Current events limn with absolute clarity the reasons why the American public is the worst-informed citizenry in the civilized world.
Most Americans get most of their "news" from television. The revolution in Egypt makes for great television because it offers so many startling images -- protesters scrambling aboard the tanks sent to suppress them, Molotov cocktails exploding against vehicles, dead bodies, bloodied faces, dramatic clouds of tear gas, evil muslims doing their nasty stuff on prayer rugs, military jets flying menacingly over Cairo. . . the producers must be wetting themselves with joy. Meanwhile, the talking heads and the analysts they bring in to answer their feeble questions, manage to get the story totally wrong even as the images flicker and fascinate in the background.
To correct just a few of their falsehoods: This is not an Islamic uprising. The protesters are from every walk of Egyptian life and every political and religious persuasion except blind support of the U.S. puppet dictator Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood is a small but extremely outspoken Islamist sect that has a stake, but not a controlling one, in the revolution. It is not the next al Qaeda, plotting to overthrow the United States by remote control from Cairo. The Egyptian revolution is spontaneous and grassroots; it is a not a creation of 'outside interests" funded by Hamas and Iran. The looters are not part of the revolution; when the police withdrew from public view they turned loose thugs and thieves to loot and plunder as a "lesson" about "anarchy" in the streets. The government did not shut down the internet and create a communications blackout, silencing cell phones and social media. The corporations that provide these services, such as Vodaphone, voluntarily shut them down at the behest of the Mubarak thuggery.
Corporations have an enormous stake in the Egyptian regime and are scrambling to cover their filthy rich asses against its now likely collapse. Boeing, via its Narus subsidiary in Sunnyvale, CA, equipped the dictatorship police with "Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)" hardware used by the regime to target and track dissenting communications over the Internet and mobile phones. The revolution spread far faster than the government's ability to track down and punish opposition figures, so the next step was to silence everything. The corporatocracy that rules America has its fingerprints all over the Mubarak dictatorship: one of its principal lobbyists in Washington is the Podesta group, consultant to giant corporations founded a quarter of a century ago by John Podesta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, and his brother, Tony; BAE Systems, General Dynamics, General Electric, Raytheon and Lockeed Martin prominently have sucked up billions of our tax dollars filtered through the Mubarak government to buy weapons and services to keep the despot in power.
You won't learn these things from Fox, CNN or network "news." You've got to monitor Al Jazeera and the BBC, and read the Guardian U.K. For a partial list of other sources worth consulting: http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2011/01/egypt-people-who-might-actually-know-what-theyre-talking-about.html.
* * *
The first producer of "60 Minutes" on CBS, Don Hewitt, and all of his reporters, were acolytes of Edward R. Murrow, the finest broadcast journalist ever to serve this country.
The "60 Minutes" broadcast last night, a hatchet job on Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, was a tragic disgrace to their legacy. Carefully editing more than six hours of interviews to reflect badly on Assange, it was a flagrant example of propaganda as journalism. A single scene serves as an indictment of the entire spectacle: the producers showed a snippet of the infamous "collateral murder" video -- but cut out the footage showing the murder of innocent people in a van.
The New York Observer's headline tells it best: "Who Put the 'BS' in CBS?"
* * *
Another example of the kind of journalism you don't get in this country, either on TV or in print, is the Guardian's clear, concise, brief analysis of our government's dilemma in Egypt, entitled, "White House Wobbles on Egyptian Tightrope."
"In the final analysis," it says, "The U.S. needs a friendly government in Cairo more than it needs a democratic one."
Throughout the Arab world, in response to events in Tunisia and Egypt, views of the common man expose the hypocrisy of that policy.
From Jordan comes the voice of Laith Shbillat:
"People want their freedom, people want their bread, people want to stop these lousy dictators from looting their countries. I'd follow anybody, I 'd follow Vladimir Lenin if he came and led me."
He quotes an Arab poet:
If one day a people desires to live,
Then Fate will answer their call.
And their night will then begin to fade,
And their chains break and fall."
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
Monday, January 31, 2011
Saturday, January 29, 2011
'The Long Night of Misery Is Just Beginning'
The Jasmine Revolution has delivered yet another smack in the face to the myth of American moral leadership in the so-called Free World.
The common people of Egypt have taken to the streets to try to bring down the U.S.puppet government of Hosni Mubarak, whose increasingly cruel 30-year rule has been sustained by American dollars, weapons and corporations.
Egypt's massive protests were fueled by the successful revolution in Tunisia which ended the 23-year dictatorship of the American-backed tyrant, President Ben Ali. They come amid similar, if as yet smaller, protests against the repressive U.S.- backed regimes in Jordan, Algeria and Yemen.
When the truncheons, riot shields and tear gas of his corrupt police failed to contain the uprising in Cairo and other cities, Mubarak called in the army whose weaponry he received from his United States benefactors.
[UPDATE: The following is from an AP report Saturday:
His grip on power was further challenged Saturday as the military that he had
deployed to take back control of the streets showed few signs of suppressing
the unrest, and in several cases the army took the side of the protesters in the
capital and the northern port city of Alexandria.
In the most striking instance, members of the army joined with a crowd of
thousands of protesters in a pitched battle against Egyptian security police
officers defending the Interior Ministry on Saturday afternoon.
Protesters crouched behind armored trucks as they advanced on the ministry
building, hurling rocks and a few Molotov cocktails and setting abandoned cars
on fire. But the soldiers providing cover for the advancing protesters refused their
pleas to open fire on the security police, while the police defending the ministry
battered the protesters with tear gas, buckshot and rubber bullets. There were
pools of blood in the streets as protesters carried a number of wounded back out
of their ranks]
Our London correspondent, a former Woodrow Wilson fellow and an award-winning contemporary historian, notes:
"The Arab 'street' is at last rebelling against repressive, tyrannical regimes put in place and kept in place by the U.S. They must be shitting themselves at Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon. How to 'we' prop up these dictators while maintaining the pretense of supporting freedom, democracy, self-determination etc? And how to 'we' do so without making the mass of the Arab world hate us even more?
"One has to laugh or cry."
Indeed, the Oz world inside the Beltway reverberates these days with those very questions as insiders across the political spectrum offer their solutions -- be more like Bush, be less like Bush, send more aid, cut off aid, teach 'them' more about Democracy. . . .They treat these events, as usual, like moves on a great global chess board for which the U.S. Empire makes the rules and decides who wins and who loses. Nowhere in any of these solutions does any expert exhibit the slightest concern about the people under the heel of these regimes, the people in the streets.
An opposition leader, Mohammed El Baradei, flew in from exile to join them. "Egypt," he said, "is one big prison."
A victim of that prison, who had been raped and tortured by Mubarak's corrupt police, was in the streets, too. "I hope Mubarak dies tonight," he shouted.
Mubarak dismissed his cabinet but vowed to stay on himself as president and to appoint a new government today (Saturday). "My government is stepping down," a protester said, "but I am not. The long night of misery is just beginning."
Some see El Baradei as a potential savior of Egypt. He is a former UN official and won a Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to the invasion of Iraq. But on the street his Peace Prize isn't worth a lot. "He should go and share a room with that asshole Ben Ali in his Jidah hotel," a protester said. El Baradei is thought of -- if he is thought of at all -- as a mere political opportunist by the people in the streets.
For three decades he has neither seen nor experienced their abject poverty. Eighty million people in Egypt are hopelessly poor, starving poor. Half the population lives on $2 a day or less. Ghada Shabander, a human rights activist, put it this way: "Egyptians are sick and tired of being corrupted, living on $51 a month. You have two choices: you either become a beggar or a thief. We are not beggars. And we do not want to become thieves." And someone who can afford a newspaper reads to them from a Cairo daily a report that one of Mubarak's top aides has fled the country with 97 suitcases stuffed with cash.
And America? America is the source of the tear gas canisters the police hurl into the protesting mobs. On the street, an Arab man with bruised face and bloody arms holds up a spent canister so that a western reporter can read its markings: "Made in the USA by Combined Tactical Systems, Jamestown, PA." Also made in the USA: the war gear of the troops surging today into Cairo, Suez, Alexandria, Luxor, Mahla and Manoura to put an end to the rising of the people.
Moral leadership, indeed.
The common people of Egypt have taken to the streets to try to bring down the U.S.puppet government of Hosni Mubarak, whose increasingly cruel 30-year rule has been sustained by American dollars, weapons and corporations.
Egypt's massive protests were fueled by the successful revolution in Tunisia which ended the 23-year dictatorship of the American-backed tyrant, President Ben Ali. They come amid similar, if as yet smaller, protests against the repressive U.S.- backed regimes in Jordan, Algeria and Yemen.
When the truncheons, riot shields and tear gas of his corrupt police failed to contain the uprising in Cairo and other cities, Mubarak called in the army whose weaponry he received from his United States benefactors.
[UPDATE: The following is from an AP report Saturday:
His grip on power was further challenged Saturday as the military that he had
deployed to take back control of the streets showed few signs of suppressing
the unrest, and in several cases the army took the side of the protesters in the
capital and the northern port city of Alexandria.
In the most striking instance, members of the army joined with a crowd of
thousands of protesters in a pitched battle against Egyptian security police
officers defending the Interior Ministry on Saturday afternoon.
Protesters crouched behind armored trucks as they advanced on the ministry
building, hurling rocks and a few Molotov cocktails and setting abandoned cars
on fire. But the soldiers providing cover for the advancing protesters refused their
pleas to open fire on the security police, while the police defending the ministry
battered the protesters with tear gas, buckshot and rubber bullets. There were
pools of blood in the streets as protesters carried a number of wounded back out
of their ranks]
Our London correspondent, a former Woodrow Wilson fellow and an award-winning contemporary historian, notes:
"The Arab 'street' is at last rebelling against repressive, tyrannical regimes put in place and kept in place by the U.S. They must be shitting themselves at Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon. How to 'we' prop up these dictators while maintaining the pretense of supporting freedom, democracy, self-determination etc? And how to 'we' do so without making the mass of the Arab world hate us even more?
"One has to laugh or cry."
Indeed, the Oz world inside the Beltway reverberates these days with those very questions as insiders across the political spectrum offer their solutions -- be more like Bush, be less like Bush, send more aid, cut off aid, teach 'them' more about Democracy. . . .They treat these events, as usual, like moves on a great global chess board for which the U.S. Empire makes the rules and decides who wins and who loses. Nowhere in any of these solutions does any expert exhibit the slightest concern about the people under the heel of these regimes, the people in the streets.
An opposition leader, Mohammed El Baradei, flew in from exile to join them. "Egypt," he said, "is one big prison."
A victim of that prison, who had been raped and tortured by Mubarak's corrupt police, was in the streets, too. "I hope Mubarak dies tonight," he shouted.
Mubarak dismissed his cabinet but vowed to stay on himself as president and to appoint a new government today (Saturday). "My government is stepping down," a protester said, "but I am not. The long night of misery is just beginning."
Some see El Baradei as a potential savior of Egypt. He is a former UN official and won a Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to the invasion of Iraq. But on the street his Peace Prize isn't worth a lot. "He should go and share a room with that asshole Ben Ali in his Jidah hotel," a protester said. El Baradei is thought of -- if he is thought of at all -- as a mere political opportunist by the people in the streets.
For three decades he has neither seen nor experienced their abject poverty. Eighty million people in Egypt are hopelessly poor, starving poor. Half the population lives on $2 a day or less. Ghada Shabander, a human rights activist, put it this way: "Egyptians are sick and tired of being corrupted, living on $51 a month. You have two choices: you either become a beggar or a thief. We are not beggars. And we do not want to become thieves." And someone who can afford a newspaper reads to them from a Cairo daily a report that one of Mubarak's top aides has fled the country with 97 suitcases stuffed with cash.
And America? America is the source of the tear gas canisters the police hurl into the protesting mobs. On the street, an Arab man with bruised face and bloody arms holds up a spent canister so that a western reporter can read its markings: "Made in the USA by Combined Tactical Systems, Jamestown, PA." Also made in the USA: the war gear of the troops surging today into Cairo, Suez, Alexandria, Luxor, Mahla and Manoura to put an end to the rising of the people.
Moral leadership, indeed.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
How, Then, to Deal With This Beast We Feed?
The American empire, like all others before it, is doomed to fall. Acknowledgment of that fate was implicit in Dr. Franklin's warning that the democratic republic he helped form would endure only "if you can keep it." The founders divorced their new republic from the British empire and did not aspire to empire for themselves or their progeny. It is we, the people, who have failed to keep what we were given.
What course is open to us now? Chris Hedges, one of the few keepers of contemporary history who fully understands what we have done to ourselves, prescribes a course of growing civil disobedience. To follow this course we must be prepared, like Ghandi and King, to suffer incarceration, abuse and pain. But few of America's vast and privileged middle class are willing to endure such sufferings even if to restore democracy, even as their "class" disappears around them.
We live under an iron fist of little minds and great wealth. Edmund Burke warned Britannia that "great empire and little minds go ill together." In our conduct of public affairs, we Americans pay no mind to history. And so, as Bernard De Voto observed three quarters of a century ago, "American empire careens toward its unpredicted end."
The question, I guess, is, will the people of these United States take a hand in their own fate? And, if so, how will they go about it? When will they begin to assert themselves? What remains in their power to turn the course of the ship of state?
First, of course, there must be an awakening to what has already happened. The last great empire to fall, the Soviet Union, imploded when people under its yoke began to learn the truth about the modern world and reacted to it. We as a people have had constant access to truth and turned our backs to it. One important example: we have been shown the evidence that government alone can assure adequate health care for all of its citizens, yet collectively we choose to believe in death panels and an ogre called "socialized medicine" -- and to just let our fellow citizens die.
Corporations wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of Midas or Khan, and controlled by a relative handful of oligarchs, have revised the vocabulary of public discourse to the extent that we no longer speak plain English to or about one another. They own our fate because they own not just every aspect of our government but the very ways in which we communicate with one another.
Even if we, as a people, understood and renounced this; even if we, as a people, achieved a common will to overthrow the corporatocracy that oppresses us, how would we go about it? Has any peoples' revolution in history confronted such enormous wealth and power?
We, the people, have plenty of guns. But could an armed revolution succeed in today's United States any better than, say, the Hungarian revolution of 1956 against the might of the Soviet empire? Obviously not. Glocks with big magazines can kill our fellow citizens, but will not fell Exxon Mobile or Goldman Sachs.
Millions of Americans who want and need to work are jobless. Millions of baby boomers, when they reach retirement age, will have no social safety net to sustain them. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will vanish under the weight of a debt created by the empire's endless pursuit of war, mindlessly funded by a congress owned by the military-industrial corporatocracy.
Impoverished, lacking adequate medical care, ill-educated, self-deluded, short sighted, small-minded, blinded by prejudice and oppressed by oligarchy, how can a people rise up and take control of its own destiny?
Oligarchies, like kingdoms, may indeed be clay, as Antony remarked to Cleopatra. But this empire will not melt into the Tiber, nor will its wide arch of ranged empire simply fall.
It will be conquered by another, stronger, smarter empire, not by force of arms, but by force of economics. Or it will be toppled by its own people in a tsunami of return to self-governance.
But are the American people capable of that?
What course is open to us now? Chris Hedges, one of the few keepers of contemporary history who fully understands what we have done to ourselves, prescribes a course of growing civil disobedience. To follow this course we must be prepared, like Ghandi and King, to suffer incarceration, abuse and pain. But few of America's vast and privileged middle class are willing to endure such sufferings even if to restore democracy, even as their "class" disappears around them.
We live under an iron fist of little minds and great wealth. Edmund Burke warned Britannia that "great empire and little minds go ill together." In our conduct of public affairs, we Americans pay no mind to history. And so, as Bernard De Voto observed three quarters of a century ago, "American empire careens toward its unpredicted end."
The question, I guess, is, will the people of these United States take a hand in their own fate? And, if so, how will they go about it? When will they begin to assert themselves? What remains in their power to turn the course of the ship of state?
First, of course, there must be an awakening to what has already happened. The last great empire to fall, the Soviet Union, imploded when people under its yoke began to learn the truth about the modern world and reacted to it. We as a people have had constant access to truth and turned our backs to it. One important example: we have been shown the evidence that government alone can assure adequate health care for all of its citizens, yet collectively we choose to believe in death panels and an ogre called "socialized medicine" -- and to just let our fellow citizens die.
Corporations wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of Midas or Khan, and controlled by a relative handful of oligarchs, have revised the vocabulary of public discourse to the extent that we no longer speak plain English to or about one another. They own our fate because they own not just every aspect of our government but the very ways in which we communicate with one another.
Even if we, as a people, understood and renounced this; even if we, as a people, achieved a common will to overthrow the corporatocracy that oppresses us, how would we go about it? Has any peoples' revolution in history confronted such enormous wealth and power?
We, the people, have plenty of guns. But could an armed revolution succeed in today's United States any better than, say, the Hungarian revolution of 1956 against the might of the Soviet empire? Obviously not. Glocks with big magazines can kill our fellow citizens, but will not fell Exxon Mobile or Goldman Sachs.
Millions of Americans who want and need to work are jobless. Millions of baby boomers, when they reach retirement age, will have no social safety net to sustain them. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will vanish under the weight of a debt created by the empire's endless pursuit of war, mindlessly funded by a congress owned by the military-industrial corporatocracy.
Impoverished, lacking adequate medical care, ill-educated, self-deluded, short sighted, small-minded, blinded by prejudice and oppressed by oligarchy, how can a people rise up and take control of its own destiny?
Oligarchies, like kingdoms, may indeed be clay, as Antony remarked to Cleopatra. But this empire will not melt into the Tiber, nor will its wide arch of ranged empire simply fall.
It will be conquered by another, stronger, smarter empire, not by force of arms, but by force of economics. Or it will be toppled by its own people in a tsunami of return to self-governance.
But are the American people capable of that?
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Kimmy and Johnny and Dr. Kidglove and All the Good News
Kim Clisters, a really nice kid who plays pretty good tennis for a Momma, was struggling to put away the Polish girl after winning the first set easily in the Australian Open quarterfinals.
"The State of the Union is on! ," my soul mate and social planner said. "Turn it on."
I risked civil disobedience. I didn't know how this second set was going to end; I knew exactly the kind of bullshit Dr. Kidglove was delivering. More articulate, for sure, than George Bush's bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless. So I stayed tuned to the tennis.
One hates to be an uninformed citizen, however. I read Dr. Kidglove's text today.
The head of the United States of Goldman Sachs, Corporatocracy Inc. and the Empire of Endless War called John Boehner a working class hero and declared that we as Americans "share . . . a common creed." Has he repealed freedom of religion? He celebrated because "Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back, corporate profits are up." Golly Gee, happy are we who thanks to that roaring stock market have recouped nearly 10% of what we lost in the great recession!
Whoopee Dee, whee, whee, whee that corporations, which are really just people, just like you and me, are making bigger profits. I'll bet that Exxon person, who was the most profitable corporation in the history of money even before he (she?) became a person, will put another hundred million or so into the pockets of degree-holders willing to become change-denying climate science whores. Never mind whether they have any actual expertise in climate science.
Climate change -- which is merely the biggest threat to human health and welfare since the development of the atomic bomb -- didn't even rate a mention in Dr. Kidglove's corporate-sanitized oratorical Librium. He rhapodized about how the fishing has improved without mentioning that the dam was breaking upstream.
His ecstasy about corporate profit left no room to mention unemployment, either. The offricial rate in this country is close to 10 per cent, but the real rate is probably closer to 20 per cent if you count all the starving workers doing part-time jobs or those who have been unemployed so long that they've quit looking for work. Are the jobless still part of the union?
Dr. Kidglove patted himself and his Republican playmates on the back for preserving the tax cuts for the richest two per cent of us and celebrated that greatest of all national myths, The American Dream. Once upon a time home ownership was part of that dream.
Dr. Kidglove did not mention the bleak fact that in the year just ended, Americans purchased fewer new homes than in any year in the last half-century. Sales for all of 2010 totaled 321,000, a drop of 14.4 percent from the 375,000 homes sold in 2009.It was the fifth consecutive year that sales have declined after hitting record highs for the five previous years.
Nor did he mention the record rate of foreclosures -- many of them illegal -- on the homes that were sold during those record high years.
In Melbourne, Kimmy finally closed out that second set, thanks as much to her opponent's unforced errors as to her own good play.
But a win is a win is a win and she's a nice kid.
Makes ya feel good, ya know?
"The State of the Union is on! ," my soul mate and social planner said. "Turn it on."
I risked civil disobedience. I didn't know how this second set was going to end; I knew exactly the kind of bullshit Dr. Kidglove was delivering. More articulate, for sure, than George Bush's bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless. So I stayed tuned to the tennis.
One hates to be an uninformed citizen, however. I read Dr. Kidglove's text today.
The head of the United States of Goldman Sachs, Corporatocracy Inc. and the Empire of Endless War called John Boehner a working class hero and declared that we as Americans "share . . . a common creed." Has he repealed freedom of religion? He celebrated because "Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back, corporate profits are up." Golly Gee, happy are we who thanks to that roaring stock market have recouped nearly 10% of what we lost in the great recession!
Whoopee Dee, whee, whee, whee that corporations, which are really just people, just like you and me, are making bigger profits. I'll bet that Exxon person, who was the most profitable corporation in the history of money even before he (she?) became a person, will put another hundred million or so into the pockets of degree-holders willing to become change-denying climate science whores. Never mind whether they have any actual expertise in climate science.
Climate change -- which is merely the biggest threat to human health and welfare since the development of the atomic bomb -- didn't even rate a mention in Dr. Kidglove's corporate-sanitized oratorical Librium. He rhapodized about how the fishing has improved without mentioning that the dam was breaking upstream.
His ecstasy about corporate profit left no room to mention unemployment, either. The offricial rate in this country is close to 10 per cent, but the real rate is probably closer to 20 per cent if you count all the starving workers doing part-time jobs or those who have been unemployed so long that they've quit looking for work. Are the jobless still part of the union?
Dr. Kidglove patted himself and his Republican playmates on the back for preserving the tax cuts for the richest two per cent of us and celebrated that greatest of all national myths, The American Dream. Once upon a time home ownership was part of that dream.
Dr. Kidglove did not mention the bleak fact that in the year just ended, Americans purchased fewer new homes than in any year in the last half-century. Sales for all of 2010 totaled 321,000, a drop of 14.4 percent from the 375,000 homes sold in 2009.It was the fifth consecutive year that sales have declined after hitting record highs for the five previous years.
Nor did he mention the record rate of foreclosures -- many of them illegal -- on the homes that were sold during those record high years.
In Melbourne, Kimmy finally closed out that second set, thanks as much to her opponent's unforced errors as to her own good play.
But a win is a win is a win and she's a nice kid.
Makes ya feel good, ya know?
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
News Item: Clarence Says, "Oops!"
Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas said he had misunderstood the filing and reporting instructions when he failed for 13 years to properly disclose his wife's income on federal financial forms. The justice then formally amended each of his forms, spanning the years 1997-2009, the accurate contents of which are required from the justices under the Ethics in Government Act.
His acknowledgment came after Common Cause disclosed he had failed to report nearly $700,000 of his wife's income from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank at which Virginia Thomas worked from 2003 to 2007.
"It has come to my attention," Justice Thomas wrote Monday to federal officials, "that information regarding my spouse's employment required in Part III B of my financial disclosure report was inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions."
There was no comment about his misunderstanding of the Fourteenth Amendment which resulted in his casting the decisive vote in the Citizens United case holding that corporations are people, and Constitutionally entitled to buy as many elections as they can afford.
His acknowledgment came after Common Cause disclosed he had failed to report nearly $700,000 of his wife's income from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank at which Virginia Thomas worked from 2003 to 2007.
"It has come to my attention," Justice Thomas wrote Monday to federal officials, "that information regarding my spouse's employment required in Part III B of my financial disclosure report was inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions."
There was no comment about his misunderstanding of the Fourteenth Amendment which resulted in his casting the decisive vote in the Citizens United case holding that corporations are people, and Constitutionally entitled to buy as many elections as they can afford.
News Item: A Chicago Judge Goes Caroling
No go, no go, Emanuel,
I deem you are not mayoral.
You haven't lived in Chi a year
And so your name cannot appear.
We'll vote we'll vote, Emanuel
For others with less capital.
I deem you are not mayoral.
You haven't lived in Chi a year
And so your name cannot appear.
We'll vote we'll vote, Emanuel
For others with less capital.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Democracy to Corporatocracy. Truth to Mythology. Let Us Pray.
The American vox populi feeds on myth. It is intolerant of dissent and of uncomfortable truths.
This is why the democracy of the Founding Fathers has vanished unnoticed and unlamented. Soon, truth of any kind will vanish as well.
Illicit governments historically thrived only for as long as they could prevent truth from reaching the ears and minds of their citizens. It was not the actor Reagan's playing the role of Joshua in front of the Berlin Wall that brought down the Soviet Union. It was the emerging communications technology that could leap over the Iron Curtain and beam truth directly to the people of the Soviet enislement. The most myth-dependent of Americans cherish the belief that Reagan blew the trumpet that made the walls come tumblin' down.
But the Reagan myth's parallels with the Biblical myth of Jericho are not mere coincidence; many of the most firmly rooted myths in America's political culture spring from the country's religiosity. Others, like the myth of American exceptionalism, are rooted in the tragically flawed narrative of American history that has traditionally been taught in our schools, airbrushing away the human flaws of our white male heroes, whitewashing black slavery, glorifying the brutal suppression of the original Americans and transmogrifying the bloated American war machine into an instrument of freedom.
Inevitably such childish addiction to myth -- like carrying a belief in Santa Clause, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny into adulthood -- produces an emotionally-crippled populace incapable of accepting and dealing with reality.
And so millions still deny the corporatocracy America has become, even after the Supreme Court Gang of Five, in collusion with the extraction Midases named Koch, gave it official sanction with the Citizens United decision.
And millions look the other way -- indeed, even cheer their own derogation -- as our illicit government slowly strips us of access to truth. It is a government increasingly controlled by those who deny science such as anthropogenic global climate change or human evolution; who are sustained in office by instilling fear in the citizenry; who sell their souls to corporations, especially those corporations that suck obscene profits from our perpetual war machine; and, most of all, who pluck the national harp strings of our desperate belief in myths.
Little by little, truth-tellers are being driven from the temples of big-corporation journalism. Even NPR bowed to corporate pressure and tried to silence Bill Moyers. More and more of our mainstream media are controlled by fewer and fewer of the richest of corporate profiteers. The ink had barely dried on the government's blessing of the obscene Comcast-NBC union when Keith Olberman's head rolled. He was the first and for years the only broadcast antidote to the lies and propaganda of Fox and the rest of the Murdoch media empire.
Seekers after truth who had time and patience could always venture into the world wide web, filter the enormous ocean of information, good and bad, out there, and accumulate grains of truth.
Now the FCC, the illicit government's enfeebled watchdog over the communications industry, has sanctioned the "right" of giants like Murdoch and Comcast-NBC to refuse to open the gates of cyberspace to information they do not like. With deliberate speed, with relentless determination, enormously rich and powerful corporations are squeezing truth out of the public domain.
Too soon, truth, like democracy, will have vanished from our bleak landscape. Vox populi will be left with only myth to feed upon.
Will they then invoke a prophetic phrase from a great repository of their own mythology? "Forgive them, Father," it goes, "for they know not what they do."
This is why the democracy of the Founding Fathers has vanished unnoticed and unlamented. Soon, truth of any kind will vanish as well.
Illicit governments historically thrived only for as long as they could prevent truth from reaching the ears and minds of their citizens. It was not the actor Reagan's playing the role of Joshua in front of the Berlin Wall that brought down the Soviet Union. It was the emerging communications technology that could leap over the Iron Curtain and beam truth directly to the people of the Soviet enislement. The most myth-dependent of Americans cherish the belief that Reagan blew the trumpet that made the walls come tumblin' down.
But the Reagan myth's parallels with the Biblical myth of Jericho are not mere coincidence; many of the most firmly rooted myths in America's political culture spring from the country's religiosity. Others, like the myth of American exceptionalism, are rooted in the tragically flawed narrative of American history that has traditionally been taught in our schools, airbrushing away the human flaws of our white male heroes, whitewashing black slavery, glorifying the brutal suppression of the original Americans and transmogrifying the bloated American war machine into an instrument of freedom.
Inevitably such childish addiction to myth -- like carrying a belief in Santa Clause, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny into adulthood -- produces an emotionally-crippled populace incapable of accepting and dealing with reality.
And so millions still deny the corporatocracy America has become, even after the Supreme Court Gang of Five, in collusion with the extraction Midases named Koch, gave it official sanction with the Citizens United decision.
And millions look the other way -- indeed, even cheer their own derogation -- as our illicit government slowly strips us of access to truth. It is a government increasingly controlled by those who deny science such as anthropogenic global climate change or human evolution; who are sustained in office by instilling fear in the citizenry; who sell their souls to corporations, especially those corporations that suck obscene profits from our perpetual war machine; and, most of all, who pluck the national harp strings of our desperate belief in myths.
Little by little, truth-tellers are being driven from the temples of big-corporation journalism. Even NPR bowed to corporate pressure and tried to silence Bill Moyers. More and more of our mainstream media are controlled by fewer and fewer of the richest of corporate profiteers. The ink had barely dried on the government's blessing of the obscene Comcast-NBC union when Keith Olberman's head rolled. He was the first and for years the only broadcast antidote to the lies and propaganda of Fox and the rest of the Murdoch media empire.
Seekers after truth who had time and patience could always venture into the world wide web, filter the enormous ocean of information, good and bad, out there, and accumulate grains of truth.
Now the FCC, the illicit government's enfeebled watchdog over the communications industry, has sanctioned the "right" of giants like Murdoch and Comcast-NBC to refuse to open the gates of cyberspace to information they do not like. With deliberate speed, with relentless determination, enormously rich and powerful corporations are squeezing truth out of the public domain.
Too soon, truth, like democracy, will have vanished from our bleak landscape. Vox populi will be left with only myth to feed upon.
Will they then invoke a prophetic phrase from a great repository of their own mythology? "Forgive them, Father," it goes, "for they know not what they do."
Friday, January 21, 2011
If Spunk Were Eggs, We'd All Eat Omelets
Say this for the handful of true progressives in American political life: they've got spunk.
It's a pity that the likes of Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich have no option in party affiliation except to align themselves with the gutless Milquetoasts who call themselves Democrats. But such is political reality in the two-party system of the former democracy called the United States. They have to lie down with dogs and accept fleas like the so-called health care reform act, which passed only after it was so modified that it merely perpetuates the crimes it set out to reform. Dean and Kucinich ultimately supported it because, for a complicated set of reasons, they perceived it as slightly better than nothing at all.
In his working class district of Ohio, Kucinich has retained his seat in Congress in successive elections despite enormous sums of money spent by the Republicans in vain efforts to buy enough votes to oust him. But if they failed at the ballot box, the Republicans now will get rid of Kucinich by the massive scam called redistricting.
Under the law, each state gains or loses seats every ten years according to its new population as determined by the U.S. Census. Because Ohio lost population, it is required to redraw its Congressional districts later this year.
Here's what Kucinich said in a recent letter to constituents:
My district might be eliminated. We need to begin to work now to prepare for what is sure to be a major effort to silence your voice. As you know, my work in Congress has never been about me. It's about the hopes and aspirations of the people of the 10th district and the people of our Nation.
I don't know where my district will be. But I owe it to you and to all those who have ever supported me to not sit idly while questions are being raised in every major media outlet about whether I will be forced out of Congress by redistricting. I will not let any special interests force me out. Your support will ensure that the debate - on issues as important as ending the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, implementing single-payer healthcare, and remaking our economy for Main Street not Wall Street - will continue.
I'm not going to let our voices and our movement be abolished by the stroke of a pen. There's too much at stake. This is the time to stand up and speak out. And based on the support and responses I've seen so far, I know you're right there with me.
Good luck, Dennis. Hell, I remember the afternoon a friend plunked down two bucks at the parimutuel window in Liberty Bell park for a "win" ticket on a 1,000-to-one shot, the longest odds in the history of the venue. The nag won and my friend took his bride out to dinner at Le Bec Fin.
And here's Dean:
The question is still what kind of country do we want to live in?
Republicans often play to the worst impulses in human nature and separate people from each other, scapegoating minority groups and dismantling our community support systems. We have a better answer.
We know what we believe.
We believe in community. We care about our neighbors and we help each other. We can provide a bright future to our children with a quality education and we can provide a secure retirement free from poverty and dependence for our grandparents. And we can accomplish it within a reasonable budget so we don't leave a burden of debt on the next generation. Democrats are responsible and balance budgets. Democrats lift up the community and make sure that everyone has a chance for a future.
We believe in security. We will foster strong partnerships with other nations to ensure the secure and safe prosperity for all. We will reduce our dependence on resources that make us vulnerable to attack. We will use our American ingenuity to strengthen our own economy and our environment. We won't start wars of choice and then perpetuate them to keep the military contractors in business. We will fund schools and investment in green jobs over funding bombers and missile defense our military doesn't need or even want.
We believe in liberty. We respect every American's right to practice their own religion and to live a life free from bigotry, abuse, and harassment. We will fight discrimination and deliver on the promise of equality for all Americans. We believe that no one, not multinational corporations nor the government, has the right to your personal information to keep tabs on you for profit or unwarranted policing.
We believe in community, security and liberty and we will never back down.
Truly, they won't quit. But how often do thousand-to-one shots win? Don't make your dinner reservations yet.
It's a pity that the likes of Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich have no option in party affiliation except to align themselves with the gutless Milquetoasts who call themselves Democrats. But such is political reality in the two-party system of the former democracy called the United States. They have to lie down with dogs and accept fleas like the so-called health care reform act, which passed only after it was so modified that it merely perpetuates the crimes it set out to reform. Dean and Kucinich ultimately supported it because, for a complicated set of reasons, they perceived it as slightly better than nothing at all.
In his working class district of Ohio, Kucinich has retained his seat in Congress in successive elections despite enormous sums of money spent by the Republicans in vain efforts to buy enough votes to oust him. But if they failed at the ballot box, the Republicans now will get rid of Kucinich by the massive scam called redistricting.
Under the law, each state gains or loses seats every ten years according to its new population as determined by the U.S. Census. Because Ohio lost population, it is required to redraw its Congressional districts later this year.
Here's what Kucinich said in a recent letter to constituents:
My district might be eliminated. We need to begin to work now to prepare for what is sure to be a major effort to silence your voice. As you know, my work in Congress has never been about me. It's about the hopes and aspirations of the people of the 10th district and the people of our Nation.
I don't know where my district will be. But I owe it to you and to all those who have ever supported me to not sit idly while questions are being raised in every major media outlet about whether I will be forced out of Congress by redistricting. I will not let any special interests force me out. Your support will ensure that the debate - on issues as important as ending the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, implementing single-payer healthcare, and remaking our economy for Main Street not Wall Street - will continue.
I'm not going to let our voices and our movement be abolished by the stroke of a pen. There's too much at stake. This is the time to stand up and speak out. And based on the support and responses I've seen so far, I know you're right there with me.
Good luck, Dennis. Hell, I remember the afternoon a friend plunked down two bucks at the parimutuel window in Liberty Bell park for a "win" ticket on a 1,000-to-one shot, the longest odds in the history of the venue. The nag won and my friend took his bride out to dinner at Le Bec Fin.
And here's Dean:
The question is still what kind of country do we want to live in?
Republicans often play to the worst impulses in human nature and separate people from each other, scapegoating minority groups and dismantling our community support systems. We have a better answer.
We know what we believe.
We believe in community. We care about our neighbors and we help each other. We can provide a bright future to our children with a quality education and we can provide a secure retirement free from poverty and dependence for our grandparents. And we can accomplish it within a reasonable budget so we don't leave a burden of debt on the next generation. Democrats are responsible and balance budgets. Democrats lift up the community and make sure that everyone has a chance for a future.
We believe in security. We will foster strong partnerships with other nations to ensure the secure and safe prosperity for all. We will reduce our dependence on resources that make us vulnerable to attack. We will use our American ingenuity to strengthen our own economy and our environment. We won't start wars of choice and then perpetuate them to keep the military contractors in business. We will fund schools and investment in green jobs over funding bombers and missile defense our military doesn't need or even want.
We believe in liberty. We respect every American's right to practice their own religion and to live a life free from bigotry, abuse, and harassment. We will fight discrimination and deliver on the promise of equality for all Americans. We believe that no one, not multinational corporations nor the government, has the right to your personal information to keep tabs on you for profit or unwarranted policing.
We believe in community, security and liberty and we will never back down.
Truly, they won't quit. But how often do thousand-to-one shots win? Don't make your dinner reservations yet.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Out of the Phone Booth and into Cyberspace
Going to lunch with the late Tad Szulc was better than going to the theater.
Tad and I were colleagues at the New York Times Washington Bureau during the Nixon administration. Between them, Tad and the late Pete Willett of United Press (who is another story entirely) knew every single person in the world who was in any way worth knowing, or so it seemed.
Tad was born in Czechoslovakia, lived all over the world, and spoke half a dozen or more languages fluently. Frequently we would lunch at a restaurant favored by the embassy crowd. Tad would scan the room, taking note of who was lunching with whom, then signal the Captain to take us to his personal table. From there he would decide which tables to visit between lunch and desert. Like a devoted puppy, I would follow him on his table-hopping rounds, watching him converse in most of the languages he commanded, with diplomats whose names were the fodder of headlines all over the world. Over desert, he'd tell me what he'd heard and we'd talk about the stories to pursue.
We'd also lunch at out-of-the-way little restaurants that only Tad and a select few other citizens of the world knew about, where the food was recherché and the lighting was dim. En route to one of these one day, Tad paused outside a downtown DC drugstore and said, "Wait here just a moment for me, please, Tomas, I've got to go in and pick up some secret documents." He entered the store, chose a certain phone booth, went inside and emerged with a manilla envelope, whose contents he scrutinized in the dim light of the restaurant.
It contained the bill of lading of a ship called the Padma and it gave Tad a worldwide scoop on how the CIA was secretly violating our own government's ban by shipping illegal arms to Pakistan.
Tad was a master of a commonplace journalistic skill back in those days: cultivation of sources who could provide the classified documents that penetrated the veil of secrecy behind which governments like to operate. It was because that skill is so scarce among today's so-called journalists, who see themselves as stenographers for government propagandists, that somebody had to begin doing what Julian Assange does.
As our government has intensified its campaign to demonize the founder of WikiLeaks, the stenographers of our mainstream media have willingly turned against a man whose efforts they once supported and now offer him up for sacrifice in the name of national security.
"Journalistic" agencies like the National Press Club, the Overseas Press Club (whose only redeeming social value is that it once employed a bartender who made the world's finest martini), and the AP (which has no redeeming social value) have agonized, reassessed and concluded that Assange isn't really a journalist and so is not entitled to the First Amendment protection that real journalists enjoy.
Among the canards these mainstreamers propagate is this: Assange "recklessly" endangers people and policies by "willy-nilly" (Real Journalist and Stenographer Bob Woodward's phrase) making public certain of the 250,000 secret cables that have produced so many major news stories in the last two months.
What the blood-lusters overlook is the real manner in which the once-secret cables, documents and videos become public. Assange simply plays the role of whomever left that manilla envelope taped under the seat of the drug store phone booth for Tad Szulc to find. Assange obtains the documents, and makes them available to a select few prestigious journalistic institutions like our New York Times, the UK's Guardian, Germany's Der Spiegel, etc. They perform Tad's journalistic function, deciding what to publish, verifying it, checking ancillary facts, providing context, soliciting the usual denials by the usual suspects, etc. Only after the journalists have finished their work and made the material public does WikiLeaks, virtually simultaneously, and with the journalists' redactions and emendings, post the same information on its own site.
And so the very methods by which WikiLeaks material becomes public has been falsified by the mainstreamers who now decry Assange's "treachery."
The question is not and never has been whether Assange is a "journalist." What he does is an essential part of the process, usually called journalism, by which citizens are given access to information to which they are entitled under the First Amendment.
Back in Tad's day, the Nixon crowd went berserk when one of their secrets got out, putting me and Tad and Neil Sheehan and a bunch of our colleagues on Tricky Dick's infamous "Enemies' List." As Thomas Paine noted, "Only error, and never truth, shrinks from free inquiry."
Many of the loudest callers for Assange's head to roll are themselves not only non-journalists, but also apologists for corrupt government officials and purveyors of bias and hate. What's really needed is for Americans to become smart enough to quit listening to them. One way for that to happen is for Americans to have access to the very kinds of information that pass through WikiLeaks and into the public domain.
Another word for it is "truth."
Tad and I were colleagues at the New York Times Washington Bureau during the Nixon administration. Between them, Tad and the late Pete Willett of United Press (who is another story entirely) knew every single person in the world who was in any way worth knowing, or so it seemed.
Tad was born in Czechoslovakia, lived all over the world, and spoke half a dozen or more languages fluently. Frequently we would lunch at a restaurant favored by the embassy crowd. Tad would scan the room, taking note of who was lunching with whom, then signal the Captain to take us to his personal table. From there he would decide which tables to visit between lunch and desert. Like a devoted puppy, I would follow him on his table-hopping rounds, watching him converse in most of the languages he commanded, with diplomats whose names were the fodder of headlines all over the world. Over desert, he'd tell me what he'd heard and we'd talk about the stories to pursue.
We'd also lunch at out-of-the-way little restaurants that only Tad and a select few other citizens of the world knew about, where the food was recherché and the lighting was dim. En route to one of these one day, Tad paused outside a downtown DC drugstore and said, "Wait here just a moment for me, please, Tomas, I've got to go in and pick up some secret documents." He entered the store, chose a certain phone booth, went inside and emerged with a manilla envelope, whose contents he scrutinized in the dim light of the restaurant.
It contained the bill of lading of a ship called the Padma and it gave Tad a worldwide scoop on how the CIA was secretly violating our own government's ban by shipping illegal arms to Pakistan.
Tad was a master of a commonplace journalistic skill back in those days: cultivation of sources who could provide the classified documents that penetrated the veil of secrecy behind which governments like to operate. It was because that skill is so scarce among today's so-called journalists, who see themselves as stenographers for government propagandists, that somebody had to begin doing what Julian Assange does.
As our government has intensified its campaign to demonize the founder of WikiLeaks, the stenographers of our mainstream media have willingly turned against a man whose efforts they once supported and now offer him up for sacrifice in the name of national security.
"Journalistic" agencies like the National Press Club, the Overseas Press Club (whose only redeeming social value is that it once employed a bartender who made the world's finest martini), and the AP (which has no redeeming social value) have agonized, reassessed and concluded that Assange isn't really a journalist and so is not entitled to the First Amendment protection that real journalists enjoy.
Among the canards these mainstreamers propagate is this: Assange "recklessly" endangers people and policies by "willy-nilly" (Real Journalist and Stenographer Bob Woodward's phrase) making public certain of the 250,000 secret cables that have produced so many major news stories in the last two months.
What the blood-lusters overlook is the real manner in which the once-secret cables, documents and videos become public. Assange simply plays the role of whomever left that manilla envelope taped under the seat of the drug store phone booth for Tad Szulc to find. Assange obtains the documents, and makes them available to a select few prestigious journalistic institutions like our New York Times, the UK's Guardian, Germany's Der Spiegel, etc. They perform Tad's journalistic function, deciding what to publish, verifying it, checking ancillary facts, providing context, soliciting the usual denials by the usual suspects, etc. Only after the journalists have finished their work and made the material public does WikiLeaks, virtually simultaneously, and with the journalists' redactions and emendings, post the same information on its own site.
And so the very methods by which WikiLeaks material becomes public has been falsified by the mainstreamers who now decry Assange's "treachery."
The question is not and never has been whether Assange is a "journalist." What he does is an essential part of the process, usually called journalism, by which citizens are given access to information to which they are entitled under the First Amendment.
Back in Tad's day, the Nixon crowd went berserk when one of their secrets got out, putting me and Tad and Neil Sheehan and a bunch of our colleagues on Tricky Dick's infamous "Enemies' List." As Thomas Paine noted, "Only error, and never truth, shrinks from free inquiry."
Many of the loudest callers for Assange's head to roll are themselves not only non-journalists, but also apologists for corrupt government officials and purveyors of bias and hate. What's really needed is for Americans to become smart enough to quit listening to them. One way for that to happen is for Americans to have access to the very kinds of information that pass through WikiLeaks and into the public domain.
Another word for it is "truth."
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Tragedy Redux: The Roads Not Taken
Each massive human tragedy is a crossroads, and the route we choose to take determines the quality of our shared civilization.
Sept. 11, 2001, placed us at a crossroads. To continue in the direction we had been going clearly would have been folly. There was a golden opportunity, a capital fund of world goodwill, a window of moral vision, by which we might have responded to a heinous crime by strengthening the international rule of law and creating a global police force to hunt down those who violated it and bring them to a bar of international human justice. We chose instead the hegemonic path of war, hate and massive destruction. We as a nation are the worse for it, and we have dragged the world down with us.
The Great Financial Collapse of 2008-2009 placed us at another crossroads. Having led the world to the brink of economic ruin, the United States could have chosen to rein in the careering forces of greed in the marketplace, and made government for people an international ethic. It chose instead the bizarre posture of "too big to fail" that has left most of the nations of the world hostage to banker gangsters and money changers.
At crossroads after crossroads, there has been an option for what Robert Frost called "the road less traveled by." For Frost it made "all the difference," but humankind has yet to know the joy of that "difference," for we have never chosen it.
Again in the wake of the terrible slayings in Tucson there was an honorable, less-traveled option. Our leadership could have confronted the mania of the NRA and begun to enact sane weapons controls. Media owners and sponsors of entertainments could have withdrawn the pulpits from which the Becks, Limbaughs and Palins spew their lies and hate. Honorable citizens could have turned off their TV sets and shunned the websites of the haters. Political leaders of every stripe could have joined together in their common humanity and agreed at least on this: we've got to stop the killing.
Already it is clear there will be no such coming together; no such movement to restore sanity; no such cleansing of our public discourse of the bile, rot, lies and inflammatory imagery of the far right. Limbaugh made it clear when he blathered about Democrats wanting to "free" the alleged killer in Tucson. Boehner, the pieties of Saturday barely dry on his tongue, vowed that by God no gun control acts would pass in his watch, nor over the dead bodies of Arizona. Lines are drawn ever deeper in the sand; those who would brutalize the black, the brown, the yellow, the red, the "other" are more determined than ever to protect their "rights" to do so; Palin spews her cockamamie defiance in Facebook and her white Christian blind followers twitter their approval; polls show that a majority of Americans don't think our appalling political rhetoric of hate and division had anything to do with the climate in which a Tucson mass murder was formed out of the cloth of middle class childhood; even those so inclined are reluctant to attempt to lead us down a road less traveled by, lest they suffer the martyrdom of Roll, Tiller, two Kennedys, King, Lincoln, McKinley, Cermak, Malcolm, Garfield, Long . . .
How many names must there be on the list before there are enough? How many times must we toll the dirge, muffle the drums, utter the pieties, pray to a deaf god, blame a mad loner, deny complicity, point fingers at one another, demand that government do less, fault government for doing too much, demonize those who are different from ourselves in color or belief, blind ourselves to reality, posture in some make-believe world where up is down and down is up and we are the sane ones and everyone else is crazy and . . .
Oh, beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain.
For purple mountain majesties
Above the bloody plain.
America, America,
All guns were made for thee.
And crown thy hate,
Assassinate,
From sea to shining sea!
Sept. 11, 2001, placed us at a crossroads. To continue in the direction we had been going clearly would have been folly. There was a golden opportunity, a capital fund of world goodwill, a window of moral vision, by which we might have responded to a heinous crime by strengthening the international rule of law and creating a global police force to hunt down those who violated it and bring them to a bar of international human justice. We chose instead the hegemonic path of war, hate and massive destruction. We as a nation are the worse for it, and we have dragged the world down with us.
The Great Financial Collapse of 2008-2009 placed us at another crossroads. Having led the world to the brink of economic ruin, the United States could have chosen to rein in the careering forces of greed in the marketplace, and made government for people an international ethic. It chose instead the bizarre posture of "too big to fail" that has left most of the nations of the world hostage to banker gangsters and money changers.
At crossroads after crossroads, there has been an option for what Robert Frost called "the road less traveled by." For Frost it made "all the difference," but humankind has yet to know the joy of that "difference," for we have never chosen it.
Again in the wake of the terrible slayings in Tucson there was an honorable, less-traveled option. Our leadership could have confronted the mania of the NRA and begun to enact sane weapons controls. Media owners and sponsors of entertainments could have withdrawn the pulpits from which the Becks, Limbaughs and Palins spew their lies and hate. Honorable citizens could have turned off their TV sets and shunned the websites of the haters. Political leaders of every stripe could have joined together in their common humanity and agreed at least on this: we've got to stop the killing.
Already it is clear there will be no such coming together; no such movement to restore sanity; no such cleansing of our public discourse of the bile, rot, lies and inflammatory imagery of the far right. Limbaugh made it clear when he blathered about Democrats wanting to "free" the alleged killer in Tucson. Boehner, the pieties of Saturday barely dry on his tongue, vowed that by God no gun control acts would pass in his watch, nor over the dead bodies of Arizona. Lines are drawn ever deeper in the sand; those who would brutalize the black, the brown, the yellow, the red, the "other" are more determined than ever to protect their "rights" to do so; Palin spews her cockamamie defiance in Facebook and her white Christian blind followers twitter their approval; polls show that a majority of Americans don't think our appalling political rhetoric of hate and division had anything to do with the climate in which a Tucson mass murder was formed out of the cloth of middle class childhood; even those so inclined are reluctant to attempt to lead us down a road less traveled by, lest they suffer the martyrdom of Roll, Tiller, two Kennedys, King, Lincoln, McKinley, Cermak, Malcolm, Garfield, Long . . .
How many names must there be on the list before there are enough? How many times must we toll the dirge, muffle the drums, utter the pieties, pray to a deaf god, blame a mad loner, deny complicity, point fingers at one another, demand that government do less, fault government for doing too much, demonize those who are different from ourselves in color or belief, blind ourselves to reality, posture in some make-believe world where up is down and down is up and we are the sane ones and everyone else is crazy and . . .
Oh, beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain.
For purple mountain majesties
Above the bloody plain.
America, America,
All guns were made for thee.
And crown thy hate,
Assassinate,
From sea to shining sea!
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
A Tale of Two Booklists
It's the instant experts of Media Zoo who are crazy. Jared Lee Loughner's list of favorite books is a principal fixation in their ill-informed psychoanalysis of the alleged perpetrator of the Tucson horrors.
Pontificators on every point of the spectral periphery find evidence in the books Loughner liked to support their own prejudices about what motivated his terrible actions.
I was struck by the fact that most of the books on Loughner's list were also on the favorite books list of my oldest grandson, dead now for five years. My grandson's list was longer and broader than Loughners: he was so avid a reader that his mourners established an online library as a memorial to him.
Logan was 23 when he died. He had risen early on his day off to help cook food for the homeless of the Florida city where he lived. Then he drove his battered old minivan around town delivering it to parks and shelters, to tent-towns behind bilboards and to nasty neighborhood where Whitey wasn't welcome. He spent the evening at a long and sometimes contentious meeting of groups opposed to war, to plan an upcoming anti-war demonstration.
They discussed speeches, guerrilla theater and readings. Logan cautioned that their arguments be low-key, factual and intellectually persuasive -- like the letters to the editor he wrote to newspapers all over Florida.
I am struck by the similarities between Logan and Loughner: their ages, the book list, their mutual interest in atheism, their disgust with our government. Logan abhorred guns, wanted all of them beaten into plowshares. Loughner, friends said, had no interest in guns until last November, when he abruptly purchased not just a gun, but a weapon of mass destruction with a 33-shot magazine. Logan dropped out of junior college for financial and family reasons; Loughner was booted out. Both were angry. Both believed that their anger was justified. Logan's was rooted in Howard Zinn's view of American history, with its emphasis on the officially sanctioned brutalization of minorities beginning with the Original Americans themselves. The bases of Loughner's anger have been described as disjointed and obtuse.
If the book list led Loughner anywhere, it was to the shopping mall where he is alleged to have committed mass murder, and to the jail cell where he awaits trial on charges that could lead to an execution chamber.
Logan's book list led him to help the homeless, the disadvantaged, the troubled; to vow to return to school and become a teacher of history; and to preach peace. The authorities speculated that after his long, hard last day he dozed at the wheel on his way home, struck a median strip and rolled his vehicle. He had neglected to fasten the seat belt. Hundreds attended his memorial service on a beach from which his ashes were scattered into the sea he loved. His boss shed tears for a wise yet fun-loving young man who always had a surprise up his sleeve -- and who always provoked his elders to think about "things" in new and different ways. "I didn't always agree with him," the boss said,"but he sure made me think and see things in a new light and I loved him for that." His fellow war resisters described a passionate young man who hated war and violence and injustice. A succession of young men in their late teens and early adulthood spoke lovingly of a powerful force who reached out to them in their troubles, made sense to them, mentored them, gave them a shoulder to cry on and a hand to pull them up. They used the phrase, "He saved my life," time and again.
There was a faint, fine line between Jared Lee Loughner, 22, and Logan David Brooks, 23.
Yet one saved lives and one took lives.
Perhaps, Media Mouths, we should look not at book lists, but inside ourselves.
Pontificators on every point of the spectral periphery find evidence in the books Loughner liked to support their own prejudices about what motivated his terrible actions.
I was struck by the fact that most of the books on Loughner's list were also on the favorite books list of my oldest grandson, dead now for five years. My grandson's list was longer and broader than Loughners: he was so avid a reader that his mourners established an online library as a memorial to him.
Logan was 23 when he died. He had risen early on his day off to help cook food for the homeless of the Florida city where he lived. Then he drove his battered old minivan around town delivering it to parks and shelters, to tent-towns behind bilboards and to nasty neighborhood where Whitey wasn't welcome. He spent the evening at a long and sometimes contentious meeting of groups opposed to war, to plan an upcoming anti-war demonstration.
They discussed speeches, guerrilla theater and readings. Logan cautioned that their arguments be low-key, factual and intellectually persuasive -- like the letters to the editor he wrote to newspapers all over Florida.
I am struck by the similarities between Logan and Loughner: their ages, the book list, their mutual interest in atheism, their disgust with our government. Logan abhorred guns, wanted all of them beaten into plowshares. Loughner, friends said, had no interest in guns until last November, when he abruptly purchased not just a gun, but a weapon of mass destruction with a 33-shot magazine. Logan dropped out of junior college for financial and family reasons; Loughner was booted out. Both were angry. Both believed that their anger was justified. Logan's was rooted in Howard Zinn's view of American history, with its emphasis on the officially sanctioned brutalization of minorities beginning with the Original Americans themselves. The bases of Loughner's anger have been described as disjointed and obtuse.
If the book list led Loughner anywhere, it was to the shopping mall where he is alleged to have committed mass murder, and to the jail cell where he awaits trial on charges that could lead to an execution chamber.
Logan's book list led him to help the homeless, the disadvantaged, the troubled; to vow to return to school and become a teacher of history; and to preach peace. The authorities speculated that after his long, hard last day he dozed at the wheel on his way home, struck a median strip and rolled his vehicle. He had neglected to fasten the seat belt. Hundreds attended his memorial service on a beach from which his ashes were scattered into the sea he loved. His boss shed tears for a wise yet fun-loving young man who always had a surprise up his sleeve -- and who always provoked his elders to think about "things" in new and different ways. "I didn't always agree with him," the boss said,"but he sure made me think and see things in a new light and I loved him for that." His fellow war resisters described a passionate young man who hated war and violence and injustice. A succession of young men in their late teens and early adulthood spoke lovingly of a powerful force who reached out to them in their troubles, made sense to them, mentored them, gave them a shoulder to cry on and a hand to pull them up. They used the phrase, "He saved my life," time and again.
There was a faint, fine line between Jared Lee Loughner, 22, and Logan David Brooks, 23.
Yet one saved lives and one took lives.
Perhaps, Media Mouths, we should look not at book lists, but inside ourselves.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
'I Hope You Jump in Rain Puddles'
I remember how it was, covering this kind of breaking news. We had to anesthetize ourselves against normal human emotional pain.
Where were you when you first heard about the assassination of John Kennedy? About the planes flying into the twin towers?
There were reporters to be dispatched, assignments to be made, facts to be double-checked, directories to be consulted, neighbors to be found, experts and authorities to be interviewed. There was no time for tears.
Old habits die hard.
Today the numbness has worn off. Others have dispatched reporters, made assignments, interviewed neighbors and authorities, made their reports.
Today I am weeping.
My tears were triggered by, and are especially for, a little girl. She was the youngest and most innocent of the victims in the Tucson madness yesterday.
Christina Taylor Greene was born on September 11, 2001. She was part of the Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11 project. Her entry reads: " I hope you know all the words to the Star Spangled Banner and sing it with your hand over your heart. I hope you jump in rain puddles."
The tears began the moment I read that.
The profound, simple poetry of hope, written by a little girl.
Back in the numbness, I read the pious prattling of the politicians: Palin, Boehner, McCain, Obama. Verbal Novacaine.
And then I read, "I hope you jump in rain puddles."
Through the tears I saw, dimly, but I saw it. I saw the old vision of hope, before the likes of Obama turned the word into a parody of itself, into the cheap talky-talk of our sound byte world.
Hope is not audacious.
Hope is a rain puddle.
A little girl gave us this profound truth. Will it die with her? Will the insanity that ended her life continue to fester and grow in this brutalized country of ours?
Is there still a thing called hope?
Can we actually join hands and jump in rain puddles together?
Can we? Will we?
Where were you when you first heard about the assassination of John Kennedy? About the planes flying into the twin towers?
There were reporters to be dispatched, assignments to be made, facts to be double-checked, directories to be consulted, neighbors to be found, experts and authorities to be interviewed. There was no time for tears.
Old habits die hard.
Today the numbness has worn off. Others have dispatched reporters, made assignments, interviewed neighbors and authorities, made their reports.
Today I am weeping.
My tears were triggered by, and are especially for, a little girl. She was the youngest and most innocent of the victims in the Tucson madness yesterday.
Christina Taylor Greene was born on September 11, 2001. She was part of the Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11 project. Her entry reads: " I hope you know all the words to the Star Spangled Banner and sing it with your hand over your heart. I hope you jump in rain puddles."
The tears began the moment I read that.
The profound, simple poetry of hope, written by a little girl.
Back in the numbness, I read the pious prattling of the politicians: Palin, Boehner, McCain, Obama. Verbal Novacaine.
And then I read, "I hope you jump in rain puddles."
Through the tears I saw, dimly, but I saw it. I saw the old vision of hope, before the likes of Obama turned the word into a parody of itself, into the cheap talky-talk of our sound byte world.
Hope is not audacious.
Hope is a rain puddle.
A little girl gave us this profound truth. Will it die with her? Will the insanity that ended her life continue to fester and grow in this brutalized country of ours?
Is there still a thing called hope?
Can we actually join hands and jump in rain puddles together?
Can we? Will we?
Friday, January 7, 2011
Appointees: How Exciting! How Encouraging! Snore.
Dr. Kidglove, the elected head of the United States of Goldman Sachs, has filled two important vacancies on his White House staff.
I give you our London Correspondent, an expatriate Yank:
I see that the Pres has chosen Larry Summers' replacement, Sperling by name. Currently working for Timmy Geithner and former consultant to Goldman Sachs. How exciting! How encouraging! Snore!
In 2008 ol' Gene was paid eight hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars. . .
. . . for part-time work . . .
. . .on a charity project!
What planet would it be where somebody gets paid almost a million bucks in a single year for part-time work of any kind, never mind "charity" work?
Wish I could ask Mr. Sperling how, in carrying out his new duties, he purges his mind of thoughts about whether his conduct in office might affect Goldman Sachs' willingness to put him back on the payroll in the future.
Even on a foggy day, the view from London obviously is more clear than that from, say, inside our infamous Beltway around Washington, DC. No propagandist (journalists no longer exist inside the Beltway) for American media has been so perceptive in reporting on the Sperling appointment.
Expatriate Chicagoan that he is, Dr. Kidglove reached into the Windy City"s Daley dynasty to replace Rahm (F-Word) Emanuel as chief of staff. Bill Daley, brother of one Mayor Daley and son of another, is the appointee.
The same Bill Daley who, as Clinton's secretary of commerce, led efforts on behalf of the NAFTA treaty, which created the "great sucking sound" of American jobs being vacuumed out of the United States and into cheap-labor countries.
The same Bill Daley who opposed creating a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to protect mere citizens from being driven into bankruptcy by the predators of Wall Street.
The same Bill Daley who is on record as saying that the watered-down, Republicanized, pharmaceutical company-favoring, insurer-enriching, barely-better-than-nothing health care bill is too far left.
The same Bill Daley who for seven years was a senior executive at JP Morgan Chase, the triple-A farm club of Goldman Sachs and the Too Biggest to Fail of all the Too Big to Fail banks that you and I bailed out with our hard-earned tax dollars.
My fellow Americans, assume The Position.
I give you our London Correspondent, an expatriate Yank:
I see that the Pres has chosen Larry Summers' replacement, Sperling by name. Currently working for Timmy Geithner and former consultant to Goldman Sachs. How exciting! How encouraging! Snore!
In 2008 ol' Gene was paid eight hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars. . .
. . . for part-time work . . .
. . .on a charity project!
What planet would it be where somebody gets paid almost a million bucks in a single year for part-time work of any kind, never mind "charity" work?
Wish I could ask Mr. Sperling how, in carrying out his new duties, he purges his mind of thoughts about whether his conduct in office might affect Goldman Sachs' willingness to put him back on the payroll in the future.
Even on a foggy day, the view from London obviously is more clear than that from, say, inside our infamous Beltway around Washington, DC. No propagandist (journalists no longer exist inside the Beltway) for American media has been so perceptive in reporting on the Sperling appointment.
Expatriate Chicagoan that he is, Dr. Kidglove reached into the Windy City"s Daley dynasty to replace Rahm (F-Word) Emanuel as chief of staff. Bill Daley, brother of one Mayor Daley and son of another, is the appointee.
The same Bill Daley who, as Clinton's secretary of commerce, led efforts on behalf of the NAFTA treaty, which created the "great sucking sound" of American jobs being vacuumed out of the United States and into cheap-labor countries.
The same Bill Daley who opposed creating a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to protect mere citizens from being driven into bankruptcy by the predators of Wall Street.
The same Bill Daley who is on record as saying that the watered-down, Republicanized, pharmaceutical company-favoring, insurer-enriching, barely-better-than-nothing health care bill is too far left.
The same Bill Daley who for seven years was a senior executive at JP Morgan Chase, the triple-A farm club of Goldman Sachs and the Too Biggest to Fail of all the Too Big to Fail banks that you and I bailed out with our hard-earned tax dollars.
My fellow Americans, assume The Position.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Stock Tip for 2011: Invest in Petroleum Jelly Manufacturers
They're off! First out of the gate in the race to crazy is Lindsey Graham, senior Senator from South Carolina, who wants to build permanent military bases in Afghanistan. He'll be passed within a furlong by other, newer nut cases, but for the nonce, he's out front.
The cost of a typical, six-hectare U.S base in the Middle East -- with operations center, residential blocks, communications hub, storage facilities, training center, medical center, repair facilities, logistics center, canteen, recreation facilities and a doghouse (yes, a doghouse is standard) -- runs about $100 million, give or take a few tens of millions. If Haliburton is involved, add another 30 to 50 million in vigorish. Graham doesn't say how many permanent bases he wants to build, but a good guess would be that just building them would add about $4 billion to the total cost of the Afghanistan war.
The $4 billion is a spit in the bucket of a war that will have cost more than $366 billion by the time this is posted. It's increasing at a rate of roughly $5,000 per second. Altogether we've spent $1.2 trillion since 2001 in order to kill nearly 6,000 United States military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than 900,000 civilians, journalists and members of allied (called "coalition") military units.
According to the latest National Intelligence Estimates, the $366 billion Afghanistan war has left large parts of the country in danger of falling to the Taliban. Kabul, the capital, is still under Afghan government control, but most of the roads in and out of the city are controlled by the Taliban. The Afghan prime minister, Hamid Karzai, recently told Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander there, "If I had to choose sides today, I'd choose the Taliban." This from our most dependable ally in the country.
So that's what $366 billion of military buys. Four billion dollars worth of permanent bases won't do a damned thing to change that. It will enclose uncounted numbers of American troops in heavily-armed enclaves which Afghanistan's expert guerrilla forces will bleed dry by the death of a million razor cuts -- as they did to the Russians before us and the British before them. The BBC, ABC and several other international news agencies conducted a poll recently that showed 40 per cent of the populace in Afghanistan approved of attacks on U.S. troops, 30 per cent didn't care one way or the other as long as nobody disturbed the opium fields, and most of the rest didn't understand the question.
Only a handful of defense contractors would profit from the construction of Graham's permanent military bases in Afghanistan. But the movement to build them is just the first of many reminders to come that the United States military-industrial complex remains the greatest single power on earth.
We have military bases in 63 countries. They comprise nearly a million buildings and equipment edifices. Our Pentagon is the largest single land-owner in the world. Its budget -- spending will top $800 billion in 2011 -- is greater than the total military budgets of all the other nations in the world.
The most realistic recent study of universal health care in the United States -- that is, of guaranteeing free health care to every single American -- estimated the cost at $110 billion a year. That's one-eighth of what it costs to operate our killing machine for a year, a cost that has been increasing, on average, by 16% per year.
The same politicians, Sen. Graham in the forefront, who approve the costs of killing and in fact want to increase them with $4 billion worth of useless permanent bases tell us that we cannot afford the $110 billion to keep Americans healthy.
One of the first acts of the new Congress will be to cut spending to pay down our national debt. Social security funding will be reduced. Our doctors'' Medicare payments will be reduced. Retirees' prescription costs have already risen because pharmaceutical companies are raising prices and Medicare is cutting benefits.
We'll cut education spending to the bone, raise the payroll taxes of the working poor, cancel any vestiges of oversight of financial institutions so that they can continue to bankrupt individual ciitzens while paying record bonuses to the executives who almost ruined the entire economy two years ago.
My fellow Americans, assume "the position."
The cost of a typical, six-hectare U.S base in the Middle East -- with operations center, residential blocks, communications hub, storage facilities, training center, medical center, repair facilities, logistics center, canteen, recreation facilities and a doghouse (yes, a doghouse is standard) -- runs about $100 million, give or take a few tens of millions. If Haliburton is involved, add another 30 to 50 million in vigorish. Graham doesn't say how many permanent bases he wants to build, but a good guess would be that just building them would add about $4 billion to the total cost of the Afghanistan war.
The $4 billion is a spit in the bucket of a war that will have cost more than $366 billion by the time this is posted. It's increasing at a rate of roughly $5,000 per second. Altogether we've spent $1.2 trillion since 2001 in order to kill nearly 6,000 United States military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than 900,000 civilians, journalists and members of allied (called "coalition") military units.
According to the latest National Intelligence Estimates, the $366 billion Afghanistan war has left large parts of the country in danger of falling to the Taliban. Kabul, the capital, is still under Afghan government control, but most of the roads in and out of the city are controlled by the Taliban. The Afghan prime minister, Hamid Karzai, recently told Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander there, "If I had to choose sides today, I'd choose the Taliban." This from our most dependable ally in the country.
So that's what $366 billion of military buys. Four billion dollars worth of permanent bases won't do a damned thing to change that. It will enclose uncounted numbers of American troops in heavily-armed enclaves which Afghanistan's expert guerrilla forces will bleed dry by the death of a million razor cuts -- as they did to the Russians before us and the British before them. The BBC, ABC and several other international news agencies conducted a poll recently that showed 40 per cent of the populace in Afghanistan approved of attacks on U.S. troops, 30 per cent didn't care one way or the other as long as nobody disturbed the opium fields, and most of the rest didn't understand the question.
Only a handful of defense contractors would profit from the construction of Graham's permanent military bases in Afghanistan. But the movement to build them is just the first of many reminders to come that the United States military-industrial complex remains the greatest single power on earth.
We have military bases in 63 countries. They comprise nearly a million buildings and equipment edifices. Our Pentagon is the largest single land-owner in the world. Its budget -- spending will top $800 billion in 2011 -- is greater than the total military budgets of all the other nations in the world.
The most realistic recent study of universal health care in the United States -- that is, of guaranteeing free health care to every single American -- estimated the cost at $110 billion a year. That's one-eighth of what it costs to operate our killing machine for a year, a cost that has been increasing, on average, by 16% per year.
The same politicians, Sen. Graham in the forefront, who approve the costs of killing and in fact want to increase them with $4 billion worth of useless permanent bases tell us that we cannot afford the $110 billion to keep Americans healthy.
One of the first acts of the new Congress will be to cut spending to pay down our national debt. Social security funding will be reduced. Our doctors'' Medicare payments will be reduced. Retirees' prescription costs have already risen because pharmaceutical companies are raising prices and Medicare is cutting benefits.
We'll cut education spending to the bone, raise the payroll taxes of the working poor, cancel any vestiges of oversight of financial institutions so that they can continue to bankrupt individual ciitzens while paying record bonuses to the executives who almost ruined the entire economy two years ago.
My fellow Americans, assume "the position."
Monday, January 3, 2011
Cuckoo, cuckoo, well you sing, cuckoo!
We have passed through the Looking Glass. The inmates run the asylum. Up is down. You cannot get there from here. You cannot get anywhere from here. We live in absolute, unmitigated, bat-shit insanity and for us it is normal.
Judith Miller was a reporter for the New York Times. She wrote and the newspaper published unverified government lies about Iraq, Al Qaeda, weapons of mass destruction, aluminum tubes and yellow cake. The government wanted these lies to be repeated as truth. The lies propelled us into wars. The wars have cost well over a trillion dollars now and the cost is rising at a rate of thousands of dollars per second. Nearly 5,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Arab lives have been lost in Judith Miller's wars. Even the commanders of those wars acknowledge there is no end in sight.
When her lies were exposed as lies, Miller said: "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought."
Julian Assange created a website called WikiLeaks that makes public official documents that governments, especially our government, don't want us to see. The documents are absolutely authentic; nobody has ever questioned their authenticity. The videos, like the one showing the murder of civilians and Reuters journalists, are real; nobody has ever questioned their reality.They were filmed from real helicopters firing real bullets and missiles; the victims shed real blood and died real deaths, leaving real corpses to be buried by real grieving survivors.
Yesterday on the ranking garbage network on TV Miller criticized Assange because he "didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone."
From Alice in Wonderland:
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
Judith Miller was a reporter for the New York Times. She wrote and the newspaper published unverified government lies about Iraq, Al Qaeda, weapons of mass destruction, aluminum tubes and yellow cake. The government wanted these lies to be repeated as truth. The lies propelled us into wars. The wars have cost well over a trillion dollars now and the cost is rising at a rate of thousands of dollars per second. Nearly 5,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Arab lives have been lost in Judith Miller's wars. Even the commanders of those wars acknowledge there is no end in sight.
When her lies were exposed as lies, Miller said: "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought."
Julian Assange created a website called WikiLeaks that makes public official documents that governments, especially our government, don't want us to see. The documents are absolutely authentic; nobody has ever questioned their authenticity. The videos, like the one showing the murder of civilians and Reuters journalists, are real; nobody has ever questioned their reality.They were filmed from real helicopters firing real bullets and missiles; the victims shed real blood and died real deaths, leaving real corpses to be buried by real grieving survivors.
Yesterday on the ranking garbage network on TV Miller criticized Assange because he "didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone."
From Alice in Wonderland:
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
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