blogger and a very interesting guy, being as how he's a 26-year U.S. Army veteran (with time spent in the Rangers) who became a leftist revolutionary.

Now, I most of you reading this are, I'm sure, familiar with DailyKos. It's the leading partisan Democratic mega-blog, and pretty much a party line type of place (Bill O'Reilly called it "a hate site"). So Goff goes there the other day and posts a diary entry in which he says he's not going to vote Democratic next year because the Democrats, local and national, are taking a timid, wishy-washy stand on the war.

He will not vote for any of the three leading Democratic presidential candidates, Goff says, because "They have consistently refused to do the one thing that has become a litmus test for a lot of people who generally hold their noses and vote for Democrats. They have refused to call for an immediate, unilateral, and complete withdrawal from Iraq."

And he goes on to say "Enough of us will stay home that fine November day to ensure that a Republican will win the Presidency; and enough will stay home to ensure that a Republican majority is returned to Congress."

The main reason he's refusing to vote Democratic, of course, is because the war is a "moral obscenity," but he adds that "An equally critical reason for allowing the Democratic Party to wither and die in 2008 is that it stand (sic) directly in the way of the people's movements in this country, especially the antiwar movement."

Almost needless to say, the response he got from the Kossacks was universally hostile. Typical was the guy who posted a picture of a kitten waving "Bye" under the title, "Please change the litter before you leave."

The Kossacks may have got all hot and bothered, but the fact is, the Democrats are useless. They promised action on the war. They ran against the war. They haven't delivered.

Some "opposition party" they turned out to be.

They're in the way, and they've got to go.

Like Goff, I'm not the least bit scared of those damned Republicans. We've already seen how much damage they can do to themselves and others.

I don't know how the rest of you here feel, but I'm with Stan.

Cheney: Good Monster, Bad Monster

From Tom Tomorrow via many others, we have the story which has popped up at various places on the net these past few days, of Dick Cheney's 1994 television interview in which he warned that invading Iraq would be a foolish and self-destructive move. Tomorrow links to the video and also to a transcript, for the benefit of those who are still in the dark ages of dialing-up.

Now everybody knows that Dick Cheney is Frankenstein's monster. But back in 1994, he was not yet the large, bad Frankenstein's monster, i.e., the red, rectangular one.

Back then he was the small, good monster. You know, the round, blue Frankenstein's monster.

But all seriousness aside, he was also Secretary of Defense under Bush I until January, 1993. Speaking as George Herbert Walker Bush's Secretary of Defense, I'm sure that even after Clinton became president, Cheney would still have felt obligated to be a good "team player," and echo the official line of the Bush I crew on Iraq.

What he said on the videotape was pretty much a carbon copy of a passage explaining the coitus interruptus of our initial penetration of the oil-bearing plum called Iraq in the senior Bush's memoir of his term in the White House.

I don't remember the name of the book, but I heard Andy Rooney read the relevant passage on his 60 Minutes segment shortly after the current war went south, and what Cheney was saying in '94 sounds just like what's in the book.

These guys always follow the script, unless they're writing it, which unfortunately is what Cheney is doing now -- writing the script for his somewhat literacy-challenged immediate superior.

Traveling

There hasn't been, and won't be any posting here for a few days.

I've been traveling since 8/2. I've been with family on the west side of Puget Sound, currently with friends in Seattle.

I won't be posting regularly until I get home next Tuesday or thereabouts.

A Voice -- Make that Two Voices -- Crying in the Wilderness

And it came to passe in the fourtieth yeere, in the eleuenth moneth, on the first day of the moneth, that Moses spake vnto the children of Israel...Behold I haue set the land before you.
--Deuteronomy, I:3 and 8 (King James version, 1611)

If you're going to San Francisco,
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair...
--Scott McKenzie, 1967

It's been a biblical generation -- 40 years -- since the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco, a time which becomes more heavily romanticized and idealized as it recedes into the fog of time. But the reality of life on the street in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in the summer of 1967 was considerably harsher than the idyllic legend would have us believe, as thousands of runaway teenagers from all over the country converged on the already-crowded district. Broke, homeless, and an easy mark for predators, this horde of migrant children was more likely to find a dirty, abrasive, hand-to-mouth existence on the San Francisco streets than the lovefest they'd anticipated.

The late sixties as I remember those years was a troubled and turbulent time. The country was at war then, as it now is again (or maybe I should say "still"), and the conflict in Vietnam threatened to spill over into open warfare at home, as the domestic generational and ideological struggle sparked by the war intensified between 1965 and 1970. It actually did break out in open and widespread violence at several times and places, most notably at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968.

The "Summer of Love" in the Bay Area was immediately followed by sporadic, sometimes intense violence between antiwar protesters and the Oakland Police during "Stop the Draft" week in Oakland in October, 1967. At one point during the week, the National Guard was called in to restore order and clear the streets in front of the Oakland Induction Center.

"Even though an official has warned us that we’re disobeying the law, the cops give no warning," reads the October 17, 1967 entry in protester Peter Vincent's diary. "They just start charging down Clay Street, pouring out of the garage as well, swinging clubs & spraying tear gas with smirks on their faces. People beaten & dragged through the streets. Bodies piling up. Bloody scalps & burning eyes."

A Gallup Poll taken at about the time of the Stop the Draft Week riots records that 23 percent of Americans defined themselves as "doves" and 61 percent as "hawks." The intense, confrontational antiwar protests were undertaken in an atmosphere of general support for the war.

Fast forward to the present day, and two lonely teenagers walking a hot, rural July highway in Iowa, in the middle of a two-person, coast-to-coast protest march to try to generate active opposition to the Iraq War. Despite the fact that an overwhelming number of Americans oppose the current war (a recent CNN poll shows that a mere 30 percent now support it, while 60 percent want us out of Iraq by a year from now at the latest), and in sharp contrast with the national identity crisis brought on by Vietnam, active opposition to the war has been weak and ineffective despite the conflict's massive unpopularity.

"It seems like the country is asleep," says the male half of the March for Peace team, Michael Israel, 18, of Jackson, California. "A lot of people we meet are against the war. But it doesn’t seem like many people are doing anything about it."

The brainchild of 19-year-old Ashley Casale of Clinton Corners, NY, the two-person March for Peace wasn't what she had in mind when she set up a website (http://marchforpeace.info) and sent out flyers to colleges across the country announcing the march. Israel was the only volunteer who offered to join Casales in committing to the whole journey, although others have joined the pair for portions of the walk since they set off from San Francisco on May 21, right after their first face-to-face meeting 10 minutes earlier.

"Although it's always nice to have as many people as possible, it's more about the message and we haven't been disappointed there aren't tons of people walking," the always-upbeat Casale says after covering 1600 miles, going through three pairs of sandals, and enduring sunburns and blisters. The pair has sometimes faced taunts and obscene gestures as well, and one farmer who had given them permission to camp on his property made them leave after he found out they were a two-person peace march.

However, Casale and Israel have gotten mostly positive feedback along the way, even if they haven't initiated a groundswell of antiwar activity. Many people have given them a place to stay for the night, others have fed them, and one gave Casale a new pair of shoes to replace her treadless sandals. Supporters have also bombarded Casale’s cell phone number, which is posted on the Marchforpeace.info website, with sympathetic messages and encouragement.

Commenting on the teenagers' lonely and Quixotic march and their attempt to arouse the inert conscience of a nation that seems to have gone into moral hibernation, an International Herald-Tribune reporter offered the opinion that "America's current anti-war movement has been regarded by historians and critics as less vibrant than its counterpart in the Vietnam era. Some attribute the difference to the lack of a draft, leaving a wider gap between anti-war sentiment and actual activism."

Certainly the imminent threat of being pulled off the street and sent into combat in Vietnam contributed significantly to the vigor of the sixties antiwar movement. But there was also an awareness of larger issues than just the Vietnam War informing the protests of a generation ago, and a countercultural awareness of the underlying causes of war which is absent today. "The system isn't human, it's a machine," was the standard expression of the wisdom of the time, "and the machine is out of control." The anti-Vietnam protester used "system" as a shorthand reference for the military-industrial complex and its need for perpetual warfare, or the war machine, as some call it.

As I look at these two, beautiful, heartbreakingly idealistic young kids sweating their way across the country, walking on blistered feet and trying to squeeze a few drops of conscience out of our dried up husk of a country, it makes me wonder whether the majority of my fellow citizens is even capable of remorse any more. As the pair gets closer to Washington, D.C. later this summer and the march gathers more attention, we'll find out.

"Our message is about ending the war in Iraq, but it's more than that," Ashley Casale says. "It's about cultivating peace in our daily lives and responding to things in a peaceful, nonviolent way."

You can get a more complete view of Casale's and Israel's philosophy of peace and a day-by-day chronicle of their odyssey by visiting their website, Marchforpeace.info. Their target date for reaching the White House is September 11. Cindy Sheehan and Code Pink are also supporting the march and post frequent updates on their various websites.

Rovemail

When Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy issued a subpoena for Karl Rove, the White House advisor and political operative sometime known as "Bush's brain" last Thursday, there he made clear he was attempting to compel Rove's testimony in the matter of the ongoing U.S. attorney firings scandal.

"The evidence shows that senior White House political operatives were focused on the political impact of federal prosecutions and whether federal prosecutors were doing enough to bring partisan voter fraud and corruption cases," Leahy said. "It is obvious that the reasons given for the firings of these prosecutors were contrived as part of a cover-up and that the stonewalling by the White House is part and parcel of that same effort."

In private, Rove was not shy about sharing with people like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or presidential counsel Harriet Miers that he wanted the heads of several of the U.S. attorneys because they were not, in his view, aggressively pursuing trumped-up voter fraud cases against Democrats in their districts, as the White House had ordered them to do. Leahy knows this.

What Leahy may or may not know is that for several years, Rove, in conjunction with the Bush Justice Department, has been actively engaging in precisely the kinds of spurious manipulations of voter rolls which he falsely accused the Democrats of.

The same day that Leahy issued his subpoena for Rove, the website Truthout.org revealed the existence of previously undisclosed documents which show how Republican operatives under Rove's tutelage mounted in an illegal, racially-motivated effort to suppress tens of thousands of votes during the 2004 presidential campaign, concentrating most heavily on Ohio where George W. Bush was trailing the Democratic candidate John Kerry.

Emails obtained by Truthout show that Tim Griffin, a Republican National Committee staffer in 2004 and later appointed interim U.S. Attorney for Little Rock, Arkansas (a post he resigned when the U.S. attorneys scandal broke) led the Republican effort to purge black voters from the rolls in Cuyahoga County, Ohio as well as targeting minority voters in several other "battleground" states -- New Mexico, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.

The method Rove and Griffin used to try to suppress minority voting is an illegal tactic known as "caging." Political operatives send registered letters to the homes of registered voters. If the targeted voters fail to respond, the operatives try to convince local authorities to remove them from the rolls.

The RNC was caught engaging in this practice in 1981 and 1986. During the latter part of 1986 Republican National Committee officials signed an agreement to abstain from voter caging in the future, but that was 21 years ago, before Karl Rove was the White House's enchilada grande of political technique.

The two sets of documents obtained by Truthout also show that the RNC strategy for 2004 included contingency plans for contesting the results of the election in the event of a Democratic victory, by challenging the eligibility of voters in the same states where the caging efforts occurred, using the same lists of targeted voters employed in the pre-election suppression attempts. This strategy is laid out clearly in an email, dated September 30, 2004, and sent to a dozen staffers on the Bush-Cheney campaign and in the RNC, with the title "voter reg fraud strategy conference call."

Truthout reporter Jason Leopold adds that "Emails among Ohio Republican Party official Michael Magan, Coddy Johnson, then national field director of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, and Timothy Griffin, reveal the men were given documents that could be used as evidence to justify widespread voter challenges if the Bush campaign needed to contest the election results. Johnson referred to the documents as a 'goldmine.' The valuable documents were lists of registered voters who did not return address confirmation forms to the Ohio Board of Elections."

Clearly, the RNC and the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign were preparing for a scenario reminiscent of their tampering with voter rolls and subsequent suppression of a recount in Florida during the 2000 election. The full story of how that tainted election, which propelled Bush into office, was monkeywrenched by Republican operatives is detailed in Greg Palast's book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy."

Rove is scheduled to answer Leahy's subpoena this coming Thursday, August 2, but will probably not show up, moving the constitutional confrontation between the White House and Congress to the next level. In a letter to Rove and White House aide Scott Jennings which accompanied the Senate Judiciary Committee's subpoena, Leahy wistfully reflected, "I am left to ask what the White House is so intent on hiding that it cannot even identify the documents, the dates, the authors and recipients that they claim are privileged."

Leahy is being somewhat disingenous. He knows perfectly well what the White House is hiding in the matter of the U.S. attorneys scandal. What is less clear is how much he knows about the deep background of the scandal -- the extent of the Republican habits of voter manipulation and election fraud which they piously accused others of engaging in as a pretext for a partisan purge of the Justice Department. It would be surprising indeed if Leahy was completely ignorant of these matters, and if he didn't have a few pointed questions for Karl Rove concerning them, once Rove is compelled by court decision to show up at the hearings and honor the hot seat which has been reserved for him with his ample posteriors.

Readers can view a more detailed account of this breaking story at Truthout.org

Trail's End?

Is this the end of an illustrious semi-career?

I'm quitting both of the bands I'm in after this weekend's gigs. Actually I don't even know why we call them "gigs," because we never get paid. Sometimes we have to drive significant distances to work these counterfeit "jobs," and even to rehearse. That, and the fact that I don't play as well as I used to are sufficient reasons for packing it in.

It's hard to recall that I used to make a living -- a pretty good living at times -- playing drums and singing. Those were the hectic and intoxicated days in Alaska when we worked, drank, sang, and foolishly celebrated our good fortune. How times have changed.

Now life is harder but more sober, lived cautiously as opposed to prodigally, and parsimonious rather than lavish. Discipline and study have replaced the thoughtless good times, and most of us are now ruled more by Apollo than Dionysius.

I'm not sorry about this, and I have no regrets. And anyway, suppose I'm not really done?

Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, on a Nice Day

At about 70 degrees farenheit, with bright sunshine and a cool breeze blowing out of the northwest, there's no place on earth nicer than this.

Leave your car wherever it is and put on your walking shoes. Everything you need is right here in the neighborhood. The Alpha Market is small and expensive, but it has the best bread, salmon, and produce in the known universe.

To be among loved ones in an idyllic environment, full of food, sleeping well, and living with a very cursory and flexible schedule, is to know fulfillment. We roll out about six a.m. and Rachel gets ready to go off to her U.S. history class at State College, where she has an excellent lecturer and an interesting study to occupy her mornings. Her mother and I eat a leisurely breakfast and prepare for her return, which of course calls for lunch.

Dogs, cats, pigeons and coffees in the garden at Reverie round out the day.

If it can get any better than this, I'd like to know how.

Reality Wedges (Updated 8/15/07)

I believe I met Owsley in 1967. At least I think it was him.

I was sitting on the grass in Golden Gate Park, dinking unobtrusively on my little tabla, when a smallish, neatly-dressed young guy came walking down the blacktop footpath. He had sandy hair, a well-trimmed beard, and glasses. He wasn't in a hurry, but he wasn't strolling either. He was on a mission, going somewhere.

"It's a pink wedge," he said, handing me a triangular-shaped tablet. "Careful -- it's two hits."

"Thank you," I said to his departing back, for he had many, many pink wedges of strong, pure LSD to distribute in the park that day.

Between 1963 and 1967, Owsley manufactured hundreds of thousands of doses of LSD and gave most of it away. At a time when supplies of clean, reliable pharmaceutical-grade acid had dried up, he perfected techniques guaranteeing a 99.9 percent pure product, and was single-handedly responsible for the shape, content and direction of the Bay Area "hippie" movement of the mid to late sixties.

A lot of his stuff ended up in the hands of people who sold it, but they sold it very, very cheaply.

In addition, Owsley Stanley was an innovative and ground-breaking sound engineer, responsible for the origins of the "wall of sound" approach to amplification, at a time when music and musical poetry were the most important vehicles of revolutionary culture, politics, and economics. His close association with Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead, and his financial backing of their most important decisions, were decisive in launching the sixties movement. It's not too much of a stretch to say that he was a major factor in shaping our current American culture.

Much of the neocon revolt and the wave of Christianized "movement" conservativism of the last 35 years has been at least in part a backlash against the sixties. If you don't believe me, read Pat Buchanan or any random issue of The National Review.

The main problem with what happened in the sixties is we forgot. We forgot that by the time those of us who are now over 55 were in high school, the American government-cum-military leviathan had become a machine, and the machine was out of control. It still is, only now it's worse. We forgot that the way of life we were and are living is an expression of insanity. We forgot that it's a way of life dependent on resources which will soon run out.

There was a time when these realizations and dealing with them were the stuff of daily life, but we forgot all that because we became first distracted, then consumed by jobs and families and insurance and 401K's and the illusion of security. Nixon was followed by Ford, then Carter by Reagan and Bush I, then came the false hope of the Clinton years, and we forgot.

But now I've noticed people are starting to remember, and maybe just in time.

Owsley went to jail in 1967, and was expatriated to Australia in 1996. He resurfaced in San Francisco earlier this year, and agreed to sit for an interview with a Chronicle reporter. You can read it here.

I was foolish with that pink wedge, by the way, and took the whole thing at once. It was a night to not remember, since I can recall only small bits and pieces of it, like snapshots from another world, leading to (as the song lyrics say) a jingle-jangle morning, sitting shivering with a blanket in the San Francisco fog, overlooking the bay from Telegraph Hill.

UPDATE: The raw material available to Owsley for his social experiment in "consciousness raising," his mission when he began manufacturing acid in the early 60's, was the youthful populations of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco and the student ghetto in the area of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.

As with Telegraph Avenue, many students from San Francisco State and USF flocked to the Haight, which was perfect for multiple roommate setups with its large flats and cheap rents. Marijuana was already commonplace there in 1963 and 1964 when Owsley came on the scene and began distributing his exciting new product. It was at this time that he began his association with Ken Kesey, who had a house in Palo Alto that was becoming famous for its non-stop parties (See Tom Wolfe's 1968 book "The Elecric Kool Aid Acid Test"), with music provided by the embryonic version of the Grateful Dead who played under the name, "The Warlocks."

It was about this same time that Sam Andrew and Peter Albin came together to form the beginnings of the band Big Brother and the Holding Company, and started playing in the basement of a house at 1090 Page Street in San Francisco, where they were soon joined by James Gurley and Janis Joplin. Not long after, in 1965, Jefferson Airplane had their first gig at the Matrix, near the Marina.

The main elements of the countercultural movement in San Francisco took shape quickly, and coalesced mainly around two elements -- the music, and the drugs. It was helped along by the general social malaise and alienation stemming from the Vietnam War.

Psychedelics were the drugs of choice, alcohol and heroin were on the outs, and Owsley acid was the rocket fuel that caused the movement to launch, culminating in the Summer of Love of 1967. That season-long event was enabled and encouraged by several high-profile events in late 1965 and 1966 that drew extensive national media coverage, publicizing the wild happenings in Haight-Ashbury world wide.

In 1965 Kesey ran several "Acid Test" parties at numerous locations in the Bay Area. They were publicized by garish, semi-legible posters, with the dates and locations of these bacchanalias hand-lettered in the lower right-hand corner. The mother of all acid tests, however, occurred in January, 1966, as a one-night component of the three-day Trips Festival at Longshoreman's Hall. Billed as an event that would simulate the drug experience, but without the LSD. Festival organizers of course had no way of knowing whether participants' minds were unaltered or blown to smithereens with Owsley acid, but it's a safe bet that most of the revelers were higher than the Sears Tower.

The Trips Festival was followed six months later by the one-day Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, which drew 20,000, mostly stoned to the bone young people for a free concert featuring The Jefferson Airplane and Alan Ginsburg. This was the largest event of its type until Woodstock, three years later, and the press coverage was no doubt responsible for convincing many a teenage would-be runaway to forsake school, home, parents and siblings, and the boredom of Cedar Rapids, or Billings, or Victorville, and set off for the land of free love, free drugs, and liberation from all life's cares, in the Summer of 1967.

Owsley set out to transform the world by distributing free LSD to anyone who wanted it. He was convinced that if enough people got high, if consciousnesses were raised high enough, that Americans would recognize the futility of their way of life, and abandon it, and the world would change for the better.

The movement he fueled gathered publicity, and the publicity drew new recruits by the thousands. And when the Summer of Love was over, no one could really say whether the world had changed for the better or not. But following closely on that famous season, the Diggers, a Haight-Ashbury-centered social activist group which had opened a free store and a soup kitchen, staged a "Death of Hippie" parade on Haight Street in October, 1967. It was meant to signal the end of the movement which the Diggers and many other old-timers in the Haight felt had been co-opted, sensationalized, and cheapened by the mass media, and turned into television freak show and an irrelevant curiosity.

Owsley was arrested and jailed in 1967, and pure LSD, while still available, was no longer the norm. Harder drugs, especially speed, began to show up more frequently on Haight Street and Telegraph Avenue, and the violence and psychosis that accompany that dangerous substance began to replace the peace and love of '65, '66, and '67.

The Summer of Love was over, and with it, the countercultural movement.

The Boys of War

"We made 500 bucks before she hung herself...I guess she was unhappy."

Here's a video that reveals warboy culture in all its sadism and depravity.

I have no doubt that there are many service people who are sickened and appalled by warboy culture. For instance, I remember the American soldier who shot himself in the foot rather than participate in the atrocity at Mai Lai.

But so what? Warboy sadism is still a fact of life, and an unalterable circumstance of war.

If war is hell, lying to fabricate a war on false premises is the work of the devil.

This video is the reality that counterbalances the patriotic wankfest that passes for debate in the American media and all over the internet.

It clearly shows the reason why any unnecessary war, a war of aggression, a war undertaken to "shock and awe" the rest of the world, to secure resources through acts of piracy, is a crime against humanity.

It should be treated as such.

I picked this video up from Stan Goff, the former career military man and U.S. Army Ranger. It should be given the widest possible circulation.

Signs, Portents, and Omens

I don't consider myself superstitious, but I've learned to pay attention to signs, portents, and omens:

*The divorce card appearing in the middle of the future line in a personal reading of March, 2003;

*Uncontrolled weeping the day I left my job and home (a day I had been working toward for years) and traveled south to my new location; black clouds with violent lightning on the horizon as I approached it, driving the straight line of CA 18 through the desert toward Yucca Valley;

*The patriarch acting like a small child at the dinner table on our first night in our new home.

My advice to people is to avoid looking for omens, but to pay heed to those which are large, distinct, unavoidable, and unambiguous as regards interpretation.

Me and You and CO2

I don't enjoy always being the curmudgeon, so it's with some hesitation that I offer my opinion that the Live Earth concert was just a lot of posturing, as are all such musical extravaganzas put on to benefit supposedly worthy causes.

Don't get me wrong. Saving the earth is as worthy a cause as ever came along. But Live Earth, like the assorted paloozas that preceded it over the last 20 years, was vanity-driven exercise in feel-goodism. Such events also give aging celebrity performers a chance to promote themselves gratis, and second- and third-rank hangers-on a chance to do the ohyeahbabyohyeahbabyohyeahohyeah for which they are undeservedly semi-famous.

It takes a real wet blanket to be so cynical about something that everybody agrees is wonderful and significant and the coolest thing since popsicles. Therefore, it was a relief to find, as I opened Jim Kunstler's weekly blog this morning, that there's at least one person who agrees with me.

"There was so much about the Live Earth show that actually expressed what is worst about the current state of American culture," Kunstler groaned. "(T)he obscene posturing of zillionaire celebrities, awarding themselves brownie points for the largeness of their concern -- even while, like Mr. Sting of the band called the Police, they buy-and-sell $20 million Manhattan condos, and burn god-knows-how many tons of Wyoming coal amplifying the bass runs to "Roxanne." And the flip-side of these celebrity pretensions, of course, is the disturbing fealty paid to them by the fans, as members of the public caught up in celebrity-worship are called. Obviously, the whole thing is a kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop spiraling up to ever worse grandiosity on the part of the celebs and ever more pathetic groveling worship of these fake gods by the fans -- until it becomes little more than an object lesson in the tragic limitations of the human condition."

But what about Al Gore? Yes, I still believe Gore is the only serious possibility for leadership we have at this point, even though he disdains to run. Kunstler touched that base too: "Gore..." he said, "could just put aside his pretensions for being a kind of global Wizard of Oz and just cut the shit and run for president of the US, where he might actually make a difference."

The rest of us might want to think about cutting the shit too, and later this year, before fall turns to winter, I'm going to sell my little tin shack in the desert and my automobile that I need for even the most pedestrian daily errands, and move to a city where I won't have a car. Ever again.

Cars are half, or more than half the problem. Carlessness is the wave of the future. And I would hope that vanity fests like Live Earth are not. We can do without any more such hooplas.

The Limits of Authority

Here's something I don't understand. Conyers and the Judiciary Committee subpoened Sara Taylor, who used to work in the White House. Her lawyer wrote Conyers a letter saying she wants to testify, but the White House won't let her.

How can the White House not let her? She wouldn't be breaking any law, she no longer works for the White House, and Bush and Cheney are not her mama. What are they planning to do about it if she does testify?

Her testimony would be in regard to the U.S. attorney firings.

I don't know of any precedent for "not letting" a former employee testify, or under what authority such action can occur. The situation was revealed this morning on ABC's "This Week" in a question the show's host George Stephanopoulis asked Conyers, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

Coyers hinted that impeachment of Bush and Cheney is getting to be more of a real possibility because of their stonewalling of various congressional investigations.

O'Reilly and the Lesbians

Anybody who still takes Bill Orally seriously better have a brain scan PDQ.

Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" awards for Friday featured an O'Reilly toofer: he took second place for having his D.C. radio show pulled and replaced by a sports talk show, while at the same time managing to capture first place for reporting the previously unremarked existence of a “national underground network of lesbian gangs carrying pink pistols” who are terrorizing and raping young girls and forcing them into lesbianism.

One of Fox News's paid shils, sitting in with O'Reilly as a guest expert, asserted that there are over 150 such crews in the D.C. area alone.

All I can say is I hope there's film at 11:00. This should be fun to watch. I wanna see those pink pistols.

I think Orally is just resentful of females who disdain a heterosexual persuasion because he hates thinking about all those women out there who will never feel the touch of his fabled falafel. Or is it his loofah? But why bother about insignificant details?

Seattle's Dave Neiwert has all the gruesome details of this heinous threat at his blog Orcinus.

Pew

The Pew Organization has published a poll that shows how low the reputation of the United States has fallen in the rest of the world's eyes, with most of the damage done in the last seven years.

Right. Well, if people elsewhere feel bad about the U.S., there are plenty of current polls showing that Americans feel bad about the U.S. too.

The last polls I saw had like 77% of Americans saying they thought the country was "on the wrong track," or something to that effect.

Everybody feels bad about us and we feel bad too. We all feel very bad. Boo hoo.

As President Merkin Muffley (played by Peter Sellers) in the movie "Dr. Strangelove" said to the Soviet Premier after the U.S. had launched a nuclear strike against Russia, "I'm sorry too, Dmitri. I'm very sorry. All right! You're sorrier than I am! But I am sorry as well. I am as sorry as you are Dmitri. Don't say that you are more sorry than I am, because I am capable of being just as sorry as you are. So we're both sorry, all right? All right."

When we get tired of feeling bad, maybe we'll do something about it. We could start by impeaching Bush and Cheney and getting a little self-respect back. Maybe if we respected ourselves a little more, other people might start to respect us a little more too.

Incidentally, the scenario in "Strangelove" hinged on the nutty breakdown of a supposedly foolproof system. The nuclear strike against Russia occurred because of the efforts of a certifiable lunatic, Air Force General Jack D. Ripper, to monkey wrench and override the system of safeguards, and launch the air wing under his command against the Soviets on his own initiative. That was back in the early 60's, the days when the theoretically sane people were in charge.

Is Dick Cheney sane? Even theoretically?

Ends and Means

In late March, two members of the Congressional Peak Oil Caucus, Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Tom Udall (D-UT) called a press conference to announce the release of a previously embargoed General Accounting Office report which reveals that the U.S. is "particularly vulnerable" to disruptions in its 22-million-barrel-per-day oil habit due to the imminent peak and anticipated decline in world oil production, and that the U.S. government is "unprepared" to deal with the consequences of these supply breakdowns, brought on either by production shortfalls or political conflict.

Their press conference announcement (two pages, pdf) provides a thumbnail of the GAO document and a link to the full report.

"This GAO peak oil report is a clarion call for leadership at the highest level of our country to avert an energy crisis unlike any the world has ever before experienced," Bartlett said, adding that this supply crisis "could happen at any time."

Udall listed the steps Washington needs to take to deal with the inevitable supply crunch, including "a concerted focus on conservation, higher fuel efficiency standards, energy saving buildings and appliances, (and) revival of passenger and freight rail..."

With the price of crude oil once again topping $70 a barrel, the age of cheap gasoline is already history, and the coming supply crisis a certainty rather than a possibility. The GAO report points out:

*OPEC countries hold most of the world's oil reserves, but the extent of those reserves has not been verified by independent auditors, and is therefore an unknown and unknowable quantity.

*Four countries -- Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, and Venezuela, hold an estimated one-third of world oil reserves. All four are either politically unstable, strongly anti-American, or both.

I'm surprised that Al Gore, who now has to be considered an undeclared presidential candidate, has not picked up this issue and married it to his global warming crusade, since the solutions to the coming petroleum supply disaster are also the solutions to the climate crisis.

I have no doubt that Americans will sooner or later do the right thing in dealing with global warming, just as an obese person in a time of famine is bound to do. Our way of life and our economic regime for the past six decades, dominated by the perpetual horizontal expansion of cities with replicated suburbs spreading farther and farther from the core, and the proliferation of automobiles to negotiate these freeway-linked megalopolises, is rapidly passing away. Whether our transition to a new, high-density urban way of life is relatively easy or catastrophically hard depends on the quality of the leadership we choose to take us there.

It will take more than just electing a president who doesn't have his head in an inappropriate place. Strong, determined, and in some ways implacable and puritanical state and local leadership will be required as well.

Because in the days to come, as the prophet said, Americans will burn gasoline and natural gas "by measure, and with astonishment."

The Tower Struck by Lightning

In the first year, in the ninth month, on the eleventh day of the month, the tower was struck by lightning.

Here in our present-day Babylon, unlike the ancient nation whose fate is recounted in the first and last books of the Bible, the tower we've built is mostly horizontal, not vertical, and spread over the ground like an amoeba. That part has been struck by disaster also, although of a different sort than that which demolished the vertical portion.

When the tower is destroyed, the pride and arrogance that built it are also demolished and lie buried beneath the rubble. If the builders attempt to hang on to the delusions of omnipotence which caused them to erect such monuments to their own vanity in the first place, they will only cause themselves more grief, and their legacy to their own people as well as others will be more widespread destruction.


When God sees the tower, he regards "this thing they begin to doe: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they haue imagined to doe." Thus the mighty are brought down, and the proud humbled.

Therefore, the time when the tower is struck by lightning is a momentous and sobering time. It signals the arrival of the day of reckoning, when the illustrious rulers of the mighty Kingdom of Babylon must realize that in their hubris they have violated the limitations and laws of proportion which nature and nature's God have put into place. And this is why they are shown from time to time that their gifts do not confer dominion, which still belongs to a power they are unable comprehend or measure.

As one prophet expressed it, they shall burn gasoline "by measure, and with astonishment.