To The Streets

I've been working on a big. long-winded political post for the past few days,


photo stolen from truthdig.com

but after a while I realized it was all about me, which is not what I intended. I'll finish it and put it here soon, but not today. Here's what I want to say:

You can make a difference in our government. For half of American voters (and who knows how many non-voters?) it feels like the country has been stolen away, and there's nothing we can do. I won't take the time now to go through the litany of abuses we have been subjected to by the Rove/Cheney/Bush Administration. If you're reading this you probably have your own list anyway.

But the government doesn't respond to us, and many, myself included, have halfway given up. I just want to say that not one of us is going to change things, but all of us together can make a difference.

When the people took to the streets in the 1960's and 70's, we didn't change things. We didn't depose two presidents and bring an end to the insane and pointless war in Vietnam.

What we did was set the stage for those things to happen. We created a climate in which Senators Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern could say "Damn! There's a constituency there! Maybe I'll run for president on an anti-war platform!" We let Congress know that if they investigated the corruption and the crimes of President Nixon, there were millions who would back them. We gave them cover to be brave. It may have been only for a few months, but it was long enough to throw a criminal out of the White House.

Well, there's another criminal there now, and there is very little political will to do anything about it. The Right has been effective at shutting us up, but they have never had much of a majority among the people of this country. Likely they are not in the majority at all.

There is no reason for us to remain silent any longer while our rights are taken away, our country becomes the most hated in the world and Big Oil runs the government. The Republican electoral "victories," if you want to call them that, were on razor-thin margins. Decent people everywhere are tired of the smell coming from Washington. The administration's poll numbers are the worst they have ever been. In an election held today they would be swept from office in a landslide.

There are State of the Union demonstrations tonight in cities around the world. Go to one if you can, and make some noise. The Democrats in Congress need your strength. They need to know that you want them to act. Their performance against the Alito nomination sucked, because they were afraid to be bold. Write to them and let them know you support vigorous action to take back the country, that they will not be punished for taking bold steps. Let them know that there is a constituency for honesty, integrity and action!

As I have said before, we will not be able to throw Bush out of the White House. That doesn't matter. We have the opportunity to clip his wings and expose him as the useless and venal sack of doodoo that he has always been, rendering him powerless for the remainder of his term. If the Democrats make gains in the November elections this year we can start to reverse the right-wing trend that we have allowed to take place, while we watched silently, in ever-increasing shock. If we loudly let the Democrats know that we are there for them, that we are the majority, that we will not sit still for any more of the same, we can get this country turned right-side up again.

By yourself, you can't do it. But without you, we can't do it.

The revolution starts today.

No One Expects the Pope of Love

So it seems Benedict XVI is coming down squarely on the side of getting it on.


I say you go, Ben! As a sexually repressed former Catholic, imagine my surprise and relief on reading Pope Benedict's new encyclical, "Deus Caritas Est" (God is Love), a teaching letter in which he encourages men and women to say "yes" to their bodily natures. "Love," says the Pontiff. "...we cannot simply abandon it. We must take it up again, purify it and give back to it its original splendor.” Yes! This is his first encyclical, the one that most Pope-watchers say will set the tone for a new pope's entire reign, and indeed Benedict has said that he wants Love to be the keystone of his papacy.

So this guy is going to be The Pope of Love. This comes as kind of a surprise because remember, his previous job in the Church was as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, known historically as The Inquisition. This led some of us to think maybe he would become the Pope of Bondage and Discipline, but certainly no one expected the Love Pope. I mean, in this letter His Holiness actually goes so far as to say sex "...is, indeed, ecstasy..." Naughty Pope! Of course, he goes and spoils it a little by adding that it must be between a married man and his wife, and yes, the wife has to be a woman, and there is to be no "intoxication" and there has to be "self-sacrificing love" or else the whole thing is degrading.

Still, I have to hand it to the guy. He's been celibate for like 60 years. There's a pretty good chance he can't remember the last time he did the nasty, and yet the first thing he writes as Pope is this cheerful guide to "ecstasy." We may be starting to see a thaw in Holy Mother Church. In the next five hundred years I fully expect to see a softening in her stance on sexy lingerie.

Worn, of course, within the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. By the woman.

Time to Impeach

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,

against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

__The 4th Amendment to The Constitution of the United States (emphasis mine)

This is the entire text of the 4th Amendment. The guys who wrote it were trying to avoid the kinds of personal invasions they had been experiencing, perpetrated by a system in which a monarch, claiming authority from God, could send police or troops to snoop wherever they wanted, confiscate whatever they saw and use whatever they found against whomever if it suited their purpose. It is admired everywhere in the world, although not always by totalitarian regimes.

Now President Bush seems to have violated this precept. He has publicly admitted that he has used an agency of the federal government (the National Security Agency) to wiretap citizens of the United States. He has said that his administration did not have warrants for their actions, nor did they seek warrants, nor do they intend to, despite the fact that there is a law requiring such warrants and providing a fast and secret way to obtain them through a special court. He has said that he intends to continue this program of surveillance.

Read the amendment again, and keep in mind that it is settled law in this country that "searches" include wiretaps.

Then tell me: How is this not an impeachable offense? Just so you don't have to read the FISA statutes, let me tell you that violation is a felony carrying a five year prison term.

There is no way in hell that this president will be convicted and thrown out by the current Congress, or even the one that will be seated after the midterm elections this year. Impeachment merely means an investigation and a trial. It would get President Bush's attention, and probably cause him to pay more attention to the "march of freedom" right here in this country. It would allow Congress to reassert its authority and oversight responsibility, which it has recently abdicated. A chastened George W. Bush could finish out his term, walking the line of good behavior, instead of swaggering over it. Only good things would flow from an impeachment at this time, while failure to stop this power grab would be a setback for individual freedom in our country.

It's the House of Representatives that initiates impeachment proceedings, so if you'd like to see a restoration of our federal system of checks and balances, write to your congressperson. Later, you'll want to let your senators know how you feel.

A Dream of Falling, Part 2

[This post refers to the previous post.]
My dream has several possible meanings.

I don't believe dreams are "sent" to us. I don't think they are visions, and I don't believe they allow us to see the future or know things we couldn't otherwise know, like the exact moment our twin brother drove his car over the side of that mountain road in Tibet, or who was the last person Lacey Peterson saw.

Still, it is our own minds that put on these shows for us while we are sleeping. In essence it is one part of ourself telling stories to another part. If, during waking hours, I thought I was scaling the side of a ten-story building, or floating down from the top of it, you'd all think I was crazy, and you'd be right. But if it happens in a dream, it's OK. It's a window into my subconscious. It is me explaining what I think, what I fear, how I feel. To me.

I have had dreams in which I was terribly afraid. There was something that was going to "get" me. When I was very young it was often something known, like whales. I had a recurring dream when I was a child that I was being chased by a huge whale, and if I got out of the water it could come right up on land and continue the pursuit. Later my sleep was disturbed over and over by having "seen" The Flash. I grew up during The Cold War, when nuclear holocaust seemed inevitable. I would wake in horror, sit up in bed and wait for the shock wave, which would be a few seconds behind the flash and would vaporize everything. Never mind the bad science: This was scary.

These days I am too sophisticated for such foolishness, instead dreaming about vague, disquieting dread. I believe consciously that I can handle anything knowable that might come at me, so my mind can't show me a picture of what it is that I must fear. It's nothing that has a form, nothing I have seen in my waking life. On mornings after these dark, moody dreams I am jumpy and blue.

All of this stuff can show me something, I'm sure. I'm just not sure exactly what. What can I learn about myself from this dream? Maybe that I believe...

• It's the journey - the climb - that is important. I scale the wall, and I am among the few who have a chance to reach the end, but it was the climb that held my interest, and so I delcine to bring it to an end.
• There is always another way. The limited options imposed by our society can be transcended, and the consequences of not doing what is expected - making a try for the roof, in this case - are not so bad.
• I am weak. I can't close. I do all the work, and I do it well, but I don't make the final leap. I don't have the faith in myself to go all the way to the top. I am afraid to compete for the highest position. I don't deserve to see the roof, or whatever is over that ledge.

This last is troubling. I could have tried to climb up to the roof, to reach the pinnacle. Who knows what rewards I might have found? And if I had tried and not made it, the results would have been exactly the same as if I had not tried at all, but merely gave up.

So why don't I try?

A Dream of Falling, Part 1

It begins in a phone booth.

I am inside, the door closed, talking to someone, or listening to someone, I don't know which and I don't know who. In the dream, the phone booth feels like a normal phone booth, but it isn't, really: It's all glass, on all four sides and the roof. It's in an alley between two tall buildings, on one side a modern blue and silver and gray skyscraper, on the other an imposing old structure of rough red brick, a relic, perhaps, of the golden days before the Great Depression. The phone booth sits incongruously in the middle of the alley, where it would block traffic if there were any traffic.

I become aware of objects hitting my phone booth, falling from above. When I look up at the glass roof, I see that living things, animals - maybe pigeons - are falling from a great height and splattering on the phone booth and on the pavement around it. I look again and I see that it is not only birds, but people who are falling to their deaths.

But there is no garish, bloody carnage, no screams of terror or pain. Instead there is silence, and as each falling body meets its fate it merely splatters into a translucent fluid, which flows down the sides of my glass phone booth and puddles in the alley.

Then I am out of the booth, and I am scaling the side of the red brick building. I have no safety line. I am pulling myself up hand over hand, using the jutting bricks and various ledges and windowsills as handholds and footholds, slowly working my way up. I am surrounded by other climbers, each laboring silently except for an occasional groan of effort. The other climbers are not with me or against me. We are all just trying to make it to the top, ten stories above.

In time I arrive just below the roof, where a large ledge juts out above me. Exhausted, I hang there for a while. I can't figure out a way to get past this ledge and up onto the roof. It sticks out too far. It seems like I would have to climb upside down for a few feet in order to get into a position to haul myself up to safety. As I think about this, I am holding on to a rail or a rain gutter with both hands, and I am suspended there, a couple hundred feet above the alley. Looking down I can see that people - other climbers - are still falling off the building from various heights.

I see a man in roughly the same situation as me, and to my astonishment he lets go of the rail we are hanging from and somehow manages to leap up and away from the wall of the building, gets a grip on the very top of the ledge and drags himself up to the rooftop and out of my sight.

I realize that he has done it the only way it can be done. A leap of faith. He could have missed the ledge. If he had he would have fallen for sure, as there was no retreating from the move he'd made. My grip is weakening, my hands are sweaty, and my options are limited: I can try for the roof, or I can hang there until my strength gives out and I fall to my death.

I hang there pondering this, I don't know how long. Then I realize I am dreaming, and there is a third option. I close my eyes and let go. The descent is not like a fall. I float, and awaken.

Naked If I Want To

Play

Would you let me walk down the street naked if I want to?



Can I buy fireworks on the fourth of July?

Can I buy an amplifier on time?

I ain't got no money now,

but I will pay you before I die.

Meet the New Guy

I'm pretty tired of the Samuel Alito confirmation hearing.

I hesitate even to bring this up because so many bloggers have written about it so exhaustively and the truth is I don't really have anything substantive or unique to add. But I have listened to the whole fucking thing so far (thank you, NPR), and I feel as if I myself have been through a grueling process. Maybe not as grueling as whatever Mrs. Alito thought she was undergoing when she burst into tears and ran sobbing from the hearing room, but bad enough that I think I should get to vent a little here.

I wish I had a television in my office at work, because then I could have watched the hearings as well as listened to them, and you know I would have. It would have been better to watch, because then I would have had an image to go with Alito's voice, and it might have given me a better, more integrated impression of this guy who wants to be on the Supreme Court for maybe the next 40 years. But I had no image, so I have to go with what I picked up from his voice.

I don't like him.

He doesn't sound that smart to me. I don't care about his humble beginnings and his degrees from Princeton and Yale. I know quite a few dumbasses who went to big-name colleges. President Bush, for example. So I don't buy the "smart enough to do this job" argument, even if it is being made by other judges (who really shouldn't be going to Congress and promoting one of their own in testimony before a political committee - WTF - but that's not the issue here.). Hey, I was drunk for fifteen years during the seventies and eighties, but I still remember every club I joined, and I haven't been prepped for testimony by a flock of flaks and handlers. Sam says he can't recall being a member of Concerned Alumni of Princeton, and he is shocked - shocked! to learn that they were (are?) a racist group who thought that there were too many blacks and hispanics being admitted to the old school, and God damn, women wanted in to the eating clubs.

It just doesn't sound smart to me. I mean, after he's confirmed, what if he just forgets about the Sixth Amendment? It could happen. I mean, even though everybody else in the United States knows about his membership in the Society of Bigoted Princeton Grads, he doesn't remember, and in three months of preparation the only answer to the inevitable question he could think of, even with all the help that Rove/Cheney/Bush could give him, is "I don't remember." Well, I should say that on the second day of questioning, he added that he didn't renew when his initial membership ran out, so that's pretty creative, I guess.

Still, I see only two possible explanations for this situation. One is that he's a racist who joins racist organizations and wants to keep minorities "in their place." Since he now claims he doesn't remember any of this, a corollary might be that he's a liar, like Clarence Thomas, who claimed he had never thought about or discussed with anyone the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision. The other explanation is that he's stupid. I'm going to guess that he's not a racist (humble beginnings, remember), but that leaves lying numbskull, and that doesn't make me want him on the court.

For the past three days I've listened to his earnest, halting responses to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and I come away with the impression that he's a guy who's working way over his head. Maybe he studies real hard and writes down all the facts in two columns on foolscap, one column labeled "For" and one "Against," and maybe he can manage to use that technique to come to legal conclusions that take the Constitution into account. But he seems to lack the quick wit, humor, intelligence and intuition that that I want in a guy who will be judging the most important questions we as a society can come up with for the next two generations.

And this is not even to mention that he is an extreme right-wing guy, an avid follower if not much of a leader. I mean, eewww.

He's going to be placed on the court, of course. If the Democrats had anything to stop it, they would have brought it out before the hearings. The Princeton Bigot thing, his record of siding with corporate interests and government over the little guy, his sitting on cases in which he has a clear financial conflict of interest, his long-standing opposition to abortion rights, his whining wife - none of that will stop his confirmation. The Republicans have the votes, and they have the votes to change the rules in the Senate and stop any idea of a filibuster, too. I tried to warn people before the 2000 election - the winner gets to pick a bunch of judges - but the complacent left - the actual majority - stayed home, and look what a mess.

Now I have to hope the Dems can wrestle back a congressional majority in the next three years, and make laws that can't be interpreted by the new court to mean that the President gets to do anything he wants, because he's the President, damnit!. That's a feeble glimmer of light for me, but it's all I have, and the Republicans seem lately to be trying to sabotage themselves just at the moment when they could almost - dare we say it? - rule the world.

Peace Talk, Part 2

I keep visualizing whirled peas.

Anonymous Coward has taken issue with my "giving up on world peace" post, but his statements are buried in the comments section of another post, hidden from your view, so I thought I'd bring it out in the open with a new post. His articulate remarks are near the end of the comment section of New Year's Wish, 2006, if you'd like to read them.

Actually I don't think he really disagrees with my claim that there will never be peace on earth. A.C., who calls himself Smerdyakov Karamazov (the morose and epileptic Karamozov sibling from Dostoevsky's novel), comments in a tone as if meaning to challenge my assertion that three powerful groups (politicians, arms dealers and soldiers) will make sure that there is never an end to war. But instead of showing how world peace is imminent, or even possible, he goes on to point out the need for troops on various battlefields, and how these troops actually do good things, like saving the families of children. And he notes some positive outcomes of deploying troops:

Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia weren't exactly lolliops and gingerbread before we got there either - just like Iraq was pre-2003. The UN noted that 5-6000 children were dying every month due to lack on immunizations. That's 60,000 kids every year for over 10 years. Their health post-invasion is something to be hopeful for. The restoration of the Iraqi marshes is something to be hopeful for. Quasi-democratic elections in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and Jordan are something to be hopeful for.

I think if you read his two comments, you will be moved as I was by his words, and I don't want to belittle what is obviously an emotional and personal conviction. Nor do I want to argue that soldiers never do anything good, because obviously they do. But if we or any nation are going to try to do "good" in the world by sending armed men who are trained to kill, I suggest that it will only lead to killing, which will lead to revenge killing, which will lead to more killing, and so on.

Let's not be disingenuous about the purpose of armies. Sure, the soldiers can feel "...personal honor and courage..." and I don't doubt the reality of their feelings. Sure, good works can be done - the weak defended, bridges built, water purification systems provided, and more. But if you had to define the nature of an army, would you say "It's an organization that experiments with radar"? Would you say it's a group who likes to sing patriotic songs? Of course not. The nature of an army, and we all know this in our hearts, is violence and the threat of violence. Armies are killing machines. And they're not going away, which means to me that war is not going away.

Thousands of years of unending and escalating conflict seem to support my view. I'm getting used to the idea. What about you?