In this season of 9/11 remembrance

In this season of 9/11 remembrance

In this season of 9/11 remembrance, I’ve been reluctant to get into it, because I’ve always felt the national response was somewhat off. Out of respect – who wants to hear that? – I thought I’d steer clear. But this morning I was able to feel for myself that the emotions that conflagration provoked and continues to evoke are an epic force not to be lightly passed by.

I’ve skipped the media coverage, only because my standard for worthwhile news is that I ought to learn something I didn’t already know, and I have high confidence I’d learn nothing new from all this. But I happened to begin the day with Weekend Edition on the radio, and they began by playing ten-year-old street-level audio of the impact and horrified witness reaction as the second tower was hit. I quickly changed the station, not wanting to immerse my 15-month old daughter in that soundscape. We arrived at WFUV, a New York music station that spent the morning playing music about or evocative of 9/11. Here, from a bastion of generally folkie/leftie vibes, I heard a lot of good music that New Yorkers wanted to hear, generally holding to the themes of strange loss, heroism, a need for shared experience, often connecting to the day in a subtle way very personal to the songwriters. Nothing bombastic, nor political or critical. I felt the shared emotion and the need for individuals to mark their immersion in the events of that day.

So who am I to step on that? I would not wish to. But in just as personal a vein, I could tell you about a different response, my own, which is marked by distance. Physically, I was living in California on 9/11, and I was woken that morning by a call from my mother in Connecticut to tell me what was going on, around the time the second tower fell. I had no TV; I spent the whole day at home, listening to the radio. Oddly, I wasn’t around TVs at all during that time. For many months afterward, I never once saw a video clip of the planes crashing or the buildings falling. I remember the first time I did, in a bar perhaps six months later. Before that, I had only seen still photos. This exclusion was more by happenstance than intention, though I believe I felt happier going without.

It was obvious from the first that this was a national trauma of the order of the Kennedy assassination. It’s not that I didn’t want to participate in all of that, and of course I did take part – we all did. But I also felt that the hundredsfold repetition of the traumatic videos was a kind of strange baptism in terror, an immersion in fear, even if largely unintentionally so on the parts of both broadcasters and viewers, that would forever color the character of Americans, and would help to change our destiny. That is the power of the moving images. When I did first watch a plane ram into a tower, that night in a bar so much later, I too was very powerfully and immediately shaken by what I was seeing. This is the power of media – to take and own your mindspace. I felt better off with some distance.

I guess that gap put me in mind to go my own way. From the early hours, it was obvious to me that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al – already figures of great suspicion in my eyes – would take license to undertake what would in short order become the genuine replacement for the Cold War, a new organizing force for another couple generations of military procurement, war powers, and patriotic citizen-control. I locked into that vision of the consequences at the outset and have never doubted it since. On September 12, 2001, I wrote:

Discussing security strategy, tactics and response misses the main point that yesterday showed: ultimately, there is no way of keeping an event such as this from happening except by making the people of the world love us more. I know it sounds absurd. But in the end, there is no other prevention…. We are unable to understand the deeper motivations of the perpetrators… What comes foremost to my mind is that we need to be sweet and highly generous – to a fault. Not to these perpetrators, obviously, but generally to the world at large…. Prior to this event, I've joked that if you take a poverty-wracked enemy of the United States like, say North Korea or Cuba (now add Afghanistan), we'd be better off strategically and financially if we paid every citizen there a personal check for $5,000 from the US taxpayers, rather than spending our money on the perpetual war machine. We'd save so much effort, stress and cash if we just bought the friendship of the populace! Obviously, I was being facetious. But ask yourself – what did we spend yesterday? What will it cost us to remain so long aloof and oblivious to the wretched of the world outside? Trillions?

At the time I wrote that, I consciously chose “trillions” to illustrate the unimaginable scale of what I was anticipating. It was then an exceedingly outrageous number to put forward. Remember, a year later Bush’s team was telling America that the Iraq War would cost just a few tens of billions. But I thought right away, what did the Cold War cost us? Bush is going to take us there. Today we can see I was right: by Joseph Steiglitz’s estimation, the war in Iraq (unjustified, unnecessary, unhelpful) has cost us $4.4 trillion. And look at us now, credit downgraded. Unbelievable decade, huh?

As I write, with my turn to these matters of consequence, I hear my own voice growing cynical, dark, basically unpleasant to hear – and that’s without trying on any conspiracy theories! I have always kept up with the left-wing critique, another news junkie seeking endless confirmation of what I already believe, and in retrospect I guess just a quarter-dose of it would have done me more good. Of course I would tune out any rah-rah patriotic 9/11 music, but I heard in today’s songs on the airwaves of New York, from some of my kind of people, a reaching for solace and shared experience. The people who were there that day want to share their sympathy and affirm our togetherness, and maybe also a little bit to display their scars. Where I tend to go artlessly in my thoughts and writings, the songwriters, audience and deejays, they’re not going there. I’ve tended to turn to the political story and the story of our national interest. I don’t have much personal connection to the day –I know somebody who lost a spouse in it, I took a look at Ground Zero that December, a friend tells the story of walking back to Brooklyn on foot… but these are things that came to me much later. I have not ever had much desire to hear the personal stories as reported in the media. The local heroism, the firefighters, the rescue and cleanup workers, the stories of loss, as true as they all are, and as deserving of memorialization, they also – and even to say this is to play a role some may find either uncaring or unpatriotic – when played through a media filter, work to reinforce the patriotic narrative that keeps us distanced and baffled from the world outside, and actually unable to come to grips with it. Just to fight and hold ourselves apart. How can I shut up when I believe that we are, in so doing, only repeating our mistakes? That it keeps us pouring out our national treasure into war debt, fruitlessly?

I remember the night the Iraq War was set to start. Bush would unleash the bombs within hours. My brother and I looked out over the San Francisco Bay as the gloaming set in, and I had a feeling of immense impending loss – a sickness for the country I so deeply love. [When I speak about Iraq in this essay and elsewhere, it is always as an accordion that opens up into so much more. The Iraq War is something akin to what the partition of Berlin and the Korean War were to the Cold War – a concrete fact on the ground that made a generations-long conflict emerge as something real. The Iraq War is different because it was unjustifiable and built on lies, and it ushered in, more than 9/11 and the subsequent Afghanistan intervention did (assuming that Afghanistan could have gone better if not for Iraq), a Cold War equivalent that really did not have to be what it is, and which, unlike the Cold War, is tangibly wrecking American power.]

How much these ten years of stories have changed us Americans, ever reinforcing the Great Conflation, that those who criticize our warlike ways do not support our troops and are deficient in their love of our country. In my hometown paper this week, a writer tells our wayward mayor, “Our military fights for that blanket of security that you have the right to enjoy and that allows you to go out and protest against them. I prefer you to just thank them for what rights and freedoms you have.” Can those who hold this view ever understand how a person like me can cherish the military service of my father and other forebears, can love the Iraq War veteran, can love our country so deeply, and at the same time believe our sacrifice in Iraq, and our entire War on Terror construction, has mostly served to hurt us in ways immeasurable? Ten years into the 9/11 era, the answer seems to be: as little as ever.

Memorial Day, 2011

Memorial Day, twenty-eleven

the army airman, fighter pilot

and later race-car driver,

later still creator of the Fitch sports car,

to this day owner of the single prototype

curve-graced Italian open two-seater,

arrived at the parade

to pick up his compatriot,

fifteenth air force b-seventeen

bomber pilot out of Foggia

who until last year had always insisted on walking,

only to learn

from the man’s wife he had died

six months before.

The airman hadn’t known – he’d been away.

He grew quiet,

stared off into space.

He didn’t drive the car,

the widow and bomber’s daughter-in-law

told their son

over breakfast some days later.

She told me about it a couple days ago,

she said. Probably didn’t want

you guys weighed down by it.

Unusual to miss the parade,

but they’d been in Toronto…

Niagara in fact, that day, swept up

as one should be

by the great, life-giving waters.

Eulogy for my father, Bill Binzen, delivered in November, 2010:

Yesterday around Dad’s grave I heard many wonderful stories from my cousins of Dad’s indelibly unique way of connecting with them. And you’ll hear many such stories today, I’m sure. I think everyone will remember Dad for that twinkle in his eye, his sense of fun, his love of family and his genuine warmth.

I shared all those sorts of experiences, of course. But somehow it’s hard for me to talk about them right now in the same way. So I’d just like to say a few things about the trajectory of his life.

Dad was a person who remembered when the blacksmith shop was a going concern. How could he have imagined ending his days with a certain adeptness at Photoshop and email?

He saw Babe Ruth hit a home run, and attended the celebrated Joe Louis-Max Schmelling fight. (Well, so did my uncle Peter, who’s here today.) And he also watched a NASCAR race from pit row just two years ago.

He took in the performances of Benny Goodman and Glen Miller. But he also attended a Guns ‘n Roses /Metallica double bill. I was there with him. He was 4 times the age of the rest of the audience, and we did depart while Axl Rose was still singing, which I somewhat regret, but that was around one in the morning.

He flew 26 missions in a flying fortress over Europe, heading right into the floating box of flack in the target zone. He repeatedly witnessed planes just off his nose falling from the sky. And, he also stood many times in the anti-nuke, anti-war vigil just down the street from here.

Dad spent time with Cartier-Bresson, knew Diane Arbus before her photography career had even begun, and worked closely with David Ogilvy in the formative years of Madison Avenue. A part of him embraced these big-time, expansive experiences. But he didn’t dwell on them.

There were things that mattered far more to him. Family and friendships mattered more. His own creative motivation mattered more. I’d say it was beauty that mattered more to him – beauty in landscapes, in relationships, in images and compositions, and in the details of daily life.

Long summer afternoons by the lake on Mount Riga; trips up the Housatonic by motorboat; dinners around a big table with extended family; the hand-drawn letters and cards; his joy at being surrounded by his granddaughters; and the many, many phone calls just to talk about what happened today; these are the moments I’ll remember.

We’ll also remember his unceasing creative drive. He always had a project going. How many stacks of pictures I flipped through with him, learning his vision of composition and juxtoposition and focal interest. He never stopped striving or learning. At about 89 he took up the art of African drumming. What can you say? It’s not a sound I ever expected to hear in church in Salisbury, but he was right there in the vanguard.

Finally, though Dad was quite reticent about inner thoughts and such, and not given to advising, when the chips were down, he was brilliant at seeing what really mattered to me, and responding to it with the right words. Helping me along in life. One of the readings today is from Shakespeare, and it contains the words which I always felt he treated as his golden rule: “To thine own self be true.” Halleluiah to that, Dad. You lived it, and I’m working on doing the same.

To close, I think the use Dad made of his memory of his war experience grew more vivid in his later years. It certainly wasn’t about war as something glorious; more about the intensity of concentration and purpose that a mission demanded. If you ask my mother, you can learn how his re-envisioning piloting missions carried him through his recent suffering with great courage. “The wild blue yonder” really was a touchstone for him.

But when you think of him in the wild blue yonder, know that the memory of flying that he held most dear was the training hours he logged over Texas and Florida in his Stearman biplane, heading up into the crisp banks of sunlit clouds, free of the bonds of this earth. He carried that airy lightness with him always. On his last day with his eyes open to the world, he gazed a long time faraway into those clouds and that light. He seemed very assured; and this was very reassuring.

Face: Book: Yell

About 1998-2000, I webbed pages with Myself.
They float out there still. Dormant.
Thickly crusted. Embarrassing only insofar as:
Who the hell cares? And: I’ve moved on.
But… I let them persist.

In plain language, my job: manage communications.
Encompass web. Once, one could proceed in anonymous glory.
Now? Add social media. Next: engage. As yourself.
Am so doing. Might start to convince
my Friends and associates they made the wrong choice.
Hold on tight.

Permit that I propel ponderous musings
on the significance of the medium.
Does anyone keep journals any more?
Write longhand? You there – got any attention span left?
Is it pompous I should persist in this way?
I shan’t apologize.
The actual is in the playground, on recess.

Reluctant, but now pliant
for my station – profession-alley – so demands:
that I turn my Face to the Book.
One cannot do one’s job without it.
Yet I have spent enough day in my Face,
would rather turn my Profile to Home,
soft sofas, familiars,
distant sound of water pouring over rocks.

And who has much to say?
Oh, my Friends. Our sharings, our likes are a bit mundane.
Piqued by snark and spunk.
Carried by the frisson of memes.
Not bad… not Michelangelo either.
Why should I worry? It’s just…
Once, the days peeled away without threatening to persist.

My parents’ generation had no need for this Book.
Nor did they have to Face it.
But transplant them to another era, they would be different people.
Which would have more merit or valor?
The times now tell us the Book is essential.
Yes,
if we consent to be all Face.

To say I’m ambivalent here.
I’m like the Grand Canyon.
I don’t want to be here at all.
I only want to be here if I succeed extravagantly.
I don’t want to just be myself.
I don’t exactly want to disappear.
I want to annoy you so much you come to need it.
I don’t want to change, not on these terms.
I want to change you.

Everybody is so absorbed.
I’m completely uninterested.
Not in you.
Just in you here, in the Book.
I’m not striking a pose.
It’s totally visceral.
This isn’t where I want to be.
Just call me: just call me.

What are the values that matter?

What are the values that matter these days, that you can stake your politics on? Any answer quickly runs up against the terrible slipperiness of our favorite big-idea words – freedom, peace, truth and the like. Everybody defines them as they like. The question is, which bundle of definitions is claiming the most adherents? So as I offer my list, I too am working to claim these grand-narrative terms:

Freedom: democratic values and open possibilities

Peace: nonaggression despite risks

Compassion: active care for those less well-off than you

Innovation and tradition: the evolution of new things, married to the continuing influence of collected wisdom

Common truth: current science, and collected peaceful wisdom, combined as the best guide to reality as we know it

Equality: our rights equal, and our different stations in life earned by merit

Renewability: earth’s dynamic and living systems allowed to sustain us without their permanent degradation

Justice: applying collected wisdom compassionately to guide matters responsibly

If we want to end by dipping our toe in the waters that, all things considered, I see as in the realm of spiritual belief, we could sum it up with:

Love: care for all.

Relative to the Arab freedom movement of 2012 – the Arab 1776:

I’m not sure what the current thinking is in Tel Aviv and Washington, but it occurs to me that if Israel’s foreign policy senses the strangely emerging freedom of Arab peoples primarily as a threat, it’s time for Israel to get a new foreign policy. If Washington is inclined to share that view when thinking on Israel’s behalf, it’s time for Washington to get a new foreign policy. After all, nothing matters more than democratic values. Right?

"...the specific intent to remove the regime in Baghdad is not even remotely thought-out in terms of consequences..."

The latest excuses for Iraq from Charles Krauthamer and others spouting this line is that Iraq was lost in three bungles - not shooting enough looters, not setting up a provisional government of Iraqi exiles, and not squashing Muktada Sadr at the outset. Oh, that it should be so easy to align stars your own way. If Bush had trouble picking Jay Garner for the job of provisionally owning Iraq, consider how his choice of Ahmed Chalabi for president would have gone down, but anyway...

Iraq was lost 101 ways, starting well before the war, and only culminating in a far-worse-than-Katrina handling of everything that came after the splendid bit of shock and awe.

All this had to be obvious to every person in Washington in 2003.

I wrote to my senator in 2003 prior to the start of the war...

"...the specific intent to remove the regime in Baghdad is not even remotely thought-out in terms of consequences such as: costs in cash and blood; destruction and danger for US forces and local civilians; the challenges of governing Iraq and nation-building (that’s a joke); regional instability (can’t wait to have our soldiers stationed along hundreds of miles of Iran’s border); over-reaching; loss of allies; unpredictable consequences; the potential quagmire of war; a no-holds-barred precendent for bellicose and unaccountable “leaders” the world over; danger to the global economy; and, not least, the guarantee that such an action will provoke decades more of unstoppable anti-US terrorism..."

It's not that I am so prescient. Any "leader" who could not envision as a realistic scenario losing as many as 2/3 of these propositions is either lying to us, lying to him/herself and us, or so stupid that s/he has forfeited the right to lead and should resign or be fired. Certainly all who voted for the war must fit in one these categories.

There is a story which speaks so loudly of crucial errors made long before the fateful, forceful entry of Iraq, but the Mark Foley scandal blew the doors off it, making it the most fascinating pre-election untold story.

Curiously, the Mark Foley scandal blew the doors off the most fascinating pre-election untold story, one which speaks so loudly of crucial errors made long before the fateful, forceful entry of Iraq. If you think about it, Foley has been a net blessing to the White House - one of the best diversions ever.

About 3 days before Foley's brilliantly-lit stage-entry, it was revealed that Condeleeza Rice had received, in July, 2001, an extraordinary, out-of-schedule briefing by CIA Director George Tenet, who described the strong likelihood of an imminent spectacular attack by al Qaida upon the United States. She actually claims not to remember anything about that briefing, while admitting the meeting happened for that purpose. That is so inconceivable that truly a person would have to be in great dementia or a coma not to remember such a briefing.

It was then revealed that both Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft recieved the same extraordinary briefing a few days later. Ashcroft at first denied it, but was soon shown to have stopped taking commercial flights because of the news. Rumsfeld, by the way, I would think, would have to have been shown the door at this point... and then Foley hit. So... what's the latest on this story? Anyone got the stomach for it? If I were in charge in Washington, I'd now say I want Rice's head for this.

In full, I wrote this letter to my senator in 2003 prior to the start of the war...

Dear Senator Boxer,

President Bush has made a major mistake in the direction he has taken US foreign policy in recent months. I am speaking, of course, of his policy of “pre-emption”; his surreal message to Iraq, “obey or don’t obey - we are going to crush you no matter what you do”; his thumbing his nose at foreign opinions and partnerships; his offensive taunting of the United Nations; his abandonment of the hard-won framework of international law; his flippant dismissal of containment and deterrence; his blatant manipulative use of fear-mongering; his disregard for our civil liberties; and, frankly, his callow disregard for your own august institution, the U.S. Congress.

Senator, if you do not act by speaking out forcefully against his errors, you will, with Mr. Bush, lead America to stumble into deep chaos and self-inflicted suffering. If you do not oppose Bush’s Iraq plans, you will have failed us all.

It is not just that the president’s foreign-policy stance is out of control; the specific intent to remove the regime in Baghdad is not even remotely thought-out in terms of consequences such as: costs in cash and blood; destruction and danger for US forces and local civilians; the challenges of governing Iraq and nation-building (that’s a joke); regional instability (can’t wait to have our soldiers stationed along hundreds of miles of Iran’s border); over-reaching; loss of allies; unpredictable consequences; the potential quagmire of war; a no-holds-barred precendent for bellicose and unaccountable “leaders” the world over; danger to the global economy; and, not least, the guarantee that such an action will provoke decades more of unstoppable anti-US terrorism.

This administration is dangerous. It is beginning to run completely out of control because a weak-minded leader is being yanked around by an aggressive, willfull, deeply paranoid senior staff. Just listen to him - he is a man who has lost all sense of himself and what he himself believes or stands for. He is being pulled around by his neck. Do not be a party to this madness. The Democratic Party does not need to help this man. Please stake out your position forcefully in opposition to the drive for war in Iraq, and please do so immediately. If you do not, I can assure you you will come to regret your allegiances.

Yours, Nate Binzen Oakland, CA

Untruth and Consequences

I have heard a lot of insightful examination and truth-telling by our TV news pundits, in the past couple weeks, concerning our present challenges in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the “war on terror.” I hear intelligent, realistic recognition of the complex mix of motives behind the terror, the diversity of Muslim opinion, the tangled histories that make for unruly allegiances and animosities in the Middle East, the limitations of military power to affect these forces, the need for deep analysis before action, the pursuit of hearts and minds, the suspicion of cheap rhetoric, the toxic effects of our oil addiction, the need, in a time of war, for sacrifice and genuine involvement, and the thousand shades of gray that our foreign policy demands.

It’s infuriating. The TV heavyweights are now, for the first time, saying on the air things that I and many others privately discussed ad nauseum, three, four, five years ago.

I welcome their newfound honesty. The window has been opened, the fresh air is in the room now. But what bothers me is that these media bobbleheads are intelligent people, they had back then the same facts before them that I did, and more. They also must have had, in private during the past five years, some conversations at the level of reality. But only now, after a year of opinion polls have given them the buoyancy they feel they need, are they willing to go on the air with it.

What a disservice they have rendered us. All that precious time lost making us swallow you’re-with-us-or-you’re-with-the-terrorists, they-hate-our-freedoms, dead-or-alive, there-is-no-doubt, mushroom-cloud, shock-and-awe, welcome-us-with-flowers, mission-accomplished, “reconstruction,” bring-it-on, Geneva-Conventions-are-quaint, dead-enders, final-throes, turning-a-corner…

It’s not that the truth didn’t squeak out here and there over the airwaves (and all over the blogosphere). It’s that the hierarchy of media orthodoxy always privileged the notion that reality-based thinking was naïve, dangerous, and, ultimately, not sufficiently robustly patriotic.

Now, all that the belated media truth-telling is good for is to help us start to think about digging ourselves out of a deep, deep hole. To see the same guys who took their paychecks spouting the party line now displaying their authentic intelligence, how can you respect that? It only goes to show how, when the nation really needed them to make good use of their perches, they sent their integrity to the back of the bus.

Put the River in Reverse

Listening to the radio today, I heard Elvis Costello’s new song, “The River in Reverse,” produced by New Orleans’s own Alan Toussaint, with its refrain “Wake me up, with a slap or a kiss.” A melodic and sinuous tune, it seemed to me to obliquely convey harsh, heavy, of-the-moment echoes of Hurricane Katrina, and of our present hell of idiotic terrorists and their perfect counterpart, the overbearing weight of our own freedom-compressing, reactionary overlords. The song is very present-tense.

Next up was Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey.” This song evoked for me both the early 1980s when I first discovered Van Morrison, and the early 1970s when he recorded it and I was a young child. Coming as it did after Costello’s quick musical soaking in our present moment, the disjunction I felt was striking.

Of course, Tupelo Honey is a finely crafted piece of sweet love emotion, a feel-good thing any time. Like any good song you love, it opens up a personal matrix of feeling-memory-evocation. But the juxtaposition with The River in Reverse brought, for me, something more. Immediately I felt the frame of history rising around this song, Tupelo Honey, this artifact. I felt the memory of a time when a rockin’ pop song could still rise above our background cynicism and dread, and just feel good.

Okay… that’s still possible. But not, for me, in this instance. This song, which I have cherished, now seemed to me like a piece in a museum of modern art.

(And I suppose I suddenly seem old enough to have been contemporaneous with the art of the generation now passed, recently acquired into the permanent collection.)

Tupelo Honey is simply a love song, but it reminds me of a time when, yes, there was war, and mistakes, and bad judgments, and poverty and pollution and all the rest. And it reminds me of a time when there was a terrible enemy, and uncertainty about whether our world would survive intact. But above all, what I heard today was the echo of the many years now past when we could hear Van sing his song, and feel that love-vibe in his craft, the art of our time, a pleasure we could all share, somehow unknowingly reassured that our nation is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, sometimes sublime, sometimes despicable… but on balance, healthy.

Nowadays that simple reassurance is gone for me. We hate to look around us. We inextricably plunged ourselves into an international catastrophe, the complete rupture of a poor but proud country into a pit of violence with no escape, initiated by our relentless, senseless, unnecessary bombing of a capital city millennia older than our own. We blithely started a high-stakes game, the outcome of which was fore-ordained as, at best, barely tolerable, and, at worst, a total loss.

At home, the powerful use fear as a tool to beat us down has won, and we, once proud Americans, are now just bobble-headed, overworked, blinkered, compliant debtor-consumers. We are lied to, and we expect it – some of us even think it’s good for us. Neither media nor government cares to discuss or investigate serious charges that our electoral system is being rigged. We are saddled by a national debt so enormous that it will hang around our necks until I am beyond retirement and heading for the grave. The era of rising wages and expectations, a signal chord of the time of Tupelo Honey, is gone: only a difficult struggle against a global race to the bottom lies ahead. Recently I saw the global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth. No one can leave the theater without knowing we are responsible for what is coming, the end of nature’s magnificent equilibrium, and still we are doing nothing. I fear, heartsick, that the city of New Orleans, home of my alma mater, is starting to fade into the history. In the long term, the Crescent City doesn’t have the future that Baghdad has.

Sure, there are villains abroad. But they don’t matter so much to me as the question, what about us? What is our deal? Because now, as not back then, in the 20th century, we are unavoidably implicated in things that are terribly, irretrievably wrong. And I look around me at the good, intelligent people I know, and what I see is that it seems we are impotent to act to make right. I am an optimistic person. But it’s hard, any more, for a simple good love song to feel so good.

"Bush has borrowed more money from foreigners than all prior presidents COMBINED"

Ordinarily I do not do this, but the facts are as stark as any voter could possibly imagine, so I am quoting verbatim, Robert Freeman, July 5, 2006 on CommonDreams.org

"Bush has borrowed more money from foreigners than all prior presidents COMBINED. To fund his own record debts, Bush goes, hat in hand, to borrow more than $2 billion a day from the rest of the world… The national debt—the cumulation of all deficits since the founding of the republic—was $5.6 trillion when Bush took office but now approaches $9 trillion, up a breathtaking 50% in only five years…

"More than 100% of the growth in Gross Domestic Product over the past five years is attributable to the expansion of debt. GDP is up $2.8 trillion since 2001. But government debt alone is up over $3 trillion for the same period. Add in the explosion of home mortgage debt at over $5 trillion, and a cumulative $3.5 trillion in trade deficit, and you get a Real Economy that is literally going backwards. The illusion of affluence is only sustained by selling off the family china. Working Americans know this all too well…

"Real average hourly earnings are 14% below their 1973 post-War high. Real median household incomes are still 4% below where they were in 1999. Employment in the communications equipment industry is down 43% since 2000. Semiconductor employment is off 30%. Electrical equipment has shed one quarter of its industry’s jobs. Textiles, off 40%. These are the high-wage jobs on which the American middle class—the American standard of living—once rested…

"This evisceration of labor and labor-based income comes at a time when corporate profits are at their highest level as a percent of national income since 1947 while labor’s share is at its lowest level since 1946. The rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting dramatically poorer…

"As onerous as they are, the deficits… constitute only a small fraction of the total indebtedness of the U.S. economy. The official “national debt” is approaching $9 trillion, as noted, a substantial figure, to be sure. But the government’s “unfunded liabilities”—obligations it has committed to pay but for which there is no known source—are estimated at an incomprehensible $58 trillion. Add in revolving consumer debt, mortgage debt, and corporate debt, and the nation’s total obligations exceed $90 trillion, more than seven times GDP. At the time of the 1929 stock market crash, total debt stood at two times GDP. These obligations will never be paid.

"The reason is that the job drain from the U.S., while it looks like a torrent now, is still only a trickle. Though the U.S. won the Cold War, it is rapidly losing the Cold Peace, which began when China ended its communist isolation and joined the world market. The average wage in China is $.57 per hour. China has more than half a billion workers meaning the drain of good jobs from the U.S. to China can go on indefinitely—and will. …As many as 56 million U.S. jobs are susceptible to outsourcing...

"But this is exactly what Bush and… fellow “conservatives” intend… Globalization means liberating capital from all obligations to national well being, freeing it to pursue only the highest returns it can find, no matter where they may lie. That means seeking out the lowest paid labor and shifting all possible jobs there. That is China. Or India…

"[The new Treasury Secretary’s] job, then, is to arrange the write down of debt that must accompany the effective bankruptcy of the U.S. He will have to promise an IMF-like fiscal austerity to foreign lenders to keep the funding flowing until there is nothing left to take. This will mean draconian cuts in social spending, no tariffs, and the removal of all remaining controls on the mobility of, and returns to, capital. The dollar will be precipitously devalued with the consequence of massive inflation and stratospheric interest rates. These will only accelerate the decline. A new international reserve currency, based on a basket of currencies including the Euro, the Yen, the Chinese Yuan, and the dollar, will be devised…

"The U.S. worker and the U.S. economy will be left to their own devices. All social safety net systems must be dismantled for, given the colossal debt, they can no longer be afforded… The only government programs of substance that will be maintained will be police and military systems…"

- Robert Freeman, July 5, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

Leaks 101

To dispose of all the hot air lately about leaks – partisans on both sides declaring treason by leakers they don’t like, while giving a pass to leakers on their own teams – I will now help you understand whether a leak is good, bad, or just normal.

There are 3 kinds of leaks: whistleblower leaks (good), partisan leaks (business as usual), and abusive leaks (extraordinary and bad).

Whistleblower leaks are leaks of any government information, classified or not, that reveals improper or illegal conduct by the government that is being hidden from the public. The leaker may have to break a law in revealing their evidence of lawbreaking activity by others. Such whistleblower activity is fully justified and proportionate, and should be celebrated as a patriotic effort to defend the integrity of our government. It serves to enhance government transparency and accountability, two key requirements of good governance in the 21st century that we should absolutely demand of our government.

Partisan leaks are disclosures of unclassified government information for the purpose of tactical political advantage. While such leaks may not be admirable, they are utterly routine under any administration, and those who expend their breath deploring them are wasting their time and are most likely hypocrites who look the other way when their own guys do it. Everybody’s always done it, and everybody will continue to do it. It’s human nature, and it’s part of the mechanics of power. It’s just the way the game is played.

Abusive leaks are leaks intended to cover up or protect questionable or illegal activities by inflicting damage on political opponents. The key example is the attempt to damage the reputation of a whistleblower. Such leaks show a wretched disregard for both the law and the responsible limits of the political game. Worst of all are (highly unusual) leaks of classified government information for such purposes. This is the very definition of the abuse of power. If someone in your local government, or your workplace, or your posse, is exposed acting in like manner, you’ll say that person is a scumbag. Those who undertake such leaks have no place in the national leadership. They hurt our nation’s reputation and they damage the trust between the governed and their government.

Whistleblower leak: Joseph Wilson exposing Niger yellowcake uranium lies told by President Bush while he made the case for making war upon Iraq.

Partisan leak: too numerous to count. The cost of doing government business.

Abusive leak: Cheney, Rove, Libby, et al illegally exposing the classified identity of Joseph Wilson’s CIA operative wife in an effort at payback, undermining his story, and silencing similar voices.

So just remember: when you hear somebody spouting about a leak, refer to this handy guide and decide for yourself whether the speaker is correct, or just a windbag, or defending the indefensible.

This government is an abomination.

I woke up on fire and started writing. Looking at my words again, I still haven't thought better of them. So here is my letter to the editor, of what publication I know not.

I think you would be surprised at how many millions of Americans share the perspective I would like to share with you now.

I love my country and our constitution passionately. But...

I would not be going far enough in describing our present evolution if I were merely to say that the present administration is a nasty blot on our history.

This government is an abomination.

Both parties are parasites.

The greed and corruption of the people who hold the large measure of wealth and the political keys in our country are a disgrace upon their heads.

The military-industrial-"intelligence" complex has grown into the ruin of us all.

Washington DC is a howling vortex of bad karma. Responsibility has vacated.

With every passing day, we look more like a resurrected Babylon, or the declining Roman Empire.

For expedience, I am willing for a while longer to throw my support to the hollowed-out husk of the Democratic Party. But...

Before our national treasure, our climate, our hydrocarbons, our middle class, our civility, the last ounce of our prestige, and our ability to dream and deliver are gone...

We need to drop our illusions and distractions, and we need to start imagining, together. Then we need to act.

We need a vision of a nation 300 million strong that Thomas Jefferson, Chief Joseph, Walt Whitman, and Rosa Parks would anoint with their blessings.

We must melt the structures of power that are hardened and strangling us, and we must replace them. Renewing ourselves, it comes down to this:

Collectively, we must ensure that all are given the capability to flourish, and then left to their freedom. We must now dream, then build, a new United States government that helps us do that, and does nothing more. That is all.

We rise from and return to the dust

See the origin of plants in the dust
The ground was fertile, fecund, ample
bearing within it many potentials,
readinesses waiting,
tools-which-now-that-you-have-
you-can-no-longer-do-without,
gift opportunities,
receptors waiting for your arrival,
welcoming you in.
Our protein-molecule hormone receptors
evolved as the fertile ground,
the gardens upon gardens within
over time that welcomed in
the wandering hormones that fit them,
keys for locks, and
have been the dust, fecund,
in which the plants of our nature have grown,
embedding the forest of a cell,
an evolving practice,
and the bed of higher things.

The following was written in celebration of my father's 87th birthday, by his brother Peter.

9/21/05

FOR ENGLISH MOROCCO
AKA BILL, BILLY, WILLY
AT FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS

I’ll not waste time, I’ll be quite quick
Explaining what makes Billy tick

Our nation’s reeling, it’s heading for a fall
Yet my bro’s focus is on major-league ball

Critics suspect the President’s in a coma
But Bill stays glued on Terry Francona

Although Bush hunts vainly for baddies under rocks
Bill’s obsession is them Boston Sox

Bush says no to partial birth abortions
And Bill says yes to Fenway’s fortunes

He knows our homeland is going to pot
But his own greatest fear is that Jeter may get hot

But now’s the time for laughter and mirth
Marking the day of Big Brother’s birth

Let good times roll, I wish you well
And may those Yankees go to hell

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What the hell is this babble? I had voice recognition running while I was on a business phone call, and this is what came out. No idea what I was really talking about, but it was none of this!

Kerry Teaches a Lesson

Bush’s election victory came as a bit of a surprise to me; I had expected him to tank with the American public by now, brought down by his accumulated falsehoods, failures, felonies, and fakery. That reckoning will come.

But for those of us who are not enthusiastic about Bush, equanimity is in order: some things are beyond one’s control, and now is a time to prayerfully build inner strength, to connect with the light in others, to live artfully, and to be grateful for the good things we have. Even if Kerry had squeaked out a win, given all the Americans out there who identify so strongly with Action-Man Bush’s “toughness” and “moral values,” it is clear that there are historical processes that our nation needs to work through. We are now on one particular path through those changes. Frankly, I think that, one way or another, the adherents of Bush’s brand of “conservatism” will need to wise up to a clearer realization of humanity’s inexorable interdependencies (some of which are beneficial to us, others hard to accept). I think that that growth process is going to be painful for both of the two Americas, red and blue. And I do not think that a Kerry victory would have done much to assuage those challenging, inevitable dynamics.

I hope the reader will remember my call for equanimity now while I indulge in recounting my thoughts as I crawled into bed late last night. The tone was anger, and it will not help if we only hold onto that anger; we must draw its lessons, and move on.

Anger at Kerry. Anger that he failed to understand his enemy. If I could have advised him, I would have told him to take every page out of Karl Rove’s playbook, and attack Bush relentlessly, viciously, dirtily, below the belt (pick your flavor of the week: dynastic heir masquerading as good old boy, daddy’s silver-spoon-protected draft dodger, moron student, brain-compromised booze-soaked cokehead, AWOL guardsman, bin Laden family business beneficiary, selected not elected, asleep at the switch on 9/11, master of justice-department-buried Administration felonies, war-manipulating demagogue, unfeeling death-dealing coward, etc, etc, etc).

Why this unseemly strategy? Because, when historians look back on this campaign, they’ll see that there was only one chess move that mattered: the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads, brought to you, with the slightest veneer of deniability, by Karl Rove. Bearing his mark of Zorro: attack the opponent at his point of greatest strength. Kerry the war hero became Kerry the unpatriotic wimp, and there, debates be damned, he remained in the minds of enough voters to bear him off into the land of pathetic political footnotes.

Kerry’s Swift Boat Waterloo reminds us of the way he set up his own ambush. He invited the attack by ducking at the Democratic convention, portraying himself simply as the gung-ho war hero, dreaming that he could somehow avoid any presentation of his subsequent anti-war protest activities. Please. He brought the fatal blow upon himself. Mr. Electability should have known before the convention that his best strategy was to take – gasp – a risk. He should have come clean and succinctly told America that in his youth The Hero saw both sides of war: the duty to serve and the duty to speak your conscience. In that way, Kerry would not only have staked out a position of real, defensible moral courage, he – and he alone, and this too is his historic failure – could have gone a long way to healing the wounds of the Vietnam era. At the same time, he could have set up a mature national discussion about what our present open-ended war commitment really means. And initiated an effective critique of Bush’s war leadership.

Oh well, missed a chance.

I hate to say I told you so, but this Deaniac saw the flaws long ago. My convictions on the manner of winning a campaign haven’t changed since well before the Gore debacle. The risk-averse Democratic strategy of the polite cave-in, of acting Bush-lite, has always been and will remain a loser until the last miserable fool of the likes of McAuliffe, Lieberman, Daschle, Gephart, Gore, and Kerry – is out of politics. How many pathetic losses will it take before the Democrats just try showing the courage of their convictions, taking some risks, differentiating themselves from their conservative opponents, giving some genuine inspiration, and, at the same time, for pity’s sake, playing dirty?

Look, Kerry defined himself for all time when he voted for the war in Iraq. If you thought that was a good idea at the time, don’t tell me now that the only problem is Bush’s incompetent handling of the occupation. You broke it, you own it.

If you thought that was a bad vote, you should have known a long time ago that you were buying a lemon in John Kerry.

But what’s done is done. My bedtime blaming session is limited to those sorry souls inside the Washington vortex who should know better. For the rest of us, I hope that anger and disappointment will be replaced by a simple, clear sense of what our strategy needs to be next time around. Spell out your compelling, inspiring progressive American values like caring, protecting, cooperating and lifting up; and attack your adversary with great cunning and equal or greater force than he, inevitably, will heap upon you.

Prediction: Bush will lose, and it won't be close

I feel more sure now than ever before that Bush will tank by election day ’04 – in the end, it won’t even be close. Economic spluttering, disappearing healthcare, oil prices, deficits, overwhelming evidence that our middle east/antiterror/you-break-Iraq,-you-own-it policy has gone off a cliff, a few more mini-scandals to come (more prisoner abuse; Halliburton, etc), and the Farenheit 911 effect (enough Americans seeing the emperor with no clothes) will combine to ensure his ouster.

Here’s why: the anti-Bush voters are already totally locked in; more undecideds will break to Kerry when they add up all the bad news; and here’s the decisive part: there’s a slice of the Bush voters who are NOT rock-solid – their Reagan-Republican loyalty is being stretched to the breaking point by Shrubbie’s assininity, and once the momentum moves just far enough against W, that wobbling slice will let him down. Some will abstain; some might even vote for Kerry. Count on it.

Yes, we can expect the terror card to be played with increasing intensity up til election day, and that will pin down the great majority of Bush’s supporters, but it won’t be enough to give him the numbers he needs.

The ONLY way Bush can win is if Kerry asses up his campaign as badly as Gore did four years ago. Well, I shouldn’t put it past him – just yesterday, he out-Bushed Bush by parroting Bush’s dumb certainty: singing in harmony with the outrageous comments Bush made a few days ago, Kerry said that even knowing what he knows now, he still would have voted to authorize the pre-emptive war. This when the Washington Post and New York Times have both issued grand mea culpas, admitting that they should have taken a harder look at the war sales pitch. So, Kerry can be a worm, but still I think he has just enough moxie to use the opportunity before him.

Anyway, I’m on an effort to limit my political obsession: it’s a broken world, and I can’t fix it by dwelling on it. I’m trying to limit my news intake to only those things I don’t already know – and you’d be surprised how that shrinks the field. And I find that news intake is best counterbalanced by some daily form of peace-inducing meditation, to prevent a buildup of excessive bile. I WILL attend the RNC protests in NYC, and I WILL do some voter registration work, but I’m trying not to carry this stuff around with me. Not easy, I admit – but let’s be sure to have fun with our outrage, cuz we’re gonna win.

No terrorism in Haiti, right?

Any Democrat presidential candidate worthy of my support will immediately be denouncing from the rooftops the recent US chess moves in Haiti. How is this not terrorism? Heavily armed bands pounce on defenseless city populations and attack the police stations. Thuggish, shadowy, unaccountable actors announce that they will topple the duly elected democratic government.

I’ll make a deal with the Bushsters: you get me footage, within 24 hours of the summation of this “war,” of a falling statue of President Aristide in Port au Prince. Then I’ll have to admit this is not actually a victory for Bush’s preferred face of terrorism, but rather a glorious liberation of the Haitian people from evil. Somehow I think that statute will be hard to find, given that Aristide is a normally elected president with just two years until his term ends and he leaves office for good.

How is this not terrorism? To at least show some legitimacy for the project of ousting Aristide, I’d like somebody to explain to me specifically what laws he has broken, how the constitution has been violated, or even what norms recognized in international law he might have contravened, making him unfit for office. I know a few things about the flaws of Aristide, but I’ve never yet seen legal specifics of his apparently assumed illegitimacy addressed in the mainstream American media.

This is terrorism, yet with it, the US and France have finally found something to agree upon: Haitian democracy is not worth defending.

To Haiti, France has 400-plus years of villainy to answer for. But the transgressions of the US are immediate, and should obviously be condemned right now by the leading Democrat in such devastating terms that Bush cannot defend himself. The leading Democrat should going in for the kill now, attempting to turn this into Bush’s policy-hypocrisy Waterloo.

Aristide is a broken figure. Once he was a man who raised a hopeful grassroots democratic ferment in Haiti, on the back of which he was legitimately elected by a landslide. But he was a decade ago illegally ejected from the presidency by thuggish armed forces. He was only returned to office after his will was broken during exile in the US. Aristide re-entered the presidency (he was duly elected again by the people) willing to sign Haiti up for a new round of economically catastrophic debt deals with the global financiers from the G-7 and its arm, the IMF – something he never would have done before. The economy has since grown more dismal than ever. Lacking an army, he brought with him new methods of repressing people with paramilitary gangs. He learned a few things during his exile in the US, corruption among them, but one thing he didn’t learn was how to be lovable.

So with his support withered, perhaps now’s a better time to make a move than later, when the people get closer to the next election and begin to envision the possibility of a peaceful electoral transfer of power to somebody unknown, somebody who might do things differently, might not accept the IMF’s terms. So it’s time to pull the plug. Too bad for Jean-Bertrand Aristide – now he’s become another of the US’s presidential-assets-gone-bad – another in the line of ex-presidents – Noriega, Saddam...

Could it be that Bush is sending a signal flare in February that will land in President Hugo Chavez’s oil-rich Venezuela by, oh, say September? Or maybe December? Maybe that’s crazy – but we’re certainly sending “hate me” messages to the world outside again.

Where’s my Democrat, the guy who forcefully pulls the rug out from under such naked duplicitousness?

Yes! Found!

For several months, I’ve been looking for an assessment that I wrote before the American-Iraq War of 2003 commenced, because I knew that in it I’d anticipated what was to come. That’s no great achievement: only dolts could have failed to expect the things I mention here. I wrote it in the early part of this year, before the attack, perhaps in January or February.

I’d like to give another reason why ‘regime change’ in Iraq is a bad idea.

Let’s assume there are very nasty weapons hidden away deep in the hinterlands of Iraq. At the moment when the US military topples the Iraqi regime – when the US becomes the Iraqi regime and begins to set up its client state – control over those hidden weapons will tumble further away from the US or UN gaze than ever before.

Captured regime leaders will be less forthcoming on the subject of weapons of mass destruction than any other. Meanwhile, field commanders in control of the weapons will suddenly be answerable to no higher authority, and will have little incentive to reveal their deeply hidden secrets.

Most likely, at least some of them will seek a profit by offering their weapons to a newly forming rebel insurgency or to the highest bidder.

I favor containment of Iraq. We contained the Soviet Union for over 40 years, so Iraq should not be a problem. One ‘relic of the cold war’ that I preferred – at least weapons that should not exist at all were held by governments, however despicable they may be, and not passed into private terrorist hands.

Rules of Puctuation

I was taught the formal American “Rules of Puctuation.” But now I find the Brits and some internet journalists using things like “The Period outside of the Quotations”. And I note that when I was first taught “The Comma Inside,” I thought, “Logically, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.” The punctuation mark sets the package, which is the “quotation”. So it should be outside!

So I like this trend. Along with it, the European wordification of acronyms like aids and Unicef. I wonder, though, whether everyone who reads the new American rules understands the shift, or whether some see its use as sloppiness? Any thoughts, “let me know”.