CA Note from M.Dash

We think of him as a distant cousin: Jon Carroll, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who this week referred to Ashcroft & Company as "inept fascists" who "can't even run a police state right" has pretty much nailed the reaction of non-Californians to California's budget crisis and recall election. Here's the link to Jon Carroll's CA column.

DASHNOTE:

If you missed Anatol Lieven's essay (ostensibly a book review) in the Nation, you should read it now, linked here: "The Empire Strikes Back".

It's as true now as it was when it was written, way back in June or July. (Published in July 7, 2003 issue.)

Here's a taste: "Given its immense wealth, the United States can afford a military capable of dominating the earth; or it can afford a stable, secure system of social and medical entitlements for a majority of its aging population; or it can afford massive tax cuts for its wealthiest citizens and no tax raises for the rest. But it cannot afford all three..."

Chaos: Theory and Reality

by Theron Dash

Could it be that the terrorists who created the 9-11 scenario were prophetic theorists in the application of chaos theory to politics and society? Did they foresee that without years of warfare, and huge quantities of blood and treasure, or even devastating weapons to wipe out millions, they could destroy the United States of America? Did they realize that they could do it with just a single day of dramatic horror, much as the well-placed, well-timed flap of a paradigmatic butterfly's wing could eventually cause a hurricane?

We are well on the way to providing their descendants with the material to support such a boast. The dominoes are still falling, but the pattern is clear: America is well on the way to destroying itself.

The events of 9-11 emboldened the hot-wired fanatics and coolly arrogant overseers of ruling class interests populating the Bush administration and their corporate (including media) and Rabid Right support system to manipulate the more infantile instincts of the public to power their apparently self-serving but dangerously delusionary agenda into consequential reality.

Now those consequences are being felt in virtually every home, in every corner of this noisy but numbed republic. With the federal purse closed to every institution except the military, and with prospect of federal poverty and inaction for years to come, the states and local governments are now facing destruction they can no longer hide. In the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, the states cannot fund programs to lend a life-giving hand to the poor, the sick and the old. They cannot lend a life-changing hand to poor and middle class children in the form of good schools and affordable higher education, or in support for the arts and other preposterously inexpensive ways of transforming lives with benefit to all.

And that's just the beginning. Local governments are facing the kind of decisions appropriate to nations mired in poverty or devastating warfare. Because people are being fired and infrastructure support is being neglected, there will be homes that burn down and people burned to death inside them because America cannot afford adequate fire departments. There will be people who suffer and die when earthquakes and storms wreak havoc because America cannot afford to provide timely assistance. Very quietly and individually, there will be people who suffer and die because America cannot afford to provide basic medical care to those who need it, especially now that even emergency room doors are often closed to those without enormously expensive insurance.

No one knows who the victims will be of ordinary but increasingly dangerous misfortunes. We will all soon be forced to understand that few homes, very neighborhoods, and no cities or regions will be as secure as they were just a few years ago.

Each state and locality has its particular layers of additional responsibility for their plight: bad laws, bad governmental practices, bad corporate behavior, bad politics. But since these situations are being repeated throughout America, there is a national responsibility.

Where is America's wealth going? It is going to the wealthy, partly in the form of enormous tax cuts. It is going to the military industrial complex, and it's going down the drain of misconceived warfare and occupation in Iraq. The Bush administration is responsible, and the media and the American people are complicit, however unconsciously or mistakenly.

Consider the blood lust exhibited at the news that Saddam's sons were killed. Consider the rules of engagement there, in which any returned fire permitted total destruction and killing of everyone---in this case, the sons (whose brutality and sadism had been visited on Iraqis, not Americans, who presumably have the right to set their own priorities) and a fourteen year old grandson. Consider that a few million dollars would make a huge difference in many American communities right now, and that the informant who led American troops to Saddam's sons will be paid rewards totaling some 30 million dollars. The current wave of triumphant preening and prediction that these killings spells the end of Iraqi resistance to America's criminally confused occupation will likely prove to be the usual wishful thinking, as it is the same kind of willful blindness and imagery-will-make-it-true so consistent with this delusionary policy as well as the fundamentalist mindset of much of the Rabid Right.

Our Dash in California
by Morgan Dash

California is a nation within a nation, large and wealthy enough to go a long way to solving many of its own problems, yet for that same reason feeling the ups and downs of the America to which it is appended more powerfully than almost any other state.

California's state budget crisis is having effects as severe as anywhere in America, and more severe than many other states. Layered on the national insanity is a political system that often bypasses both the barriers and institutional consistencies of representative government with single issue ballot measures that reflect the natural if moronic desires of Californians (as expressed in a recent poll) for lower taxes and more government spending.

Now mandated through the similar petition process, California will hold the first recall election of its governor in history. This comes when the California budget is still not passed, while millions of people are directly and indirectly affected by the expected cuts that have not yet been officially made (and thousands who are paid through the state are facing dramatic loss of income if the budget isn't passed very soon.)

The recall petitioning and politicking by the rabid right has already diverted attention and serious engagement in the process of dealing with the realities of state income and outflow. The upcoming recall campaign will mean much more politics and much less government, and therefore more chaos and neglect.

The recall campaign also offers governor Gray Davis the opportunity to go on a dramatic offensive, to talk sense about the total political system in the state, and to propose comprehensive reforms. The seeds of this approach are in his budget document itself, which catalogues the absurd and contradictory mandates of the ballot measure system. He has the opportunity to be heard on what the state really needs to do to make the state government work for California's people: To propose needed reforms of the system, to talk in graphic detail about the responsibility of the Bush administration for this crisis, and to propose how California can take advantage of its size and wealth to institute solutions to its people's most pressing problems, regardless of what the federal government does. At the top of this agenda should be a state financed comprehensive health insurance program that guarantees coverage to all Californians.

Gray Davis is widely believed to be excessively political, self-serving and insensitive to the needs of Californians. And that's just among his supporters. He may believe that he can survive a recall election with relative ease, but that may not be the case. If Richard Rioardan is his chief Republican opponent, he is in for a very tough fight. Even Arnold S. has the potential to draw enough votes, especially if he comes out strongly for support of the arts and adds that constituency to those who would vote for him because he's a Republican or a "non-politician" celebrity.

So Davis may decide that the best political move is to shatter his gray image with bold analysis and proposals. If he does and if he can do it with some effectiveness, California and the nation will benefit from the ensuing debate.

By the by, in the interest of family unity I remind you that brother Gabriel continues his archival verse project over at http://gabrieldash.blogspot.com.

Reaping

The United States of Bush was going to crush the Great Saddam, with his weapons of mass destruction and U.S. equipped army and CIA trained terror squads, and bring democracy to Iraq. It granted other less powerful and morally clarified nations the privilege of participating but when they balked, well fuck em. We don't need them. We'll see who gets the damn contracts when the dust settles and the oil flows again. Pass me some of them freedom fries.

So the U.S. of B. figured to get in, wipe out the bad guys, be conquering heroes, scare the shit out of other countries, get the contracts and get out. Couple of months, and on to Iran, or Syria maybe. Get the whole Axis of Evil by Christmas.

And it all worked great until it all started falling apart. The same folks who foisted such an obvious B-movie story of the Heroic Private Lynch onto a tabloid-brain media whose idea of a literary genius is Tom Brokaw, got caught crossing their fingers and telling a little white whopper in the State of the Union. Iraq turned out not to be a self-winding watch you took off a dead soldier; once you owned it you actually had to run it. Costs $5 billion a month just to keep the place in soldiers. Or some say $4 billion. The difference in the estimates could change several million lives back in the states, where the poor, the sick and the children would be paying for all this with their lives, but that's another story...or is it?

Well, turns out the U. of B. S. could use some help after all. How about some soldiers to replace the ones who are falling down with exhaustion and being picked off in the public market? Or a few bucks anyway, can you help us out here? Hey France? Germany? But oddly enough, nobody is lining up to volunteer. What do you mean, we're out of freedom fries?

Now that Bush Nation is showing how easily overwhelmed it is in that one little test case country without much in the way of even weapons of fairly big destruction (but still with lots of automatic rifles), those other Axis of Evil countries are no longer quaking in their boots. More like they're laughing up their nuclear weapons suitable aluminum sleeves.

Turns out those contracts aren't worth much without a government making sure the trains run, not to mention the water, and that there's a law or two, and some people to make them and enforce them, so you don't get picked off climbing the oil rig.

It's all very funny isn't it except for the Iraqis dying, the American dying, the Brits dying, and here at home when the house catches on fire it goes on burning because there's no firetrucks coming and you can just burn in America, and if you get sick or an infected cut and you've got no insurance even the emergency room doesn't have to take you anymore so you can just suffer and die in America, and if there's an earthquake or a terrorist attack you can call homeland security or you can call your momma in heaven for all the good it will do you because nobody's coming and you can wait and starve and die of thirst and exposure in America, and if you're looking for a future and some hope don't look to the schools, don't look for your arts programs your theater teacher who told you yes your life does mean something, you can do something well, there were people who suffered before and found out things, we can at least all sing together but don't bother because all that's unaffordable in America, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in human history and can't afford anything except an army for the 99% and everything else for the one-tenth of 1%, the gated ones, them of the royal coup, the supreme coup, the corporate backscratch club of the U.S. of Bush.

As the Worm Turns

Now that young Americans are once again the cannon fodder of politicians' ambitions, being subjected to from ten to 25 attacks every day in Iraq, and dying at the rate of one a day for awhile, the worm is starting to turn. The most vocal alarm is coming from a traditional harbinger (people who have been "in country" and have talked to troops there) and from a source that usually isn't heard from this early (families of military personnel.) But it's only going to grow.

At the same time as Americans are beginning to question what the hell we're doing over there, they are also beginning to doubt that there was sufficient reason to start the war in the first place. The White House admission that one of the two pieces of evidence Bush claimed in his State of the Union address to show that Iraq was readying nuclear weapons (the uranium buy in Africa) was false made lots of news, much more dramatically than the earlier revelation that the other bit of evidence (aluminum tubes that turned out to be the wrong kind for nukes) when it was shredded weeks ago.

This is how it happens to extremists. The uranium lie happened because White House political operatives intimidated and overrode intelligence and foreign policy professionals. They've been doing that since 9/11, although until recently it's been heresy to say so. But being hoist on their own petard is only a part of how the worm turns. Extremism always invites its opposite. The claim of complete virtue, of being the force of pure good battling against the force of pure evil, encourages the hidden evil to rise and explode. When it does, the claimer of total virtue looks doubly bad, and moreover, cannot admit to sin or error. It doesn't allow the worm a lot of wriggle room.

The drama, or at least the soap opera, will continue, with its ups and downs, heroes and villains, dizzying ascents and incredible collapses, the inevitable falters and the underdog comes through, or not. Que sera sera may not be much of a political philosophy, but stay tuned. As grandma used to say, you live long enough, you see everything. For instance, Ralph Nader running again.

Meme This: An Essay for a Day

by Phineas Dash

Blogger has switched to a new system which seems unable or unwilling to publish longer entries. I assume this is a temporary problem, so for now I’ve sliced this essay up into separate posts, but you should be able to follow it easily in the normal way, from top to bottom being from start to finish. Just ignore the time checks.


Something called a "meme" is a highly fashionable idea at the moment. What is it? A meme is a highly fashionable idea.

Richard Dawkins is credited with naming it, as a kind of imitation (from the French meme) as an analogue to genes, because it is copied and transmitted from one person to another. Darwinists like Dawkins sometimes use the term as if memes were genes for ideas or information.
But they also use it as if memes are viruses. People become infected with ideas or information, such as buzz-words, fads, "urban legends," and so on.

In that sense, as Lee Cronk writes, "The idea of the meme is itself a meme, and a successful one at that..." Highly respected thinkers like Daniel Dennett use the term. For the short time I was a consulting editor for them, the folks at Adbusters Magazine swallowed it whole. Perhaps they saw in it an alternate pedigree as well, from William Burroughs and his idea of language as a virus.

Are you confused yet? I am. And I suspect we're supposed to be. This meme stuff has the smell of semiotics and deconstructionism, both perfectly good tools until they became dogmas, with their own clergy and secret language. Memeticists who might chance to read the rest of this commentary might simply dismiss it by saying that I don't understand what they mean by "memes." And they may be right. But rather than saying I'm sorry, I am inclined to get loudly in their faces with the simple retort, THEN YOU DIDN'T EXPLAIN IT VERY WELL, DID YOU?

So let's get down to it. First off, no one has ever seen a meme. They have not mapped them as they appear in the human organism, as they have genes. They have not studied them under microscopes, as they have viruses. I mention this because, though sometimes memes are treated as metaphors or similes, they are also sometimes treated as if they have the same effects as genes and viruses---that they are genes and viruses of a sort.

But of what sort? And in what realm? Here is a source of major confusion. Genes are physical things that get passed on from person to person through sexual reproduction. The genes themselves pass on stuff that interacts with other stuff that forms yet other stuff into organized stuff that becomes feet and ears and brains. We say "Genes pass on information" but really, that in itself is pretty close to a metaphorical description. This is how we describe what genes do, in effect.

But memes aren't physical in the sense that genes are. So if genes replicate in the body, and viruses operate in the body, where do memes replicate and operate? Damn good question. (Remember, these are evolutionary biologists, philosophers, anthropologists, etc. talking about memes, not neuroscientists.) Name the realm better, then we can talk. Maybe you're making some sort of sense, or maybe you're just you're violating the categorical imperative by telling me that apples act like automobiles on television except when they don't.

But memes are very popular. The idea that ideas are infectious is infectious. We're enthralled by the speed at which commercial culture, corporate buzz-words, fad-driven media and electronic communication pass "facts", fashions, catch-phrases, images and ideas around.

But look at the words I've used so far, and how many different kinds of ideas and information they describe (don't forget "dogma"). Just exactly what do we gain by grouping them all, and more, under a single heading? Far less than what we lose, I think.

Sure, a phrase, a slogan, a hairstyle, a "look" will "catch on." Melodies can be "catchy," they are "infectious melodies." Certain books and authors, or political leaders, or movie stars, will "catch fire" with the public. Those are nice descriptions of particular phenomena. But they aren't all the same.

A fad is not the same as a dogma, though they both have a social component, a "belonging," a sense that exhibiting the same idea or image is a necessity of membership. But we have far more to learn by finding likenesses and differences, contrasting and comparing, and going deeper, than we do by equating them.

And they are certainly not the same as dogma, as cultural norms, as expectations, as legends, as discoveries, as new theories, as old assumptions, as wisdom. Yes, we can probably learn a few things by looking at them together. But we learn a lot more, with more accuracy and significance, by analyzing them separately, or within a restricted domain, and then comparing them, relating them, synthesizing something from them.

To me, memes are also a dodge, a way of avoiding personal and societal responsibility. We no longer have to worry about such phenomena as conditioning, as social pressure, self-censorship or the economic pressure to conform not only in certain behaviors but in certain worldviews and beliefs and even emotions. (It's not enough anymore to do a job for money; one has to be "committed" to it, be "an associate" and "part of the team," and one must even be "excited" by the goals and sometimes literally the gods of the employer. Giving control of the body and part of the mind to the economy is no longer enough in increasing areas of paid-for endeavor. They demand your soul as a condition of employment and therefore of a certain kind of survival.)

Once you posit ideas as behaving like and practically being biological entities, inherited or caught as infections, self-replicating entities for which you are merely some sort of carrier and they are somehow (like the selfish gene) only interested in their own survival (so to speak), then we are helpless, or require some unspecified form of medical attention (drugs probably.) What's really laughable is that the same sort of people who decry a culture of victimization---who prefer that people with emotional trauma, physical addictions and psychological pathologies just stop whining and get on with it---are now telling us that we're not responsible for what we believe, accept, favor, admire or choose. It's a different flavor of dehumanization, the mirror image of 1950s behaviorism.

Some adherents would say that by positing memes as infections, they are using a potent metaphor easily understood in today's world, in order to warn people that they need to fight off these infections, these pernicious ideas or skewed values or downright lies and subterfuge buried beneath the surface of a cheery commercial image or slogan. Fair enough-but what do you need "memes" for? And once you've gotten your point across, that these are powerfully infectious messages, that in some sense they are feed addictions to consumerism and so on, aren't they pretty useless? Don't they start getting in the way, when you're trying for more precise analysis? Or are you content to fight meme with meme?

Memes institutionalize the superficial. They discourage making distinctions, or developing and communicating more meaningful and significant explanations, or looking for cause (and maybe even cure) in social, cultural, political, economic and interpersonal realms.

Some would say that memes, like genes, are just one factor, and insofar as they are infectious, we can call upon the antibodies of consciousness and good sense to combat them. Fine. As some sort of new simile, as a weak metaphor meant to suggest the power of vivid images in a world high on connection and low on judgment, okay. But I don't think that's how the concept is usually used. Memes are real to their adherents. And they are certainly real enough to spawn an academic discipline, with its conferences, journal articles and books. To which I say, pish, tosh. Get in line behind deconstructionism, semiotics and postmodernism as dogmas that were pushed to absurd heights, and like stock market bubbles of ideas, deflated to nothing, leaving a lot of stale, stinking air.

Part of this also reflects what seems to me an overly mechanistic approach to Darwinist evolution and genetics. But I am not arguing that there is no biological basis for how we receive and judge ideas. New ideas are attractive, I'd guess, because humans survived by taking new information seriously, and not resting until every aspect of it, every possibility, was thoroughly explored. There is survival value in a stable and dependable set of beliefs and practices. (Plus there is resistance to new information by those heavily invested in the old, especially those who derive their power from the established order.) But humanity, and I suspect other creatures, haven't survived by ignoring new information completely. (Plus some will be excited by the old guard's resistance, especially those with less power.)

New information of a negative kind is the most obvious, such as the novelty of a new predator in the neighborhood. (If you think this doesn't still impress people, try the phrase "9-11.") But positive novelty is also important, beginning with new food sources or ways of getting food. We are curious creatures, as many creatures are, and among social creatures, new information that gets the attention of others provides identity and status.

There's also little doubt that humans (like other creatures) find certain qualities in the form of information-melody and rhyme for example-that may indicate some survival value as direct as making information easier to remember, and as indirect as that they cause pleasure, and pleasure has positive physical effects that can enhance survival and fitness for reproduction. And perhaps these qualities are akin to the burrs that encase seeds so the burrs will stick to animal fur and fall off on distant ground where the seeds propagate. But information doesn't come in catch-phrases and melodies. Corporations pay billions to have information crafted, shaped, formed in precisely the most infectious images, sounds and words that money can buy and, more to the point, human minds can devise, because they are trying very hard to do just that.

Some information---like push-button patriotic phrases, expressions of race hatred, or to some extent like the information in commercials and political persuasion-may bypass consciousness and go directly to the unconscious. (I suspect meme-meisters don't make this claim because "unconscious" is not a fashionable idea in their neighborhood.) Again, I find this terminology more useful, more fruitful, for contemplation, analysis and action (the action is: make it conscious and deal with it) than the blunt instrument of memes.

I could go on, but my box of memes is empty. Except for one more: I've concluded that memes make sense to extraverts, because extraverts are oriented towards information more fully formed from outside. So information would appear to them to be like an infection coming into a body. And since most people are extraverts, memes are a popular idea.

Intraverts have their own problems, but some-like being taken over like zombies (or patsies) by the belief that stock markets always go up, or believing in memes and selfish genes mostly because they're cute, fashionable, endlessly repeated, and the boss says so -we are immune to.

king to pawn

by Phineas Dash

Musings inspired by the confluence of Bushism and the Matrix Reloaded, among other distractions...

The idea of kings began perhaps as a mutation of the tribal figure we call the shaman: from one who hears the gods by deftly reading the signs of nature, to the one and only one, who the one and only God talks to.

Maybe the first were charismatic types with a flair for administration and certainly with a taste for power. They ruled by fear and love---by claiming to be the chosen of the King of Heaven who said whether or not the crops will grow to fruition, and by physical force: with an army to subdue the populace, and to fight enemies, invented or real. Conquest could lead to kingship. More lands meant more power. So it went, and so it goes.

When human societies were small and moved through the landscape among equals, there was no need of a king, an absolute ruler. Only when people became dependent on a single source of sustenance---even a single cultivated crop---in a single place, did they feel the need for a single authority. One King of Kings, one king of the realm, and a hierarchy of ownership and administration: the aristocracy to supply the army and control the peasants in exchange for land, power and courtside seats. Warfare of king against king, war within the aristocracy for the right to become king, transformed and absorbed the energies of human societies as they grew.

The religions that emerged from the Mesopotamian deserts were funneled into the king system. Who owns the holy truth? At first it's everybody until somebody claims it all, claims to know, claims the direct line to the King of Kings, so we fall right into following. But it's a damn good job so there are lots of contenders: prophets and heretics and who's on first-- so it becomes dogma eat dogma out there: popes vs. kings, kings vs popes, kings become popes, popes become kings, let's call the whole thing off. How about a savior then? Another name for the new king. Is this the best you can come up with?

We have yet to escape this system. It rules us in our so-called democracies and republics, in our churches, our sciences and arts. It governs our economics and determines how we spend the time of our lives. The authoritarian power may seem dispersed and unidentifiable now, but its basis is clear in how we deify one king or another, even if it is the king or queen of the moment; even if it's Stephen King.

The only meaningful revolt now is the revolt against kings, the idea of kings, the power of kings, the structures of kings, the king’s specialists, the emotions evoked by the system of kings, the beliefs based on the faith in kings and saviors.

Heroes are something else. Heroes and leaders, excellence, special gifts and sensitivities, and a captain to steer the ship, are all real, all to be nurtured and celebrated, and appropriately used. No hero triumphs without help, many myths are stories of groups of heroes, each contributing a talent or strength. The myths of heroes are myths of diversity and cooperation, with leadership and sensitivity to the realities of nature.

We need heroes, but we don't need another savior. Kings and saviors are the wellsprings of violence. The king suckers heroes and turns them into specialists, gets them fighting turf wars against each other, fighting for favor and funding, ignoring each other, learning nothing, dividing so the king can conquer.

We must oppose the king, disobey and resist. The king we must kill is inside us. We must understand what is inside us, what kings and what killers. The hero inside must be encouraged. We must understand, reconcile, invent, encourage, and work at it like the addicts to the king system we are. Saviors won't save us from ourselves.

WMD

Terrorists will try to use Weapons of Mass Destruction in America in the next two years, predicts the Bush administration. Say, doesn’t that include election year? I guess we’d better reelect these folks who are taking such good care of the country. What with Syria harboring terrorists and now Iran touted as a nuclear threat, we sure are glad we’ve conquered Iraq and are hard at work turning it into an American military base and oil well, surrounded by civil chaos.

So what if none of these WMDs are found in Iraq. The most important WMDs are in your minds and hearts anyway. The focus of your fears.

We’re too busy to read biographies of Karl Rove, or Joan Didion’s reporting going back to Bush the Elder that lay out the dangers in scandalously transparent detail. Despite their supposed piety, nothing is sacred to these people but power. They will manipulate every issue and emotion for one purpose: to keep and extend their power. Right now the Bush administration is as dangerous to America as Hitler and the Nazis were to Germany in the 1930s. (Of course, Americans would never commit such violence on a race or class as the Nazis did with the Jews. Never mind that our concentration camps are full of mostly one race, comprising a high proportion of said race, and we execute mostly one class, with some eugenic benefits when they also happen to be retarded.)

We’re so fixated on the latest flavor of fear, so attuned to novelty in our favorite WMDs, that a recently signed pact between the U.S. and Russia promising to reduce their arsenals of nuclear weapons by two-thirds came and went unnoticed. Apart from the mutual cynicism masking a tiny bit of actual progress (at least as measured against standing arsenals, if not previous agreements), this is a disquieting suggestion of how used to the idea of nuclear weapons we’ve become.

It’s been forty years since the nuclear test ban treaty, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis made the awful prospect of nuclear holocaust a clear and present danger. It’s been 58 years since Hiroshima; only fading codgers were around for that, and only retirees remember the days of desert booms and fallout in the backyard. Nuclear war is no longer the sum of all fears (especially if an a-bomb dropped in Baltimore doesn’t disrupt the Beltway too much.) So impoverished is our imagination that it seems quite thinkable that we’ll see a nuclear bomb—not a so-called “dirty” bomb, which is just some explosives that spread a little radiation and a lot of panic, but a bona fide big bang nuke---used by some country against an enemy—before the decade is out, perhaps well before any more chi-chi WMDs. We came close to the first actual nuclear exchange just a year or so ago, and India and Pakistan have not exactly resolved their differences since.

This is not to downgrade the dangers of your favorite WMD; biological and chemical and soon genetic weapons can be deployed cheaply and by small groups, and pretty soon by individuals who find automatic weapons too limiting. It would be nice if our leaders were actually doing something about these dangers other than trying to scare us into voting for them and increasing their power, but of course that's your usual liberal wishful thinking. No, the likelihood of a big bang is just a predictable consequence of our apathy. The nuclear threat has been around so long without anything much ever happening, and people no longer fear it, that it just becomes more likely that it will finally be fulfilled, and we'll see what it really looks like (that is, if we don't happen to be real close to where it happens.) Bet the cable channels can't wait.

West Wing Clipped?

Aaron Sorkin, according to the buzz, left "The West Wing" at least partly due to differences with NBC over political content, both of "The West Wing" and NBC news. The series ratings had dropped this past season and NBC apparently felt part of the reason was that the show's politics (and Sorkin's) are "out of step" with Bushville America. (Yeah, and that's why we watched it.) So Sorkin gave them a final plot arc and a melodramatic last episode that---as nobody else has yet pointed out---exactly mirrors his own situation. President Barlett/Sorkin essentially abdicated, though without necessarily relinquishing all control, leaving the future course of the Barlett presidency/West Wing series unknown, and his/their abdication leaves control in the hands of Republicans/NBC's desire for the show to be more patriotically in tune with...Republicans.

What will Barlett/Sorkin and the Republican president/NBC do next? Stay tuned next fall.

The Matrix Reluded: The Dash Brothers Review the Wachowski Brothers' Movie

subtitle: Crouching Superman, Hidden Grasshopper
plot: fight, fight, talk, talk, talk, talk, fight, fight, dance, talk, talk, talk, fight, fight, etc.

Review: uh, actually we prefer Fred Astaire.

How to Achieve Peace in the Middle East

Of all the complex and dangerous problems in the world, the most dangerous and the least complex is the Israel-Palestinian situation. It is the least complex, that is, on rational terms. In fact, it is now so simple that while it may still lead to world war, it is still likely to bore us all to death first.

This is a case in which I have sympathy for both sides and neither side, or rather, none of the major players. So many people have been killed, and so many living in poverty and oppression and fear for so long, it sickens the heart. Some of the conflict in the early years of Israel had a certain inevitability about it, and was in some sense cleansing. But enough is enough. Particularly in the last decade or so this violent stalemate has become inexcusable.

Everyone involved knows what the final settlement will look like between Israel and Palestine. (I’ve heard experts on both sides say as much on national television.) Everyone has known for years, right down to where the borders will be. But the leaders involved have failed to make this settlement, at least some of them because they’ve used this conflict for their own political ends. That includes the current U.S. administration.

Whatever the reasons and whoever specifically is at fault, the solution is painfully simple. In recent years, whenever a faltering step towards a peace settlement is taken, there is an incident in which people are killed by Palestinian terrorists (or terrorists who advocate for Palestine) and Israeli soldiers, one after the other, though not always in that order. Every killing is an outrage that derails the peace talks and begins a cycle of revenge. It’s happening right now: the so-called Middle East roadmap is announced, some faltering steps are taken, suicide bombs explode in Israeli shopping malls, and the peace process stops dead.

This repeats the same cycle so dear to braindead news organizations who just have to fill in the names to produce the latest version of the same old story: peace talk, terrorist attack, shock, grief, anger, angry retribution, followed by shock, grief and anger, and revenge from the other side, and the collapse of peace talks.

Whatever one can say about those repeated emotions, it does seem that they are being indulged and used for political purposes, probably with a degree of consciousness if not downright cyncism.

In a world in which not much is dependable, you can take this sequence of events to the bank. As for the terrorist violence, I think this is what the military theorists call “asymmetrical” warfare, though physicists might call it a “non-linear” system in which a small action can have large consequences. In this case--- though nobody much points this out-- a few terrorists are in complete control of the peace process that involves entire nations, including the most powerful one. So those leaders purporting to be fighting for peace are defeated every single time by terrorism. “We won’t give in to terrorists,” they all say, and then they all do, by shutting down the negotiations, which is exactly what the terrorists want.

The way to a settlement which is the beginning of peace in the Middle East is therefore very simple: all the leaders involved get together and state unequivocally that they are going to negotiate this settlement, and no terrorist attacks will stop them. They will defeat terrorism by refusing to be terrorized into stopping the process.

This requires political courage. It also tests the sincerity of the parties: do they really want peace, or are they using this travesty of a peace process for other ends? But clearly there is not going to be a peace settlement until something like this happens.

POSTSCRIPT: Rachel Corrie was an American activist crushed by an Israeli military bulldozer as she tried to prevent the destruction of a Palestinian home. That's about all the U.S. press has reported about her. But there is more, much more. Her moving and articulate emails home are published in the June issue of Harper's Magazine. They are also on the Guardian Unlimited website here,here and here. For more on what happened to her and other peace activists in Palestine as well as what our ignorance plus blatant abuses using the war on terrorism as an excuse, there is this Guardian Unlimited story.

Courage Under Fire


by Theron Dash

Now that The War is over, it's time for courage under fire. People whose contributions to the fighting were made in front of their TV sets are giddy with vicarious triumph, and like bullies in the wake of defeated second graders they're out for more easy blood. They'll pounce on anything relatively defenseless ---actors, the Dixie Chicks, even French fries, and oh yes, the First Amendment---that stirs them to vent their mean spirits. And those whose only principle is whatever is selling at the moment are cynically pandering to this spineless ugliness.

It's another time of testing, as was the Blacklist 50s, the FBI Love It or Leave It 60s, the Enemies List 70s, the flag waving Reaganomics 80s, the Gulf War I 90s. There's little point in trying to figure out how bad it is in comparison. It's plenty bad enough.

The media is being tested, and it's failing and flailing. Most Americans, it is said, got their news about the Iraq war from cable news channels. The most popular cable news channel is the most radical: Fox News, which foments a continuum of opinion ranging from the fundamentalist to the fascist. The news coverage is only marginally different.

The other cable channels. CNN and MSNBC, were shamefully competing to be even more rabid, sensationalizing and flag-enshrouded. It is probably too much to expect American television to cover a war that involves U.S. troops with complete objectivity. An American news channel is going to report from the American point of view. But that's a far cry from what they're doing, which is to stifle the least criticism of even the political basis for the war, let alone report fairly on the facts of what happened and what is happening now. It's one thing to cover the deaths of Americans more thoroughly than the deaths of Iraqi soldiers. It's quite another thing to refuse to cover the deaths of Iraqis, civilians or soldiers, except now and then to refer to them euphemistically.

Consider some of what's happened at MSNBC. Just before the war started, when it was clear that it was going to happen and all the news operations were gearing up for it, MSNBC canceled the Phil Donahue show (cable TV's only more than entirely frivilous yet non-radical right talk show), ostensibly because of poor ratings. But an internal memo reportedly claimed that Donahue would be a ""difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." The memo warned that the Donahue show could be "a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

More recently, one of MSNBC's star reporters, Ashley Banfield, was called on the carpet by her bosses for saying in a talk in Manhattan, Kansas that Americans didn't see the real war on TV. And no, she wasn't being criticized for uttering an obvious truth.

There are two basic reasons for such bizarre media behavior, exemplified by two other recent outrageous incidents. The Huron (Michigan) Daily Tribune killed an anti-war column by its columnist and reporter, Kurt Hauglie. He was told it was because it might upset readers.

That's one reason. The warm feelings of triumphalist readers and viewers can't be disturbed by the complexities revealed by unsavory truths or troubling points of view. The folks at home might get mad at the newspaper and not buy it, or at the TV station and not watch it. (Hauglie resigned, by the way.)

Then there's the case of Ed Gernon, a veteran TV producer for CBS. He worked on the upcoming miniseries on Hitler. He was dutifully promoting it when he made the mistake of suggesting there were parallels between Germany during Hitler's rise and reign, and America today. But CBS, the erstwhile network of Edward R. Murrow, didn't suggest to him that maybe he was trying a little too hard to sell the series as relevant, and it didn't reassign him to the editing room for awhile and leave the promotion tour to others. No. CBS fired him. That's it. You're gone.

Why? Because he pointed out, correctly if ungrammatically, that Germany was "an entire nation gripped by fear, who ultimately chose to give up their civil rights and plunge the whole nation into war. I can't think of a better time to examine this history than now."

And so by firing him, CBS, rather neatly if absurdly, proved his point. That's the second reason---and since it's really the reason behind the first reason, it's the whole reason: a nation gripped by fear.


Maybe it's time to take another look at the national behavior since September 11, 2001. Since that date, hundreds of thousands of Americans have died preventable deaths. Millions of people are suffering because our government and our electorate are neglecting crucial problems. Our health care system is on the verge of collapse. In the blink of an eye, in the space of a single year, there are formerly middle class people who've gone from a reasonably comfortable life with expectations of a secure retirement and with full medical coverage, to suffering and death as the result of a minor ailment unattended because of this bizarre economy and dysfunctional health insurance system.

Meanwhile the number of black children living in extreme poverty is at a twenty year high. It's gone up 50% just since 1999, thanks to the neglected effects of "welfare reform." I don't doubt that the number of all children as well as adults of all races, creeds and genders in extreme and not as extreme poverty has also gone up. Unemployment continues, and benefits are running out.

Thanks to the cuts in state spending unrelieved by a federal government controlled by political extremists obsessed with enriching the rich, rewarding corporate pals and extending its power, our educational institutions are next on the deathwatch. Need I go on?

But instead of considering all of this, Americans seem obsessed with one event, and it's scared them. It was understandable and even sane to be scared by September 11, for the next weeks and even months. But thanks to that fear, excesses were permitted and encouraged. Civil liberties, inalienable rights, they could all go. It was most important to feel safe. Turn a blind eye to the cronyism and corruption in Washington, the fundamentalist takeover of national life and international relations, it doesn't matter...as long as we can feel safe.

So we send our high tech engines of death and devastation to destroy the ragged wily men who committed this outrage, or at least (since the ones who actually did it foiled us by dying in the process) the ragged wily men who helped them, encouraged and fed them. And after Afghanistan was crushed, and well before it's been rebuilt (if it ever will be), it was time to send those engines to crush another country that looked like it might someday be a threat, whose leader was distinguished from a number of other vicious dictators by his approval of 9-11 (as well as his oil), and of course all those chemical and biological and maybe nuclear weapons he had ready to deliver to Oshkosh and Santa Rosa. (Apparently they got lost in the mail.)

In the meantime, international terrorism has so quieted that there is less of it than at any time since the 1960s, even though the devils Osama and Saddam are probably still alive. Western efforts to root out terrorists and cut off their resources has doubtless been partly responsible for this relative quiet, but the fact is that no Americans have been killed by terrorists since 2001, but lots of Americans have been killed or faced with immense suffering due to other needlessly neglected problems.

Yet we apparently still live in fear. We'll do anything to feel safer, to feel powerful and right. So it may not be too soon to wonder what this country is really made of. Because this is starting to look like cowardice. Yes, 9-11 was terrible, and there will probably be terrors to come. But there are people in many places around the world who live in terror that is far worse, every day of their lives. The people of London during the Blitz lived in more danger every day for years, and they did not snivel or strut. Americans are more in danger from drivers on drugs and cell phones, falls in the bathroom, fat-drenched fast food, second-hand smoke (while the U.S. is trying to torpedo yet another international treaty, this time limiting the death-dealing scourge of Big Tobacco) and getting shot by friends and family and other good Americans with too easy access to profitable guns than they are from terrorists. These days they are also more in danger from not getting adequate medical care, from retiring to a cardboard box on the street, and from wallowing in abject but self-righteous ignorance than they are from a shoe bomb or a half-dozen terrorist attacks on the scale of 9-11.

None of this is about effective action to prevent terrorist acts, especially the big, really devastating kind, like causing a nuclear plant meltdown or throwing an entire city into a panic. Those are problems like any other---a matter of forethought, planning, resources, action: you do your best and if it happens anyway, you deal with it as best you can. (Whether we're even doing that right is another question, and the answer might be, not really.)

There may very well be more American deaths caused by terrorism. Are we so coddled and deluded that we'll let the country fall apart because our current dad-figures tell us we have to or the boogy man will get us?

This is about fear and the manipulation of fear. It's about a nation that lets its fear be manipulated. Americans have great reserves of intelligence, courage, resourcefulness and heart. But it's fear that's being encouraged and exploited. And it's fear that's running the show.

So just as we all need to grow up and realize that terrorism is one of the dangers of this world (especially when we refuse to acknowledge injustice that contributes to it), we have to face the kind of country we are in at this moment. We need to rally around those who the purveyors of fear are targeting, by their aggressive action or by their neglect. We're under fire and we need the courage to survive it, and the presence of mind to encourage those activities and ideas that represent our vision of a responsible society and a worthy future.

Are They Kidding?

by Morgan Dash

I came across two "news" items---that is, items apparently purporting to be factually true, reported by reputable outlets--- that are causing some family dissension. Brother Chris, the family dramatist, claims that if he allowed himself to believe these items, they would be evidence that the world had now gone so far beyond the credible that the already dubious occupation of trying to make dramatic sense of this existence would be rendered futile beyond redemption. (I hope I'm not overdramatizing his position.)

Brother Theron of course believes them with all the roaring absurdity of his simultaneous love-hate relationship with humanity, not to mention the apparent laws of the universe.

I can't settle the argument---maybe you can. Here are the two items. Truth? Fiction? You decide.

1. There is a best-selling book in America called Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. It's a slim volume containing a fable which some have found revelatory, about adapting to change. The premise, apparently presented without irony, is that the reader is expected to identify with rats who run the rat race maze, but who are confounded when their expected reward (i.e.”the cheese”) is not in the same place it always had been. (As nuts as that sounds, that's at least a verifiable part of the story.)

It seems that this book has also caught on in China, where it has inspired a number of follow-ups (or "imitators" as stated in the Times Literary Supplement column that is the source for this tale) . These tomes published in the erstwhile land of Confucius include: Can I Move Your Cheese? by Chen Tong; Who Dares to Move My Cheese by Kang Yanning; Make the Cheese Yourself by Dong Huangfu; Whose Cheese Should I Move? by Wu Yizhou, and No More Cheese! by Lin Zhanxian.

The column (signed by "J.C.") concludes the item by observing that "most Chinese people have never eaten cheese."

2. This story involves the Klingon language and the United States National Security Agency. As you may or may not know, Klingons are a race of aliens invented for an episode of Star Trek some 37 years ago. Klingons were somewhat reinvented for the Star Trek motion picture series and became important in subsequent Star Trek TV series. (Worf being the most famous Klingon.) In the first Star Trek movie, a few words of a language meant to be Klingon were heard. These were invented by the ace linguist and master of voices of the Enterprise crew, James Doohan, who played Scotty. (He invented the first Vulcan language dialogue for that film as well.) When Klingons talking in their own language became more elaborate later in the film series, linguist Marc Okrand invented a Klingon vocabulary and rules for a basic language. There's a Klingon dictionary of some 2,000 words; some Shakespeare and parts of the Bible have been translated into this language, and some young fans, who probably would not be caught dead taking Russian or Spanish, learn and converse in conversational Klingon.

You may have guessed a little of where this story is going if you've recently seen the film Code Talkers or if you know that Navajos used a code based on their language--a language, like all Native languages, that the U.S. government tried long and hard to suppress and destroy---for the U.S. armed forces in World War II. The Japanese were never able to break it (although if it had only been used as it was in the Code Talkers movie-to radio back the firing coordinates for fixed enemy positions--- it would have been irrelevant. Presumably the Japanese already knew the position of their own artillery, and whether they knew that the U.S. had a fix or them or not hardly mattered, since they couldn't move them.)

So finally, here is the story: Lawrence Schoen, founder of the Klingon Language Institute, recently gave a presentation to the National Security Agency on the Klingon language, as the "government was curious about the potential for al-Qaeda operatives" to communicate using Klingon.

First we mourn

by Morgan, Christopher and Theron Dash

First we mourn those who died, who suffer lost limbs and deep wounds of the body and the psyche. We mourn the peace of mind of soldiers who will carry with them the consequences of these weeks, these days, and what they saw or did in a single moment. We mourn the future of children estranged by violence. We mourn the continuing suffering of people without adequate water and food, without light.

We are grateful that more life was not lost, that more lives were not rent apart. We are grateful for the acts of courage and restraint, the acts of charity and compassion. We are grateful for those who return to their families, and hope for the best for all in the future that is bound to be influenced by the violence in Iraq.

Now on the level of consequence some things seem to come clearer. There is still much we do not know about why this war really was fought, and why it happened the way it did. We do know that while there was no adequate plan for protecting hospitals or saving artifacts of the cultural memory of many centuries, there was attention paid to securing anything to do with oil production.

While much attention is focused on how long a general occupation of Iraq will go on, and the U.S. insists there will be an Iraqi government run by Iraqis, it has also been more quietly reported that whatever the timetable or eventual form of governance, the U.S. plans to maintain military bases in Iraq for the long term.

That very well could have been a chief purpose of this war. It represents an enormous strategic advantage. The U.S. doesn't even have a real presence in Israel, let alone Arab countries. But with military presence, the U.S. can let the Iraqis have whatever government they want-they can still always protect the oil, which is mostly what "America's vital interests in the region" means, and they can intimidate the entire region, including current "allies" like Saudi Arabia.

So the U.S. doesn't have to ensure domestic order in Iraq---let them squabble and slaughter each other over the spoils, let the factions within the factions have their intrigue, and let criminals run their rackets-none of it will matter except to Iraqis, and the U.S. can claim it has done what it promised to do: liberate Iraq from Saddam and turn over the country to "the Iraqi people," after getting rid of the weapons of mass destruction (made much easier in that so far none have been found, although some will surely show up, and just as surely, many in the Arab world and elsewhere will suspect Americans planted them after they took over.)


In the U.S., the current wave of approval for the war is as predictable as the dead children once the bombs fell. A large portion of the American public got its news about the war from the cable news channels, who had every possible incentive to sell the war and very few to cover it soberly. American commercial television is about only one thing: Adrenalin sells. The audience must be excited, because excited people buy things. Positive people buy things. The only contrast that's allowed is some wallowing in sentimentality with affirmation at the end, so the catharsis leads to that positive buying. Sure, people go shopping when they're depressed, but when they are really sad, or chastened, or fearful, or worst of all, thoughtful, they might stay home. They might feel alienated. They might think, what's the point of buying that gas guzzling SUV? So my grandson as well as my son can be sent over to shoot at children grasping after fallen grenade launchers? So my granddaughter as well as my daughter can live with the nightmares of having dropped bombs on sleeping cities?

Being mad at somebody is good, because it's adrenalin. But it's better that they're mad at weenie peacenik Frog-loving appeasers than piggish CEOs or businesses that ignore global heating and the final solution for the planet's forests, rivers, air and oceans. You want them to admire the stalwart cliché-spouting flag-wrapped president, not be afraid of a fundamentalist fanatic who disdains Darwin as a fuzzy thinking liberal. Basically, though, you want them to feel good about America, the TV series. You want them to tune in, and absorb the commercials. Buy a flag. Better yet, buy a big car and a flag decal for the windshield. You'll probably be paying the interest on the loan for the rest of your life, unless you are a CEO, but that's not a ratings problem, that's not going to be on this quarter's report.

That's the name of this tune. The piper gets paid later.

This just in: later is on the way.

Occupation

by Phineas Dash

The model currently being punditized for the reconstruction of Iraq is the Marshall Plan and the occupation of Germany and Japan as they were transformed into democracies after World War II.

What no one is mentioning is that the Marshall Plan was not without its critics at the time and since. Not for the generous amount of money that was spent or the overall goal of reconstruction, but because it was a United States-only program.

Albert Einstein was one who opposed the Marshall Plan on these grounds. It was an important moment in establishing the United Nations as a force in postwar order, and Einstein believed that the Marshall Plan should have been under international auspices, specifically through the United Nations.

He also argued that if it was only the United States controlling the reconstruction of western Europe, the Soviet Union would see it as an attempt to establish hegemony in the area, and to threaten the Soviet Union. This in fact is how the Soviets saw the Marshall Plan, and they tightened and expanded control over Eastern Europe. Perhaps the Cold War would have happened anyway, but the Marshall Plan was arguably a factor in creating it.

Now the U.S. wants to establish a min-Marshall Plan for Iraq, which will be seen as establishing American hegemony in the Middle East, the one place in the world where political tensions are similar to those existing in Europe in the 1940s and most of the rest of the century. An international program, through the United Nations, would mitigate this image, and also enrich the possibilities for Iraq's democracy. The American model is not the only "successful" model in the world, and European models or the Japanese model, for instance, might offer more of what Iraq needs.

Of course this would loosen American corporate control over the Iraq economy and its oil. So it's not likely to happen. But it's worth mentioning that the Marshall Plan model is not without danger.

But the one thing the U.S. occupation has going for it is that occupation is boring, and it will soon disappear from the media. Does the media have anything at all to say about the administration of Afghanistan? The troops still in the Balkans? Iraq largely disappeared from view after Bush War I and now that Bush War II is about over, it soon will again.