Serial War

I was of a mind to write about pot today . . . I've read a couple of things on that subject to comment about, but it keeps get pushed back by my daily encounters with other articles on the Net that are much more pressing. For example, this one today in Huffington Post by David Bronwich. It touches on a subject that always gets my attention: war and peace. This is a long piece, and you should read it if you can spare the time. The main argument of the piece is this: the United States has become a country that will be constantly engaged in wars. Bronwich calls them "serial wars." Our young people are actually being taught to expect no end of war--no end to wars.

It was not always this way. In the wake of World War II, the country, indeed, the world was virtually united on the idea that human beings had to advance beyond war--for its own survival. The Cold War did not negate this idea. The "lesson of Vietnam" was "never start a war without knowing what you want to accomplish and when you intend to leave."* Whether Democrats feel obligated to wield the sword more robustly than the Republicans, who according to folk wisdom are more adept about all aspects of war, is arguable, but not essential to the argument. The key event that shaped the "American military-political consensus in favor of serial wars against transnational enemies of any sort" was the defense of Kosovo during the Clinton administration. It was the kind of clear conscience war that won universal media support. It appeared humanitarian, but in actuality was not.

So, according to the argument, Clinton and Kosovo brought us to the current period, in which we're totally self-deluded about our wars. For behind the legitimization of both our current wars "lies a broad ideological investment in the idea of 'just wars'--chiefly, in practice, wars fought by the commercial democracies in the name of democracy, to advance their own interests without an unseemly overbalance of conspicuous selfishness." Savor this. In plain English, it says we have come to the mind set that sees our wars which have no purpose other than preserving corporate capitalism as good. That means we're always the good guys.

The article goes on to show how this attitude easily accepts the notion of crossing the border of one county into another. We will constantly be weighing the strength of our footholds in a region in anticipation of the war to follow. Tell me true: does it look like we're ever going to get out of war the Middle East? Not from where I sit.

*Just as an aside, our conflict in Afghanistan does not meet these conditions.

Raining Spears

It's been raining big spears on us for the past couple of days--points down. It all started on the trip back home to Oklahoma from the funeral in Baton Rouge. The plan was to avoid the running sore that is Dallas and take the blue highways through Oklahoma back home. Great idea until we got to Atoka, OK. Sounds like a speed trap, doesn't it? Well, it was, and the ticket for "72 in a 55" cost me--are you sitting down?--$241 frigging bucks!! The cop was polite, and I knew the minute I saw him, we were doomed. No mercy: he could plainly see a couple of geezers in the car, but that didn't stop him from writing us up. It's obvious this is Atoka's sole source of income. And it occurred to me that this cop got paid out of the same pot that these outrageous fines go into. There's a conflict of interest here somewhere.

But this is just the first in a series of disasters to befall us in the past three days. Next thing was my discovery on Saturday, that the battery in the car was dead as Franco and had to be replaced. Which in turn required my going to the Mart of Darkness, and worse, hanging around for almost 2 hours in the hideous place until the car got fixed. More money for this.

There's more: my iPod has crapped out. I don't know if it will be worth fixing. It's got some kind of hardware problem. Will not play after being turned on. Sad, sad face. I use my iPod a lot. I will have to be repaired or replaced.

There's more: the microwave oven in the kitchen has also crapped out. My wife says she overcooked an egg in there, and after that happened, the thing would make this awful noise whenever the door on the microwave was shut. When the noise stopped . . . eventually after I gave it a couple of hits with my fist, no more heating. Let me make this observation right now: modern man cannot live without a microwave. Susan says she would give up just about every other appliance before the microwave. Yet another costly problem staring at us. Guy is coming tomorrow to fix it, we hope. Maybe it will be something simple and cheap.

Against all these disasters, Susan leaving her phone charger in Baton Rouge and being without a phone since we got back . . . well, this is just a very minor annoyance.

New Music Flood

Lateralus by Tool ==>>>

I can think of several things in life bring me right up: having all of my kids together in one place, red beans and rice, my wife's fried chicken, being at the ballpark, finishing a writing assignment, a new book, new music. I've been really blessed in the latter department. I recently discovered that an old grad school bud likes all the same kinds of music as I do: everything. He plays guitar, loves rock music, and has a whole bunch of stuff by bands I've never even heard of. But it so happens I've got a lot of stuff he doesn't have a lot of like blues, reggae, country, and classical. It didn't take us long to figure out that a swap of music would be beneficial to both of us. And we're in for the long haul. I can see a whole bunch of new CDs on the horizon.

Long story short: I got a real jolt of feel-good on Saturday morning when the mail came. I got the first batch of music from him while we were in Louisiana for the funeral. All of it of the rock, metal, alternative variety. Honestly, I had never heard of most of the bands--I suspect my kids and younger readers might know them. But that was the whole point: we're sending stuff the other guy has probably never heard of. I've finished to listening to over half of the 15 CDs by such artists as: Tool, Porcupine Tree, System of a Down, The Mars Volta, Sonny Landreth, and Thenewno2. (Any of you out there heard of these bands? The only ones I knew were Frank Zappa and Gov't Mule.) The long and short of it: I'm pretty tickled with what I'm hearing.

Hokum

The guy's name is Robin Wright, and his book is The Evolution of God. He talked with Bill Moyers last night on TV. Most interesting. Man's concept of God evolves along with man, he says, and God has evolved to a much more tolerant being than the vengeful earlier forms of his evolution. The whole process is a net positive, a net gain in human morality.

So it's against this backdrop that Wright notices in this piece that the modern day atheists are also all right-wingers about foreign policy. Now, why would this be? Because, Wright argues, the "new atheists" [Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins--recent authors calling God's existence into question] all brand religion as evil. The Middle Eastern conflicts are a good example. Both Harris and Dawkins contend that the Arab-Israeli struggle is rooted in religion, and that's what explains Islamic radicalism. So, the line of reasoning goes, since "Muslims are possessed by this irrational, quasi-autonomous force known as religion, then there's no point in trying to reason with them, or to look at any facts on the ground that might drive their discontent." Hence, right wing foreign policy, which posits as a given that the West is the only rational player on the field.

Wright destroys this idea by pointing out that, er, other things besides religion trigger conflicts among human beings.

People are survival machines built by natural selection. (This Dawkins gets.) When they sense threats to their interests, they can not only get violent, but wrap themselves in a larger cause that justifies the violence. Here they're as flexible as you'd expect well-built survival machines to be: that larger cause can be religion, yes, but it can also be nationalism or racialism. Hitler whipped up more fervor with the latter two than the first. Whatever's handy.

Of course, when religion is handy, special problems can arise. If there were no belief in paradise, there would be few suicide bombers. Then again, there might be less charity. Whether belief in posthumous rewards has on balance done more harm than good is an empirical question whose subtlety Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens don't exactly emphasize.

Which is putting it delicately. The trinity of atheists are not too subtle at all. Bottom line: There is a lot of hokum being dispensed by the new atheists. Whether it's as much as the Christian right has dispensed is a matter for debate. But I don't think intelligent reviews like the one I've been talking about are going to make the slightest difference. People have their minds made up on this subject of religion, and irrationality rules both sides.

Sick & Tired

It was a long ride back home from the funeral. Driving when there's no distraction like music or conversation is ideal for thinking. I don't have great thoughts often, and I can report that I had none on this trip. But there is one thought I remember well. I'm just damned sick and tired of "the bottom line," "market forces," and "profits." I think I'm damned sick and tired of this destructive, murderous brand of capitalism that we practice here. It doesn't give a damn about what's good for people. Doesn't give a damn about people in general. The only people who matter are stockholders. Period.

I was thinking about the health care issue. I simply cannot understand how people can honestly believe that:

a) the health of people--a life and death issue to every human being, literally--should be connected in any way with profits to some damn corporation;
b) the health of people in a society is not that society's business;
c) 50 million people without health insurance is acceptable in a supposedly civilized society;
d) continuing to succor the health insurance companies in this country is an acceptable "reform" of health care here.

I'm sorry. There are imperatives that citizens have to live with if they chose to be part of a society. Things like obeying just laws, serving the society in some way, and paying for services that societies are bound by their very nature as being composed of human beings to provide: health, education, transportation. A society's first responsibility is to have compassion. To take care of its least members: children, the poor, the crippled, the helpless, the sick. But where's the profit in that? Right? Hence the unshirted opposition to any meaningful reform of the vicious American approach to health care.

Keep America Beautiful

Another great poem for you while I'm on the road for this funeral trip. Keep the faith.

Keep America Beautiful
by Kenneth Hart

Somebody hung out his red, white and blue
laundry on the highway overpass outside Providence,

a short distance from the prison crew picking up
our Cheetos bags and burger wrappers

and monster drink cups. We're stalled in traffic;
bumper stickers announce the price of freedom,

claim liberty is our right.
The guard in mirror sunglasses leans against

the correctional facility van, props a shotgun on his knee
like he's auditioning for a movie. He's protecting

our freedom to litter from the inmates' desire
to be free to litter. We inch along;

past the Budweiser billboards and the ad haiku,
brakes wheeze – some like an espresso machine,

some like an aging soprano with emphysema.
It looks like this is going to take awhile, here

beneath the soiled laundry of the republic
which clings to a chain link fence.

Maybe the seagull floating above us
sees a few things that we can't.

He's probably scavenging for something
we've left behind.

Latina Worker

I'm in Louisiana. My brother-in-law died. No surprise. Hospice had been engaged, but only for a short time. He was supposed to have another six months to a year. He got three weeks instead. He has suffered for the last two years or so. He's better off now. His family is better off now. May he rest in peace with God.

Latina Worker
by Doren Robbins

Then I notice through a triple-Americano-awakening moment,
in the mall food court, a young Latina cleaning around by the chrome rail
at Sbarro Pizza. Maybe a Guatemalan, possibly Salvadoran or
Honduran—

could've been Argentinean or Columbian, Chilean, Bolivian,
Panamanian—good chance a Peruvian, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Mayan,
Toltec, Sephardic, Huichol coffee plantation or U.S. Fruit Company

or tobacco company or auto industry slave labor robot or CIA-trained
death squad Guardia Nacional butchery massacre survivor.

Several tables down from mine--roughly stacking chairs on tops
of tables—cussing in Spanish, in the mall food court, she hates her job,
I hate her job.

Dolts, Buffoons, Etc.

Every once in a while, something comes along that just tickles me. This was one of those things. Let me quote a line:

"America’s history of electing dolts, buffoons, scoundrels, knaves, low-jackers, pig-fuckers, gomers, dog-whistlers, Kloset Klansmen, recidivists and sheep pimps to the Highest Elected Office in the Land does not make one optimistic about the prospects for Barackapalooza."

This is the kind of marvelous invective that I can't write myself, which maybe is one of the reasons I find the piece so enjoyable. I don't think I've got much quarrel with any of the characterizations either. I've long been a spokesman for the "Jimmy Carter Will Be Vindicated by History" point of view. And anybody can tell you what I think of Reagan, W, his father, Tricky Dick, etc. The first two so ignorant as to lead to a false sense of security when a guy with obvious intelligence such as Obama comes along. That--intelligence--of course, is no guarantee of anything being broken being fixed, and everything is broken. As I've intimated, and the current piece suggests, even given the immense problems Obama faces, he's not exactly going at the enemy tooth and nail. Indeed, it's beyond question that he's all about saving the scumbags of banking and Wall Street that brought us to our present pass.

Fatally Flawed

The climate course set by Waxman-Markey is a disaster course. This bill is an astoundingly inefficient way to get a tiny reduction of emissions. It's less than worthless, because it will delay by at least a decade starting on a path that is fundamentally sound from the standpoints of both economics and climate preservation. And we don't have a decade to waste.

Check this out, from a web site that advocates solid direct taxation of carbon.

"By any measure, the bill would do little to address the climate challenge. For example, the International Panel on Climate Change figures that the United States will have to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 to 25 percent less than in 1990. The official line is that the bill would cut emissions in 2020 to 17 percent less than 2005 levels — and that comes to just 3 percent less than the 1990 levels. Moreover, the actual reductions would be even less: Greenpeace has calculated that because the bill provides “offsets” to power companies and energy–intensive industries — letting them emit more greenhouse gases so long as they take “offsetting” steps such as planting trees — its actual caps “could be met without any reduction in fossil fuel emissions for more than 20 years.”

and this, from a recent post on Huffington:

For all its "green" aura, Waxman-Markey locks in fossil fuel business-as-usual and garlands it with a Ponzi-like "cap-and-trade" scheme. Here are a few of the bill's egregious flaws:

• It guts the Clean Air Act, removing EPA's ability to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants.
• It sets meager targets -- 2020 emissions are to be a paltry 13% less than this year's level -- and sabotages even these by permitting fictitious "offsets," by which other nations are paid to preserve forests - while logging and food production will simply move elsewhere to meet market demand.
• Its cap-and-trade system, reports former U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Robert Shapiro, "has no provisions to prevent insider trading by utilities and energy companies or a financial meltdown from speculators trading frantically in the permits and their derivatives."
• It fails to set predictable prices for carbon, without which, Shapiro notes, "businesses and households won't be able to calculate whether developing and using less carbon-intensive energy and technologies makes economic sense," thus ensuring that millions of carbon-critical decisions fall short.

Bottom line is we're dooming our kids and ourselves. And there's not much that can be done. The worst kind of government possible when there's a genuine crisis like climate change is an oligarchical system such as ours, or if you prefer the so-called democracy in the US that can ignore 70 percent majorities among the people so the porcine capitalistic system can continue to devour us all. The first thing to always ask about anything passed by Congress is who benefits. I think you can guess on this bill. It will be the same with health care reform.

Money Talks, Sarah Walks

The Alaskan Bimbo Sarah Palin has hit the news big time again. A week ago she up and just quit her job as Alaska governor. To the mystification and surprise of everybody. There's still a great deal of speculation as to exactly why. Her own explanation is virtually gibberish. I can make no sense of it, and neither many other people. See what you make of it. At least one explanation she offered, that she would save the state of Alaska all this money it was spending fending off ethics charges, has been shown to be bunkum.

So to say the least speculation about why she is quitting has been rampant. But I'm here to tell you, the best and most likely true scenario is the one painted by Levi Johnson, the dude who was engaged to be married to Palin's daughter, the guy who got her preggie. Anyway, Johnson says Palin needs the money. She owes about $500,000 in legal fees, but she can get several million dollars advance on a book deal. (Just as an aside, it always is a source of amazement to me the vast amounts of money publishers will front celebrities--and certainly Palin is better qualified for this title than say, vice president, or even governor--for books that at best rise to the level of terrible. I wonder, too, who spends perfectly good money on such things.) There's also been talk of a reality show . . . how many truly needy people could be helped by the millions about to be lavished on this silly woman simply because she's famous?

Update I: Sarah Palin says she is not quitting politics, she's just "changing her priorities." Interesting--that when you're the governor of a state you should discern that your priorities do not include completing your term in office.