In Search of the Last Remaining Patches of Paradise

I came to visit Glacier National Park before the last of its glaciers vanishes, which some scientists seriously predict will happen by or before 2020. (Twenty-five rapidly-shrinking glaciers remain today; there were 150 in 1850.)

 It is a trip well worth the taking, meandering, as we did, through wide open spaces of Wyoming and Montana without touching an inch of Interstate highway. We have been as far out of reach as possible of e-mail, wi-fi, cell, mobile, cable -- even carrier pigeon. Did the Supreme Court never yet decide who won the 2008 presidential election? Or did Bob, proprietor of the only gas station in Hungry Horse, simply forget to take down his "Ron Paul for President" sign? It's still right there beside his "God's Ten Commandments" sign. I forgive him for both because he sells the world's best huckleberry pie, made on premises by Ruth, his wife. Besides, all politics is local, and Bob remains good friends with Digger, whose sign reads, "Don't let the far right wing take over everything!" Digger's fur, Indian art and gift shop shows no sign of firebombing, but it is for sale, since Digger means to move up to Alberta to live with his daughter and her family.

Drive two miles from Bob's gas pumps and Ruth's pies and you're in another world -- the real world, I'd like to hope, but fear otherwise -- where bear, and elk, and moose, and other wild creatures from Robert Service rhymes can still be seen. Such creatures can be seen, too, in Glacier National Park, against a backdrop of incredibly beautiful lakes and waterfalls and mountains, but only rarely, because like its more accessible cousins, this national park is being loved to death. Some critters seem not to mind the slow death they are undergoing. On the way to Logan Pass the other day, a young white tail deer moseyed, oblivious to the gawking motorists and motorcyclists who stopped to photograph, ogle and otherwise subject it to indignities Mother Nature never intended for it. The baker's dozen mountain goats grazing and frolicking at Goat Lick Canyon seemed similarly unmindful of the herd of humans oohing, aahing and shooting cell-phone photos from the bridge over the gorge.

 Even by our chosen route of the backest of roads, signs of the sins of man are too visible for comfort. The melting glaciers, of course. The patches of split-log vacation mansions where, ten years ago, only fir, oak and range grass occupied the piedmont slopes. Garish bait-and-convenience store ghettos on the shores of sylvan lakes. Acres of junk autos sprawled on the outskirts of pretty little cities trying to become Newark. Earth movers, drill rigs and monster trucks pooping pollution on Paradise.

 Enough already. Magnificent vistas remain. Pockets of tranquil silence. Trails less tramped, roads less traveled, glens less trashed. I've lived to share them, left no trace but footprints. It's back to the back roads for us, meandering more or less homeward, experiencing less of the reality of the wilderness and more of the wildness of the real world, such as it is. Sooner or later we'll be on Interstates, inhaling carbon dioxide and eating Dorritos. I believe there's some sort of election coming up, is there not?

Reserving Special Places in Hell

As my geezerhood advances, and my vision darkens, and my hearing declines, and my arthritis worsens, and my muscles weaken, and my aches and pains proliferate, and my patience seeps away, and my needs increase and my self-sufficiency to meet them evaporates, and my memory doesn't remember and my plumbing leaks, and things that were easy aren't, and much of what I learned is no longer relevant, and the new things whose use I have finally mastered are already obsolete . . . . .

When tying my shoes is an adventure and reaching the top shelf of the closet an acrobatic feat . . . . . when my gait is slow but makes my heartbeat fast . . . . . .when the wireless phone only rings if I've misplaced it, the car keys somehow wander off and come to rest in the refrigerator and the doorbell rings the moment I've stopped into the shower . . . . . .

Then it is that I take special satisfaction in contemplating particular tortures in Hell for those who add still more difficulties to my daily struggles with living.

 Foremost among those for whom I contemplate such terrible infinities are the makers of packaging. We punish mass murderers, so why don 't we punish those fiendish monsters who cap bottles of essential medicines with caps that can only be opened by small, carefully placed explosive charges? We have laws against child abuse, but why do we have none prohibiting the capping of jars of vital human viands with lids that can be opened only by very strong and very intelligent orangutans? We require that road safety signs be readable, so why do we not require that those little tabs one is expected to grasp to peel back the film on the mustard cap be at least large enough to grasp with, say, needle-nose pliers? Why, when the little note says "Tear Here," are they allowed to render the fabric so resistant to tearing that even an unshorn Samson would tear his hair out in frustration? What about those containers -- made of seamless case-hardened steel -- that seem to say "Open Other Side" on all sides?

 If you're over 60 or so, you'll know the things I'm talking about, things that break your fingernails, make you short of breath, slip out of your grip, can't be reached if you're not a contortionist, won't fit where they're supposed to fit, require that you "lift, press and tilt while turning" but still won't open, say "no tools required" but in fact require simultaneous use of a screwdriver (neither Phillips, nor slot, however, but some other exotic type), wrench (metric, of course), hammer (but not balpeen), coping saw and diamond-head glass cutter. And so forth ad nauseum.

 If I were St. Peter, I would require every applicant for eternity in Paradise to submit documentation of his or her earthly occupation. For those who had any association whatsoever with the packaging industry, I would turn to Torquemada and say, "This one merits special attention. Put the CIA on the case."

This Was Her Second Saddest Hour

By Brittany M. Brooks

Social Services Professional

 For the past year I was on the ground. I fought hard. I protested. I educated many on the importance of this election. Last night, that idiot still won. Last night was the second saddest night of my life.


I am not sure what direction my state or national politics will take, but I know it is scary. For me, this was not about the unions, although they are surely important. For me, the Wisconsin recall was about the effect that Scott Walker's wrongful policies have had on people who live in poverty and on women.  All women, every benighted one of us.

Since Scott Walker has been in office, there are twice as many pregnant teens in Dane County. They are  half my caseload. I am at the Sun Prairie high school every day meeting with them. Why are all these teens pregnant? Because in December of this year, Scott Walker passed legislation that abstinence only education must be taught at high schools. This limits what information teachers and guidance counselors can give to their students.

Forget abortion services because planned parenthood funding was cut. Now only two planned parenthood sites provide abortions services. Many of my clients have to find a way to Milwaukee if they want to terminate their unwanted or unhealthy pregnancies. Even the atmosphere around something as common as birth control has changed into some outlandish conservative v. liberal battle.

 A doctor refused to prescribe birth control for one of the young girls I work with because he does not believe in it! This cowed little  16 year old ended up pregnant, scared and alone because  her mom kicked her out. She couldn't get an abortion because planned parenthood was too backed up with other appointments and now she is too far along.

Scott sure does seem to love little babies -- until they are born. Then he tells their mothers that they can only get a welfare check for six weeks. Then they have to go back to work. This is really laughable because he cut daycare subsidies for poor families and now they struggle to find safe, affordable daycare.

 But perhaps the worst of his crimes is his cuts to Badger Care. Badger Care is WIsconsin's state medical assistance program. With his cuts about half of my client families will have to pay a premium for their health care. I am talking about single moms who work at McDonald's or Taco Bell for minimum wage. Under Scotty's Badger Care,  if you don't pay your obscenely inflated premium by the due date, they cut your children off for six months and any adult in the family  for a year.

One of my clients said to me today that she voted for Scott Walker because she would rather not have insurance then have her partner out of a job. She had been told  that voting for Tom Barrett would somehow create an atmosphere in which a carpenter who works for a private contractor could lose his job. This is just one turd of falsehood in the torrent  of bullshit talking points the Citizens United billionaires dropped on Wisconsin to  save their boy Scotty's political hide.

It is so pathetic that I live in such a rich country, yet the people who have to pay the deficit caused by greedy bankers and blundering politicians are the poorest and least fortunate among us. This is sick. This is criminal.  This is insane.

 ----

Blogger's Note

Brittany M. Brooks, who was first on the barricades in Madison and last to leave, is my granddaughter. Her saddest day was the one on which her elder brother, Logan D. Brooks, historian, polemecist and friend to the oppressed, was killed in an auto accident while delivering food to the homeless. The torch has passed to a new generation. May it somehow succeed where ours has failed.

A Journalistic Scandal (NOT Murdoch)

An unidentified someone leaked a sketch of a something to the Associated Press on behalf of some unnamed country and "proved" that Iran is on the way to making nuclear weapons.  (So then, of course, we're expected to conclude that we've got to make war on the rascals "before it's too late.")

A good spy fiction writer would dismiss  such ploys as too transparent to fool his readers.  But AP took the bait:

VIENNA —AP) -- An image said to come from inside an Iranian military site shows an explosives containment chamber of the type needed for nuclear arms-related tests that U.N. inspectors suspect Tehran has conducted at the site. . .

The image was provided to The Associated Press by an official of a country tracking Iran’s nuclear program who said the drawing proves the structure exists, despite Tehran’s refusal to acknowledge it.

The official said he could not discuss the drawing’s origins beyond that it was based on information from a person who had seen the chamber at the Parchin military site, adding that going into detail would endanger the life of that informant.  . .

A former senior IAEA official said he believes the drawing is accurate. Olli Heinonen, until last year the U.N. nuclear agency’s deputy director general in charge of the Iran file, said it was “very similar” to a photo he recently saw that he believes to be the pressure chamber the IAEA suspects is at Parchin. . .

It didn't take long for sharp noses to smell the rat.

Gerald Meyer is an old school journalist, a Nieman Fellow and Woodrow Wilson Scholar who was always suspicious of information from people who didn't want to be identified.  Now a distinguished author ( A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, Executive Blues, The Memphis Murders, et al), Meyer needed to read only a few paragraphs of the AP story before observing:

"'...a country tracking iran's nuclear program' . . .a country that doesn't want to be identified... surely that couldn't be our old friend Israel!"

William O. Beeman, chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota and a distinguished Middle East scholar, called the AP report "a  scurrilous piece of dangerous trash."

He said: "This is not a photograph, but a computer generated 'image.' (TEW: Indeed, data necessary to generate such an image can be found in less than ten minutes of internet surfing.) It is unattributed--even to the point of hiding the country of origin of the person supplying it. Then the "authority" who sort of verifies the image as seeming to resemble a photograph he once may have seen is Olli Heinonen, former IAEA official who has made a career of promulgating the unproven idea that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.

"It is unclear what the room in this image is supposed to have been used for--only these rather wild and unsubstantiated assertions. Something as ephemeral as this with no attribution, no proof of existence and no proven purpose is simply a red herring.

"The fact that this silly piece of nonsense has appeared just before the next round of talks between Iran and the West is no accident. Every time it appears that some progress will be made toward improving relations with Iran, someone comes up with something like this to try and torpedo the proceedings. "

Blatant it may be, but the tactic seems to work.

Gareth Porter, investigative historian and journalist, reporting today on the talks:

Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Yukiya Amano has signaled that there will be no agreement with Iran in meetings in Vienna  on the terms for Iranian cooperation in clarifying the issue of alleged nuclear weapons work. . . .

Amano indicated ihat he intended to hold up an agreement on Iranian cooperation in responding to allegations of military involvement in its nuclear program until the IAEA was allowed to visit to Parchin, the military complex about 30 kilometers southeast of Tehran. . . . (He)  insists that a visit to Parchin must come first before any agreement.

But the actual draft negotiating text of the agreement on "Clarification of Unresolved Issues" with Iran's proposed changes from the original IAEA proposal shows that the major conflict over their cooperation was whether the process had a definite endpoint, not access to Parchin. 

Porter, whose detailed reporting revealed the holes in the official version of the intelligence leading to the killing of Osama bin Laden, believes that major news outlets like the AP have "an implicit rule"  that "they can run with just about anything sourced to a US national security official or one of our allies -- especially, of course, Israel -- and that you can cover up the nationality of the source, too."

He added: "It's the journalistic scandal of the century, in my opinion."

Mine too. 

* * *

SEE related post, "Fear Stalks, as It Always Does," on or blog cousin, An Ironist's Toolbox.

http://ironitool.blogspot.com/

Shall We Now Praise This Infamous Man?

Some outfit e-mailed me yesterday urging me to thank President Obama for his courageous act, endorsing the right of gay people to marry.

I declined.  I have thought for quite some time that one thing Dr. Kidglove would never be accused of was courage.  I still think that.

I also think that people whose sexual orientation is different from mine have all of the same rights that I have, including the right to marry the person of their choice. Just because the President finally came around to acknowledging what seems like a pretty clear-cut constitutional position -- the guy used to teach law, for Pete's sake! -- I refuse to turn cartwheels or jump with joy.

Next issue, please.

What about our prolonged, agonizing, illegal, immoral and fruitless wars, Mr. Nobel Peace Laureate?

What about the hundred million, more or less, Americans still without jobs and increasingly without hope of ever finding employment, Mr. Social Justice Guy?

What about the greedy, unregulated bankers and financiers who caused the worst recession in three-quarters of a century and have rewarded themselves with billions in bloated salaries and bonuses, Mr. Kiss the Republican Asses in Congress?

What about the millions of Americans still without adequate health care, Mr. Cave In to Insurers and Pharmaceutical Manufacturers?

What about the ongoing failures of our educational system, Mr. Vouchers Are OK?

What about the old fashioned Jeffersonian notion of the separation of church and state, Mr. Faith-Based Scams?

What about the First Amendment -- free speech, peaceable assembly -- Mr. Police Crackdown on Occupy?

What about the Fourth Amendment -- probable cause -- Mr. Arrest Without Warrant and Detain Forever? And unreasonable search and seizure, Mr. Build a Spy Castle in Utah ?

What about the Fifth Amendment -- due process -- Mr. Kill by Executive Order?

What about the Sixth Amendment, Mr. Detain Forever and Stage Military Kangaroo Trials?

What about the Eighth Amendment, Mr. Rendition and Torture?


What about campaign promises of open government, Mr. Secrecy and Official Lies?

What about fear-mongering, Mr. Inheritor of the Cloak of FDR, who said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"?

Thank him?

Thanks for nothing, Dr. Kidglove, our very own Cowardly Lion.

Riding a Misinformation Train to War

As a body politic, citizens of the United States are among the most misinformed in the world.

More Americans seek information from Fox TV, whose contempt for truth is self-evident,  than from any other source.  What's far worse, though, is that other sources, including some once held to be virtually unimpeachable, can no longer be trusted. American media, as an entity, have betrayed the mission for which their First Amendment shield was written.

Now, as a result, Americans are once again wallowing toward war in a pigsty of distortion, misunderstanding, ignorance and falsehood. Even as useful bilateral talks continue between the so-called P5+1and Iran, Americans are subject to new rounds of misinformation and misinterpretation. (P5+1 stands for the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- France, the United Kingdom, the United States, China and Russia-- plus Germany.) A new report from Media Matters  finds that the broadcast news networks — NBC Nightly News, ABC’s World News and CBS’s Evening News — “frequently” distort or exaggerate key information regarding Iran’s nuclear program. “Two egregious misrepresentations in particular repeatedly came up,” the report says, “suggesting that Iran will imminently obtain the bomb and suggesting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has major influence over the country’s nuclear program.” Neither statement is true.

How can so many be so wrong about Iran? Let us count but some of the ways:

The Basics:  David Ignatius of the Washington Post wrote that in a possible compromise, " Iran would agree to stop enriching uranium to the 20 percent level and to halt work at an underground facility near Qom built for higher enrichment. Iran would export its stockpile of highly enriched uranium for final processing to 20 percent, for use in medical isotopes. . . ."

Dr. Cyrus Safdari, Michigan State University's Middle East expert: First, Iran does not have a "stockpile of highly enriched uranium". It has a stockpile of low-enriched uranium. Twenty per cent is the upper limit of what is considered to be low-enriched. Second, Iran would not be exporting this stockpile for "final processing to 20%." It would be doing so for processing into nuclear fuel rods (a technology which, Iran has now started to develop indigenously, thus vitiating a need to export the stuff and probably making the issue a better bargaining chip for the Iranians...all thanks to the sanctions on a medical reactor that posed no proliferation threat in the first place.) And the 20% uranium is not "used in medical isotopes" but is instead used to power the reactor that makes isotopes. And I'm at loss as to how Ignatius concluded that Qom is "built for higher enrichment" than 20%. It is not.

The Serious Stuff:  The common line in U.S. media is that while Iran asserts that its nuclear work is for peaceful purposes, our leadership suspects that it's really intended to produce weapons.  The United States in fact does not suspect this.  Its intelligence agencies have said publicly, twice, that there is no evidence that Iran is preparing to build weapons.  The International Atomic Energy Agency said it has no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran "now or ever."

Even as the first "constructive and useful" P5+1 talks with Iran were being held,the New York Times published a piece by James Risen that was littered with fallacy and misinterpretation.  Quoting "some analysts," Risen wrote that Ayatollah Khamenei's denial that Iran wanted nuclear arms "has to be seen as part of a Shiite historical concept called taqiyya, or religious dissembling. For centuries an oppressed minority within Islam, Shiites learned to conceal their sectarian identity to survive, and so there is a precedent for lying to protect the Shiite community." As usual in this kind of Times piece, we aren't give a clue as to who these "analysts" are. But Juan Cole, one of the top Mideast scholars in the United States, points out that historically, taqiyya was not a license to lie about anything, but permission to conceal one's religious identity in the face of life-threatening sectarian prejudice. He also notes that, in the twentieth century, the tide of Shiite legal opinion ran against taqiyya, and that Imam Khomeini, who led the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, demanded that taqiyya be abandoned. Cole concludes by saying that the taqiyya argument is "just some weird form of Islamophobia."

Risen's article seemed designed to question Khameni's religious edict, or fatwa, banning the possession of nuclear weapons as a sin against Islam, just as top U.N. officials were meeting "constructively" with the Iranians.  Risen rehashed old arguments by Iran's adversaries and added some of his own.

Once again on the word of unnamed "analysts," Risen wrote that Khamenei's no-nukes posture was contradicted "by remarks he had made last year 'that it was a mistake for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya to give up his nuclear weapons program.'"

In fact, Khamenei's remarks referred to "all  his (Qaddafi's) nuclear facilities," and not to his nuclear weapons (as Risen reported). Khamenei was making a point that other Iranian leaders frequently make: merely having a nuclear program without nuclear weapons can be a deterrent to attack. They cite the Japanese model as one for Iran to emulate.

Risen wrote that Khamenei's predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, reversed his initial opposition to nuclear weapons as inconsistent with Islam in 1984, and "secretly decided to restart the nuclear weapons program." He cited no source for that sweeping accusation.

Gareth Porter, historian and investigative journalist, says he has encountered skeptics who doubt that the Khamenei fatwa even exists.  "But," he writes, "even Mehdi Khalaji of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy acknowledged in an essay published last September that Khamenei's oral statements are considered fatwas and are binding on believers."

Condi Rice's infamous "mushroom cloud" threat from Iraq turned out to be thin blue smoke. But even the so-called "responsible" American media snuffed it up as the real thing.

Dare we let it happen again?

Guilty! Guilty of, er, Thinking!

The thought police are running rampant on a new field -- major league baseball, a playpen for overpaid brats about which I usually don't give a damn.

Ozzie Guillen, manager of a team called the Marlins, has been suspended for five games, without pay, because he formed an opinion and expressed it. This transgression might have gone unpunished except for certain modifying conditions:

 1. The opinion he expressed was about Fidel Castro, the aging former leader of Cuba. Guillen told an interviewer he "loved" Castro and "admired" him for surviving so long with so many enemies.

 2. His employer's home base is Miami, a city rife with Cuban exiles whose hostility toward Castro is without limit. The team has just opened a new stadium situated in the part of Miami known as "little Havana." Christians in the colosseum of old Rome faced better odds than Mr. Guillen after he exercised his right of free speech.

 I have no interest in, and attach no importance to, his opinion of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez or Donald Duck. His expertise on anything more complicated than "take two and hit to right" is scant. He has never been celebrated for weighing his words before uttering them. But he has an absolute right under the Constitution to utter them.

 His importance at this moment is purely symbolic. He is a representative victim of a society that not only tolerates but cheers the evolution of its once democratic republic into a police state. Brutal police attacks on and arrests of peaceful Occupy protesters. Arrest and mistreatment of dissenters seeking to present their views at public forums, even the halls of Congress. Torture of Bradley Manning. Persecution of whistle blowers. Laws authorizing detention and even killing of American citizens without warrant or charge.

 President Bush conducted office with utter disdain for the Bill of Rights. His successor acts as if he wants to erase it entirely. At the risk of offending not only the thought police but also the incomplete analogy patrol, I submit the hardly original suggestion of chilling similarities between Bush-Obama America and early Hitler Germany. Increasingly militarized police. Warrantless arrest and detention without charge. Bloodthirsty mobs shrieking epithets against Islam, dissent and unpopular speech. Government sustained by a climate of fear.

 Poor Ozzie Guillen should be grateful for having been born in Venezuela rather than, say, Teheran.

Committing Suicide in Increments

The great American biologist, E. O. Wilson, observed that, in nature, if it's beautiful and easy to capture, it's probably lethal.  He cited a number of examples including that of a lad in Florida who noticed an exotically colored snake which did not resist when he picked it up and put it in his shirt pocket.  When he reached to remove the coral snake, it bit him and killed him.

There seems to be something of a corollary to Wilson's theory in the science of human nutrition.  It would go something like this: if it looks good and tastes good, it's probably bad for you.

Sad, indeed, for those of us who used to enjoy eating. Worse yet, they keep changing the rules on us.

For example: they told me the average life span of residents in a village somewhere in the High Himalaya was nearly 110 years because they ate a lot of yogurt.  I decided to eat yogurt but its taste was unappealingly sour.  Then someone gave me yogurt with fruit on the bottom.  Ah! I've been eating yogurt with fruit on the bottom for decades, proud that this healthy food, at least, had found a permanent place in my diet. Now I'm told: All yogurt contains lactose, which is a naturally occurring carbohydrate; generally in a single serving it equals about 12-15 grams of carbs, which is fine, but when you add the jammy fruit you can nearly double that amount. You end up with nearly 30g of carbs, half of which is the processed, quick-burning kind. Stick to the creamy (and protein-packed) Greek variety, I'm told,  and add some cut-up fresh fruit.  Wonderful.  I went out looking for  Greek yogurt and by the time I found it the once-fresh fruit was old and moldy.

Another healthy food I was told about was bagels.  "Stop eating those Danish pastries, that sugary breakfast cereal, those awful donuts," I was told.  "Eat healthy, low-fat bagels."  Done.  Now, howewver, "they" tell me:  even if you opt for whole wheat, many deli bagels can have 250-300 calories and more than 50 grams of carbs each. That's OK if you plan to run three or four miles after breakfast.Otherwise . . .

For decades, I loved chocolate malted milk shakes.  Such an energy boost.  Then they told me about all the unhealthy fat even one such treat put into my belly.  I was tortured by withdrawal symptoms. But I discovered "smoothies" and other "healthy" fruit juice drinks.  Fantastic! Almost as good as "malts" and good for me!  Oops! Come the nutrition police:  these can seem like a healthy drink to get on the go. But a 16-ounce fruit-heavy juice can have as many as 75 grams of carbohydrates and 64 grams of sugar (ditto for smoothies). If you can't start the day without juice, they command, stick to about 4 ounces, which has a reasonable 15-20 grams  of carbs.

Damn! Damn! Damn!

My brother-in-law Ted, a fit specimen and wonderful tennis player, ate lots of popcorn.  "Air and healthy grain," he would say.  When we watched movies on the TV, or went to theaters, Ted always supplied the popcorn.  Air and healthy grains.

Wrong again.

The nutrition police: Popcorn is already about 1,200 calories, almost all from carbohydrates (and a whopping 580 milligrams of sodium) for a large-sized bag. That's before you add the butter. Don't waste an entire day's worth carbs and calories while you mindlessly munch your way through "The Hunger Games".

Hunger Games? I'm starving to death trying to stay healthy.  A health-food-store cracker maybe? With a touch of organic cheddar cheese?  Please?

Nope.  Processed flour and high-fat cheese can still be called "organic."

I'm headed off to Starbucks to think about this over coffee.

Not so fast, Thomas. "Their fancy coffees can have as many calories as a meal, (sometimes upwards of 400), and their carb count can be on par with a pre-marathon pasta binge. Some have 60-80 grams of carbs per serving. Add in sugars, saturated fats in whipped cream and chocolate flavorings, and you've got dessert in a very large plastic cup."

Pour me another drink, Sam.  Play it.  Play "As Time Goes By."  By, God, I'm gonna go out happy.

A Brief Peek into the Far Future

If somehow Earth and what passes for civilization on it both manage to survive for another 500 years or so, future historians and scientists may have access to the record of our times.

They'll be appalled to learn how low their species once sank.

For example:

* Males in government actually wrote laws regulating women's body parts, with rules about menstrual periods (Arizona), vaginas (Virginia), sexual activity and pregnancy protection. Doctors were actually slain for providing health care to pregnant women.

"Barbaric!" some future historian might exclaim.  "A law actually requiring vaginal penetration with some kind of primitive stick!  Mandated rape!" She searched in vain for laws regulating penises, testes or male heterosexual activity.

*The supreme judicial panel in the land met to consider the constitutionality of a health care law that affected every single person under its jurisdiction, from birth to death -- without bothering to read the law being considered.  “You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages?” asked "Justice" Antonin Scalia, a member of the same political party whose members cheered when a political candidate, asked about the dilemma of seriously sick people without health insurance, said, "Let them die!"

*The executive branch of the government had the authority to track down, torture and kill any citizen it deemed to have been involved in "terrorist activities" or to have associated with or harbored any person or organization it deemed to be a possible terrorist threat.  "Terrorism" and "terrorist" meant whatever the government said it meant.  Citizens accepted these laws as "protection" and "homeland security."

* Having somehow survived the consequences of a generation that scoffed at climate science, these future historians and scientists might be horrified to learn that senior legislators and candidates for the highest elective office in the land scoffed at the evidence of climate change as "a hoax" for a greedy few scientists to extort government research money.

* Having developed a heat ray weapon that emitted "unbearable heat," the government decided that this was a really peachy keen thing to use for crowd control, because some people were getting uppity about little things like joblessness, sickness,  oligarchy and war.  After all, the government said, the heat ray was tested on military volunteers, most of whom survived when they ran away from it starting at a distance of 100 yards.  Nobody tested the damage from exposure at, say, 83 yards.

*The most important government policy of all was to wage endless war. When the chief executive and his advisers feared that a war might be winding down, they simply started another one someplace else.  It kept  certain sectors of the economy really, really profitable.

These are just a few of the 21st Century treasurers that historians and scientists of the future might discover about us.  Perhaps one of them might mention some of this within hearing of her 8- or 9-year-old daughter.

"Mommy," the child might say, "how could people have been so stupid as to allow such things?"

"Well," the future scientist might explain, "when homo sapiens first evolved, it was from apes who were much smarter than the creatures who ruled the earth in the early 21st Century."

"What does that mean," the child might ask, "homo sapiens?"

"It means wise man," the parent might reply. "Go figure."

In the Land of Guns and Skittles

Several years ago, in a coffee shop just off I-65 in Montgomery, AL, I saw two state troopers on coffee break.  One was black, the other white.  They were partners in the patrol car parked outside. 

A few miles down the road, I-65 crosses U.S. 60 to Selma, one of the bloody milestones in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.

It was tempting to mark the white police officer and the black police officer in the nearby booth as symbols of the great progress the United States had made in race relations and attitudes since Selma.  It would also have been wrong.  The hatred, the ugly urge to violence, still lurked just beneath the surface not just in Alabama, but throughout American society.

Now, with the election of the first black President, it is emerging like sulfurous gas from the interior depths of our national soul.  You could smell it among the gun-waving Tea Party zealots at a Congressional "town hall" in New Mexico, in the coded rhetoric of Christofascists in Virginia, in the instant celebrity of a politicized pop-off in Ohio who wasn't named Joe and wasn't a plumber.

It's in the air again with the tempest over the slaying of an unarmed 17-year-old black male by an armed 28-year-old Hispano-Caucasian male who had anointed himself to be a "watchman" for his gated community in Sanford, FL.

Citizens on both sides of the great and ever-widening American Schism are jumping to conclusions without knowing a lot about what happened that February night in Florida.  Leaks meant to bolster the biases on both sides have simply inflamed the blind passions, but done little to enlighten public judgement.  ABC news jumped all over the leaked information that the victim, Trayvon Martin, had been suspended from his high school because a plastic baggie was found in his backpack that contained traces of marijuana.  The LA Times trumpeted its own exclusive finding that the shooter, George Zimmerman, "dreamed of being a cop."  Republican seekers of the Presidential nomination assailed President Obama for remarking that if he had had a son, "he would have looked like Trayvon."  A leak said Sanford police didn't consider charges against Zimmerman because they had "evidence" that supported the shooter's version of events that night.  Then another medium unearthed two women in the neighborhood who heard the fatal shot and witnessed the "immediate aftermath" of the slaying whose version seemed to contradict the one the police had accepted.  Skittles.  A hoodie.  An SUV.  The vocabulary of the case is fraught with flash-point code words and phrases.

Surely the Sanford police did not do their job: any slaying by handgun calls for more thorough investigation than their acceptance of the shooter's story.  It's not likely, either, that satisfactory answers will come from a special prosecutor's investigation by a Florida attorney whose statewide reputation as being "tough on crime" is based on the large number of black kids in hoodies she has sent to the slammer and then thrown away the key. Why does a neighborhood watch guy have to carry a weapon? We have a neighborhood watch in our community whose commitment is to call 911 if they see a crime being committed or a non-resident acting suspiciously.  None of them totes heat out on the street.

Zimmerman told the police he saw Martin acting suspiciously and  followed him. No neighborhood watch person in my neighborhood would follow a suspected criminal; that's what 911 is for.  Maybe George the would-be cop saw the kid throwing Skittles at someone's stray cat.

Zimmerman's story reeks of untruth.  Our greater society reeks of racism.

Trayvon Martin is far from the only unarmed black youth who has been shot to death this year under questionable circumstance, many of them by men wearing badges, and, I fear, he will not be the last.

Guns are roughly as easy to come by as Skittles in our sick country.

Kidglove Goes Whoring for Votes

Here he goes again: Dr. Kidglove, who said "No" to the environmentally abominable Keystone XL pipeline, has now typically begun to say "yes" in increments.

Barack Obama is proving once again that he is incapable of staying true to principles because in fact he has no principles.  He is nothing more than a Chicago ward healer of the shabbiest kind: cross the right palms, wield the right baton, invoke the right names and anything is possible -- dead people voting, regulations winked at, rules broken, laws ignored, profits multiplied.

Whoring for votes, he has gone into oil country and promised to expedite the southern portion of the pipeline from Cushing, OK, to Port Arthur, TX.   Why in Hell build the terminal part of the vile thing unless you intend to build it all?

“The Gulf Coast leg would add to the fossil fuel infrastructure at a time when we critically need to transition away from fossil fuels in order to avoid climate catastrophe,” said Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Just like Keystone I, the Gulf Coast leg of Keystone XL will spill, polluting land and water and ruining important habitat . . ."

Milquetoast! What about people's health, the contamination of water tables?

“The president’s support for this pipeline is troubling,” said Greenwald. “Keystone XL may be a boon to Big Oil companies in the exporting business but those profits will come at a stiff price for our land, water, wildlife and climate.”

Another way of saying this: "The President has fucked the People of the United States so that the richest corporations in the history of money can become still more profitable."

Greenwald again: “The American people have spoken clearly against this project. Building Keystone XL in pieces doesn’t make it any less dangerous.”

The Three Stooges seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency have increasingly blathered about how Obama is at fault for the increasing price of gasoline at the pump.  Rather than doing the courageous thing -- confronting this egregious lie for what it is -- Kidglove once again has "compromised" with his opposition.  His version of compromise once was known -- and still ought to be -- as "unconditional surrender."  He'll let Exxon, Chevron, Shell and the other fossil fuel criminals have their polluting, killer pipeline; you and I will get a dime or even a quarter off the price of a gallon of gas.   Big Oil's profits will rise by 10 or 25 billion dollars.

In fact, any literate human with the capacity to reason slightly beyond 2 + 2 knows perfectly well that Wall Street  speculators and hedge fund managers have driven up the price of gas at the pump.  And you and I know damned well that if you took down the names of those speculators and hedge fund managers, and fed them into the data base for Republican campaign contributions, you'd hit  the bloody trifecta.  These unregulated hooligans have a license to steal from us, the people, thanks to the right-wing Republican congress and the contumely of Citizens United, and Dr. Kidglove's gutless unwillingness to be a real President.

We elected these scoundrels.  Hey, Shylock: Carve another pound or so off our fleshy asses. We get what we deserve.



 

Examining the Bond of Hatred

Since the Far Right and its Christofascist allies took over the Republican party, I have been searching for the Common Denominator, the central factor that drew these bedfellows together and fuels their political passions.

I think I've found it: hatred. Herewith a partial list of what the Far Right hates:

Women.

Women who have fun.

Women who earn equal pay with men for equal work.

Women who have sex.

Liberals.

Liberals who have sex.

Women and liberals who have fun having sex.

Sex. (The immaculate conception theory has special appeal for conservatives.)

Brown people.

Black people.

Red (native American) people.

People who talk funny.

People with funny ideas (examples: "All men are created equal." "All men are endowed with certain inalienable rights.")

People who don't believe in the existence of gods.

People who worship different gods.

People who worship the same god but in a different manner.

People who don't worship at all.

All religions except fundamental Christianity.

Adequate, affordable health care for anyone We hate.

Decent living conditions for anyone We hate.

Decent pay for anyone We hate.

Black people in white houses.  There's a reason  it's called the White House.

People who think government has an obligation to help people We hate, such as the poor, people of color, immigrants, non-English speakers.

People who think government should be on the side of all the people, not just very rich people.

People who understand the difference between Good Law and Bad Law and advocate for the Rule of Law.

People who understand the nuances of language and thought and respect them. They're called Elites and they should be kicked off the bus.

Scientists.

Scientific facts that contradict Our Cherished Beliefs. 

Science that tells inconvenient truths.

Truth of any kind.

Progress.  The bad old days are good enough for Us.

People who oppose Our Wars.  You gotta Support Our Troops by sending them to a new Vietnam every couple of years. 

Me.  But, like FDR, I welcome their hatred.