Good Guy? Yes. Saint? Nope.

This was inevitable. The Catholic Church is rushing the late Pope John Paul II to sainthood. He was beatified today before a throng of over a million people in and around St. Peter's Square in Vatican City. (This means John Paul is now "Blessed" and only a step away from sainthood. You may expect this soon also. This is the fastest anybody has ever moved to sainthood in the long history of the church.) And tomorrow will the the celebratory mass there. The longest reigning pontiff, 27 years, as well as the most traveled, JPII made a huge impression on the youth of the world. He materially assisted in the overthrow of the communist regime in his native Poland. His outgoing personality was perfect for the media age. He was probably the best-known, most beloved pope in the Church's long history.

He also presided over the Church during the flood of worldwide revelations about heinous sexual crimes committed by Catholic clergy against children. JPII wrote about all kind of subjects; he spoke out on a raft of issues. But you will search in vain for a pronouncement about pedophilia. You will also come up empty-handed if you search for any strong action, or any action at all, for that matter, by that pope to address these crimes.

And for this reason alone, the man should not be made a saint. Worldwide impact and worldwide visibility do not cancel out worldwide coverup of literally thousands of crimes against children and papal silence, much less papal remedial actions, in the face of these unspeakable sins. I can only conclude that this past pope, just as certainly as the present pope, was part and parcel of the Church apparatus that enabled these crimes, paid hush money to silence victims, erected obstacles to investigation of the crimes, fought paying compensation to victims of these crimes, and in general made itself odious by acting like any other self-interested institution when it's criticized.

But this isn't going to hinder the Saint John Paul express.  It's going to roll into that holy saint station before you know it. While the countless victims of Catholic pedophile priests remain quite uncelebrated.

Saint? I don't think so.

Related articles

• Pope John Paul's Path to Sainthood: A Rush to Judgment? (time.com)
• Bill Briggs: The Rush to Beatify John Paul (huffingtonpost.com)
• Sainthood Not Easy Ride for Pope John Paul II (foxnews.com)
• Fast-Track Saint (thedailybeast.com)

RIP Old Friends

I had one like this upon which I typed a gazillion words.

My sister alerted me to this story, and I have to confess it makes me a little sad to hear that nobody on the face of the globe is manufacturing typewriters anymore.The company in India, Godrej and Boyce, says they were not getting many orders anymore. [see Update I, however] I think about my faithful Smith-Corona that saw me through countless book reports and papers in grad school. And the research notes I typed on it. At some point in our moves, it went away, an irrevocable sign that the computer keyboard had taken over completely. I'm not sure when that was, but it's been some time ago now. Typing on a computer calls for the same keyboard skills, but there is where the similarity to typewriters ends.

Anybody old enough remembers what a terrible experience it was to make corrections on a piece of typed material. What about the hassle of typing columns? And, my God, discovering that you had left something out of a multi-paged document. Well, that was grounds for suicide. I think of all those other accouterments that went along with typewriters. Remember erasable bond paper? (You can still get it from Amazon.) Remember the special erasers? Remember correction tape? Onion-skin paper? Carbon paper? Remember those fancy and expensive typewriters that had "auto-correction"? And do you remember how LOUD those things were?

George Harrison says it: "All Things Must Pass." But not without a sad face sometimes.

UUpdate I: Gawker is reporting that there are still manufacturers in China, Japan and Indonesia making typewriters.

Related articles

• 500 machines left at world's last typewriter factory (cbsnews.com)
• the end of typewriting (text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com)
• The typewriter: the end of an era (teresaedmond.com)

What a Crime!

An item caught my eye in the USA Today: in Norwalk, Connecticut, which I will just betcha has got a lot of well-to-do people. (Actually, I checked this guess, and guess what? I'm right. Norwalk is better off--considerably better off--than the rest of Connecticut, not to mention the nation, in a bunch of categories. Like: income per capita, median household income, and both male and female per capita income.) You can rest assured that this is a community that is careful to keep the riffraff in line.

The story is a homeless woman, one Tanya McDowell, an unemployed cook who lives in her van is being charged with the felonies of committing and attempting to commit larceny, i.e., "almost" $16,000 worth of education for her son, a kindergartner. What she allegedly did was used her babysitter's school district to enroll him in a Norwalk school instead of nearby Bridgeport, "a significantly poorer district."

So here's what strikes me, once again. The extraordinary privilege wealth entitles. In this case superior education, not only at the beginning, but all through. People like Tanya McDowell's son are doomed from the age of five to grow up to be somebody marginalized by a lousy education. And a mother that tries to squeeze just some little advantage for her kid is branded a criminal. Now, I ask you: do you really blame this woman? Why should there be such disparity in public education? The answer is in a word: money.

What do you think the chances are the system is going to be forgiving here? Can you believe that a city would actually try to squeeze $16,000 out of a homeless person because she tried to dodge the inevitable for her kid, even if just for a year? You bet your sweet ass it will. Oh, and she also faces 20 years in prison for this heinous crime. What a frigging outrage! Need I remind you that not a single one of the Wall Street criminals has spent a minute in jail or been hauled before the court of law for crimes that affected literally millions of people? Outrageous!

Stay tuned. Apparently this case is arousing a lot of similar reaction all over the country.

Related articles

• Arrest of Homeless Connecticut Woman for Enrolling Son in School Illegally Sparks Debate (tipggita32.wordpress.com)
• Homeless Woman Faces 20 Years For Enrolling Son in Wrong District (theroot.com)
• Homeless Mom Charged With Larceny for Sending Kid to Good Public School (alternet.org)

2,000 Light Years from Home

Out of all those albums the Stones have produced only one was a psychedelic album, the underrated Their Satanic Majesties Request in 1967. This song, at least for me, is probably the best on the record. An interesting look and listen to relatively early Stones. Enjoy.

Maher is Right On (As Usual)

Bill Maher is always funny . . . and incisive. (Just an aside . . . who actually watches late night TV? I can't remember when I ever did.)

Easter Monday

Today is Easter Monday. The day after the greatest feast in Christendom, Easter, the sign of everlasting imperishable hope for billions of people throughout the world. Here in the United States, in the areas of affluence and the suburbs, people in their new Easter finery trekked to churches for celebrations of various sorts. Easter is also a day when people in their hundreds of thousands who don't ever darken the door of a church otherwise also go to church. Habit, gesture, tradition? I guess. I could never really figure it out. It certainly has nothing to do with the Gospel.

The whole exercise of Christianity, at least the kind of exercise and Christianity I'm familiar with, misses the entire point of the gospels. Or so it seems to me. There is nothing plainer in the gospels than the fact that Jesus would doubtless take a dim view of the kind of self-congratulatory, pablum-based, feel-good, judgmental, and sometimes downright silly religions, practices, and beliefs that have been formed around his name and life.

It's for dead certain that you don't hear this kind of thing from the pulpits of America's Christian churches: "Jesus was a working man, a carpenter, who advocated for the underclass, the powerless, and those country clubs would exclude." If this kind of dead-on gospel does get preached, you can be sure it's couched in enough provisos and qualifications to allow anybody listening to wriggle off the hook, to not be challenged by the radical equality of everyone that Jesus recognized, preached, and most of all, lived. No, we prefer our gospel comfortable and toothless. And we certainly don't want it to have anything to do with equality.

So the Risen Lord is forced to wonder once again just what these people who claim to follow him are actually doing. That is, aside from everything he preached against and despite his many examples to the contrary.

Guilty, I Say . . . and Not Even a "Whoops"

Why not just hang a sign around his neck that says "Guilty" or maybe a tatoo on his forehead. Or let's put a sign over his cage that he's a guilty man. Remember Bradley Manning, the guy the military has had locked up without charges for almost a year now in the Wikileaks case? Well, our president probably thinks some public proclamation of Manning's guilty is probably a fine idea. After all, he's publicly pronounced the man guilty himself. In answer to a question about Bradley Manning after a speech he'd given at a Democratic fundraiser, Obama had this to say:

We're a nation of laws. We don't let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law.

Can you believe this? Glenn Greenwald and a number of others could not either. Greenwald scoffs at the idea that Obama should invoke the old "we're a nation of laws" chestnut.

But even more fascinating is Obama's invocation of America's status as a "nation of laws" to justify why Manning must be punished. That would be a very moving homage to the sanctity of the rule of law -- if not for the fact that the person invoking it is the same one who has repeatedly engaged in the most extraordinary efforts to shield Bush officials from judicial scrutiny, investigation, and prosecution of every kind for their war crimes and surveillance felonies. Indeed, the Orwellian platitude used by Obama to justify that immunity -- Look Forward, Not Backward -- is one of the greatest expressions of presidential lawlessness since Richard Nixon told David Frost that "it's not illegal if the President does it."

 Why don't we just declare Obama a lost cause and be done with it? The only thing worse in the White House is one of these psycho Republicans, which, I might observe is about all that party has to offer these days.

Related articles

• Convicting Private Manning (truthdig.com)
• Obama Pretends the Bob Woodward Law Doesn't Exist (emptywheel.firedoglake.com)
• Obama Has the Constitutional Scholar's Greatest Gift: He Can Tell Who Is Guilty Just By Lookin' At 'Em (reason.com)

It's Gonna Kill Us

It's going to kill us, all this plastic waste and our what-the-hell attitude about it.

Did you know that today was Earth Day? I didn't. Not till I read in today's edition of the Writer's Almanac. I'm less interested in the history that's recounted there than in the environmental consciousness that's laying heavy on me today. Why? Because quite by accident I watched a TV show we had recorded about the mess that plastic has made of our earth. Damned if I can find a reference for you to this show. But this link which discusses the impact of just plastic bags and not all the other plastic garbage we despoil the planet with. Like plastic water bottles. The numbers of these things we're talking about are astounding. And then there's something I knew about, you know, one of those vague, back-of-the-mind kind of things. This is the staggering amount of plastic shit we've put into the oceans of the world. There are plastic garbage dumps in all the oceans of the world, huge concentrations of plastic. The TV program reported that plastic is turning up in the stomach of just about all marine animals.

From the article: "The number of plastic pieces in the Pacific Ocean has tripled in the last ten years and the size of the accumulation is set to double in the next ten unless the use of disposable plastics is reduced.While this 'trash continent' is not thick enough to be walked on, from the ocean surface to a depth of 30 feet, the plastic is floating at a concentration six times that of its neighboring zooplankton, the most abundant animal type of life both by number and total weight. The plastic can reach concentrations of a million pieces per square mile.

Here's something you haven't thought about: Practically all the plastic waste that goes into rivers, creeks, streams, storm drains, and adjoining land eventually washes into the oceans. And "[a]lmost every single piece of plastic ever made is still around. Much of that plastic waste material has ended up in the ocean; out of sight, out of mind, but never gone."

The good news is that many countries and cities throughout the world have banned plastic bags altogether or they charge for their use. The bad news is this is not nearly enough to meet the looming crisis our garbage is engendering. How many times have I posited that we are a doomed people? I don't do that lightly or without evidence, brothers and sisters.

Related articles

• Plastic-Free Challenge: Can You Give It Up For An Entire Month? (huffingtonpost.com)
• Traversing The South Pacific Gyre: Plastic Marine Pollution Is Officially A Global Issue (treehugger.com)
• Why is plastic pollution such a big problem? (greenanswers.com)
• Birds Digest Plastic Faster Than Previously Thought, and That's Bad News (treehugger.com)
• Ocean Plastics In Our Food Chain: The Importance Of Lantern Fish And Night Trawling (treehugger.com)

Selig Cannot Depart Fast Enough

If you're a true baseball fan, Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig has been a royal pain in the butt. For many years. He will always be remembered as commissioner on whose watch the whole so-called "steroid era" happened. We're talking pretty much 15 years, from the early 1990s to about 2005. And the steroid era happened because Bud Selig and the rest of the fat cat team owners (Selig was the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers before he got the  commissioner's job) turned a blind eye to rampant PED abuse in the major leagues. Major league baseball did not have effective drug testing until a few years ago. All because Selig let it happen. So now we're stuck with a host of records in the books that are bogus. And some of the biggest names in the sport have had their reputation sullied forever. Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Alex Rodriguez, Raphael Palmeiro, and the list goes on and on.

The man is supposed to be retiring next year, not near soon enough for me. But before he goes, he naturally is going to screw the game up some more. I read today that in all likelihood next year the baseball playoffs will expand from eight teams to 12 teams. I cannot think of anything more horrendous then admitting to the playoffs yet more teams who did not win their division title. Making baseball more like the National Hockey League or the NBA where half the frigging league gets into the playoffs is not my idea of making major league baseball better. I'm hard pressed to think of anything that Selig has made better. The list of sins that Selig is perpetrated on the game is almost endless: interleague play, All-Star game determining home-field advantage in the World Series, allowing a tie in the All-Star game in 2002, introduction of wild card teams into the post-season playoffs.

The game I remember from my youth is still the same between the lines, but it's turned monstrous in many ways outside the lines. Stone traditionalist that I am, I have no use for just about any innovation since 1970 or so. That would include the designated hitter, exploding scoreboards, team mascots, bazillion dollar contracts for baseball players, work stoppages and strikes, artificial turf, pitch counts and absurd specialization of baseball bullpens, interleague play, wild-card teams, and is probably more that I can't think of right now.

Oh, no. Bud Selig cannot leave the game near soon enough for me. I contemplate with utter horror What I've read about what's likely to happen: that Selig will be elected to the Hall of Fame. That would be the final straw.

Update I: Ken Baxter in the LA Times on why expanding the baseball playoffs is a bad idea. Here. 

Related articles

• Tim Lincecum Rips Bud Selig's Plan for Expanded Major League Baseball Playoffs (bleacherreport.com)

It's What I've Been Saying . . .

. . . for, lo, these many months. The military is out of control. These guys have assumed the posture of co-equals with their civilian commanders. Hell, you see more of Petraeus on the screen than you do Obama almost. Since when have we elevated military personnel to the status of people who have to be listened to on policy issues?

Here's what Jonathan Stevenson has to say in the May Harper's in a report called "Owned by the Army: Has the president lost control of his generals?" [emphasis in the quoted material is mine]

The armed forces have become an insular professional class. At the same time, the United States has moved toward a quasi-imperial – or to use the Niall Ferguson's more tantalizing term, "crypto-imperial" – model of security, whereby open-ended military deployments keep the homeland safe by effectively pushing its borders outward. This is what turns generals into proconsels, especially when their areas of responsibility are, as Central Command's have been for a decade, theaters of war. Foreign governments view regional commanders as the principal representatives of the United States, and their military exploits and media prominence of for them greater visibility authority than their civilian counterparts in the State Department, which is roughly one-fourteenth the Pentagon's budget and one-third the personnel. . . . The ramifications are clear: presidents with decreasing military experience direct regional combatant commanders newly emboldened to second-guess civilians on strategic matters.

In this light, and inclination on the part of some senior military officers toward seizing  a greater share of putatively civilian authority is not surprising. In a recent issue of Joint Force Quarterly, a Pentagon-sponsored military magazine, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Millburn contends that a military officer's oath and code of ethics accord him the "moral autonomy" to disobey an order he believes would harm the United States, its military, or the soldiers in his charge "in a manner not clearly outweighed by its likely benefits." Millburn's argument conjures the image of a troubled German soldier refusing to execute a Jewish prisoner, or a noble G.I. disobeying Lieutenant Calley's order to massacre Vietnamese families at My Lai. Millburn, however, quickly turns the argument from "the obligation to disobey an illegal order" on the tactical level to "the strategic level of decision-making," at which he believes the soldiers judgment "provides a healthy check in the execution of policy." Millburn ultimately imagines a dialogue of equals between civilians and soldiers, playing into entrenched post-Vietnam truth-to-power fantasies.

 . . . Absent an outright traitor or psychopath in the Oval Office, though, a government takeover of the tanks-at-the-White-House sort seems far-fetched. The more likely result, and the one suggested here, is a coup d'spirit, in which civilian leadership voluntarily submits to the military way of thinking. The risk that this state of affairs poses to the country is considerable: soldiers' essential expertise is not in grand strategy but in the operational art of warfare. If they are left to determine the United States is strategic and diplomatic direction, they will tend to do so on the basis of the feasibility of their operational missions are, worse, on the perceived need to develop the operational capability of fulfilling future missions – another hazard of an open-ended war.

If you could read this stuff without a sense of real chilling fear, then you must not know about or know enough about the continual history of the military in all ages and climes overthrowing the constitutional or legitimate authority. Let your mind mull a little bit what the phrase "moral autonomy" purports in this context, for example.

But I agree with the insight that posits a surrender of civilian independent thinking to a subservient sort of approach to the "expertise" that resides, supposedly, in the military leadership. You can already see this at work in our society. The idea that four-star generals have to be summoned before congressional committees to expound on policy matters is anathema to what the Founders had in mind. But, of course, those among us who actually know what the founders had in mind are few; those among us who believe they know what the Founders had in mind are legion – and incorrect ninety-nine percent of the time.

Related articles

• Commentary: A good military a terrible thing to waste (mcclatchydc.com)