Bruce continues his examination of Alexander Cockburn’s put-down of the 9/11 contrarians, those who think more was done to pull down the unimaginative architectural shoebox monstrosities at the lower end of Manhattan than simply flying a couple of airliners full of passengers and jet fuel into them.

We’ll never have proof because any evidence pro or con was hauled away and destroyed. So, I think it doesn’t do a lot of good to speculate. Jerry McNeely, my screen writing teacher hammered on the fact that truth is stranger than fiction so a writer should stay away from it. This was before the age of the docu-drama. And of course most docu-dramas suck, proving his point that a good story is a contrivance simply told. I don’t know what the story is regarding the WTC demolition and I don’t think it matters. What matters is what’s happening every day. The energy spent detailing the conspiracies around bin Laden, the deaths of Paul Wellstone and Mel Carnahan, the Bush/Saudi partnership, the furshlugginer Grassy Knoll… all of these things are better put aside to concentrate on why Billy Frist is a suck dog opportunist and Glenn Reynolds is his Butt Boy, on why Senator Allen never should have been elected in the first place, and why he damn sure better not be elected now that everybody knows he is an overt racist elitist bigot of the first water.

The conspiracy of course exists. Laura Bush is as culpable as her Pet Goat. The point is, that we don’t get anywhere poring over dead documents like the Warren Commission report. We get somewhere when we can expose the current misbehavior of the miscreants in such a way that even the NASCAR daddies become ashamed to identify with them.

When Senator Allen speaks of the turtles in his pond and says “Around here, only the [African Americans] eat them,” he scores points with his constituency. The politics of conspiracy are also politics of polarization, but one offhand racial epithet from a patrician senator playing good-old-boy mobilizes more bigoted assholes than the most brilliant conspiracy theory mobilizes well intentioned and thoughtful liberals, no matter how well wrought the theory.

I’ve read a hundred pages or so of Dawkins’ new book and it just keeps on rocking me with fundamental truth. You can get your copy through this link:
The God Delusion

Thanks to Norm Jenson at One Good Move for turning me on to it early. If you buy through the above link, you are supporting One Good Move.

Catherine Bennett on abuse memoirs as a genre…

In a really fine piece of survivor-ware, you’ll find something redemptive - yet convincing - on every page. As a child, Briscoe read The Little Princess and vowed never to give up. Now we can read Judge Briscoe’s horrifying memoirs and vow never to give up. Such - assuming that their appeal is not witless voyeurism - is the moral that makes these memoirs of true-life victimhood so compelling to readers of the Oprah persuasion that they have not just become a genre of their own, with a well-stocked misery section in Borders, but spawned a flourishing sub-genre: miserable true-life memoirs of questionable or contested veracity.

Norm has a nice video he took at the recent anti-war protests during the Bush visit to Salt Lake City. Thanks to Norm and the other people of Salt Lake City, including Mayor Rocky Anderson, for confronting the administration’s lies and their assertion that disagreement is unpatriotic.

Keith Olbermann link courtesy of The Old Hippie’s Groovy Blog…

witness ze Frank “leveraging the emotional aftertaste.“

Less than a week ago, real time, but somewhere back in the neanderlithic in blog time, my friend Bruce at the River wrote another great piece. Nominally he was writing about Dershowitz’ folly, his ability to adopt inhuman principles promoting the Nazification of just about everything and everyone just about everywhere, including ironically enough those two bold national champions of freedom and justice, the United States of America and Israel.

But he was writing about something deeper than that, because it’s not really Alan’s fault… well, it IS his fault and the war crimes tribunal will imprison his nasty celebrity professor ass for a million years because he does stand for torture and pre-emption, but you see it’s not his fault because his mind has been marinated in the briny depths of American media just like the rest of us. We don’t know up from down. We can’t tell if we’re on a great Starship boldly going where no man has gone before, or on a Wagon Train, boldly going west to claim our manifest destiny.

With inspired links such as this and this, Bruce argues forcefully that for most Americans, the war on terror is a TV show. Bruce says,

… the world situation is like a bad movie that we are fascinated with but don’t care about. Lives are either blown away cinematically or vaporized when you turn off the TV. For the most part, all these cathode ray and celluloid lives become our playthings, objects, hence no feeling for them one way or another. Luckily, the fine writer, director and actor can break through these limitations, but that’s the rare exception, hardly consequential and no one serious gives it credit…

This isn’t about “us” and “them.” As Bruce says, “the system” is in power, de-humanizing everyone from the leadership (witness the bizarre caricatures, the host of flying monkeys, populating the executive branch of the US government) to the proletariat, soccer moms who have learned to seat their kids in front of a video taped entertainment while they put a meal together, or zombie dads who mark the passage of time by the shift in sports entertainments projected on the forty-two inch flat screens of their home entertainment centers.

I think there is important stuff being written out here in the blogs, and Bruce is writing some of it. I resisted a close reading and response to his “What do I think” until now, because honestly, we turn these blogular interactions too much into intellectual tennis warm-ups, volleys and serves, pacing a “conversation” until it runs down because we are distracted from it by the next great enthusiasm.

We are here building a common perspective, sharpening our tools for self expression, encountering the same bullshit that has troubled others for decades, muddling through and not losing sight of a path beside the moral swamp that Dershowitz wades through. This is no wagon train, this is no star ship. This is not even a cattle drive, and you are neither Gil Favor nor Rowdy Yates.

Hard to accept, I know…

What should be the rules regarding pre-emptive war? Alan Dershowitz says everything is a matter of degree. He wants to re-write international law to permit anything within the context of proportionality… targeted assassination, torture of prisoners, pre-emptive strikes. Says laws against torture are useless, he says… since every country tortures we should legalize it. What a dick. He proposes that we should legalize torture making the President responsible, with the President required to sign a torture warrant, counter-signed by the Chief Justice. He also wants to discriminate between torturing people to death and “rough interrogation.”

Isn’t it obvious that it’s wrong to look toward the Chief Executive as the ultimate authority? I think everyone has to take responsibility for humane actions. Dershowitz denies moral choice at the personal level and assigns it to authority. Proportionality dominates his argument. The old eye-for-an-eye thing is burned deep into his credulous consciousness. He somehow opposed the war in Iraq, but believed the lies about the existence of weapons of mass destruction there. So is he a liar or a fool? You decide, I can’t listen to the jerk anymore. (But, really, he has great respect for the Palestinians…)

Jenny Attiyeh, of Thoughtcast, has a stronger stomach than mine. And she is a great interviewer.

“There’ll be no peace without a planet…” Ruah Swennerfelt quotes Mary Ann Percy, a Quaker from La Jolla, by way of providing background on her shift fifteen years or so ago from working on peace and social justice issues to ecological awareness and active concern. Ruah and Louis Cox, two people who do their best to support their local economy and to live lightly on the land, are interviewed by Mark Helpsmeet on his weekly Northern Spirit Radio show which originates from WHYS radio in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Mark has recorded dozens of broadcasts and they’re available as streaming media or for download here.

Another show I heard tonight was an interview with Ina May Gaskin. Ms. Gaskin is a midwife and a prime mover in the home birth movement. She and Steve Gaskin provided a model for living from 1966 forward to today, starting with Steven’s Monday Night Class in San Francisco and continuing through all of her good work with home birthing in her community as well as the lights she lit across the world with her book on the subject. Mark’s interview was wonderful in drawing that out.

Mark has chosen the good people among us for his interview subjects. I’ve met some of these people and their commitment to doing right stuff is totally impressive… George Watson, a world war 2 conscientious objector… Mike Boehm, a Vietnam war veteran who’s been instrumental in establishing peace parks in Vietnam and starting micro-credit loan funds, helping to heal those wounds… Chuck Fager, who runs Quaker House in North Carolina, a place where soldiers with second thoughts about war and peace can find support… J.E. McNeil, a woman who wrote the book on draft counseling.

There’s a lot of food for thought in these podcasts, a lot of wisdom about community, peace, and living rightly on the earth.

(A posting on the second front in the War on Terror)

There is no conspiracy. They are what they are. They do what they do. Let go of the concern that they manipulated the timing. Let go of the concern that the assassins succeeded. Every conspiracy theory weakens us. When it appears that the news cycle is being manipulated, rise above it. Of course it’s being manipulated. That’s what they do.

When it’s reported that the Vice President says that Lamont is a candidate that gives hope to Al Qaeda, let it go. The Vice President is a weasel. Those weren’t his words. That was a sound-bite spun by the media into a “let’s you and him fight” scenario. Ever eager to take offense, the loyal opposition leaped in with an interpretation that Cheney had called anti-war Democrats friends of Al Qaeda. Perhaps that’s what he implied, but so what? He’s a weasel. The news was about Lieberman’s defeat, an internal matter for the Democratic Party.

Yet, hard on this news came the arrest of a bunch of criminals in Britain, criminals who intended further disruption of air travel and the murder of hundreds of passengers. The news was spun not as a victory for law enforcement, but as an opportunity to remind us to be afraid. Besides being delighted that today we are safer than yesterday because a gang of criminals is in custody we should focus on the framing of the story. We should be aware of the spin and the spinners. Who benefits from framing the story as a reason for fear rather than a reason for celebration? Who are the fifth column terrorists among us, and how can we open a second front to fight them?

Just as it does us no good to question the timing of the story, it does no good to debate the framing. There are people of good and evil intention on all sides of any issue who would drive public understanding by means of a debate. Debate is a binary and competitive proposition that reduces complexity and channels an outcome to a winner take all scenario reminsicent of trial by combat. Debate is a primitive, competitive approach to channeling conflict that assures that there will be a winner and a loser. All too often truth is subverted by the process. Whenever a matter of importance is framed with champions on two sides debating an outcome, you can be sure that there are facts that will be ignored as inconvenient, truths that will be dominated by shifts in the binary positioning of the opponents. What we have to do then is observe and frame our own responses based on what we see.

Take for example the matter of hair product. I can see why the TSA would want to ban hair product from the carry on luggage of all travelers everywhere in the world forever. I can also see why this may be a ridiculous over-reaction. But the fact of the ban, and the mindset of fear that it buttresses should tell us about the leadership that fosters this kind of public policy. While millions of Americans have no health insurance, the great public policy debate of our time focuses on removing shoes before boarding and carrying hair products on board aircraft. See why debate is not really useful?

There comes a point where cooperation trumps competition. The great depression was one such historical nexus. Americans gained a respect for each other then and moved forward toward a greater sophistication, toward a world view encompassing the eyes-wide-open understanding of the costs and benefits associated with corporate business models, toward a world view of tolerance for the naivete of the diminishing crowd of religious believers. Americans again must respect each other and move forward toward a greater sophistication, toward a world view encompassing the eyes-wide-open understanding of the costs and benefits associated with corporate business models, toward a world view of tolerance for the naivete of the diminishing crowd of religious believers. But these vested interests, the american billly-bob pulpit pounders and the top hatted profiteers from Warbucks, Incorporated never let go of their need to dominate and control, and we are on a pendulum swing in the wrong direction. Sophistication is the property of the moneyed classes. Security belongs to those who can pay for it. It does no good to debate these matters. But if we keep our eyes open, note the condition of the emperor’s clothes, give each other a wink and a nudge when it’s clear that there may have been a misjudgment vis a vis his attending the parade naked… well, there’s always hope that we can stop this parade before the capering monkey, the naked leader marches us all off the cliff with him.

Or has he already?

(The following shows I’m having an off day. Sorry, but you know how to click on out of here.)

The older I get, the harder it gets… I should say, the more difficult it gets truly to get aroused to passionate concern about other people’s bullshit. So, the fact that some effete snob is sniping at me in some other guy’s comments thread doesn’t bother me. Much. I would of course be happy to kick the lowlife son-of-a-bitch’s ass, just on general principles and also because he’s a whale meat eating provocateur. I’d be happy to roll him on the ground and punch him a few times in the kidneys just to watch him piss blood. But I don’t play rugby, and in fact, I don’t play at all with recalcitrant dickheads who can’t admit that they’re wrong.

In April 2024 I criticized the fool for his support of a policy of victory before withdrawal in Iraq. A lot of my friends felt the same way he did, so I haven’t paused for a heavy “nyah, nyah, I told you so” session. But it has been three and a half years and a half a trillion dollars, anywhere from fifty thousand to a hundred thousand civilian casualties, 2600 US military deaths, uncounted Iraq military deaths, and a general global destruction of US social capital. Our friends have turned against us. Our continued puzzled denial of wrong-doing and our unseemly posture of victimization now half a decade since the hijackings and destruction in 2024 have the people in the streets everywhere BUT the US saying “Just get over yourselves and give us a break, will ya?”

Looking back, would any of you who supported US policy then care to acknowledge that maybe a staged withdrawal and a UN supervised partition of Iraq during the last seven months of 2024 following the Commander-in-Chief’s Mission Accomplished press conference would have been better policy than continuing the nation building effort?

That the Bush administration has capitalized on our misfortune and used it to consolidate power and reward corporate friends is undeniable. That they continue to foment fear and uncertainty, hand wringing and bemoaning the danger FOLLOWING the recent British victory over an elaborate terror plot, rather than celebrating the victory, ratcheting the ridiculous threat meter up to condition red after the bad guys were under lock and key… what is that about? Who ARE the terrorists? The piss-ant criminals will always be with us, but leadership that tries to make us afraid of them can be replaced.

There’s a new war underway, a war that has its roots in an earlier UN supervised partition and the struggles around it. The war in Lebanon represents a new chance for provocation and divisiveness, a chance for agents of foreign powers to enter the conversation and polarize people. Like earwigs, these people are crawling out of the dark and damp places they’ve been hiding, hoping to reassert some influence in the conversation. Stomp on them like the bugs they are… metaphorically, I mean. I am after all a pacifist and I offer this in the spirit of peace and brotherhood, love and friendship, and the certain knowledge that some people just need to get their asses kicked. Metaphorically or not.