This is not about the campaign

Updated Several pieces in various places lately have made note of what Tommy Christopher, a columnist at Political Machine, described as "crowds turning ugly at [McCain] campaign events." Incidents have included someone shouting "terrorist" in response to Barack Obama's name, someone calling him a "traitor," and in at least two cases, people urging he be killed.

Then there were the examples of Lehigh County (PA) GOP chairman Bill Platt and Lee County (FL) Sheriff Michael Scott going out of their way in rally warm-up speeches to refer to him as "Barack Hussein Obama," the latter of who did it while on duty and in uniform. (Both, of course, profess their purity of spirit, insisting there was no malice intended because after all, that is his name, isn't it? I'll buy that argument when they can convince me they routinely refer to their preferred candidate as "John Sidney McCain III." And not before.)

Obama is not the only target: The boogeyman "media" is another, with the New York Times for some bizarre reason a particular target of boos. (The NYT is lefty? When did that happen? Okay, kinda sorta liberal, but come on.) In one case,

[o]ne Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him to "Sit down, boy."

My intent here is neither to support the Obama campaign nor even, in a way, to attack the McCain campaign: Although the latter deserves fierce condemnation for exploiting these irrational fears, these hatreds and bigotries, what I more want to point to here is their existence.

No, not that I think their existence comes as any surprise to you, but rather that we often forget or ignore or overlook how pervasive they are and, more importantly here, the kind of thinking that drives them and the ends they can come to seek. The kind of screeching we now hear at McCain/Palin events, the very kind that they tactitly encourage to "fire up the base," are clear examples of what David Neiwert at Orcinus calls "eliminationist rhetoric," the desire - sometimes implicit but somethimes express - not simply for victory over progressive or merely liberal forces, but for their utter destruction.

(The first part of David's important 10-part series on "Eliminationism in America" can be found at this link.)

Here, it's not enough for them for McCain to win, Obama must be destroyed. Even killed - and not necessarily metaphorically. Everything he represents to these acolytes of atrocity, all of his support and supporters, must be brought to ruin. Why? Because he's a threat! He's a socialist (Would that was true!). He's a terrorist. He's a "secret Muslim" (Oh, the horror!) out to destroy American and freedom. He's, he's, (and this is the important point) not like us!

(Including, of course, in one very overt way which even these folks know better than to admit aloud.)

No, he's not like us, they say - and that fact alone, that single fact of that conviction, is at the heart of more of the bellowing and bombast, the driving force behind more of the viral e-mails and the incendiary posts and comments, than any other factor. He's different, alien, foreign - or, rather, he seems so to them.

These are frightened, frightened people who see dark forces all around them; dark, even demonic forces beyond their understanding, forces affecting their lives in ways beyond their control. When the present looks dark and the future can't be faced with confidence, only the past looks secure (even if it wasn't - but at least you know you survived it and that makes it seem safer than what looms before you). For anyone living like that, feeling like that, change, the very concept of change, becomes threatening.

And frightened, threated people can get angry - and then "ugly" - and then violent.

One recent example of that is what got me thinking about this again. The example is perhaps more telling because it didn't even happen in the US but in "laid back" Canada, illustrating it as a type of response rather than as a product of the US right wing or (false comfort) a product of the McCain campaign:

In Toronto last week, vandals cut the brake lines on at least 10 cars and maybe as many as 14. At least one car owner found out when they nearly collided with a bus.

The cars were also damaged in other ways [the Toronto Star (Canada) reports]; some were scratched and keyed with L signs. Phone and cable lines of some homes were cut.

The "L" has extra significance when you realize that the incidents had one thing in common: All the homes displayed lawn signs for a candidate of the Liberal Party. Toronto police acknowledged there appeared to be "a connection (to the lawn signs)."

The Liberals aren't even the more left party in Canada; they're centrist. The New Democratic Party is the actually liberal party. Yet even that centrist attitude could provoke potentially murderous behavior on the part of someone or someones.

The truth is, and here is my fear, there are still dark times to be survived. Even, maybe especially, an Obama victory in November will not put an end to the eliminationist expressions or the fears that drive them; more likely, it will intensify them. The one thing that unites conservatives of all stripes, cutting across difference in age, sex, class, race, and culture, is fear - fear of change. The greater the fear, the further to the right. Barack Obama is a centrist, a moderately liberal but still a corporatist Democrat who more than once has shown his willingness to burn principle at the altar of political expediency and whose biggest potential lies not in making things better but in merely making them no worse. (Which, I'm forced to admit, would be an improvement over the past couple of decades.) But to the fanatics and to those being drawn to fanatacism by the legitimization of their terror, he's not us - and being in the grip, under the sway, under a government, of the not us is the ultimate threat.

There is no escape from this in a McCain victory, which could easily give rise to the sense of an "opportunity" to put an end to the "threat" once and for all, just as the rhetoric escalated in the wake of Shrub's wins. So I truly believe that no matter the outcome in November, the threat of physical violence against those on the left half of the American political spectrum is increasing and will continue to increase. The only question is how much of it will be driven by those inside the government and how much by those outside.

That does not mean you give up or even retreat; we may indeed come "down to the ethic of total opposition" but that does not reduce our duty of defiance. The future isn't dark so much as it is unformed; it's for us to shape and to light as we can. But right now, today, I have to admit that for me it's looking a bit darker and a bit more unformed than usual. To work for real change will require, I think, more courage - physical as well as political - in the coming years than it has for some time. We have to be ready for that. Then again, as I've mentioned before, we have been in this position in the past only to emerge - "eventually," yes, but still to emerge - with gains in justice.

Now, if you're another centrist corporatist Democrat who can be satisfied with a touch of tinkering and who thinks that drawing down in Iraq ("responsibly," mind you) only to build up in Afghanistan is a great idea - and a hell of a lot of the so-called "progessive" blogosphere fits that description - then you may not need any particular political courage, as you will be in the ascendency in the event of a (very likely) Obama win. But that doesn't mean you're safe - just ask some folks in Toronto.

Updated with a Footnote: Mikey at The Core 4 brings news of another, related incident, this one in the southern parts of greater London. The source is the London Daily News (UK).

A black council worker was shot in the face for wearing a Barack Obama t-shirt after a racist gun man open fire in South Norwood[, a town in the London Borough of Croydon].

Dube Egwuatu, 36, was also blasted in the hand and shoulder with a gas powered ball bearing weapon by a white skinhead in a broad daylight attack.

The black t-shirt bore the US Presidential candidates face with the word 'Believe.' Egwuatu, a systems analyst for Croydon Council, told the Daily Mail how when shopping at an off licence near his home, a man saw his top and started shouting racist abuse at him saying he “fucking hated niggers." [emphasis in original]

There is no question that Barack Obama is threatening to many and his prominence brings a real focus to the fears, phobias, and the associated hatreds. My point, still, is that he is not the cause, the cause precedes him and exists entirely apart from him. And that cause - the terror of a changing world - generates a threat of physical violence that is increasing. Obama may right now be the most obvious, most threatened, target of that violence - but he is by no means alone.

There's a whole world out there

Another in my occasional series to remind ourselves we're not the only ones with issues.

Democratic Republic of Congo - Alan Doss, the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative in the DRC,

today asked [the Security Council] for additional peacekeepers beyond the nearly 19,000 uniformed personnel already there to prevent the vast country from slipping back into "horrendous" conflict. ...

"We are entering a potentially very dangerous phase, tensions are rising and we do not want to see the Congo plunge back into the conflict which spilled over and involved neighbours," he said, referring to the six-year civil war that cost 4 million lives in fighting and attendant hunger and disease – widely considered the most lethal conflict in the world since World War II – before it ended earlier this decade.

While most of the country has been calm since UN-organized elections two years ago, there has been some renewed fighting in the eastern provinces which has even involved the UN peacekeepers, with rocket-firing UN attack helicopters going into action against rebels who had opened fire on them in Ituri province just last week.

Mauritania - Last August, a military coup overthrew the nation's first democratically-elected president, President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi after he tried to dismiss top military commanders.

The African Union suspended Mauritania's membership in the group and set a deadline of Monday for President Abdallahi to be freed and restored to office. However, coup leaders showed no signs of respecting the call, rejecting it as "unconstructive."

Now, a demonstration in support of Abdallahi in advance of the deadline - one held in defiance of a ban on such actions - has been broken up by police using tear gas and clubs. So Abdallahi, while reportedly in good health, remains in captivity and the junta's hand-picked "interim" government remains in power. And the military continues to tolerate "free" governments so long as they are the ones who are really free.

Peru - An interesting twist on an old story comes out of a group called the Manthoc Child and Adolescent Workers' Association. Its members range in age from six to 18 and their goal is not to continue or strengthen Peru's ban child labor but to supplant it with government regulation to enforce "dignified working conditions"- in this case "dignified" work meaning voluntary, suitable to the child's age, and which allow the child to attend school until they have a basic education.

Speaking with a coherence and eloquence that belies her young age, [Manthoc national delegate Fabiola] Segura, who since the age of nine has been working as a baker, artisan and street vendor, said the rationale of child labour is apparent: children will have to work so long there is poverty.

'Without alternative policies and dignified work, child workers will be exploited, and as long as wealth is not well distributed, poverty will continue to exist. Young people work illegally out of necessity and it's there where (authorities) need to intervene,' Segura said.

Some of the statements by the group's representatives sound rehearsed and even a little creepy to me, such as when they talk about how "proud" they are of earning their money and that opponents of child labor "do not consider the positive aspects." Still, the arguments that banning child labor has not stopped the practice and the pressure of poverty will drive its continuance are not easily refuted, especially if the claims that

at their small workshops, the organization's 3,500 children work in dignified conditions and receive food, help with schoolwork, psychological assistance and professional training while they make sweets, wooden toys or gift cards that they later sell

are true. Even so, I am aware of our own struggles with child labor about 100 years ago and that the only way we banned it was to ban it to the point where employers had no choice but to hire adults at better wages in order to have a workforce. However, that situation, I also realize, was quite different in that most of the focus was on children working in factories, not being an "artisan and street vendor." So I have to admit I go back and forth on this a little, because while the goal is and must be to end the grinding poverty that forces children into labor, the question before us is what about the here and now and those who are working illegally just to have enough to eat.

If you feel the urge, there is a several-years old article in the Nicaraguan magazine Envio about child labor organizing in Latin America, an ILO compilation of world government statements on ending child labor from 2001, a 2004 Master's dissertation on "why the laws that regulate child domestic work in Peru are not effective," and a 2007 report entitled "Working Children’s Movements in Peru" from the Amsterdam-based Foundation for International Research on Working Children.

More information about MANTHOC can be found at this link; the group's own website, in Spanish, is here.

Somalia - The BBC reports on a statement from Human Rights Watch that the Somalian capital of Mogadishu has become a free-fire zone between government and insurgent forces such that the world should be shocked at the systematic destruction of the city and its residents.

It said if such a situation was happening anywhere else in the world, like Georgia or Lebanon for example, it would be considered a travesty.

Instead Somalia was the most ignored tragedy in the world today, HRW said.

Meanwhile, a group of 52 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has issued a statement saying the international community had "completely failed Somali civilians".

The aid groups estimate that almost 40,000 people had been displaced from Mogadishu in the last few weeks, with 1.1 million uprooted in the last nine months.

BBC World Affairs correspondent Mark Doyle describes the city as dying and that it was "eerie," with many parts of the rubble-strewn city devoid of residents, something even the notorious period in the 1990s failed to do.

Somalia again - Der Spiegel (Germany) has a rundown on the background of the standoff with pirates off the Somali coast who seized a freighter nearly two weeks ago. The incident - hardly the only recent example of piracy in those waters - got world attention largely because of the freighter's cargo: Some 33 Ukrainian T-72 combat tanks, supposedly on their way to Kenya.

"Supposedly" is the key word because one particularly interesting thing about the story and the real reason I mention it here is that the article says there is "mounting evidence" that Kenya was only to be a way station - and the actual destination was Sudan.

That eventuality could have dramatically ramped up the violence that people fear will arise surrounding a referendum on independence for the southern part of the country, scheduled for 2011. If the growing suspicion is true, it would be "embarrassing" for Ukraine and "devastating" for Kenya, "whose president likes to portray himself as a peacemaker."

As well as a classic example by the pirates of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Footnote to the preceding

Updated Well, I suppose we should be extra glad for whatever goodies we managed to get. Because right now, it looks like the bailout may not have done a flipping bit of good. From Agence France Presse (AFP):

Global stock markets reeled Monday, shaken by massive sell-offs by panicked investors who fear a much-vaunted US finance sector bailout will fail to end a crippling credit crisis. "There is all-out panic," said ING senior strategist Adrian van Tiggelen. "Everyone had hoped that after the acceptance of the package in the US and the bailouts in Europe, things would calm down but in effect, there are still strong fears of the domino effect."

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell below the key psychological level of 10,000 points for the first time since October 2004. The Dow was down 4.02 percent at 9,910.66 points at mid-day. [It recovered to 9,955.50 by end of day, but still closed below 10,000 for the first time in four years. The average is down 30% from its peak of a year ago. - AP]

The slide in the Dow accelerated huge losses in Europe, with markets in London, Paris and Frankfurt all plunging between 7 and 9 percent. Asian exchanges earlier in the day also closed deeply in negative territory. ...

"Markets are looking ugly around the globe. Investors are voting on the bailout plan with their feet. The crisis is now accelerating," said Barry Ritholtz at Ritholtz Research & Analytics.

There was some indication that the decision by Australia's central bank to cut its interest rate by a full percentage point was helping to stop the bleeding, but "investors remain jittery" and the best face Shrub (Remember him? The guy with the approval rating as low as Nixon's just before he resigned?) can put on things is that "it's going to take awhile."

Is "awhile" a unit of time longer or shorter than that until "Iraqis stand up so we can stand down?"

Updated with an update: That Australian central bank move might - might - have stabilized Asian markets some, but elsewhere it's the continuing saga. The Star (Lebanon) quotes AFP as saying that

[s]tock markets plunged across the Arab world on Tuesday as panic over the global financial crisis gripped investors, wiping billions of dollars off the value of shares. ...

In all, the seven Arab stock markets in the energy-rich Gulf have shed about $150 billion of their capitalization in the past three days alone to around $800 billion.

Saudi economist Abdulwahab Abu-Dahesh called it "a catastrophe." That may be overstating it, but a drop of nearly 16% in three days is still quite serious. As I noted a few days ago, the giant banks and the corporations will be the first to feel the effects, but they won't be the only ones - they're already pushing their losses off onto the rest of us; what would possibly make anyone think they won't do their damnedest to either make us pay the rest of their costs (higher interest rates, more stringent terms) or protect themselves to our detriment (no credit at all)?

Instead of simply blathering on about how important it is to head off a recession or worse, or simply predicting - by some fearfully, by some others almost gleefully - the total meltdown of the world economic system, it's time to start preparing for that "worse."

And if the worst doesn't come? Good. But better to be prepared for a disaster that doesn't come than to be unprepared for one that does.

Good News? Part Two

Well, kinda sorta. It develops that the horrendous bailout of rich, money-grubbing insiders that Congress just vomited up contained a few goodies for people living in the real world.

For one, Grist tells us the bill contains $17 billion in tax credits for renewable energy. It

includes an eight-year extension of the investment tax credit for solar energy, a one-year extension of the production tax credit for wind, and a two-year extension of the PTC for solar, biomass, and hydropower. The residential energy-efficient property credit would also be extended through 2016, and the definition of the systems that qualify for that credit would be expanded to include small wind investment and geothermal heat pumps. There are also incentives for bicycle commuting and plug-in electric vehicles.

Not surprisingly, there are other, unhappy energy-related provisions, such as support for carbon sequestration, oil shale, tar sands, and coal-to-liquid fuels.

All in all, I certainly won't call the renewable-energy tax credit provisions a silver lining - they're more like a couple of flecks of pewter - but hell, if the bailout was going to pass, and it was, we might as well take what we can get.

On that same logic, there was another handful of pewter flecks in the bill, this one in some ways more significant than the renewable energy credits. The New York Times has the story:

More than one-third of all Americans will soon receive better insurance coverage for mental health treatments because of a new law that, for the first time, requires equal coverage of mental and physical illnesses.

The requirement, included in the economic bailout bill that President Bush signed on Friday, is the result of 12 years of passionate advocacy by friends and relatives of people with mental illness and addiction disorders. They described the new law as a milestone in the quest for civil rights, an effort to end insurance discrimination and to reduce the stigma of mental illness.

It would have been nicer if it hadn't required tacking this on to the (falsely-labeled) "must pass" bailout, but dammit, at least it's there.

Companies have until January 1, 2010 to adjust their plans.

Good News? Part One

Yeah, pretty good as these things go. Human Rights Watch reports that

[u]nder a new law signed today by US President George W. Bush, leaders of military forces and armed groups who have recruited child soldiers may be arrested and prosecuted in the United States.... The law could apply to leaders of dozens of forces that have recruited and used child soldiers in over 20 armed conflicts.

Child Soldiers Accountability Act makes it a federal crime to recruit knowingly or to use soldiers under the age of 15 and permits the United States to prosecute any individual on US soil for the offense, even if the children were recruited or served as soldiers outside the United States. The law imposes penalties of up to 20 years, or up to life in prison if their action resulted in the child’s death. It also allows the United States to deport or deny entry to individuals who have knowingly recruited children as soldiers.

The law, of course, only applies to people who are in the US. Which is good under the "we shouldn't be cops of the world" argument, but still I can't help but remember that when it came to drugs, the fact that Manuel Noriega was in Panama was no bar to an invasion there to "arrest" him. The official policy was, literally and in so many words, "we will come get you" if you violate US law. I guess it says something about priorities.

Still, as noted by HRW's children’s rights advocate Jo Becker, the law is at least symbolically significant

"because it no longer leaves the prosecution of child recruiters to international tribunals and the national courts of conflict-affected countries.... The United States is stepping up to hold these war criminals accountable in its own courts.”

While I seriously doubt there will be any such prosecutions in the foreseeable future, it's still nice to see the US on the morally correct side for once.

(Link via WorldPress.org.)

Geektuary

The story of life just keeps getting more amazing.

Ohio State University Professor Loren Babcock has found what he is "reasonably certain" are tracks made by either a centipede-like ar­thro­pod or a leg­ged worm. (Ar­thro­pods are invertebrates with joint­ed limbs and seg­mented bodies. Insects are arthropods.) From the tracks, he determined it was about a centimeter wide with multiple, spindly legs.

What's cool here is that the tracks are 570 million years old - which makes them, if they are indeed animal tracks, a good 30 million years older than the oldest previously known tracks and would push the existence of walking creatures back to the Ediacaran period, which preceded the Cambrian period when most major groups of "modern" animals first appeared.

Scientists had once thought only microbes and simple multicellular animals had existed prior to the Cambrian, but that notion is changing,

Babcock said, and if his find is confirmed, it would prove the existence of more complex animals before the Cambrian. He expects his find to raise "a lot of skepticism," adding that "there should be." But wouldn't it be fascinating if it pans out.

That wonderful life just keeps on getting more wonderful.

The geek lives!

There's a measure of which you may not have heard, but others have. In fact, Google's conversion function can convert measurements into it.

It's the smoot, and it's a unit of distance equal to five feet, seven inches.

It's named for Oliver Smoot, who as a pledge to the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1958 was used - literally, physically - to measure the length of the Massachusetts Avenue bridge across the Charles River. He lay down repeatedly and fraternity members used his height to mark off the bridge, smoot by smoot. It proved to be 364.4 smoots long.

It became a tradition that every year, freshmen at MIT would repaint the lines marking off each smoot across the bridge. In fact, it became so much of a tradition that when the bridge was rebuilt in 1989, the concrete pavements were scored at 1-smoot increments instead of the normal 6 feet. Police no longer try to prevent the annual repainting.

Today, 50 years after it's creation, the unit's originator was honored at Smoot Celebration Day at MIT with a plaque to be installed on the bridge to "brighten the lives of windblown pedestrians," in the words of MIT President Susan Hockfield. He was also presented with a smoot stick - which is, of course, five feet seven inches long.

After his graducation with a BS from MIT and a doctorate from Georgetown, Oliver Smoot went on to become chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

But while he was honored with the plaque and smoot stick, he did not receive one of the major awards given out two days earlier: the Ig Nobels, presented at the 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony.

Given every year by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine, the awards honor research that may seem trivial or even silly but which might have merit; research, the magazine says, that makes people "laugh, then think."

This year's award recipients included among others a team of researchers who showed that Coca-Cola is a spermicide, another that showed it isn't, a behavioral scientist who determined that expensive fake medicines work better then cheap fake medicines, an archaeologist concered with how armadillos can affect the reading of history by moving artifacts around as they dig their tunnels, and a psychologist who examined the relationship between the incomes of strippers and their fertility cycles.

The magazine itself is a satire on standard scientific journals. While it does feature reports on serious research on what would seem odd topics, most of its articles are about absurd research, some of it fictional but some of it real. It grew out of an earlier (still-publishing) science humor magazine called the Journal of Irreproducible Results when JIR's then-editor, Marc Abrahams, broke away to found AIR in 1994. (His version of the tale can be found at this link.)

As I recall, the very earliest Ig Nobels were directed at research "that could not, or should not, be replicated." But as the tone has shifted over the years to work that unintentionally raises questions about how to measure what is "important" in science research, many recipients have recognized the light-hearted nature of the awards and come to accept theirs personally.

How many scientists does it take to change a light bulb?

One - but only if the research grant comes through.

Double take

A little bit of yin-yang for you: The News-Herald of Panama City, Florida, reports that

[a] Marianna Middle School teacher was suspended after students said he used a racial epithet directed at presidential candidate Barack Obama.

It seems that a seventh-grade social studies teacher named Greg Howard wrote "CHANGE" on the board and turned it into an acronym for "Come Help A Nigger Get Elected."

He was suspended without pay for 10 days, relieved of his football coaching duties, and transferred to the local adult education program. He'll be required to submit a letter of apology to the students and attend diversity and sensitivity training.

"Actions of this nature are inappropriate (and) will not be tolerated by the Jackson County School Board," the [school district's] news release states.

An illustration, I think, both of how far we've come - and of how far we haven't.

Ease on down the road

The road toward tyranny, that is.

The Bush administration has issued new rules for the FBI, supposedly to enable the agency to pursue potential national security threats "with the same vigor and techniques used against common criminals" but which more accurately would be described as expanding the feds' authority to monitor and spy on political dissenters.

The ACLU

quickly blasted the Department of Justice and FBI for ignoring calls for more stringent protections of Americans’ rights. ...

The new guidelines reduce standards for beginning “assessments” (precursors to investigations), conducting surveillance and gathering evidence, meaning the threshold to beginning investigations across the board will be lowered. ...

“The attorney general today gave the FBI a blank check to open investigations of innocent Americans based on no meaningful suspicion of wrongdoing,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. “The new guidelines provide no safeguards against the FBI’s improperly using race and religion as grounds for suspicion. They also fail to sufficiently prevent the government from infiltrating groups whose viewpoints it doesn’t like. The FBI has shown time and time again that is incapable of policing itself and there is good reason to believe that these guidelines will lead to more abuse”

including the possibility of instituting racial profiling as policy, even if "unofficial."

The ACLU was hardly the only voice in opposition; even some in Congress got in on the act.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was not reassured [by DOJ claims that the guidelines "protect privacy and civil liberties"].

"I am concerned that the guidelines continue the pattern of this administration of expanding authority to gather and use Americans' private information without protections for privacy or checks to prevent abuse and misuse," Leahy said.

Three Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee also wondered in writing about the "rush to change these procedures in the last days of this administration."

That question, however, answers itself: The rush is precisely because it is the last days.

The truth is, though, I hardly think a Congress that passed the grossly misnamed "Protect America Act" is in any position to question anyone else's devotion to civil liberties and privacy. Still, better some voices than silence and better some opposition than none. Now, if this was followed by some sort of Congressional action, that might mean something real.

Which is why it won't happen.

Noted in passing

So it seems there's this new movie coming out called "An American Carol." It's supposed to be a comedy - a "right-wing comedy."

Now, there's a contradiction in terms.

I mean, really, have you ever once, just once, found anything approaching wit or originality or insight or the other qualities that make for true humor in "Mallard Fillmore?" Did any of you find it hilarous when "Prickly City" had a character get brainwashed by the Chinese during the Olympics, as a result of which they "fit right in" at the Democratic National Convention? Was there even just one appreciative smile for a well-crafted shot, even if it stung, obtained from "The 1/2 Hour News Hour?"

Honestly, have you come across right-wing "humor" that is not banally obvious, which does not rely on the sledgehammer rather than the rapier? I doubt it. Their humor is as crass and uncreative as their politics.

It appears this movie will be no exception. It involves "an infamous documentary filmmaker" named - catch the subtlety - Michael Malone, who is out to abolish the Fourth of July. (I assume they mean the holiday, not the actual day, abolishing which would leave a rather big hole between July 3 and July 5. But with those zany jokesters of the right, you never can tell.)

Malone is subjected to various fantasy sequences under the guidance of General George Patton as a "ghost of politics past." (So, y'see, the title of the movie is actually a very clever, rib-tickling take-off on this other story.... Oh, you got that part.) Although the article doesn't say, I assume at the end Malone learns his lesson and repents of his lefty past.

The only real reason for mentioning this sludge is that producer-director-screenwriter David Zucker said the movie is "taking on the excesses of the far left in politics." So the next time any wingnut complains about some sort of usually non-existent left-wing bias in movies, the response should be "Hey, your side has declared that open mockery of the other side is legit. You've got no business complaining, you WATB. So shut up."

Footnote: The article begins by saying that

[i]t's a movie genre you don't hear much about in Hollywood: the right-wing comedy. For that matter, it's not much of a genre at all.

There's a reason for that. And it has nothing to do with political bias.

But don't count on it

The Policing Board in the UK

has formally endorsed the chief constable's decision to deploy Taser stun guns[, the BBC reports].

Twelve guns were given to specialist police teams in a pilot scheme in January. ...

The chief constable will decide if the weapon should be used on a permanent basis after an equality impact assessment is completed.

The decision was taken in the face of a legal challenge to be heard in January and a call by Sinn Féin for the action to be deferred until after the judicial review.

In defense of the move, police officials pulled out the usual clichés:

The DUP's Peter Weir said it was a "logical move".

"Would the opponents of Tasers rather that police officers were forced to use handguns in every situation where a Taser should be used?

"Or perhaps they would like to make it impossible for the police to use necessary and proportionate force in order to defend innocent members of the public?"

This kind of sneering dismissal is not only bullshit, it's not even original bullshit. It's run of the mill bullshit that presents guns as the only alternative to tasers and suggests that opposition to tasers equals opposition to public safety. It really reads, "You're either with us or you're with the criminals! Why do you hate innocent members of the public?"

But if the record of tasers was one demonstrating that it only gets used in cases where otherwise guns would be used, there would be minimal opposition. The point, the point, the point - the point that never seems to register with these chowderheads is that tasers are frequently, mostly, used not as an alternative to deadly force, but as an alternative to any force, often enough to no force. Used instead as a means of domination, of humiliation, of intimidation, as punishment for resistance, as a convenience rather than a necessity.

Meanwhile, Great Britain is not the only place experiencing tasermania. Police in the Australian state of New South Wales are expanding their deployment of tasers.

Specially-trained police officers at this year’s Bathurst 1000 [auto race] will be equipped with taser stun guns after Commissioner Andrew Scipione yesterday announced the weapons would be issued to general duties police officers across the state. ...

Until yesterday, the weapon was restricted to the NSW Police Force’s riot squad and elite tactical operations unit, but now general officers with special training will be able to carry the weapon.

As has become typical, the decision to expand the use of tasers, which were described by local police commander Lionel White as "just another tool," came before, not after, a NSW Ombudsman report into their safety, which is not expected to be presented to the NSW parliament until later this month.

Footnote: Scipione said tough police procedures would avert the sort of deaths that have been associated with the weapons.

“We have really strong ... procedures that govern the way we use these devices and it can’t happen here[," he said.]

They had "strong procedures" in New York, too.

Maybe this is the one that will get them thinking

Maybe a different kind of tragedy is what's required to move them. From Reuters:

A New York City police lieutenant committed suicide on Thursday, eight days after ordering the use of a Taser stun gun against an emotionally disturbed man who then fell to his death, police said.

Lt. Michael Pigott had been on desk duty since the September 24 incident, when police responded to an emergency call saying that a man, Iman Morales, 35, was behaving erratically in his Brooklyn apartment.

Police chased Morales naked through the building and then he stepped onto a ledge. After a standoff, Pigott, a 21-year veteran of the police department, ordered a sergeant to fire a Taser at Morales.

Morales fell 10 feet (three meters) to the sidewalk and died of severe head trauma.

Pigott was stripped of his gun and badge and put on desk duty for violating department rules against using a taser in "in situations where the subject may fall from an elevated surface." He was described by colleagues as "torn up" over the incident and he said he was "truly sorry."

Apparently, he was. On Thursday morning, he went into a police locker room, got another officer's gun, and shot himself in the head.

The sharp edge of this double tragedy is that Michael Pigott, the man who realized the enormity of what he had done, who apparently knew there had to be consequences, it couldn't be brushed off, became his own second victim, one more sufferer, physically and mentally. And at the same time, those who would dismiss what happened to Morales, just like those who shrugged off the cases of Pastor Al Poisson, of Andrew Meyer, even of Robert Dziekanski, undoubtedly sleep quite soundly.

But this time a cop died. So maybe, just maybe, it will make them think a little.

Footnote to the preceding

As always, the devil in the details. Or, more precisely here, there is a devil hidden in the deails.

Section 128 of the House bill would have sped up the enactment of a provision of a 2006 law from October 1, 2011 to October 1, 2008. That same provision, same section, was in the bill the Sentate passed, the one the House is going to reconsider perhaps as soon as Friday at a time when GOPper opposition there is supposedly "softening" in the face of all the pro-corporate goodies festooning the Senate version of the bill.

It's a short section, in fact it's only one sentence. Here it is:

Section 203 of the Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act of 2006 (12 U.S.C. 461 note) is amended by striking October 1, 2011 and inserting October 1, 2008.

What would that innocent-sounding, seemingly merely technical change mean?

First, bear in mind that after the depression of the '30s, banks were required to maintain a certain minimum level of reserves. The idea was to protect against catastrophic failures born of, for example, the bank's outstanding obligations being called in at a time of tight credit when there proved to be insufficient reserves to cover them. It was intended as a protection for depositers.

Yeah, yeah, fine, what does that have to do with this?

Well, because of the effect of that provision of the bailout bill, immediately upon passage, banks would no longer be required to hold any reserves on deposits. As Pam Martens says in Counterpunch,

[b]anks already in trouble for lack of capital would get to hold as little as “zero” capital for transactions.

Part of the "solution" the bill offers, it seems, is simply to define the problem out of existence. After all, banks can't be regarding as failing due to a shortage of capital if they're not required to hold any. Oh, but don't worry! The upper limit on deposits covered by FDIC insurance has been upped from $100,000 per account to $250,000! So it's all A-OK!

But it's not. Besides the fact that very few of us live in a world where that difference will mean a freaking thing, the net result is to shift the burden of risk from the banks to the public. Another case where the gains stay private while any losses go public. It's a variation on what used to be called "lemon socialism," the process where failing or mismanaged enterprises got taken over by the government - so the public got the lemons while the sweeter fruit remained in the hands of the corporations. And we've certainly seen a fair amount of that of late.

And all the while, the very people who benefit from this arrangement, the very people living their elitist, sheltered, privileged lives but who will clamor for the government to as if as a matter of right protect them from the effects of their own decisions, will be the same ones who with a tear in their eye will declare themselves deeply moved by the beauty and perfection of "the free market" while sneering that those others, those déclassé others looking for "handouts" like unemployment compensation, a decent minimum wage, Food Stamps, health care, a way to not lose their homes, that they need to, like them, learn the importance of hard work and most importantly, self-reliance.

Section 128: a monument to the corporate way of life.

Economics 000

So I go away for a little while and the whole world goes in the crapper. We're surrounded by doomsday scenarios of another Great Depression, complete with references, some stretched but some spot on, to 1929.

Well, okay, first things first. This is a problem, a very real one; I suppose you could even call it a crisis, although I shy away from that because the word gets so overused. But when there is a big enough credit crunch that banks are getting antsy about extending loans to each other, yes, we do have a situation on our hands.

It's a cliche to say our economy runs on credit, but sayings only get used often enough to become cliches by expressing some truth. (Have you ever seen a wet hen? They really are pretty pissed.) I'm not even talking here about mortgages and individual credit card debt, it goes deeper than that to the overnight loans and other such instruments that banks and investment houses are constantly taking in, paying out, advancing and collecting. Those shut down and banks, needing capital to cover their own outstanding obligations, start issuing consumer credit under the most stringent conditions - if they do it at all.

That, in turn, affects not only things like the housing market but car sales, major appliances, travel, any sort of purchase, even ordinary ones, where cash up front is not the usual means of payment. Declining sales lead to retrenchment leads to unemployment leads to recession and maybe worse. So yes and contrary to some voices I've heard, this does affect us.

Ultimately, this will require some sort of bailout. The real question is what sort and, more importantly, of who.

The roots of this whole mess lie in one place: the greed of the financial industry. An industry built entirely on greed, on go for the big bucks, on you're either a player or a loser and being "just" a millionaire makes you the latter, has reaped the results of its own tunnel vision.

What happened in a nutshell is that in their world, everything seemed to be going up. Even as most struggled, they prospered. Even as bankruptcies grew, they were safe - and when they grew to be too many, they simply got Congress to change the rules in their favor. So - just like in the 1920s, it seems almost banal to note - they started acting under the assumption that it would always be that way. That things would always go up for them. Significantly, they assumed the housing market would always go up in the long term. It might stall temporarily, but ultimately it was a profit machine.

That was why the subprime market, giving mortgages to people with less-than-sterling credit, took off: The thinking was that even if you have to foreclose, you can resell the house for more than enough to cover yourself. It was a huge potential market for new mortgages with little, if any, risk.

Or so it seemed. But of course it wasn't and the housing boom went bust, foreclosures climbed, and because of the bad market the foreclosed homes didn't prove to be the hidden gems they had been assumed to be. And guess what: You've got a "liquidity crisis."

Something to be dealt with right here is the right-wing attempt to push the blame off the greedheads of Wall Street and onto the backs of liberals - particularly, it seems, Barney Frank. The argument, if you can call it that, is that Frank and others lead the effort against "redlining," the practice where banks would refuse to extend credit to people living in certain - almost exclusively minority - neighborhoods. Those advocates supposedly "forced" the banks to make loans to "underserving" people.

But of course the complaint about redlining had nothing to do with not loaning money to people who couldn't afford to pay it back. It was about not loaning to people because of where they lived - their creditworthiness didn't even enter the picture. Only their address did. It was a blatantly racist practice. Contrary to the bullshit being tossed out now, the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 outlawed redlining but did not require making risky loans, in fact it required "sound practice."

Still, the rightists persist in trying to blame an act for racial and economic justice for our current troubles. Some, such as wingnut columnist Jeff Jacoby, even specifically linked the old practice with the new claims, saying in a recent column that

[t]he pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless.

That is, minorities equal "weak credit histories" equal minorities. It doesn't get more direct than that.

However - and getting back to the main thread - that doesn't mean there isn't a problem here. It was the stupidity of the financial industry born of its institutional culture of greed that is the cause. More fundamentally, it was the failure to realize that the "business cycle" has not "been repealed" and in a capitalist economy where "more" is not only an economic philosophy, its a moral imperative, this kind of stuff is going to happen. The only reason it hasn't happened more and worse is not because of the so-called "self-correcting market" but because we do not have a "free market," our economy is partly socialized, helping to ease both the highs and the lows and reduce the pain of the latter.

Which means first the answer now is not less control, less regulation, but more control and more regulation - especially since, as noted in a link above, something over 80% of the problematic loans were not made by banks subject to FDIC oversight under the Community Reinvestment Act but by "financial institutions that operated with little or no federal regulatory oversight." (Original emphasis.) It was neither the CRA nor regulation that caused the problem, it was the lack of regulation.

So with that classic capitalist combination of short-sightedness and hubris, the institutions took idiotic risks that didn't look risky to them and when it all fell apart they came crying to the public to save them from the effects of their own greed-driven stupidity. Which leads directly to my single biggest gripe about the bailout: It proposes to have the public buy the bad mortgage debts of the lenders, thus giving them the public teat at which to suckle and taking them off the hook for collecting those debts while leaving the mortgagees, the people trying to hold onto their homes, on the hook for paying them. Indeed, one of the arguments used in the bailout's defense is that the $700 billion (or whatever the actual figure would be, no one claims to know) would not be the net cost to taxpayers because some of that outlay would be recovered when the feds subsequently sell the debts to other institutions, which will of course go about collecting them.

(Which means, parenthetically, that the deal is "we're going to spend a huge amount of money but we don't know how much or just who it's going to, some of which we might get back but we don't know when, how much, or over what period of time. Sign here.")

Screw that. Screw it right down to the ground. And screw the claims like that of Barack Obama (who, it appears, had been "actively whipping" the bill in the Senate) that "if we only had time we could do better, but we don't" so members of Congress must, he said, "step up to the plate." We don't need "more time," there are better ideas out there already. One example:

A group of liberal Democrats, backed by unions, proposed an alternative measure calling for more oversight by the Securities and Exchange Commission over Wall Street and a $61 billion stimulus package to aid working families.

Representatives John Tierney and William Delahunt, both Democrats from Massachusetts who helped defeat the [bailout] package, said yesterday they want to give bankruptcy courts the power to help people facing foreclosure by rewriting their mortgages.

There's also the "No BAILOUTS Act" sponsored by Peter DeFazio.

[T]the measure would impose a securities tax equivalent to one quarter of one percent of profits and empower the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to deal more effectively with bank failures.

The plan is based on a proposal made last week by former FDIC chair William Isaac, who recalled that in the 1980s Congress enacted a "net worth certificate" program – which allowed the federal agency to shore up the capital of weak banks to give them more time to resolve their problems – and the FDIC resolved a $100 billion insolvency in savings banks for a total cost of less than $2 billion.

Another: Ian Welsh at Firedoglake proposes to give Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson $150 billion now (since he never said the 700 big ones would be needed all at once) and tell him "come back in January with a real plan." He also lists several facets of what he considers a better plan, too long to quickly summarize here.

For me, there are three things I think should be part of any package. One, repeal that evil bankruptcy bill.

Two, as other have suggested, instead of giving the money to Wall Street, give it to the homeowners to pay off their mortgages. Or at the very least take up the suggestion of former Federal Reserve vice-chair Alan Blinder, and others, to re-create something like the Depression-era's Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to renegotiate troubled mortgages on owner-occupied homes at sharply lower rates, with the intent of heading off as many foreclosures as possible.

And three and the biggie in my mind, in order to get their part of any bailout money, a firm has to agree that by buying up these bad debts that the government is buying that much equity in the company. Which means that wherever the debt is big enough, the firm will essentially be nationalized.

And once that happens, the government keeps those firms. It doesn't resell them at a loss to some other outfit of greedheads looking to gain by our self-sacrificing, self-flagellating, devotion to the mythical "free market," instead it operates those firms under new management on a non-profit basis to serve any and all communities underserved by the financial markets. Oh, those lenders and their wingnut sycophants will whine and squeal that it's "unfair competition," but the reply should be "you have always claimed that government couldn't do anything right and the market was inherently superior. Here's your chance to prove it. So shut up."

You want a bumper sticker version of the principle involved? How about "We deserve an economy built on need, not greed." The rest follows from that.

There's a story, perhaps apocryphal, that the Chinese character for "crisis" combines the characters for "danger" (or "risk") and "opportunity." If that is true, the word "crisis" does fit here. We face a danger but we do have an opportunity for a - well, I can't say a just economy but I can say a less unjust economy. It's too bad that with "leaders" like Barack Obama we won't take it.

Footnote: The fact that the CRA outlawed redlining does not mean the practice has stopped. It hasn't. It merely has changed forms.

Finally!

Okay, here it is, the very brink of October 1. The new old - or old new or maybe the ... never mind - Lotus. My promise is to have something posted every single day. It may be long or short and it may be serious or sarcastic or a geek post. But dammit, there'll be something.

I went missing these past two weeks because moving proved to be more of a hassle than expected and we're still some time away from being settled here. Sometimes the short moves, which this was, are harder than the long ones.

More to the point, moving required a shift in our internet access, with the result that for the moment, only one of our two computers can be online at a time. Unfortunately for me, that one is my wife's so she gets first dibs on its use. So until I get a router, I'll have to choose my times. More importantly, all my cool programs for rapid links to news sources are on my computer. I do expect that just a few days of having to locate the links and enter them by hand will inspire me on that router business.

On weightier matters, I have my own thoughts on the wildfire in the financial industry, which I'll lay out later today. Bottom line on the cause, though: The banks and investment houses got greedy.

(Did he say "got?")

More banal insights this afternoon and/or evening.

Not big, just low

It really is. It's just low.

From Eli over at Left I on the News I hear that the National Park Service is poised to put into place new regulations affecting the possibility of public protests during the inaugural procession in January.

It seems that back in March, the US District Court for DC ruled that the NPS's practice of exempting the corporate-funded Presidential Inaugural Committee from the ordinary permit process was unconstitutional. The effect of the exemption was to give a private organization exclusive rights to determine who could be present along the parade route along Pennsylvania Avenue - and, Judge Paul Friedman ruled, "the Inauguration is not a private event."

The NPS did not appeal the ruling. Instead, it is now issuing re-written regulations in what I see as a transparent attempt to circumvent the ruling and thus still give the PIC the ability to limit those along the route to "invited guests," guests which, it's safe to say, will not include protesters.

More information is available at this link, including how to make a public comment on the proposed regs. (Use the link toward the bottom; the ones at the top don't work.)

Admittedly, I'm not sure this is a big huge deal (although it does have the potential to become one if the use of such permits creates more or less permanent "no protest zones" in public spaces) but it's just so... so... so low, so cheap, so slimy, that at the very least it shouldn't pass without objection.

Be quick, though: The period for public comments ends September 22.

Footnote: The original suit aimed at protecting the right of protest along the route was filed by the ANSWER Coalition, that group that all right-thinking, sober, serious liberals reject for its radicalism because they know in their right-thinking, sober, serious minds that their own right-thinking, sober, serious approach to issues such as stopping the war has been shown to be much more effective than, you know, making a fuss about it or anything.

Countdown: Twelve days to the Lotus Surge^TM.

Not another word

Updated No. Not one. Not one more fucking word about Democrats or even about "more and better" Democrats.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, facing political pressure from high gas prices and a struggling economy, has backed off her emphatic opposition to offshore drilling.

Instead, she's advanced a proposal that would allow drilling 100 miles of both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts - a distance reduced to 50 miles if a state approves.

Even though analysts have pointed out that offshore drilling will not have any effect on energy prices any time in the near future, congressional observers said that with the November election approaching, high gas prices and a sour economy have put political pressure on Democrats to go along with Republicans who have been pushing an expansion of drilling.

Pelosi "doesn't want some of the Democratic members - especially from the more conservative districts, and there are a lot of them - to lose their seats," said former congressman Mickey Edwards, a lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs at Princeton University.

Expanded offshore drilling has been banned for more than 20 years. That ban is to expire on September 30 but instead of moving to renew the ban, Pelosi and company cravenly capitulated to GOPpers and the oil industry out of sheer political cowardice. They don't give a damn about the environment, they don't give a damn about the fishing industry (too many small owners equals not enough big contributions), they don't give a damn about the public or the public interest, all they care about is getting and staying elected, protecting their perks, securing their sinecures, preserving their pensions.

No, I am not going to say that every single Congressional Democrat is a scumbag. But the leadership is composed of scumbags. The leadership is composed of cowards. There may be individual Democrats worthy of support, even of your vote. The leaders of the party - and therefore the party as a whole - are not among them.

Countdown: Fifteen days to the Lotus Surge^TM.

Updated to note that I wrote that very quickly and a main point I wanted to make is probably too well hidden: Nancy Pelosi and company were supposed to be the "more and better Democrats" we were (and are) supposed to focus on electing while ditching other forms of activism.

A tribute...

...to the persistence of memory.

This is, naturally, a day late but that's how the month is going. Still, since some other folks noted the anniversary of the September 11 attacks - I particularly liked this one from James at Never In Our Names - I figured I would, too. What I've chosen to do is to post some things I wrote in the aftermath of 9/11 to see how my thoughts and predictions have stood up to the passage of time.

The first is an email, September 13, 2001, in response to an online friend asking how I was feeling in the wake of the attacks. The part in brackets is from the friend.

[ How are you doing? ]

I’m hanging in there. Stressed and sad like most, I expect - and fearful of what happens next, wondering what’s going to be the next loop in the cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation, a cycle in which everyone (including us) views themselves as the wronged innocents. And, as the reports of attacks on, harassment of, and threats against Arabs and Muslims in the US begin to come in, as people equate Arab with Muslim and Muslim with fanatic (much as if they equated American with Christian and Christian with the KKK) and as cries of, in one form or another, “kill them all” start to rise, reminded of the dictum that those who deal in vengeance tend to become that which they say they oppose.

“We will never be the same” is an instant cliche. And it’s certainly true - the question for us as a people now is what the change will be. I’ve been thinking of the last verse of “There But For Fortune” by Phil Ochs:

“Show me the country/Where the bombs had to fall./Show me the ruins/Of the buildings once so tall,/And I’ll show you a young land/With so many reasons why/There but for fortune may go you or I.”

We have indeed been fortunate, and still are. A good question now is when faced with misfortune (not in the sense of bad luck but of bad events) will we as a people act as mature adults who will think about what we do and what it will accomplish or as spoiled brats flailing wildly at any convenient target within reach?

The magnitude of the event remains a little hard to grasp, perhaps (perhaps) more so for those of us who grew up in or around NYC, for who the twin towers were a natural part of the skyline. I’ve been told that the closer people are to NYC, the more the shock hasn’t worn off and the further away, the more anger there is. If there’s a silver lining at all, maybe it’s that the magnitude of the tragedy will keep us focused on the task of rescue and rebuilding long enough for the unreasoning anger to dissipate at least a little.

The second is another email reply to another friend on the same day.

[ Such sad news. Hope no-one close to you is caught up in this. ]

No, no one I know personally. But there’s always more of an impact when it’s something you know, something you can picture. I remember when the World Trade Center was built. Now I’ll remember when - and how - it came down.

Apparently, the delay between the first and second hits enabled a good portion of the second tower to be evacuated. Nonetheless, the loss of life will be huge; I wouldn’t be surprised if it ultimately reached 5 figures.

Now what happens? I’m afraid of what this could mean to the future. Already there have been incidents of violence and threats against Arabs (who are ALL Muslims, of course, as we all know) and mosques (because ALL Muslims are rabid extremists, of course, as we all know). Even someone I know online who would usually be considered rather liberal said she has “no problem with that” when I expressed a worry about “anti-Muslim xenophobia” because “I never met a nice Arab who wasn’t a Jew-hating racist at heart,” using the attack to justify her own concealed bigotry.

Meanwhile, the White House is promising an “extended military campaign.” We may be in for hard times, times which will not include asking any questions about why it happened that don’t involve “security lapses.” Even wondering about motivations beyond “unreasoning hatred” and being “uncivilized” simply won’t be allowed and risking such a thought is liable to get you branded an apologist for terrorists.

We’re headed, I expect, for more cycles of retaliation and counter-retaliation, everyone insisting their enemies are subhuman devils and they themselves are the offended innocents. It’s gonna get worse.

This is the big one; it's an unpublished op-ed piece dated October 2.

In the wake of September 11, a blunt truth: Barring divine intervention, and I for one do not count on that, we will never “rid the world of terrorism.” As long as there are people there will be those, both individuals and governments, prepared to commit the most venal cruelties against innocents to gain political ends. What we can hope to do is control terrorism, limit it, minimize it.

But if the history of the Middle East over the last 30 years proves nothing else, it proves beyond question that neither terrorism nor “counter”-terrorism, neither retaliation nor counter-retaliation nor counter-counter-retaliation will stop the circle of death - particularly not so long as those on each side insist on seeing themselves at the wronged innocents only defending themselves against unreasoning violence or oppression or exploitation (or all three) while viewing their adversaries as evil brutes fully aware of their own brutality. Another cycle of mayhem is simply not an answer.

If we want to limit, to minimize, terrorism, we have to understand the roots of it, understand what produces it, understand what moves people to embrace such desperation-driven fanaticism. And that in turn requires seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, which is where most of the mainstream commentaries attempting to answer the question “Why do they hate us?” have failed. The authors have projected themselves into the Muslim world and tried to think of what they might resent about the West in general or the US in particular. That is, they have changed their imagined location but not their eyes, still seeing the world through the filter of their own perceptions and desires. So they wind up producing answers like “They hate us because we’re rich” or “we’re modern” or “we support Israel.” Such answers are so removed from context that even to the extent they’re right, they’re useless, the more so because they add up to the unintentionally-revealing “They’re backward, jealous, anti-Semites who hate us because we’re better than they are.”

So for a moment, just for a moment, try to see the world through the eyes of an average person on the ground in the Middle East. This is how the world might look to you:

For centuries the West has looked down on you, regarding you, your culture, and, if non-Christian, your religion as inferior. (There is a reason bin Laden keeps referring to American “crusaders.”) They think of you as “ragheads” or “towelheads.”

Every time a strong Arab leader rises and tries to become independent of the West, they get slapped down. The only regimes that survive are those too weak or too corrupt to threaten Western interests. (One such “threatening” government was that of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, who was overthrown in a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 after he attempted to nationalize oil reserves. The result was the 26-year reign of the Shah, whose army was practically stamped “Made in the USA.”) Yes, you resent the West’s wealth but it’s not so much that they’re rich and you’re poor, it’s that they’re rich because you’re poor, that their wealth is built on exploitation and economic domination.

In just the past 20-plus years, you’ve seen the US pick a fight with Libya in the Gulf of Sidra, bomb Tripoli, openly try to kill Moammar Khadaffi, bomb a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan on the spurious claim it was a chemical weapons factory (leading to thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of deaths due to inadequate supplies of medicines), stand by along with the rest of the West while Muslims were slaughtered in Bosnia (stepping in only when European interests were threatened), shell Beirut, shoot down a civilian Iranian airliner, and fire cruise missiles into Afghanistan.

Then there’s Iraq, it’s infrastructure systematically destroyed in a war which it seems to you had nothing to do with the West except to humiliate another strong Arab leader. In the runup to that war you saw foreign troops stationed near the holy sites of Islam at the insistence of the US despite Saudi Arabia’s reluctance and warnings that doing so would be deeply offensive to conservative Muslims - which it was. (One thus offended being Osama bin Laden.)

For 10 years you have seen the bombing of Iraq continue, so much so that a few months ago a Pentagon press representative referred to one such raid as “routine.” Sanctions imposed by the West have cost the lives (by UN estimate) of 500,000 Iraqi children over the last 10 years, a death toll which then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright described in 1996 as “worth it.” Worth it, yes, you say - as long as it’s Arab children who are doing the dying. [I noted later that some sources dispute that total, saying it may have been “only” 370,000.]

And you see the US justify both the bombing and the sanctions on the grounds that Iraq “defies UN resolutions” while at the same time it pours billions of dollars in economic and military aid into Israel despite the fact that for 30 years Israel has openly defied UN resolutions about Palestinians and the occupied territories. It’s not even so much that the US supports Israel, it’s that the US does it to the detriment, the denigration, the denial, of the Palestinians.

If that was your world, what would the West, what would the US, look like to you? Like a noble friend? Or like a selfish, conceited, arrogant bully which figures it can do as it damn well pleases without cost to itself? And amid all this, what is the only force that has offered you hope, offered you help, offered you a model that has defied the West, offered you self-respect? Islamic fundamentalism. Seen through such eyes, the question “Why do they hate us?” answers itself.

This doesn’t mean excusing the terrorists who brought such ruin and pain to the streets of New York on September 11. We are all responsible for what we do and their acts deserve nothing but condemnation: Understanding does not mean approving.

What it does mean is that our best targets for “attack” in this “extended campaign” are not the actual terrorists (who likely number no more than a few thousand) but the tens of thousands, the millions, among who they recruit and from who they draw their strength. Our best weapons are bread and butter, not bombs; our best tactic reconstruction, not retaliation; our best strategy justice, not jingoism. The best way to minimize terrorism is to ensure that the dispossessed have a genuine stake in the world and don’t see us as grasping bullies - and the best way not to be seen as a grasping bully is not to be one.

These last two aren't complete pieces but excerpts. The first is from a letter to The Nation dated October 16, replying to a column by Eric Alterman in which he condemned some unnamed folks for their reactions to 9/11, saying they should be “rejected for reasons of honor and pragmatism.”

In any political dispute, it is a dreadful tactical mistake - one of which the left has been too often guilty - to let your opponents define the terms of debate. By decrying “the refusal to draw [a] line” between “principled dissent” and an ill-defined “‘Hate America’ left” Alterman effectively acknowledges that questions about our patriotism - however we individually define the word - are proper ones and thus repeats this same blunder. His proposed course of action does not defuse the right’s attack, it legitimizes it.

If “patriotism requires no apologies,” neither should it require conscious demonstration. Instead of trying to prove we are part of “responsible debate” by slicing others out of that range, we should simply assume that we are and act on that basis. I’ve long maintained that the left in this country has been at its strongest and most influential when we have spoken the truth as we understand it without giving a flying damn if anyone was offended or not. Our task must be to present ourselves and what we believe, clearly, strongly, unreservedly, and unashamedly. Time and energy wasted defensively declaring what we don’t believe are just that - and we’ve little enough of either to start with.

Finally, an excerpt from a December 24 letter to Mother Jones. Todd Gitlin, still living off his radical credentials from the '60s, had written a piece blasting what he called the "blame America first" crowd, the single requirement for membership seemingly being not sharing his resurgent sense of flag-waving patriotism.

As deeply as I mourn the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, as much as I admire the dedication of the firefighters and rescue workers, the EMTs and RNs, who rushed to get to the place everyone else rushed to get away from, as hard a wrench as I felt the first time I saw the post-attack profile of New York (with sky where the twin towers should’ve been), I still insist that the question for us as Americans is not, cannot be, what Osama bin Laden could have or should now think or do differently, but what we could have or should now think or do differently. The clock of history did not start on September 11 and refusing to face our own complicity in creating and maintaining the conditions of desperation-driven fanaticism in which such as al-Qaeda can take root and grow (and continue to recruit) is the surest way we as a nation can guarantee a continuation of terrorism directed against us.

I have to say that on the whole I think these thoughts and predictions have held up pretty well. Certainly better than those of Alterman and Gitlin (and a fair number of others we could name, I expect). Do you disagree? Say so and say why.

Footnote: For another perspective on patriotism, try this.

Once more with feeling

I just wanted to quickly repeat what I said a few posts down that posting here will be very scanty for the month of September and folks probably shouldn't bother looking here more than once a week.

Every time I think "I should say something about that" - such as Barack Obama's nauseating assertion that the "surge" has "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams" or the news that a county in Virginia is actively misinforming college students about their voting rights - I immediately think "But what I really should be doing is packing."

So I pack.

As I also said earlier, I do intend a renewed commitment to this thing come October 1, a commitment to having something posted every day, even if it's just one of my famous geek posts. I do think that what I put up here is worth reading (at least for the most part) but I also think there hasn't been enough to keep people coming back. I'm going to do my best to remedy that.

One thing that won't change is my tendency to focus far more on topics and events that are not filling the pages of the Big Blogs unless I think I have something to say or a perspective to add that is noticeably different from what is already out there. Put another way, I don't want to just be going, either directly or by implication via essentially carbon-copy content, "me, too" or "what so-and-so said." If I can't add anything, I'll just let it slide.

I'd better go pack something. See you soon.

Unimportant but I'll note it anyway

Just after 1 AM today, someone in Austin, Texas (I have a fair idea who) became my 50,000^th hit.

A small thing, I realize, but I still felt like making note of it.

(Actually, I passed 50,000 a while ago because I had a few thousand hits before I hooked up with Sitemeter, but this is the "official" crossing of that line.)

And BTW, yes I am both furious and frightened by what's been going on in St. Paul - frightened, I will say, less by the brutality, illegality, and conceited arrogance of the cops than by the cavalier attitude of the mainstream press (which is largely content to limit itself to what the cops and the city government hand them) and the almost ghoulish indifference to the implications displayed by way too many among the public (who either shrug it off as not worth noticing or, worse, celebrate the cops' assaults on both conscience and the Constitution).

There is one thing that keeps me going at times like this: historical perspective. I have recently read two books about the battle for civil liberties in 20^th century America, one spanning the majority of the century and using the history of the ACLU as an organizing theme, the other concentrating on the debate over free speech in wartime during and after World War I, with the case of Eugene Debs the central focus.

The lesson I take from those two books is that things can be worse. Indeed, things have been worse and not all that long ago in historical terms. But we survived and even managed to expand our rights over time. Sometimes it was the result of the "aroused populace" we so often invoke. Other times it was legal battles. Other times it was just that it was other times and society had changed until the legal details had no choice but to get dragged along.

So yes there are dark times ahead, made darker by the pompous dismissal of "old styles of protesting" by some who damn well should know better but are too wrapped up in their sense of "importance" to the campaign of Barack Obama (or whoever would be the "liberal" Democratic standard-bearer of the moment) to think it through. But remember that the title of this blog includes the phrase "surviving a dark time." Ultimately, I think, I believe, we will. But it will not be easy and the darkness will not be lifted by an Obama win. It will be a struggle.

Even so, there can be happiness in the fight. Let's make sure that at the end, we can say with Joe Rauh, "tell them how much fun it was."