Scotched in Scotland

The G8 Summit in Scotland is over. As honcho of the convening country that set the agenda, Brit Prime Minister Tony Blair was widely praised for placing world poverty and the climate crisis at the top of the agenda---and he would have been even without the show of support after the terror bombings.

After that things get murky. When it came to farm subsidies reform, European nations stuck close to their self-interest. But on the larger questions, it was Bushcorps that spoiled the apples. Even on the one major accomplishment---doubling aid to Africa---Bush had to brag that it didn't cost the U.S. anything it wasn't already going to spend.

But the Climate Crisis was as usual the main rot.Bushcorps prevented the conference from endorsing real emissions goals, while continuing to argue that Kyoto standards would wreck the U.S. economy, economic studies to the contrary. But the Bushitters had at least a possible point that the emphasis should be placed on alternative energy. But in the end, it was all talk. Bush didn't commit a cent to development or research.

Bush is going to be remembered for many crimes against the country: lying the U.S. into a war of aggression, turning a surplus needed to address pressing present and near-certain future problems into a devastating deficit---those will probably dwarf the others. But one crime against the world, it's people and it's life will be what he's doing and failing to do about the climate crisis. He's the new and global Nero. Bush twaddles while the world burns.

Terror

The Guardian called Wednesday's transit explosions England's "worst-ever terror attack," "causing the biggest loss of life..."

But was it? If the definition is restricted to postwar violence by parties other than a sovereign state, then it fits. But from the point of view of the targeted population, it was not.

Because around sixty years ago, there was something called The Blitz.

For a full description with pictures:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blitz

The people of London and people in other areas of England endured German bombing as early as 1939 to as late as 1945. But they experienced the concentrated bombing campaign known as the Blitz from the fall of 1940 until the following May of 1941.

Look at these numbers with recent acts of terrorism in mind.

At first the targets were military and supply. On September 7, some 300 German bombers escorted by 600 fighters came in the first wave, followed by another 180 bombers that night. The target was the port, but most of the bombs hit residential areas-"collateral damage" we'd say today---killing 430 and injuring 1600.

This kind of bombing continued for 60 consecutive nights. An average of 200 bombers each night dropped a total of over one million incendiary bombs and 13,000 tons of high explosives.

Then the Luftwaffe expanded the targets to other cities, but there were still attacks on London. A third phase began in February 1941. According to the wikipedia entry, "By this time, the effort was aimed as much against civilians as against industrial targets and the raids were intended to provoke terror among the civilian population."

Some 43,000 people were killed in the bombings, and over one million homes were destroyed. Such national landmarks as Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral were damaged. The devastation was so extensive that piles of rubble survived into the 1980s.

Then came the V-1 Buzz Bombs and the V-2 rocket bombs: nearly 1400 V-2s fell on London alone.

The terror was supposed to break the will of the British people. Hitler predicted workers would revolt against the government. It didn't work. The British held together and fought back. The article describes their "stoicism," the same word used in a report about London after the terror attacks Wednesday.

This Friday the subways and buses are expected to operating at near normal levels. London would go about its business.

When the Allies achieved air superiority in Europe and then in Japan, they eventually also used bombing for the chief purpose of terrorizing the populations of German and Japanese cities. In most cases, it had the same effect as the Blitz bombing: it stiffened the resolve of the people being terrorized.

Good and Evil

President Bush has used the London terrorist bombings as another occasion to broadcast his analysis that we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. It is a deceptively simplistic argument, and it is damaging to our ability to focus on what needs to be done to prevent terrorist attacks.

How do you decide who is Good and who is Evil? Empirically? The Good guys don't blow up innocent civilians in London subways---they blow them up from airplanes over Iraq, or with artillery shot into houses, etc. How do you measure the relative evil?

Do you make a balance sheet of good deeds versus bad deeds? How do you weigh one against the other---in terms of numbers of people? Or dollars spent, or saved? What is the time frame---throughout history, in the past year, in the current administration?

Does the inability to come up with commonly agreed upon criteria mean that good and evil are empty concepts, without meaning? No. Not at all.

Good is something we strive to be. Good is something we try to do. There is nothing exact about it. We know that we have good and evil in our natures. We know that there are people who are transcendentally good, though not everything they do is good, just as there are people who are operationally evil, though they may treat their pets very well.

The human problem is that if we think we've done something bad, we feel guilty, we don't want to own up to it, and we wish we hadn't done it. That helps us in trying to do good, to get better at it. But it also leaves us open to manipulation. People can guilt-trip each other, and they can also mollify each other, take away the guilt by denying the evil act.

This is politically potent. If you can make people feel they are Good, this is a Good country, you are likely to get elected and reelected. There are other underlying complexities here, some due to differences in fundamental beliefs about the human situation, which some people derive from their religious doctrines. Some people believe that because of their faith, they are Good. Other believe that good is a matter of deeds.

Put together politics, a certain studied simplemindedness, and perhaps a certain religious faith, and you've got the GW Bush view. The big problem with the Bush view is that he sees Us as Good in a way that means everything we do is good and nothing we do is evil.

That's not only morally devastating, it hinders practical efforts, for example in preventing terrorist attacks.

The act of killing innocents in London was evil. The thought of planning it for months, and then (if the claim of responsibility is to be believed) promoting it as some holy fulfillment, is sickening. But we will get nowhere on any level by taking the absolute view that being the Good Guys means we're pure and without responsibility for evil that sows the seeds of more evil.

Ignorance is no excuse either, especially when military and economic power is being wielded in our name. And when those who we charge to protect us are failing. Believing ourselves to be Good suggests we have nothing to learn. That's an error that invites tragedy.

I would define a Good country as one that relentlessly tries to do good, that admits its errors, makes those responsible accountable, and takes responsibility for correcting errors, correcting evils and doing better. A country that is always learning, and takes seriously what it learns, and acts on it. Then the idea has meaning: we can say we're a good country, without saying or implying that we're pure, that anything we do can be justified because we define ourselves as Good.

News Flash! Bush Not Entirely Wrong on Climate Crisis!

The Bush administration is taking a new tack in its approach to global heating at the G8 Summit in Scotland, which past experience suggests may be cynical and mendacious, but on the merits it is almost not untrue. Fancy that.

Starting with the positive, G.W. Bush allowed these very words to escape from his oil-based lips: "I recognize that the surface of the Earth is warmer, and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem."

Strike up the band! What's next? Bush discovers gravity?

Okay, let's not get carried away.

The exact proposals Bush will make, and the exact wording of the final communique out of Scotland, are yet to occur. But Bush is urging movement away from fossil fuels, which must be regarded as positive, and suggests a package of financial incentives to encourage alternative energy.In this, he is partly being just realistic about what businesses are already doing, and perhaps offering them more government welfare to do what they know they have to do anyway. But that's not unprecedented, and the truth is that the attempts to deal with the two main elements of the climate crisis are going to be messy and fractious.

The two elements are near-term crises and long-term prevention. At the moment, proposals for alternative energy have all kinds of near-term benefits, except that they are unlikely to assuage the near-term effects of the climate crisis. When those effects start to be pronounced in various parts of the world, there may be a reaction against alternative energy because it didn't prevent them. That's a problem leaders should be aware of and talking about, but in fact political leaders are dealing in baby steps. For now, it's at least something that they are talking about moving away from fossil fuels at all.

There are a number of prominent examples of the unorganized and often entreprenurial efforts, which "Dreaming Up Daily" will highlight in coming weeks. For now, this one: the prominence of wind power.

In this International Herald Tribune article, a number of nations and international companies are getting into the wind power business in a big way. Though most conspicuous in Europe, they include companies in Japan, and General Electric in the US:

General Electric said on June 28 that its revenue from wind power equipment in 2005, its third year in the wind power sector, would exceed $2 billion, based on orders and commitments through the first six months. "Wind power continues to be the fastest-growing segment of the global energy industry," General Electric said in a statement.

Of course, the growth of this industry belies Bush's contention that the Kyoto accords are destructive and unhelpful, for Kyoto spurred these alternative energy efforts. It ensured some sort of a global standard that gives businesses the confidence to pursue this.

But Bush is right, if only accidentally, that Kyoto is not the complete answer, and it alone is not sufficient to address the climate crisis, in near-term or far.

Name Change and New Portal

The name has changed, the address remains the same, so if you've bookmarked "American Dash", you'll still come here.

The content will probably remain largely the same, as I experiment with a new Portal blog. Please check it out and let me know what you think, by leaving a comment or emailing me. It's currently called Dreaming Up Daily.

New to this template is the Links feature to the right, under the ads. You can link directly to Dreaming Up Daily from there anytime.

Thanks.

And Endowed by the Great Mystery

Among the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence (that's what this fourth of July thing is supposed to be about, right?) is some outright slander of American Indians, despicable crap that Jefferson and his fellows knew wasn't true.

It's fitting and proper that the founding document of the United States should include the shadow of the entire European invasion enterprise. It's fitting that we acknowledge this as well as the eloquence and historical importance of this document.

But don't miss the oped piece in the New York Times that spells out some of the ways that American Indians and their cultures created and shaped the entire idea of liberty and equality. For instance:

When the 17th-century French adventurer Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan, tried to convince the Huron, the Iroquois's northern neighbors, of Europe's natural superiority, the Indians scoffed. Because Europeans had to kowtow to their social betters, Lahontan later reported, "they brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having." Individual Indians, he wrote "value themselves above anything that you can imagine, and this is the reason they always give for it, that one's as much master as another, and since men are all made of the same clay there should be no distinction or superiority among them."

It's probably fitting then that so many seem compelled to celebrate this day by shooting off explosives. American Indians provided key ideas (which combined with European ideas as well, from the Enlightenment back to the Romans and Greeks and probably the Indigenous peoples there, because as this piece rightly points out, pre-agricultural societies are characteristically more egalitarian than post-agricultural ones. Read Paul Shepard on why this is so.) But the European transplants had the guns.

That particular war of the worlds worked out badly for the indigenous, especially since it was they who caught the imported diseases. Because they didn't live in overcrowded unsanitary conditions, they hadn't developed virulent contagious diseases of their own, and so had no immunity and no horrible germs for the invaders to catch. Wells' novel actually hints at this, although the Spielberg film that is this 4ths spectacle can only suggest what being invaded is like, and let the imaginative extrapolate, to Iraq for example, or even to their own U.S. backyards, before and even after the first big 4th of July weekend.

The Founding Sachems - New York Times

In Other New...

Review of Spielberg's version, "War of the Worlds" at Soul of Star Trek.
An essay upon Quiet at This North Coast Place.