The Token Club

Clarence Thomas has recently written a book called My Grandfather’s Son. The title is unsurprising if one remembers the tendency of self-righteous male political figures to invoke their fathers. The book is a dull read: Thomas devotes a great deal of space to sputtering denunciations of liberalism, and an unseemly obsession with his own perceived status as victim of liberal elites. It would seem that, incapable of writing a decent opinion for the Supreme Court, he will have to settle for writing self-pitying and vindictive personal opinions in his ill-considered memoir. Foremost among Justice Thomas’s themes are his tired complaints concerning his confirmation hearings sixteen years ago. He reveals nothing that would effectively counter the testimony against him, but continues to throw dust in our eyes.

But let us leave aside the Anita Hill controversy—as important as it was, the allegations of sexual harassment obscured other substantive issues regarding Thomas. The American Bar Association gave Judge Thomas a very tentative rating of “qualified” in 1991, with two voting members on the panel voting for “unqualified.” To put this into perspective, you must realize that the third possible rating is “well qualified,” and that this highest rating is fairly easy to achieve. Samuel Alito, a legal mediocrity if there ever was one, got a “well qualified” rating from the ABA. More importantly, it was very unusual, and perhaps even unprecedented, for a Supreme Court nominee to be confirmed without a unanimous evaluation of at least “qualified.”

Thomas never really practiced law, except for three years in the Missouri Attorney General’s office, where he worked on state tax issues. He was an in-house lawyer for Monsanto, which is not a job where you’d be expected to have much training in Constitutional law. He then rose through the ranks of the Reagan Administration, where he ended up heading the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (One should note that the Reaganites were pioneers in the practice of promoting right-wing blacks to positions previously identified with progressive liberal causes. Perhaps you recall the crook Samuel Pierce, the secretary of HUD under Reagan.) Finally, Thomas served as a D.C. circuit judge for exactly one year before getting the call from Bush Sr.

The occasion was the retirement of the ailing Thurgood Marshall (who died two years later), the first black member of the Supreme Court and one of the giants of the civil rights era; the man who argued Brown vs. Board of Education; a tireless defender of civil liberties, racial equality, and the rights of the accused. Shallow political thinking being what it is, it was generally assumed that he would replaced by another African American, without much attention being paid to what made this particular African American a great judge.

Now consider the thinking behind the nomination of Clarence Thomas by Poppy Bush and his gang. Here we have the retirement of a great black man, a defender of the oppressed and a champion of freedom and equality. The reasoning, if you can call it that, going on in the brains of these toad-like political hacks could be summarized as something like the following.

“So they want another black guy on the Court? Okay, let’s find a black guy who’s as right wing as they come. Let’s make sure he’s a mediocre lawyer with very little experience, even though there are many other black judges who are far more distinguished. And let’s nominate this nobody, this nonentity who represents a fraction of a percentage of the black community, to the highest court of the land.”

Think about the utter contempt that this nomination demonstrated—for the Court, for Marshall’s legacy, for the black community, for all of us. Consider how this strategy was calculated to turn the tables against civil rights, and against all the gains of that movement through decades of struggle. And remember that all this was to be accomplished by nominating a black man, and then contemplate the nauseating depths of political calculation to which George H.W. Bush and his advisers were willing to go. These were the guys that deliberately evoked racial hatred and fear in the 1988 campaign. They continued to push the Nixonian “Southern strategy” that used code words and secret winks to win the votes of white bigots, and keep the country divided for their own political advantage. Their successors have continued on the same road.

And Judge Thomas has been everything that they hoped he would be. He has consistently embraced the unchecked power of the police to do whatever they want against the citizenry of this country. In the backward march of the Court against racial equality, he has been in the forefront, to the point now where it seems as if we might as well reaffirm Plessy vs. Ferguson. He is the black Jim Crow. He is against abortion rights. He is for torture. He doesn’t even believe in the rule of legal precedent—one of the very foundations of our judicial system. His career on the Court has been one of astonishing mediocrity and ineptitude. And of course, he helped appoint Bush Jr. in 2000.

In his spare time, he performed the ceremony for Rush Limbaugh’s third marriage. What a guy.

As for Poppy Bush’s strategy of racial contempt, the Shrub took it to a whole new level. The appointment of black rightists, culled from an African American population that is overwhelmingly progressive in its political and social leanings, is a Bush hallmark, with Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as the most conspicuous examples. (And when you need someone really batshit crazy to bring out during a crisis, there’s always Alan Keyes.)

You see, the evidence of New Orleans notwithstanding, Bush and the Republicans really do care about black people. They care so much that they’ve appointed blacks to the most important administration jobs—our chief liars, thieves and killers.

The familiar problem

Recently I ran across this passage from Plato (Laws, bk. III). He’s discussing the decline of Persia:

“We find that they degenerated still further. The reason is that excessive curtailment of the liberty of the commons, and improper intensification of autocracy, made an end of their national feeling and public spirit. Since their disappearance, the concern of the authorities is no longer for their subjects, the commonalty, but for their own position; they give over loyal cities and peoples to fire and desolation whenever they think it of the slightest advantage to themselves, and consequently hate and are hated with savage and unrelenting animosity. On the other side, when they need the arms of the common people for their defense, they find no patriotism in them, no loyal readiness to hazard themselves in the field; in theory their forces are reckoned by countless thousands, but all these thousands are worthless for service. Hence they hire mercenaries and aliens, as though they had no troops of their own, and look to them for their salvation. Moreover they are forced to an exhibition of their folly, since their habitual conduct amounts to a proclamation that all that society esteems honorable and of good repute is a toy in comparison with gold and silver.”

Now, with a few little adjustments (the well of patriotic soldiers has not yet run dry, for instance, although one can't help but note the mention of mercenaries), this passage can be applied justly—not to present-day Persia (Iran) of course, but to us, the United States under corporate rule, and to the Bush regime especially. Which demonstrates, as many other documents of our Western heritage could, that the problem we face is neither new nor particularly complicated. The arrogance of technology, and the politics of the image, fool us into thinking that we have advanced beyond the problems of the 4th century B.C.E. But the folly of valuing gold and silver over the good of society as a whole plagues us still, and to this narrow and short-sighted self-interest we can still attribute the majority of our ills. Only now the disease may be fatal, since the end of the human race has become an actual possibility in our time.

In their face

Channel surfing is a terrible habit, worse than biting my fingernails. I’ll inevitably run across something by chance on one of the “news” channels that will piss me off. Last night my remote clicked around to the evil clown Glenn Beck, who somehow managed to get a prime time show on CNN. Watching the antics of this bug-eyed lunatic is equivalent to slowing down next to a bloody car wreck, just to get a glimpse of some mayhem.

Perhaps part of my sick fascination stemmed from reading about something he’d said Monday, to wit: "I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today." Think of the families forced to flee their homes on a moment’s notice, losing everything they have. Then read that sentence again and wonder why Glenn Beck has a job.

Anyway, last night he was showing clips of the recent Code Pink action at the Congress, where a woman with her hands painted blood-red actually got up close to Condoleezza Rice, calling her a war criminal and yelling, “The blood of millions of Iraqis is on your hands." She was dragged away, along with the other Code Pink women that were there.

And Glenn Beck is gesticulating in that clownish way that makes you feel nauseated and saying, “They're horrible, just a horrible group of people! I mean, look, you can be against the war. You can have this debate. There's nothing more American than saying that. But this is -- these people are over the line!"

I’d like to know what “debate” he’s referring to. Public opinion has been overwhelmingly against this war for literally years now, so that debate is over. But you wouldn’t know it from watching the “news” channels. And what avenues, may I ask, are available to the people to voice their outrage over what has been done? Well, I guess we can write letters to our senators and representatives. Or to the editor of our local newspaper. Oh yeah, we can vote every two years, assuming that the vote is not being rigged or suppressed, which is sadly not something we can ever assume again. In fact, I seem to recall that there was an election last year in which the Democrats were put back in control of the Congress, an election result fueled in large part by disgust with this war. And yet—nothing has happened. Bush and Cheney go on their merry way while Congress ensures that we're not making any disrespectful puns on General Petraeus’s name.

The citizens of this country are treated like spectators who have no duty to their conscience but to keep out mouths shut while war-mongers and plutocrats continue to drive us to ruin. That’s why Code Pink disrupts public events. Face it, everyone who has stood up for peace has been ridiculed, slandered, demonized, and accused of disloyalty, even when they’ve been polite and played by the rules. So raising a little hell is quite appropriate. Getting in the face of a murderous flunky like Rice is just what’s called for. She deserves to feel uncomfortable, maybe even a little scared.

Women taking action, angry women, women who are acting “unladylike”—these things inspire fear and revulsion in the patriarchal brain. Even Jon Stewart, bless his heart, cracked “You’re not helping!” when they showed a clip of a previous Code Pink action on his show. But what would help, do you think? Folding our hands, being polite, being quiet, waiting our turn? Our turn never comes if we just wait for it. We march in the streets by the millions and the “news” channels say that we were “thousands,” if they mention us at all. Have the rightists practiced dignity and civility? Hmm, maybe we should ask Ann Coulter about that.

The more hissy-fits the wingnuts, the better off we are, I think. The Fox zombies and AM radio roaches starting piling on Media Matters over the last few months because this little website has had the nerve to regularly fact-check their statements and expose them as liars. And they’re such pathetic little whiners that the thought of some website criticizing them provoked them into a torrent of whining and finger-pointing. It’s funded by George Soros, they sniveled, as if that would make a difference, even if it were true—which of course it isn’t.

Whenever an anti-war group or a progressive organization is attacked by these people, it means we’ve hit a nerve. That’s a good thing. We want that.

And you know, the last time I looked, Code Pink hadn’t killed anyone. They haven’t shoved anyone’s head underwater to simulate drowning. They haven’t blown little kids to pieces in the name of democracy. They haven’t put American soldiers in the line of fire while looting the treasury for all it’s worth. And yet somehow, they’re a “horrible group of people.” You know what? I’m reaching for my checkbook right now and I’m making a donation to Code Pink.

There. I feel better.

Bad faith

In a speech the other day, Sam Brownback said the following: "The view of government without faith has been tried and failed; it was atheistic communism. It had the idea that somehow man would move himself into a perfected state, and it utterly failed. It didn't look to the transcendent, and didn't pull man out of himself in love.”

Here we have a fairly standard distortion, an imitation of actual thinking, in which the separation of church and state is identified with atheism. It’s designed to appeal to the fundamentalists. Liberty from religious intolerance, from the enshrinement of religious power in government power, is framed as a threat to faith. The harking back to communism is an almost nostalgic appeal to the knee-jerk hatreds of the Cold War. If you don’t want prayer in the schools, if you think women should be able to decide themselves whether they want to go through with a pregnancy, if you think gay people should have the same rights as everyone else, well you must be an atheist communist.

An all-too obvious aspect of all this—which is, however, seldom pointed out—is that Christian fundamentalists and their enablers must have incredibly weak faith, seeing as how they are in a practically constant state of anxiety about threats to it from liberals, feminists, gays, atheists, Muslims, or what have you. Their almighty God must be a puny little weakling if his rule is threatened by a few gays, or for that matter by any mortal who summons the courage to question his existence. But of course the fundamentalist faith is the real weakling, since it relies on a constant diet of hatred, resentment, anger, repression and contempt to stay viable. The spiritual midgets of the so-called religious right apparently think that God needs their help. Without Pat Robertson scrunching his eyes closed and asking for a Supreme Court Justice or two to have a heart attack, Jehovah just may not be able to succeed in his mission.

When someone like Brownback starts to pontificate about faith and the sacredness of life, etc., I am puzzled—no, dumfounded—trying to understand what he means. He voted no on requiring CIA reports on detainees and interrogation methods. I guess “faith” means keeping silence when people are tortured. He voted no on banning chemical weapons. So I guess “faith” shouldn’t interfere with the right of the state to use nerve gas on human beings. He has continued to block pulling troops out of Iraq. I guess “faith” means more war, more death, more militarization, more fraud, more lying, more lawlessness.

The faith that countenances continued violence and state-sponsored terror is no faith at all. It is a sham. And the only way someone like Brownback can tell himself that he is a man of faith is if “faith” is a concept so devoid of meaning as to simply indicate the craven exercise of power over others. And when our modern Pharisees hear of the suffering caused by their government, they cheer inside, and cry against those who stand for peace, and use the idea that liberals want to man to “move himself into a perfected state” as an excuse to do nothing.

The Clinton cul-de-sac

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” It’s a narrowly tactical saying, and therefore false in almost every way that matters to ordinary working citizens. But in the American political scene in the last fifteen years, this fallacy has had a destructive effect on liberals and progressives seeking meaningful change.

I’m referring, of course, to the Clintons. The right wing has demonized them to such an extraordinary degree—to this day obsessing about the Clinton presidency even as they make excuses for his deeply corrupt successor—that many well-intentioned Democrats seem to think that the Clintons must be friends of the progressive movement. On the other hand, I have known many an instance when attacking the Bush regime has prompted conservatives to assume that I must be a Clinton supporter. Such is the shallow cul-de-sac that is mainstream political thinking.

It’s no use pointing out here that Clinton was a much better President than Bush. It’s not hard to be better than the worst. The Bush gang’s depredations have lowered the bar to virtually subterranean levels. I have heard comparisons of Nixon, Ford, and even Reagan to the current occupant in which the previous crooks and mediocrities have gained a better rating than Bush. Does that mean these men were good Presidents? Not to a sane way of thinking.

In discussions that I’ve had, Clinton supporters have extolled his charm, his eloquence, his marvelous speaking ability. Frankly, I’ve never seen it. He’s always come off as a facile glad-hander to me, and a very boring speaker, full of general platitudes without fire or substance. His stultifying “bridge to the 21^st century” State of the Union speech was not at all unusual for him—a pretentious lathering of rhetorical emptiness that numbs the mind into apathy at best, impotent rage at worst.

But let’s look away from the man and measure the accomplishments. What did President Clinton do?

He went to the mat for NAFTA, and for “free trade” in general, just like the corporations wanted him to. Unions? Forget about it. Clinton never did a thing for them. On the other hand, he was in favor of deregulating the banking industry, part of the short-sighted corporatist strategy that still plagues us.

He jumped on the right-wing anti-welfare bandwagon, helping to craft punitive anti-poor legislation.

He flinched when rightists opposed gays in the military, turning around and establishing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” an unworkable anti-gay policy that plays right into the hands of the hate lobby.

Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism Act foreshadowed Bush policies. It included wiretapping without warrants and giving the State Dept authority to decide what organizations are terrorist and then make anyone contributing to these groups liable to prosecution. It also negated habeas corpus for non-citizen terrorism suspects.

He used military force in Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Sudan. He instigated a long bombing campaign against Iraq that went largely unreported in the U.S., and his sanctions on that country were estimated to have killed a million people, many of them children.

And what about the economic prosperity we supposedly enjoyed under Clinton? The upper five percent became much wealthier under Clinton, and Wall Street prospered. But it didn’t translate into change for working people. Wages stagnated while downsizing and outsourcing accelerated. The internet boom provided a nice illusion for the media to latch onto, but we all know what happened next. Clinton helped facilitate corporatist policies that led to constant mergings, short-term speculation, and corruption. Basically he was bought and paid for by Wall Street.

Under Clinton the Democrats became a minority in the House for the first time in five decades. They lost eight Senate seats, which basically destroyed Democratic effectiveness in that body, and led to further losses later on. Eleven state governorships went Republican under Clinton. The Clinton presidency was a golden age for the right-wing. And did he stand up and confront them? No, he tried to co-opt their power by becoming more and more like them. Principles didn’t matter, only power. And how did this strategy play out? While Clinton played for the ever-shrinking “centrist” vote, and took liberals for granted, the Republicans viciously attacked him on every front, finally impeaching him for lying in a civil suit that they instigated against him for sexual misconduct.

The degraded state of our political landscape today did not just appear out of nowhere. A lot of the reasons that it has gotten this bad can be found in eight years of spineless surrender to the right during the Clinton administration. Clinton was a creature of the Democratic Leadership Council, a conservative group whose goal is to align the Democratic Party with the corporatist agenda, and thus keep the money flowing in. They bought into the rightist mantra that “liberal” is a dirty word, and that progressive politicians are unelectable. They still wield a lot of clout. And their way leads to disaster.

Was there any area in which Clinton held firm for progressive values? I can think of one: choice. Not the greater issues of women’s rights, health, and empowerment; not the needs of poor women with families; but just abortion rights. In a time when we needed someone to fight for us against the rising tide of reaction, this is the sop we were thrown. Is that enough for you? Is being pro-choice, and nothing more, enough to qualify someone as a liberal? I think not.

Since the catastrophe of Reagan, the official definition of the “center” has continued to move farther and farther right. This was a conscious strategy. When outrageous things are said, they begin a process in which the outrageous can become “normal.” By going along with this, Clinton Democrats marginalized liberal and progressive voters. The assumption is that there was nowhere else we could go. (The same attitude was maintained regarding African American voters.) They’d say stuff during election years, but when it came time for action we were ignored. One of the results has been widespread voter apathy. Rather than see this as a problem, both parties have been afraid to expand voter participation. Better the security of low voter turnout than the wild card of an energized citizenry. This dovetails with the strategy of appealing to the “undecided” voter. Although Rove demonstrated that energizing the base can win elections, Democrats don’t seem to have a sense of their base, or rather one should say that their base consists of the corporate donors who are bankrolling them. If the voters turn against corporate interests, what are Democrats to do? Give lip service to the public interest, while placating the corporations, that’s what. And this is exactly what we still see now.

Do you think Hillary Clinton offers anything different in essence than Bill Clinton? Study her words and actions carefully, and you will find no meaningful evidence of such difference. Once again we have sheer opportunism, a consistent placating of the right along with token gestures to the left. I hope we can do better.

When we witnessed the spectacle of Democrats, even progressives like Eric Alterman or Todd Gitlin, become apoplectic about the third party candidacies of Ralph Nader, it’s a symbol of the impotence and weakness of mainstream liberal thinking. What they’re really saying is: “Your vote belongs to us! How dare you waste it on a third party candidate!” A mature adult response would be to question oneself, asking how the Democratic Party can meet the needs of this portion of the constituency that is voting for a third party. What can we do for progressive needs and causes, so as to bring them back into the fold?

But instead, as you know, they pouted, threw tantrums, pointed at Nader and whined that he had thrown the 2000 election to Bush. The immaturity and entitlement of this stance is breathtaking. We supposedly owe them our votes without question, or we’re branded as stupid idiots. But what had eight years of Clinton done for us? What had he done for civil rights, women, the environment, equality, racial justice? All we saw was an opportunist game of double talk and triangulation, in which society became increasingly engulfed by the right-wing narrative. And the Gore that campaigned that year was not the Gore we saw emerge later on.

I’m sure even the majority of us, who voted for Gore, didn’t expect that the Bush administration would be a crypto-fascist coup. The narrative that was sold to us was that he was just another Republican shithead. But even though Bush has been an unmitigated disaster, in the long view we need a much more radical change than electing some cautious establishment figure to the White House. In fact, the focus on the Presidency as an agent of change is misguided in itself. There’s a huge architecture of power that is in place in this country, an imperial power inflated to mammoth proportions during the Cold War, and no one person in the White House will be able to transform it into a true servant of the people. I mentioned how different Gore was as a Vice-President and a Presidential candidate than as a Nobel laureate. We’ve also seen how Jimmy Carter has said and done some wise and sensible things after he was President. While he was President, he had Brzezinski as his Secretary of State, and he made sure that the federal government would survive underground while we all fried to death in a nuclear war. He was a conservative Democrat, not a liberal, and this is what we forget. But it seems everyone changes in the secret corridors of power. If by some freak accident, a man like Kucinich was elected, don’t you think he might get assassinated, or otherwise disposed of?

So the answer is a mass movement of the people. It always has been. If we want politicians to pay attention, we have to be mobilized. This is not easily done. The material comforts offered to the masses by the corporate powers act like a glaze over the mind. The wasteful luxury of our “way of life” is bought at the expense of a lot of other lives in other countries. Most people don’t want to see this, or do anything about it. But besides all this, people are generally busy with their lives, and they’re not going to drop everything to become political activists. How can you blame them? Strategies of engagement need to be fashioned that ask more of people without asking more than they can give. In the meantime, I suspect that things will have to get a good deal worse, economically and otherwise, for the mass of Americans, before a progressive movement will make the kind of gains we need. The rightists are not going away quietly. The polls show them losing at every level, yet they still dominate Washington and the media discourse. The astounding thing is how well progressives have actually done in the last few years, considering the forces arrayed against us.

Just trust us

On Thursday, Dana Perino, the White House’s new official liar, brought out the old “we don’t torture” mantra in response to the New York Times’ revelations about U.S. endorsement of torture. When asked to elaborate, she used the old “we won’t tell you because the enemy is listening” rationale: “You don't hand over your game book to the opposing team.”

You see, children, the enemy trains itself to resist interrogation. If they know what we do, they will be better prepared to resist. Mind you, we don’t torture. You’ll have to take our word for it. Trust us. But we can’t answer questions about our interrogation techniques.

Fact: the torture methods are already well known, and have been public knowledge for years now. The notion that we’re not being told in order to protect us is another insult to our integrity and conscience. The Bush regime wants the American people in the dark as much as possible because our knowledge threatens their power.

“Just trust us” is not within the American tradition. If anything, it’s an ancient royalist concept of obedience to divinely ordained authority. If all we needed was to trust that our masters were doing the right thing, there would be no need of representation by legislatures, or trial by jury, or a Constitution, or for that matter, the vote. “Just trust us” is merely a doctrine of submission to a paternalistic power, like peasants submitting themselves to the will of an Emperor. This republic was not founded on trust, but in fact on a wise and healthy mistrust of the human capacity to govern itself without proper checks and balances. So for the government to refuse to give an account of itself, to keep the people in the dark as a matter of principle, is an inherently un-American philosophy. It’s a philosophy much more in keeping with dictatorships such as China or North Korea.

The Bush regime must make the pretense of being moral, because an amoral political philosophy of pure power is not completely acceptable to most Americans. Therefore we get this infantile insistence that “we do not torture.” They do in fact torture, and have been torturing for years now, but the denial is necessary in order to keep the mass of people, who are generally uninformed, in a semblance of moral comfort and apathy. It doesn’t matter if the statement has repeatedly been shown to be false, as long as this information is confined to a relatively small educated segment of the populace.

As part of this strategy of deliberate obfuscation, concepts which are incompatible can be combined without much consequence. Thus Perino emphasized several times that we haven’t had another terrorist attack here since 2001. The implication is that torture has helped prevent such attacks. (But of course we don’t torture.) Bush himself has used this ploy, as when he credited “tough” tactics last year in the cracking of terrorist suspect Abu Zubaydah. (The narrative concerning Zubaydah was a lie, but we can generally assume that any statement of fact by Bush is a lie.)

The moral stance is flimsily transparent. The real message, the red meat thrown to the rightist base, is that torture is good when used against the enemy. If you’ve got bad people who want to kill you, then you’re justified in torturing them. This really appeals to the basest, most primitive human elements, the part of us that hates and wants to make the enemy feel the pain of vengeance. I think this element is a big part of what motivates the base—pure rage and hatred against enemies. And “the enemy,” we know, is domestic as well. It includes liberals, leftists, feminists, etc., so implied in this appeal to the base is the prospect of using torture against the “domestic” foe as well.

Conservatives used to decry the “moral relativism” of the left. What could be more relativist than this desire to justify torture? If we can torture an enemy, who is going to decide what the definition of “enemy” is? What’s to prevent me or my family from being designated an enemy, if I protest, dissent, or say the wrong thing? If a Democrat were in the White House—say for instance Hillary Clinton—what’s to prevent the government from declaring anti-abortion groups as the enemy? But you see, when their political opponents do it, it’s wrong; when it’s their guy doing it, it’s right. This is the quintessence of moral relativism. It’s government by men instead of laws.

The use of public discourse as a means to hoodwink the uninformed masses is perhaps best epitomized by the “ticking bomb” argument. We recently witnessed the grotesque spectacle of a Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, using the fictional character Jack Bauer from the TV show 24 to argue for torture. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles...He saved hundreds of thousands of lives...Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" The utter contempt that this argument demonstrates is breathtaking. We’re considered so stupid that we will accept the confusion of a TV thriller with reality, by a Supreme Court justice no less.

When the ticking bomb defense comes up (and it does, frequently), I haven’t heard anyone ask, “So is that what we’re facing in these cases? Are we racing against time here to dismantle an atomic bomb? And if not, what possible relevance does this argument have to the debate on torture in Guantanamo and elsewhere?”

To which the Fox viewer might reply, “Yes, this is a ticking bomb. These terrorists are out to get us.” Who decides which person is a terrorist, and who gets tortured to save us from this metaphorical ticking bomb? The Preznit, of course. Just trust him.

Which brings me to another subliminal argument going on underneath all this talk of game plans and scorecards and tough tactics. The secret message is: “These weak, pansy liberals are more concerned about the rights of dirty Arab killers than they are about you, Mr. Decent White Guy, and your decent white family. So publicly we’ll say that we don’t torture (wink, wink) to keep these do-gooders at bay. But we know, don’t we, friends and patriots, that your glorious leader is doing whatever it takes to keep America strong, and if that means attaching electrodes to the balls of some filthy wog, then so be it. We’ll do what we have to do, like true manly men, and we'll deny it so that the liberal traitors can't sabotage our righteous work."

We wonder why the constant exposure of lies hasn’t brought this regime down. I’ll tell you a story. I had a t-shirt made with a big picture of that hooded prisoner from Abu Ghraib on it. The shirt says, “If these are our values, we’re losing more than a war.” Yes, it’s provocative. I was wearing it a couple of weeks ago when I was in line at the grocery store. The cashier looked at me with a quizzical expression. “If these are our values…” she said, “What does that mean?” “I had this shirt made myself,” I answered. “The picture is from Abu Ghraib.” Can you guess what she said?

“What’s Abu Ghraib?”

I told her it was the prison in Iraq where they tortured people. She said, “You mean our soldiers?” I said yes. She said, “Oh. I…don’t like to think about the war.”

This person was not hostile, just curious. And I don’t blame people for not wanting to think about the horrific things going on in this world. But it was an eye-opener for me because I assumed everyone had heard of Abu Ghraib. The torturers have shown themselves less naive than I in this regard. They know that most people don’t pay very much attention to the news, beyond the most superficial aspects.

They count on it.

The roots of denial

Holocaust denial is in the news again, thanks (but no thanks) to the President of Iran. Ahmadinejad’s opinions have elicited the usual indignation, but what are we to make, finally, of Holocaust denial itself? There is no question that the “final solution” is among the most well-documented events in history. The Germans kept very precise records—not to mention the countless testimonies from survivors and perpetrators, along with all the other supporting evidence. That anyone would even attempt to deny the Holocaust has always puzzled me. Yet it’s been going on for at least forty years.

Sometimes the denial manifests as a critique of the extent or nature of Nazi persecution of the Jews, as for example in claims that the gas chambers were a myth. I don’t think it makes any difference whether a revisionist denies the Holocaust outright, or just the extent of it, or the means employed. None of it withstands critical scrutiny.

It seems to me that the question as to why such denial is being advanced has two related answers, one of them obvious, the other not as much. First, the obvious one: antisemitism. Hatred of Jews has a long tradition. The ambivalent relationship between Christianity and Judaism, in which organized Christian power incorporated the Jewish scriptures while claiming to usurp the Jews’ “chosen” place within the biblical story, has been one of the most tragic aspects of European history. The 19^th century, however, saw racism as a cultural construct give way to an ideological racism. The mythical position of the Jew as scapegoat became a lightning rod for those using fear and resentment to wield a new kind of power that we’ve come to know as “totalitarian.”

When the magnitude of the Nazi regime’s crimes became widely known, the world shuddered. A supposedly “civilized” nation demonstrated to what depths human beings can go, and they were deeper and more frightening than anyone had dreamed. The post-war revelations concerning the death camps were a repudiation of ideological antisemitism. As the cause, so the effect: the end of antisemitic rhetoric was mass murder.

Rather than boldly attempt to justify the “final solution,” therefore, the antisemite of today seeks instead to deny that it existed. If there were no Holocaust, then anti-Jewish ideology can pretend once more to have a case. Holocaust denial, then, is an attempt to regain access to the destructive energy of the old Jew-as-scapegoat mythos, a time-honored source of power. Of course there are other scapegoats available (the right wing is currently using gay people for that end) but none of them have the history or the potency of the Jewish scapegoat.

I believe, however, that there is a second reason for Holocaust denial, related to the first but more subtle. That the Third Reich was really a rightist state is a fact that must be secretly embarrassing to right wingers. During the Cold War, the American right was fond of raising the specter of Munich and “appeasement” when attacking the left as being soft on Communism. This obscured the fact that it was the right that opposed entry into World War II, it was the right that was isolationist, and what support there was for Hitler in this country came exclusively from the right. During the McCarthy era, anticommunism and antisemitism went hand-in-hand, and this was no different in essence from Hitler’s own political views. A number of Congressmen were on record as believing that America had been duped into supporting the “wrong” side in the war by a “Jewish-Bolshevist” conspiracy.

As a symptom, then, of this largely unexpressed embarrassment, we witness the appearance, on society’s fringes, of Holocaust denial. For if the Holocaust didn’t happen, or even if it wasn’t as severe as we’ve been told, then Nazi Germany was just another regime that waged an unfortunate war and lost, rather than a massive criminal enterprise. And if the fascist state was not beyond the ken, then the fascist project for the future is given a new lease on life. I don’t believe the issue at stake is whether or not the denial is supported by the facts. The motive is to sow the seeds of doubt in the public mind. A gradual erosion of faith in the historical record advances the fascist cause. Most of this is unconscious, of course, just as all such ideological systems are an expression of an unconscious drive to power.

In the case of Ahmadinejad and other Holocaust deniers from Muslim countries, I think it’s primarily a symptom of their hatred of Israel. A sane perspective is to consider Israel as a state among other states, which means that one can oppose the policies of an Israeli government without being anti-Jewish, contrary to what many reflexive defenders of Israeli policies may say. Conferring a “special” status on a particular country is just as delusional as giving it a “hated” status. To do neither is not only a prerequisite for sane political discussion, but for respect as well. But both are apparently in short supply. So we have the spectacle of a Muslim leader spouting off about the “myth” of the Holocaust. No matter what the motive may be, the negation of the historical record reveals an insidious prejudice.

I understand that there are Holocaust deniers on the left as well. Delusion is not the sole property of the right. But if I were to believe what the right wing noise machine tells me, liberals and leftists are natural allies of Islamic fundamentalists, although the fundamentalists oppose homosexuality, abortion, women’s rights, and just about everything else that the American right opposes. The Orwellian state of public discourse is such that indignation about Holocaust denial can be expressed by those who haven’t learned anything from the Holocaust. The mortal danger of extremist ideology, whether we label it “right” or “left,” is not something in a museum. It’s still very much with us.

Bamako

In a sleepy corner of Bamako, the capital of Mali in West Africa, residents mill about. Children are playing; some are being breast-fed. A beautiful Malian woman leaves her house, where her little daughter is suffering from a fever, and goes to sing at a local nightclub. A young man lies in a nearby building, deathly ill but with no medical care. And in the midst of all this, something unusual is occurring. There’s an open-air trial being conducted in a little enclosed town square. Judges sit at a table; there are lawyers and witnesses. Gradually we find out who is on trial: the World Bank. The plaintiff is the African people.
I'm describing a film called Bamako, and it’s directed by the extraordinarily talented Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako. Now, I would expect a film in which a symbolic trial of the World Bank takes place, with impassioned speeches on both sides of the issues around globalization and African impoverishment, would be contrived, didactic, or in any case difficult to sit through. But not at all. Sissako’s method of placing this highly charged rhetorical event in the middle of what amounts to a village atmosphere creates a compelling and realistic link between oratory and ordinary life.
Most of the men seem alienated or listless, sitting with heads down outside the court, listening to the trial on loudspeakers, sometimes having laconic and rather intriguing conversations. The women are more active—dyeing cloth, weaving, handling the food and the childcare. Sissako is even confident enough to be absurd: at one point the kids watch a mock-Western on TV starring Danny Glover in which the sheriff and the outlaws shoot it out but the only people who get killed seem to be civilians, which in itself is a symbol of the situation in Africa vis-à-vis the West.
The trial itself is the film’s centerpiece. On the plaintiff’s side we have eloquent denunciations by a writer, a professor, and others, talking about the tremendous burden of debt hanging on the neck of Africa, how it relates to colonialism, how the World Bank’s policies only reinforce servitude and the shattering of traditional communities, and how privatization degrades Africa’s right to its own land, water, education and health. Sissako also gives the devil his due, so to speak, in the person of the lawyer representing the World Bank, who presents the kind of counter-arguments you’d expect, credible if not humane, claiming good motives, economic progress and concessions on debt—notwithstanding the occasional intervention of a local goat, who seems to want to give the lawyer a good butt with his horns.
This is a polemical film, a film of outrage about what has been done and continues to be done by the prosperous north enriching itself at the expense of the south, and the tremendous cost in human life and dignity. But the careful creation of atmosphere, the film’s accurate feel for the rhythms of life, and the fiercely intelligent script, ensure that it doesn’t just leave you feeling angry, but wiser, more determined, more empowered. Bamako is an extraordinary achievement, and I urge you to see it.

Move on

The reaction to the Moveon.org ad attacking Petraeus provides a convenient glimpse into the rightist mindset. It would appear that attacking the military is the one unpardonable sin. Before venturing any criticism of the war regime, we must always reassure the public of our admiration and devotion to the brave, fine, excellent men and women of our armed forces. Unless they’re whistle blowers exposing abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Or soldiers who have turned against the war. Then we’ll ignore them, or denigrate them if necessary.

On cue, the “centrist” opinion makers are sure to fall in line with the lemming march against Move On. It’s all a bit surprising, since Move On has been comparatively cautious in its approach in the past. That hasn’t stopped various Bush mouthpieces, such as Dan Bartlett, from painting them as radical extremists. In our country, anyone even approaching sanity is a radical extremist.

The unquestioning worship of the military is not a particularly American sentiment. It doesn’t distinguish us from any number of kingdoms and dictatorships through history. In fact, civilian oversight of the military has been the American approach, ideally at least if not always in practice.

The military is not a republic, or a democracy. It is by its very nature a dictatorship. You do as you’re told. That’s the way it has to be. The danger is that if the military becomes a dominant political force in society, you end up with tyranny. That’s what right-wing authoritarians crave, because they don’t really care about America in terms of its republican traditions, the heritage of the founders. It’s just a fiefdom to them—a way to get rich and lord it over the rest of us. The identification of patriotism with militarism is one of the main corrupting influences in the political process today. You see it everywhere. To challenge it is to challenge the climate of fear and the threat of ostracism and violence. As the tin-horn fascist John McCain said, “MoveOn.org ought to be thrown out of this country.” Deep in the reactionary psyche, criticizing the military is like challenging Dad’s authority. Hysteria is the automatic result.

The ad made a pun on Petraeus’ name (“Betray us”) which seems to be what pissed the wingnuts off the most. I don’t think wordplay of this sort is a good thing. It sounds too much like the rightists themselves. As those of us who are conscious will recognize (but the corporate media and their drone viewers don’t see), the right has been using this kind of rhetoric with impunity for decades. Bill O’Reilly and the rest of that ilk have no qualms about calling liberals, or even just those who oppose their views (e.g. John Murtha) traitors to America. And they do it continually. But if a liberal or a progressive, or a group like Move On does it, then that’s not acceptable. A big brouhaha will be kicked up in the media and the sneering mob will demand an apology.

No apologies should be made. None. The noise machine needs to be attacked for what it is. And that’s the only effective strategy when it comes to this kind of incident. Because the fascist group will always find some distraction like this to whine about. That’s their method—distraction.

The larger lesson to be drawn from all this is not a new one. It’s the same ugly fact we can discern from any one of such incidents in our recent history. And that is that the assumption of moral values by the American elites is a lie. The sad part is that it has also become a lie for a great deal of ordinary Americans as well—I wont’s say all, or even most. I don’t know. But the evidence is discouraging.

Thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result of the American invasion. The conduct of the occupation—the brutality, the profiteering, the constant lying—has shattered Iraq. Millions have fled the country. But do we hear any concern for that on the part of the political elites? What politicians, pundits, or candidates demonstrate an awareness of the criminality of what has been done and continues to be done in the name of America? Almost no one says a word about that, or expresses the slightest moral qualms about this war. It’s always expressed in selfish terms: how we’re stuck there in a quagmire, how the war was “mismanaged,” or even how the Iraqis are ungrateful and uncooperative. Among those who may feel the horrifying moral implications, few speak out, because they know they will be condemned and ostracized if they do so. The few exceptions, such as Kucinich, are already marginalized, therefore ignored.

The underlying belief is incredibly infantile. The United States is inherently good, and cannot do wrong. Anything we do is right, and anyone who questions that is a dangerous traitor. If someone else does exactly what we do, that’s different, because they’re not us. This is an essentially amoral belief. It does not recognize any objective moral standard. To grieve the loss of American losses while being indifferent at best to the lives of non-Americans, is not moral in the least. It’s nothing more than barbarian tribalism. To be “outraged” and “repulsed” by an ad attacking Bush’s general, and at the same time to have no outrage or disgust at what the American government is doing, has been doing, around the world and at home against its own people, shows that the power elites and those who follow them have absolutely no moral values whatsoever. If you’ve grown up believing in the United States, if you’ve had faith in American ideals of freedom as expressed in our founding documents and in the rhetoric of our leaders, this insight is a shocking one. We are an amoral country whose only real value is power and self-aggrandizement.

I recently watched The War Tapes, a documentary film culled from video footage shot by American soldiers on duty in Iraq. Towards the end, when the soldiers we’ve been following are back home, and suffering some of the after-effects of war, one of them explains that the war has to be about oil and money, and that this is a good thing. What would happen to this country without oil? he asks. Then he says that it better be about the oil because he doesn’t want to believe that his friends were killed and wounded for Iraqi freedom.

It’s understandable that a veteran would want to draw meaning from the experience, and be as honest about motives as possible. What’s astonishing is that the notion of fighting in self-defense doesn’t enter the equation. Bush and company pushed hard on the “WMD” angle because the inherent belief is that you don’t go to war unless your country is threatened. But underneath that, in the rationale of the soldier from The War Tapes, is the fall-back argument, the real motive when self-defense is a sham, and that is that we have the right to kill other people to gain an economic or political advantage over them. Ultimately, people are just so many means to the ends of power. There’s a word for the end of that road: totalitarianism.

Beyond belief

The subject of theism versus atheism has almost always been a difficult one to discuss calmly, because the social tension surrounding religious beliefs and institutions are inherently high. I must preface my remarks by saying that I am a member of more than one twelve-step fellowship. These fellowships practice a program of recovery from addiction that is based on the Alcoholics Anonymous model. Friends and other people I know in the fellowships who hold what I would call conventional theistic views are often surprised by my opinions about God and spirituality. On a basic intellectual level, my point of view is far closer to that of an atheist than to the church-goer or other religious person. I don’t know many atheists—I’ve become acquainted with more on the internet than in my personal life—but I have found that they are often surprised by my opinions as well, perhaps even more so, because I argue for the value and necessity of spirituality despite my disbelief in God.

When I ask theists to define God, by no means do they all give me the same answers. There’s usually something quite vague about their answers, which in itself indicates something about the problem. But if I had to summarize most of the answers into one definition, it would be that God is a supernatural and all-powerful being who created the universe. This being has many different attributes depending on the speaker’s background, religious upbringing, or any number of other factors. In our culture, which is predominately what they call Judeo-Christian, the being is usually referred to as “He,” a male person. Other characteristics include the aspect of a judging watcher or listener, someone who listens to prayers, a being characterized by perfect love for humankind, a being that can perform miracles, and so on and so forth. One may have problems or differences with one or more of these attributes, but that doesn’t really affect the basic “supernatural creator-being” concept.

On a purely logical basis, I have long been convinced that such a being is literally impossible. When we come to those attributes conveyed by the major religious traditions that are of cosmological (and thus social and political) significance, I end up having grave moral objections as well. There is no point, however, in attempting to explain my conviction within the confines of this essay. Most skeptics won’t need explanations, and most believers would be impervious to them. But rather than merely reject this concept, and thereby put an end to my thinking on this subject, I seek its origins and its significance for human life, and this search leads me to a wider understanding of what spirituality really is and why it is important.

It seems to me that human beings—those animals on this planet that developed self-consciousness, which in turn engendered thought, language, and culture—experience a basic intuition which concerns something beyond the immediacy of their existence. I call this an intuition of eternity. A rational formula that aimed to convey the thought-content involved in this intuition would be something like: “In order for all things to be conditioned, reality itself must be unconditioned.” Historically, such formulas appear much later than the original intuition; usually they never appear at all. Human beings simply experience awe and wonder—at existence itself, but even more importantly, at the existence of a living, experiencing subject: the wonderer himself. That is to say that the questions posed are not merely, How did all this come to be? or What is all this? but Who am I? Self-consciousness is the spark igniting the spiritual impulse.

Experience is personal, in the sense that I alone, or you alone, experience everything as a single existing individual. Therefore everything we experience seems personal as well, until finally reality itself, the unconditioned that we intuit, is conceived as a person. And every social aspect of our existence, from the parents and children to the tribe, as well as other animals, feeds into this central idea, so that the gods (and later God) constitute a sort of cultural palimpsest in which one can read the thoughts of the human wonderers.

It is all metaphor, a mythopoetic realm in human consciousness. Metaphor is the way humans express the meaning of their lives. It is absolutely subjective. Even insofar as the metaphors accurately reflect the phenomena we perceive, the significance can only be subjective. I believe that “God” is the absolute conceived in the human mind as personal. A Hindu philosopher might say that if God is absolute and ultimately impersonal, God must be inclusive of all manifestation, and therefore of the personal as well. This is an ingenious way of explaining theism, but it won’t hold up unless one accepts the validity of metaphor as the only way that humans can express the meaning of their own lives.

The false attitude towards religion, in my view, is of the literal truth of a religious belief or doctrine. When a religionist proclaims literal truth, he is denying the validity of metaphor and placing truth outside of the mythopoetic realm, and into the realm of mere phenomena or things. The source of meaning is shut off, and a crucial sense of importance is placed on belief, a mental operation. The conflict here is primarily political, the issue being the desire to unite people around a particular religion and codify their social behavior through beliefs. The intuition of eternity is ignored and suppressed, and along with it the subjective nature of meaning—in its place we are offered an external (objective) belief system to which we are ordered to submit in order to be happy, be saved, have a moral society, or what have you.

Until the rise of science, there was very little perceived contradiction between metaphor and literalism. Science arose from the human need to understand the actual nature of phenomena. A scientific treatise is metaphorical only in the way all language is metaphorical—as an abstraction of real things into thoughts and symbols representing them. But in the spiritual sense--in the way that myth, metaphor, and poetry have been conceived from time immemorial—science is something completely different. It is, in fact, a way to understand and express the literal truth.

Scientists struggled to discover the truth about the planets, for instance, for no other reason than to understand the actual truth about the phenomenon of the planets. Truth in this sense is an objective value. On the other hand, if we take two religious mystics, one of them believing in an earth-centered cosmology and the other believing in a sun-centered cosmology, both of them will derive some symbolic meaning from their respective cosmologies, and they will most probably be very different meanings. The meaning has to do with themselves, with the reality of being a self, of being alive and conscious, and all that this involves. The scientific fact that the earth revolves around the sun has no meaning in and of itself. Its only significance, if we can use that word in the context, is that it is objectively true, but it has no mythopoetic significance without the human subject.

I think most scientists understand this. Their business has nothing to do with religion. But for the religionists who cling to the literal truth, science is an obvious threat. Science places a firm boundary between the metaphor and objective fact, but the religious literalists don’t want to see that their beliefs don’t qualify as objective fact. Perhaps they have an unconscious sense that the validity of the mythopoetic realm is being threatened. The trouble is, they are not conscious of the realm in which they live. They think that meaning comes from outside the human breast, that the subjective cannot be trusted. They’ve bought into the idea that “myth” means “false” and that “metaphor” means “not really.”

When I was in summer camp as a boy I got into a conversation with another boy in which the subject of Adam and Eve came up. At one point I blurted out that of course Adam and Eve was a myth. The other boy, who was Catholic, was so shocked that he refused to speak to me from then on. I wasn’t trying to shock him. I just knew instinctively, probably because of my liberal upbringing, that there was a difference between mythology and history, and what each of them looked like. I loved mythology and derived a lot of benefit from it, including myths from the Bible. Today I don’t accept many aspects of Biblical mythology as meaningful for me. In other words, there are metaphors expressing meanings that I don’t accept. But I don’t question that whatever power a story such as Adam and Eve has for us is born from the power of metaphor. The other boy had no conception of that. Being shut off from the actual power of his own myth, he could only surround the story with anxious taboos, and flee in fear whenever the poetic nature of his own belief was revealed.

I see the controversies around religion today, the apparent conflict between religion and science, as actually a conflict within religion itself. The intuition of eternity will never go away, because it is true. But because it can only be expressed through metaphor, those who seek spiritual meaning are being challenged to recognize and embrace the poetry of the religious impulse, and to realize a life beyond the mental adherence to a set of beliefs—in short, an expansive, visionary life.

What troubles me about the current debate from the atheist side is that I hear (not always, but quite often) an expressed desire for humanity to realize its error and abandon theism. This is really the same mistake the fanatic makes who thinks everyone should convert to one true religion. It’s not going to happen. The human race is never going to all have the same beliefs. Nor is it desirable that it should. Such a goal could only be attempted through brutal violence. The attempt has been repeatedly made, and it has always failed. Atheists are of course not threatening to convert anyone to atheism through violence, but the idea of mankind renouncing religion through reason is hopelessly naïve as well. I also think that there is a failure on the part of atheists to seriously explore the sources of spiritual practice and culture, and a general discounting of myth and metaphor as mere superstition that people should do without. We cannot do without it, because we need to have meaning, and meaning is an expression of our subjectivity.

The real problem, it seems to me, is political. It’s no threat to others if people develop and practice a spiritual culture, in whatever way they choose. It only becomes a threat when people attempt to impose their culture and practices on other people through government, war, or other forceful means. The religious institutions as political entities, with their own social agendas based on self-interest, are all about controlling other people, and very little about asking, “Who am I?” There is no alternative but to place a legal wall between these entities and the state, and that’s exactly what the founders of the U.S. tried to do. My neighbor has a right to be a fundamentalist. But if my neighbor wants the public school—the school my kids go to—to be fundamentalist, that’s not his right.

The fundamentalist would argue that the teaching of evolution in the public school violates his rights because it contradicts his religious beliefs. An atheist might remark that the fundamentalist thereby demonstrates that he does not understand what science is, and I agree. But what I’m also saying is that in addition to not understanding what science is, the fundamentalist, more crucially, more tragically, does not understand what religion is.

Uncommon thievery

Matt Taibbi has written an important piece in Rolling Stone about the rampant fraud by contractors in Iraq. You should read it, even if it means going to it right away and leaving this blog. He makes the case, quite eloquently, that stealing from the taxpayers is not an aberration in the Iraq War, but an essential aspect of that deadly enterprise.

It’s not that the point hasn’t been made before. Robert Greenwald made a very good film about it called Iraq for Sale. There have been excellent reports on this and many other shameful aspects of the debacle from the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, Mother Jones, The Nation, and other places in print and on the web. Here, however, we have a rock music publication aimed primarily at younger people—far more ephemeral in content than in its 1970s heyday—that has saw fit to print good, hard-hitting journalism from time to time. And that’s what Taibbi’s piece is: actual journalism with a point of view, not the empty “objective” version of reality we get from the corporate news outlets. The piece is curiously uncredited in its online version, but I’m guessing that’s a mere oversight. Rolling Stone has put Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News to shame as the rags they are. We need more pieces like this, in more widely read popular magazines.

Among other essential points, the author makes what I consider a crucial connection between the unbelievable level of swindling and the very nature of this war and occupation. In World War II, the country was fighting for its survival. If a contractor had delivered equipment that didn’t work, it would not have been tolerated. But in the case of Iraq, the administration has consistently blocked attempts to make the contractors accountable for their crimes, arguing that the swindlers are exempt from prosecution because they work for the government.

Besides the devastating truth that the administration is deliberately countenancing theft from the public treasury, this fact also makes clear that the basic claims of national security on which the war is justified are a fabrication. If this conflict is the great challenge of the century, part of the great struggle against terrorism, Islamo-fascism, or whatever they’re calling it now—if this war, in other words, is a struggle of true importance for our national security, our freedom, our safety, the future of democracy, etc., as we are continually told by its supporters—would fraud on such a scale be allowed? Here's Taibbi's answer: “Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget.”

The Bush administration is a danger to the security of the United States. Nothing could be clearer. Every day this regime stays in power constitutes a threat to our safety—yours, mine, our families, our communities, our country. Even if you discount the subversion of our Constitution and our tradition of liberty, even if you ignore the shameful policies of secret prisons, torture, and lawless detention—just on the basis of national security alone, the impeachment of George Bush and Richard Cheney must be initiated, if only to slow down the destructive machine that threatens our very lives.

Hubris Over Easy

The Torture Guy finally resigned on August 27, and one wonders why it happened at this particular time. At first I assumed that Boosh’s “reluctance” to accept the resignation was pure bull, like everything else he says. Gonzales wouldn’t leave unless his master wanted him to, right? But emptywheel offers some interesting speculation over at The Next Hurrah. It’s possible that Gonzo was unwilling to perjure himself further. Not out of principle, of course. Everything is naked self-interest with these folks, never principle.

Understanding what’s really going on in Washington always means reading between the lines. It has become a simple fact of life that the public pronouncements of our “leaders” hide the truth rather than reveal it. It’s either empty rhetoric or carefully crafted code. This is because the government takes a stance against the public—its primary purpose is to hide the facts from their own people. No matter what kind of flattery and baby-kissing one may see on the stump, the citizens are seen only as a mass of stupidity, if not potential treachery, and everything is done to keep them passive and ignorant. One symptom of this is the casual dishonesty that permeates the public discourse at every level.

For instance, in Gonzales’s brief resignation speech, he said the following: “It is through their [the DOJ staff’s] continued work that our country and our communities remain safe, that the rights and civil liberties of our citizens are protected, and the hopes and dreams of all of our children are secured.”

Come again? Rights and civil liberties? Since when has Gonzales given a crap about that? Under his authority, the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ was crippled and demoralized. Experienced attorneys were replaced by Bush toadies with no interest in civil liberties whatsoever. His role in the justification of torture, and the odious policies regarding “enemy combatants” is enough to make you sick just hearing the word “rights” emitting from his lips. Then there’s his participation in the subversion of our voting rights through voter suppression and other means, his undermining of the Fourth Amendment, and the list goes on.

But Gonzo can stand there and say “rights and civil liberties” without blinking an eye. Does he really believe it?

I had similar thoughts listening to Rove when he resigned last week. “At month's end,” he said, “I will join those whom you meet in your travels, the ordinary Americans who tell you they are praying for you. Like them, I will ask for God's continued gifts of strength and wisdom for you and your work, your vital work for our country and the world, and for the Almighty's continued blessing of our great country.”

Here’s a guy who would do anything, and did—slime McCain for having a “black baby” in order to win a primary in South Carolina; reveal the name of a CIA agent in order to punish her husband for opposing Bush; and undermine one of our most precious legacies, the right to vote, without a second thought. And this only scratches the surface of what this scumbag did to the country. And here he goes, talking about God and prayer. I would bet everything I own that Rove doesn’t believe in God or prayer. But when he stands up in front of a microphone and mouths these words, maybe there’s a part of him that believes his own bullshit?

I guess it doesn’t matter. When the only value is political power, and nothing else, then the very idea of truth becomes outmoded, or “quaint” (as Gonzo termed the Geneva Conventions). Since you don’t really believe anything, you can choose to believe whatever rubbish comes out of your mouth in the moment. You can choose to believe that you’re a public servant, that you’re actually doing something for the country, that you have a “cause.” And because your capacity to fool yourself makes you impervious to criticism, or indeed reality, thousands of people die.

The age of arrogance will not endure. We must hasten its end.

Strawberries

Our absurd, illegitimate bizarro President made a speech to the VFW comparing Vietnam to Iraq. Apparently if we leave Iraq there will be chaos and bloodshed. This argument assumes that you’re ignorant enough not to know that chaos and bloodshed reached obscene levels in Iraq some time ago.

Bush making a speech at the VFW is nothing new. He appears publicly only at military events, where the audience isn’t allowed to boo, or at meetings of the VFW, American Legion, Raving Wingnuts for Christ, Stupid Sons-of-Bitches of America, and other patriotic groups. Next week, President Queeg will be addressing the United Spooks Against the Rest of Us on the subject of the strawberries. Yes, you laughed at him and made jokes, but he will prove beyond the shadow of a doubt, and with geometric logic, that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox did exist.

The armchair killers still want to believe that Vietnam was just about winning. There’s no admission, no mention at all that maybe napalming the shit out of people, and wiping out men, women and children on a daily basis might have been wrong. When it comes to war, there is no right or wrong any more, just the prestige of victory or the shame of defeat. This is Kissinger’s old idea. If only the people weren’t such wusses, if only they were tough like us, we could have won, but you see, they lacked resolve. It wasn’t the fault of those clever men who sent 60,000 Americans down the pipeline to their deaths, it was our fault for saying we’d had enough.

Now we see the same attitude about Iraq. Do they really believe that if Iraq was really a threat to our security, and the citizens of this country knew that they were fighting in defense of our land, that we wouldn’t support the war? The country’s sick of the war because we know that it was founded on lies, that we’re not fighting to protect our country (in fact the war continues to make us less safe) and that the people running it are greedy, incompetent fools whose every move creates further destruction. Bush pretends to stand “firm” against the opinion of the majority of the citizens of this country, as if he were principled and we’re just a bunch of idiots scared by images on our TV. Faint-hearted and impatient, we don’t have what it takes, we don’t have the far-ranging vision to see that the war is good and noble, and by God the surge is succeeding.

The real problem is that Americans aren’t dumb enough to be fooled by anything these evil clowns say anymore. It’s only the 25-30% who still support Bush who are still shitting on cue when the Commander says the code word “terrorist.” We are left with the saving remnant of old farts at the VFW who still applaud the ravings of this little psychopath.

The perpetual drumbeat of fear can only work for so long before people get tired. You can’t base an entire nation on a single event (9/11) or on the constant dread of an over-inflated enemy. That’s why we have a Constitution. That’s why we have laws. Mad dictators just don’t have staying power in America, if only because people need some kind of stability in their lives, and the neo-conmen only know how to exploit instability.

The utter and complete failure of the neoconservative movement is inevitable. The only question is whether they’ll take the rest of us down with them. Let’s not be shy. Speak out while we still can.

The plan

I got into a spirited discussion recently about the whole notion of a cosmic “purpose” or “plan” behind what happens, or as I put it, behind “history.” Of course I was adamantly against this notion, and although the talk was friendly, I came away with a familiar feeling, a sort of guilty conscience for challenging beliefs that seem to provide meaning and comfort to those holding them.

Part of the problem in such discussions is that the boundaries between the principled and the personal are inevitably blurred. When I drew inferences from the notion of purpose that resulted in justifying the unjustifiable, I was assured that the other had no such intent.

But you see, someone’s intent is not the issue at all. Ideas need to be evaluated on their own merits without regard to the character of the person advancing them. This is a point that is very difficult for many people to grasp in the middle of conversation, because we are involved personally in the interaction. We are afraid not to hurt someone’s feelings, or offend their cherished convictions, or somehow damage our friendship by engaging in contention. In fact, all this is beside the point.

One argument that I did not make, but which is actually foremost in my estimation, is that self-importance lends a sense of significance to human activity that we then project onto the cosmos. To seriously believe that the Divine (however you may conceive of it) would need to bother about a purpose or a plan behind the Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia, is to betray a very pedestrian idea of divinity. Uncountable life forms are born and pass away in the space of a moment, and the number of galaxies exceeds the mind’s ability to calculate—surely there’s no need for a creator or cosmic demiurge to arrange the pathetic drama of human history like a puppet show.

Furthermore, if there is a plan, it’s a damn lousy one for sure. No plan that requires the cruelty, barbarism and savagery that we have witnessed, even only in the last hundred years, is worth my reverence or consideration. Earthquakes, disease, and other pains that are part and parcel of conditioned existence I accept as the natural order. Torturing people, throwing them in gas chambers, wiping them out en masse with bombs, etc., I don’t see as part of a plan, nor would any supposed higher purpose make them worthwhile.

I think that reality is too great to have a meaning. But this truth has a disturbing effect on many of us. Human beings require meaning, and I think this need is based on an intuition of absolute truth. However, we don’t see that spirit (the divine metaphor) is identical with subjectivity. Instead we are hypnotized by the so-called outside world, not realizing that this is an abstraction. Not an illusion, as the traditions of the East seem to say, but a conception of reality. This conception serves us, but our bondage begins when we serve it. That’s when we become objects in the game of an historical spirit. That’s when we start frantically looking for meaning behind things instead of in ourselves.

Regular readers may know that I posit a link between this abandonment of spirit to an objective concept of reality and the fear of death. I’m not sure that this can be demonstrated logically, however. I only sense that the intuition of spirit as identical with the unconditioned (reality itself) clashes with our conscious identification with this soul (the ancient metaphor), this particular mind-body complex that I call myself and associate with traits of personality. This identification is, in my view, what the Buddhists mean by “clinging” or “attachment.” It is not a mere mental operation or belief, but a kind of primordial act, based on the simple need for survival.

The secret of the sages and mystics, then—an open secret, really—is that the intuition of spirit as identical with the unconditioned (reality itself) needs to become conscious, and simultaneously the conscious identification with the individual self needs to be seen through. What is seen through doesn’t vanish. It’s just that its transparent (conditioned) nature is perceived. We survive, but without enslavement to the fear of death.

End results

Where we are today is not an aberration. It is the logical outcome of Reaganism.

When Reagan said that "government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem," he summarized a right-wing agenda intent on abolishing public responsibility in favor of a pre-New Deal vision of unfettered capital. The Reaganites endowed the market with the magical power of making everything work towards the good.

In this vision, selfishness is the only real good. The profit motive is the only legitimate motive. In the years since Reagan, we have seen privatization create havoc in our health care system. Healing is founded on the idea of service, of working together for the good of individuals and communities. The profit motive has proved to be only a degrading force in this regard, but those who made money from exploiting the system continued to force health into the Reagan mold.

The inability to recognize the public good as a value is a prime characteristic of Reaganism. For this reason, it’s impossible for the right wing to make any progress in the country’s educational system. In fact, the system continues to get worse.

The rise of Reagan constituted a quite deliberate and overt repudiation of empathy and compassion as social values. His fairy tales about welfare queens were all about blaming the poor. If people were poor, it was all their own fault. In addition, racism was no longer a problem. Black people who criticized institutional racism were guilty of a victim mentality. It was black culture that was at fault. This is a vein that the Republicans have continued to mine up to the present. Reagan was actually George Wallace, but with a nice smile.

If I had to pick a slogan for the Reagan movement it would be, “We don’t care.” We don’t care about anything except standing guard while the rich make their money. To accomplish this, we will pour the tax revenues into the Pentagon, from which no ordinary citizens will experience any benefit. When your taxes go for nothing, then of course you’ll demand lower taxes. Lower taxes, more money for the rich, the poor stay poor, and the defense contractors stay fat.

After Reagan, every little hate-filled cockroach came crawling up from the under the rocks. They got AM radio talk shows, newspaper columns, and TV shows, along with high government positions. People who were rightly considered wackos in the 1970s were suddenly treated as if they were respectable. Reagan’s appointment of the nutcase James Watt to head of Interior was symbolic of everything that’s happened since. When your position is that government is the problem, and you run the government, then government becomes a topsy-turvy circus, a grotesque theater of hostility. Reagan’s America had a sneer on its lip and a mean glint in its eye.

Reagan secretly sold arms to Iran in order to fund murderers in Central America. All he got was a little slap on the wrist. Many of the players returned under Bush Jr. to play their illegal games again.

So don’t look around and act surprised that we have a vicious mobster in the White House, bleeding our future dry with dirty wars and secret plotting. Reagan won two elections, the second by a landslide. A lot of people voted for this shit. This is exactly what happens when you say “We don’t care. All I want is mine. To hell with justice, fairness, kindness. To hell with children, the aged, the poor.” This is exactly what you get.

Our Enemies

I was going to write a hard-hitting piece about the Bush administration’s NSA spying program, and how the Democrats caved in and made it easier for Bush to bypass the law.

But then I remembered that criticizing the President’s efforts to fight terror would play into the hands of our enemies. I’m sure they’re rubbing their hands with glee when they see liberals undermining this administration. So what’s a little wiretapping when the security of the country is at stake? I’m not a terrorist, so I have nothing to worry about. Besides, George Bush and Karl Rove wouldn't use their power to spy on domestic political opponents, would they?

I thought of writing a piece decrying Alberto Gonzales’ refusal to give direct answers to questions by the Senate Judiciary Committee about the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

But then I realized how trivial this whole attorney scandal is compared to the war on terror. Just when we need a strong Attorney General to protect us from our enemies, along comes this story that nobody cares about. It’s obviously been blown out of proportion for partisan political reasons. Besides, George Bush and Karl Rove would never use their power to try to rig American elections, would they?

I then thought of launching an attack on the Bush Administration’s use of torture.

But I remembered that the President recently announced a new policy that makes it clearer than ever that we don’t torture. I think we need to trust him on this. If we talk too much about torture, we certainly aid our enemies. They need to be kept in the dark so that we can be safe. Besides, George Bush wouldn’t distort the truth about such a sensitive issue, would he?

Well, I could write another article against the war in Iraq. I doubt if it would make much difference, though. You know, every time someone criticizes the war, it emboldens our enemies even more, and damages the morale of our troops. Maybe if I’m quiet, the war will go better. Besides, if I protest, it could be argued that I’m trying to undermine the Iraqi government, and then all my assets could be seized by the government. And damn it, I would deserve it.

We all need to be stand unified behind the President in order to fight terror. If we lose this fight, it will be the fault of all those liberals and nay-sayers who protested and complained about one little thing or another. Boy, our enemies must be really happy.

They just keep getting happier too.

Let’s just shut up and be grateful that we have free speech. After all, that’s what our troops are fighting for.

Our pyramids

The first signs of mythological awareness we have found are the Neanderthal burial sites from about a thousand centuries ago. The recognition of death gave human consciousness a sense of urgency—the eternal present was bound within a finite time. With the advent, far more recently, of what we call civilization, we see the rise of the great tombs, most spectacularly in the pyramids of Egypt.

The pyramid was the burial mound of the pharaohs—that is, the kings. Is there not something awful about them? They were built from the dread of death. For we are born into a society—a family, a clan, a tribe, a city, a state. A huge mysterious world confronts us, and we need this society to survive. The single human being finds not only its security, but its meaning, in the many. There is one human being in whom all these single human beings are combined into one symbol, one metaphorical man or woman—a king or a queen.

The burial of the royal person effects the collective survival of death. The ritual killing of the king described by Frazer can never be fully grasped by our modern intellects unless we appreciate the depth of fear inspired by our mortality. Looking at the pyramids we realize that the human heart was gripped by cosmic dread and to this degree—the unimaginable labor expended in constructing these massive tombs. All eyes in the kingdom will see the tombs, just as all hearts will be one with the king who represents us.

The gradual realization of the individual consciousness—what we moderns call the “ego”—has posed endless problems for society. Foremost among these is the perversion of the king. If the king can be just a person, not a merely symbolic entity, then he can be a tyrant. And more often than not, he has been. Why? Because the fear-based society demands conformity to a single cultural norm, and when individuality creates fissures in that conformity, they must be plugged up by force.

The fear-based reliance on authority has persisted down to the present day. The establishment of democracies and republics ameliorated its influence from time to time, but it never died. It has stayed potent because the fear of death has retained its primal power in our minds.

The potentially free human being realizes that she is not projected onto a royal authority figure. She comes partly out of hypnosis, so to speak, but the underlying fear is still a force to be reckoned with. The individual suddenly feels opposed to society, in a contest for freedom that always seems hopeless. Surrender is a common regression, a return to sleep, and in the last century we’ve seen it manifest in the totalitarian regimes, where authority is reduced to its simplest essence.

The beginning of wisdom is the end of the fear of death. All spiritual truth, all poetry, all divinities, return to the self. The self lives in the eternal present. Humankind doesn’t need to attain anything in order to realize this—we need only see through the falsehood of what we think of as self. The struggling, naked little being who seeks to wield power over other beings in order to survive—that is a falsehood, an illusion. It is a creature of the mind. The quest to survive death is futile. We wake up when we know that survival is not an option. Then we can love others in fullness, without inhibition. It’s not just that we realize that we are the same as everyone else—it’s knowing that we’re actually one self, that there’s no real self or other. This is the end indicated by mystics, Buddhists, and other free spirits.

What they don’t indicate, or at least rarely ever hint, is that this end involves the end of the king. Not just the king out there with the crown, but the king in our heads. The sky god and the volcano god and all the other embodiments of the power principle disappear and we realize that no one is watching or listening. The society is embodied in each individual human being, not the other way around. For the mass of humanity (if you’ll pardon the expression) to realize this would require a spiritual revolution. It would not be merely rationalist, contrary to what most atheist thinkers seem to say. It would be emotional and ecstatic as well. It would not be the end of religion, but the fulfillment of religion. Will it ever happen on this planet? I don’t know, and I hesitate to let my pessimistic side have the last word. But I know that fear only leads us deeper into darkness.