Klaatu barada nikto

from the Manchester, New Hampshire Union Leader -
Sunday, during a town-hall meeting in Exeter, Giuliani assured a young questioner that preparedness will be key for all crises, including those from outer space.

"If (there's) something living on another planet and it's bad and it comes over here, what would you do?" a boy asked.

Giuliani, grinning, said it was his first question about an intergalactic attack.

"Of all the things that can happen in this world, we'll be prepared for that, yes we will. We'll be prepared for anything that happens," said Giuliani, who was mayor during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Personally, I doubt it, and not just because neither Giuliani in particular nor the United States in general was prepared for the attacks of 9/11. A better answer would have been, for example: "How the hell would I know?" Or: "I don't think we'd stand a chance. Better hope it doesn't happen." As many cosmos-oriented thinkers have noted (including, of course, Neal the dog), the sudden, surprise arrival of space aliens here on Earth carries with it certain presumptions. First, they found us before we found them. Second, wherever they're from, they managed to get here, and we've never gotten farther than about 240,000 miles from where we're sitting right now. Third, if they can build a vehicle to get here, and survive the multi-light year trip to Earth themselves, God knows what other kind of nasty stuff they've come up with.

So to say, blithely and without explanation, that "we'll be prepared, yes we will," did not fool that young boy in New Hampshire. He was so on to Giuliani and his bullshit. Rudy must be a tone-deaf cornball if he couldn't see that the last thing his 11 year old questioner was looking for was reassurance. The kid wanted Giuliani to acknowledge that the monsters of the kid's imagination could beat the USA every time out.

And, of course, they probably could. These candidates have to inhabit such an artificial world that even admitting that giant green aliens, from a solar system in the region of Alpha Centauri, who look like a genetic crossing of an octopus and an alligator gone horribly wrong--to concede they might be too much to handle -- you can't even do that now. Instead, you have to assert, in the complete absence of any information whatsoever concerning the nature of the beast or his weaponry, or his designs on Earth, or even whether he exists in the same dimensional coordinates as we think we do, that you'll be prepared to deal with him when he comes.

Suppose we can't stop Gort this time? The phrase, after all, was a lucky guess, especially since no one has ever been able to translate it. How can Giuliani know he'll be able to guess right again?

The Potsdam Conference on the Climate, Currently at a Venue Nowhere Near You

"Next speaker was the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, herself a theoretical physicist by training. She pointed out that inaction on the climate issue would be at least five times more costly than reducing emissions, and she called for a reduction of global emissions by 50% by the year 2050. She reaffirmed that the European Union has pledged to reduce its emissions by 30% by the year 2020 if others join in, and that the target of the German government is a 40% reduction by 2020...Several physics and chemistry Nobel laureates highlighted the tremendous potential of solar power for solving the world's energy and climate problems. Carlo Rubbia (NP physics 1984) pointed out that a square of the size 210 x 210 km receives as much solar power as the whole world consumes in energy today. This is just a small pixel on the world map he showed, and just 0.13 % of the world's desert area. Walter Kohn (Nobel Prize Chemistry 1998) reported from a meeting in China a few weeks ago, presenting a number of interesting facts, such as that the solar cell production in China is growing at a rate of 40% per year. Alan Heeger (Nobel Prize chemistry 2000) presented an inspiring lecture on cheap plastic solar cells - his lab is working on solar cells that can literally be printed on a roll of plastic sheeting, from a polymer solution. Present status is that they achieve an efficiency of 6.5 % with these printed solar cells, with much promise for rapid improvements."

I know. You're trying to get your mind around the idea of a major Western country with a theoretical physicist as its head of state. There are 15 Nobel laureates at this Potsdam Conference, and I'm thinking: Angela Merkel not only understands, in rigorous detail, what they're talking about, she probably can follow them in their native languages. Can you imagine? Suppose we had a president in this country who not only knew what the double-slit/electron experiment of quantum physics was, but could explain it to you in entertaining and clever detail, instead of telling you that childrens do learn and acknowledging how hard it is to put food on your family. A theoretical physicist making decisions at the top of government. What would public discourse have been like if Richard Feynman had ever been president of this country? He actually told us in one of the last books he ever wrote. He said when he had a problem to solve, he'd get the smartest people he knew within the field of inquiry to research the hell out of it and then make suggestions on the best approach. Then he would decide. I guess my question is: why is it ever done any other way?

Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., we must first explain a couple of things to W. For example, .13% of the world's desert area is not the same as "thirteen percent" of the world's desert area. It is thirteen one-hundreths of one percent. Okay, let's try that again. Suppose, Mr. President, you had ten thousand marbles. You'd have all your marbles! Get it? Okay, let's move on. If you gave away thirteen, you'd still have...how many? That's right, math was your higher...reported score on the SAT. 9,987 marbles. Perfect. (While we're doing this at the easel with a marker pen, Angela Merkel is sitting in a comfortable chair near the window reading a book in French about string theory.) Why did I use ten thousand? I multiplied 100 by 100, thinking that each of the 100 percentage points had one hundred parts, and then...no, you're right, Mr. President. Too much information! Cut to the chase: we'd still have 99.87% of the world's desert left for unmolested use by camels, gila monsters, and all-terrain three-wheelers, if we can capture the solar power falling on a square...oh no, here we go again. Can you look over this way for a minute and stop waving at those people through the window? Those aren't really people. They're statues along the roof line of that old building across the street, actually. They used to build a lot of that stuff like that here in Europe.That "km" that Signor Rubbia is talking about is a metric measurement, but it's not one of Donald Rumsfeld's "metrics," you know, that word he would use to talk about "progress" in Iraq because he thought it sounded smarter than "measurement." The Nobel Prize winner (don't worry, that's one award they'll never bother you with) is referring to kilometers. Most of the world uses the metric system; we use it here, in fact, in science and medicine, two activities which I know you oppose. A kilometer equals one thousand meters, and it's about 62% of a mile. Can we try multiplying 210 by point 62? Why? To get an equivalent...look, Mr. President, take my word for it. We're almost done here. You could build this power plant near Midland, and it could get lost out there. I mean, as a practical matter, you'd build a whole bunch, but the idea is...the idea is...I'm going down to the ratskellar and see if I can score ein grosses helles Bier, Mr. President. I'm gonna try and get Angela to explain to you about why it's cheaper to cut emissions now, by a factor of five...huh? Factor is like "times." No, it has nothing to do with Bill O'Reilly. What? Oh. He's okay, I guess. Not really, but I gotta run.

Pondering the future of this great country of ours

I've occasionally tapped into the dismal spectacle of candidates' "debates," both Republican and Democratic, and like you I have become quickly dyspeptic at the unedifying spectacle of robotic sloganeering by all the "serious" candidates (the ones without any controversial ideas which could possibly have any effect on the country's real problems). The marginal candidates, such as Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, naturally have all the "radical" proposals, that is, ideas which upset America's moribund status quo. To be taken seriously in America as a presidential candidate, you have to find a way to adopt and announce "positions" which (a) retain your base without (b) saying anything so "outrageous" that you make yourself a laughingstock with the political arbiters of the mainstream media. As an example of a completely outrageous idea, take Dennis Kucinich's proposal for a "Department of Peace." We don't do peace in the United States; we are the New Sparta, and you will listen a long time before you hear Hillary Clinton, John Edwards or Barack Obama say anything about substantially reducing America's military budget. In fact, listen as long as you want; you'll never hear it. We don't say stuff like that.

I remember, as an undergraduate, becoming interested in the political theory based on the concept of the "normative tendency of the factual." Essentially, this idea is that the essential inertia of a political system derives from the citizenry's identification of what is with what ought to be. So keeping America "strong" has become unassailable gospel in American politics. Is this because America has more enemies than anyone else? Consider that 9/11 was followed by the Madrid train and London transit bombings, not to mention terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Bali, Russia and many other places where America was not the direct target. The Spanish and British apprehended the perpetrators; the United States, with the possible exception of Khallid Sheikh Mohammed, has never actually caught anyone directly and materially involved in the 9/11 attacks, though, practically speaking, those 19 hijackers must have had many accomplices for logistical and financial support. The overriding point is that virtually all Western countries are vulnerable to terrorist attack, and indeed endure such attacks. This is viewed as the essential and existential danger of the modern world. Yet the United States alone feels the need to maintain this huge military-industrial complex with such a disproportionate part of its federal budget devoted to a high-tech military designed, obviously, to fight wars in foreign countries.

If a presidential candidate were to challenge this orthodoxy by venturing the "radical" idea that this military complex is not for the purposes of fighting the "global war on terror," he (the sole woman in the race would never say such a thing) would be McLuhanesque toast by the following morning. Suppose the candidate said: I think the MIC exists because it's a business arrangement between government, military contractors and the defense industry, and because we want a big expeditionary force to protect our access to vital resources, mainly oil. We both know that would be it for that flake. Chris Matthews would bray himself scarlet in the face. Rush Limbaugh would demand a Senate resolution accusing the candidate of sedition. Game over. You can't say stuff like that and be taken seriously.

The interesting thing about the "stuff" is that it's true. If the real threat to the USA is a band of terrorists trying to infiltrate the country with a nuclear bomb, say, then it's obvious that F-15 fighter/bombers and cruise missiles and up-armored Humvees and the rest of it aren't going to do any good. For specific example, they didn't stop 9/11. They didn't stop the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. They didn't stop the bombing of the USS Cole or the African embassies or the Marine barracks in Lebanon. The reason they didn't stop any of these things is because a huge military establishment has nothing to do with a group of terrorists fighting "asymmetrical" warfare. The way you counteract asymmetrical warfare is by making it symmetrical, the way Israel uses the Mossad. Infiltration, espionage, bribery, blackmail, assassination. All in a self-defensive way, of course. Aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean are not going to stop a group of Wahhabist Saudis sitting around a dining table in a condo in South Florida.

So we're at the point where a candidate is not electable unless they avoid saying logical and obvious things. There is a very narrow bandwidth of acceptable ideas in the presidential race. On the environment, say, the idea is to "reduce" greenhouse emissions by cap-and-trade or by voluntary reductions. Are these ideas actually related to the inexorable demands of atmospheric science? Who cares. Sound good, anyway. On oil: let's increase CAFE standards by the year 2020 so we're somewhere in the neighborhood of where the rest of the industrial world already is and has been for sometime. Let's grow some corn and make some ethanol, so we have 15% ethanol mixtures by, I don't know, 2020 or so. 2020 is a good year, since it's far enough away to avoid actually doing anything now. On healthcare: that's tough. Let's do something. We'll get back to you.

The leading Democratic candidates have these advantages: Clinton - her last name. Edwards - his haircut and boyish charm. Obama - he's African-American. Since these advantages are decisive over all other candidates, it does not matter whether their actual ideas do any good or change anything, because as long as they remain safely inside the bandwidth, they're good to go. The winner will be chosen on subjective criteria similar to "American Idol."

One might ask: but what about Reality? Won't Reality at some point impose some nonnegotiable demands of its own? Won't the country founder, and break up, and be torn asunder by its inability to adapt to changing circumstances? Well -- sure it will. But remember: that's not what the candidates are talking about.

Trials continue at Guantanamo

Colonel Blick Mordred presides over the 3-officer tribunal in Guantanamo Court Room 3, United States vs. Ahmed bin-Mavri. Appearing for the United States is Captain Pierce Rechtman, JAG; for the defendant, attorney Sam Leinwold.

Col. Mordred (Judge): We're on the record in Mavri, day 2. Ready for the United States, Captain Rechtman?
Rechtman: Sir!, yes sir!
Judge: Mr. Leinwold?
Leinwold: As we'll ever be.
Judge: Mr. Rechtman, you're continuing today with your case in chief?
Rechtman: Sir! yes sir! I'd like to present to the court Exhibit 16, an affidavit signed by Abdullah Kalar, not his real name, detailing the defendant's complicity in a conspiracy to attack American interests overseas.
Judge: Marked next in order. Please approach the bench.
(Rechtman does so, hands two page document to judges, who begin reading.)
Leinwold: Can I see this one, judge?
Judge: I'm afraid not. Under the terms of the pretrial order, matters of national security cannot be divulged to the defendant or to his counsel.
Leinwold: We don't even know who Kalar is.
Rechtman: Sir! He doesn't actually go by that name, sir!
Leinwold: How do we know he exists at all?
Judge: Counsel, are you suggesting the United States is fabricating evidence?
Leinwold: How can I cross-examine a piece of paper which I can't read?
Judge: I can assure you this is devastating evidence, counsel, and unlikely to have been made up. I am a little concerned about these water stains on the document. Mr. Rechtman?
Rechtman: Sir! it rains in Cuba, sir!
Judge: Very good. The affidavit is admitted into evidence.
Leinwold: (shrugging) I suppose I can ask. Was that statement voluntarily given?
Rechtman: Sir! the United States does not torture, sir!
Judge: Anything further for the United States?
Rechtman: Sir! the prosecution rests, sir!
Judge: Very good. Mr. Leinwold?
Leinwold: Call the defendant, Ahmed bin-Mavri. (defendant is sworn by Arabic translator). Mr. bin-Mavri, how were you arrested?
bin-Mavri: Near Kandahar, December, 2001. I was tending my poppy field when I was approached by U.S. Special Forces and informed I was under arrest for war crimes.
Leinwold: And what were those crimes?
Rechtman: Sir! objection sir! The indictment is sealed and protected by national security order, sir!
Judge: Sustained. The defendant is aware he has been charged with conspiracy to harm the U.S.A. That is sufficient for your purposes, and strikes a fair balance with our need to protect America.
Leinwold: My apologies to the court. I was seeing if I could get lucky and find out who my client conspired with. What did the U.S. forces tell you?
bin-Mavri: That the son of a devil dog, may his eyes burn in the sun, who lives near my farm, whose cursed name is --
Rechtman: Sir, objection sir! Informant's name is classified, sir!
Judge: Sustained.
Leinwold: But my client knows, Judge. So..
Judge: But you do not, and it is you who will return to the mainland at the conclusion of this trial.
Leinwold: Gotcha. Okay, so devil dog, what did he say?
bin-Mavri: I know that he received $5,000 American, and sold me out just so he could take my crop.
Leinwold: Have you ever...done anything against the U.S.?
bin-Mavri: No!
Leinwold: Which brings us to this signed confession, where you admit you wanted to blow up...
Rechtman: Sir, objection, sir! Target is classified information.
Leinwold: Yeah, but I know what it is, and the defendant knows...
Rechtman: Sir, the court reporter does not know, sir!
Judge: Sustained. There's no point in taking unnecessary risks.
Leinwold: Did you do these things in your confession?
bin-Mavri: May Allah chasten me for untruths, I did no such thing.
Leinwold: Yet...?
bin-Mavri: First, they tied my hands and feet to an eye-bolt in the floor...
Rechtman: Sir, objection, sir! Move to strike and to bar all inquiry into mode of inquiry on grounds all enhanced interrogation techniques are top secret, sir!
Judge: Sustained. You may ask if the statement was voluntary.
Leinwold: (shrugging) Was it voluntary?
bin-Mavri: No. It was coerced by torture.
Leinwold: Your honor, I move to strike the confession from the record on the ground it was coerced.
Judge: And your proof?
Leinwold: My client just said so.
Judge: In a conclusory manner without factual support.
Leinwold: You won't let me get the facts.
Judge: That hardly changes the situation.
Leinwold: Why can't I ask him to describe what they did to him?
Rechtman: Sir! That's classified information which in the hands of terrorists could allow them to prepare better for interrogation, defeating the purposes of enhanced techniques, sir!
Judge: Exactly.
Leinwold: How would they do that? Grow gills?
Judge: Your motion is denied on the basis of an insufficient record of coercion.
Leinwold: Then the confession remains in the record?
Judge: Of course.
Leinwold: So you have a pile of hearsay affidavits from a bunch of people we've never seen and never questioned, and you may have tortured that stuff out of them. And now you won't let me prove you tortured the confession out of my own client. What chance do we have?
Judge: The same one you had when you walked in here. Submitted?
Leinwold: Why not.
Judge: Bailiff will call the case of United States vs. Saleem al-Nouri, Case No....

The Overworld

I think one is apt to see the world in terms of immediate influences, so that if you surf the liberal web, as I sometimes do, no doubt you find yourself in a state of perpetual consternation about the various misprisions of the Bush Administration, and the impotence of a prostrate Congress, and the indifference or complicity of the mainstream media, etc. I'll cop to this syndrome. Where I part company with a lot of the hardcore liberal commentators I encounter while reading around, as I think I've mentioned before, is the tendency to see a dark conspiracy among all the plutocrats, Republican politicians, business tycoons, oil companies, Blackwater, et alia ad infinitum ad nauseum, and to explain the plight of the "middle class" and the poor in America in terms of their manipulations. Such thinking probably reaches its apotheosis in such books as The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, who traces all our modern miseries to a conspiratorial cabal in the United States who have "traumatized" us into economic submission; or perhaps in the periodic screeds of Jane Smiley, she of A Thousand Acres and the Pulitzer Prize, a brilliant mind and writer, who periodically lays it all out, how the Bush Administration has seized control and subjugated us and used their inborn sociopathic tendencies to monopolize all wealth while constantly lying to the public about the reasons for war or economic policy or anything else.

Of course - there must be an element of truth to these ideas in order to support the grand superstructure of their explanatory theories. On the other hand, I don't think they explain very much, and they ignore the most basic of truisms about the current state of America. To wit, however powerful all these gathered forces are, the fact remains that the American people retain the capability to change it all, if they got motivated to do so. We don't actually have to elect dumb guys as President if we don't want to. There are plenty of smart people in the United States; I see where Europe finally won a physics Nobel (shared by a German and a Frenchman) for nanotechnology which is the basis of magnetic hard disk storage, making possible - yippee! - iPods and all the other pointless distractions of modern life. Prior to that, the USA had won the Nobel Prize for physics for every year since 2000. Instead, for ideological reasons, we tend to elect dunderheads like Ronald Reagan, and Bush pere et fils. I know that George II cheated to win the first election, but then JFK secured his election in 1960 with a huge payoff to the Chicago Democratic machine. La plus ca change... Like Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics, you have to win by a lot to overcome the effects of scandal. A good candidate could do that.

Similarly, the American consumer could make conscious choices to change the whole world of commerce: balance of trade, American job flight, all the rest. Instead, Americans eat way too much crummy food (getting obese, like Michael Moore), pay too little attention to the requirements of citizenship, put too much faith in divine providence (religiosity, in other words), waste tremendous amounts of energy, and are excessively materialistic. The "Overworld" does not require the average American to do any of this; we choose to do it.

What I think the conspiracy writers tap into is this American sense of entitlement and resulting grievance. Our European and Asian friends (if we still have any) are often too polite to say so, but this is what bugs them about us. Let's face it: the Greatest Generation and the society their forefathers had built won a world war against astonishing odds, overcoming a tremendous German and Japanese head start, and then built an economic colossus which stood astride the world. We exported all kinds of durable goods, we manufactured like crazy, we had plenty of our own oil and other resources, a tremendous food surplus, American citizens enjoyed a lifetime of secure employment at good wages -- and then the world caught up. I understand the concept that economics is not necessarily a zero-sum game, but water does seek its own level. As Asian and European countries took over the manufacturing sector, we became a "consumer and information economy". And the middle class began to erode as international competition drove wages down, while we clung to the same economic model which had propelled our success in the first place.

The American populace then began to panic as the life of assured prosperity began to vanish, and a sense of injured pride (similar to the Germans in the early Thirties) caused us to look around for scapegoats and villains. In truth, we needed to reinvent ourselves and to throw off a lot of the legacy industries (auto-based transportation, nonrenewable energy) on which the old economy was built. Many of the deep ecology writers of the Sixties and Seventies wrote about all this long ago. The "power structure" ascendant in the United States now has relied upon these legacy industries for their own wealth: oil, pipelines, nuclear energy, defense contracting, so they're biased in favor of their maintenance. Duh. But there are other people with other good ideas--most of whom the good people of America regard as "nerds" and "geeks" and "unelectable." We'd rather sit and grouse about the way things ought to be than take steps, for example, to construct a high speed rail system in the USA, or install solar roof panels or change to a vegetarian diet.

We want the old America back, in other words, when we had it made. Since we're Americans and entitled to have what we want, whatever the cost to the Earth or our fellow man, anything standing in our way must be an Overworld conspiracy which is preventing us from our rightful restoration. Baloney. The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are such underlings.

A President for the People

Before I leave behind George W. Bush's solecisms in favor of the above, more felicitous observation by the immortal Mark Twain, perhaps it would be wise to reflect on the President's recent grammatical atrocity and its implications for America's immediate future. It's my URL and I'll bloog if I want to. To wit, the President of the United States of America recently observed that "childrens do learn" as one of his evaluations of the success of No Child Left Behind, his signature contribution to American education.

First, I didn't think there was much controversy about this phenomenon. Human childrens, along with most higher chordates, do learn things as they...live. I guess that's the process involved, and it reflects on the level of generalization at which GWB ordinarily operates. Bush has a way of announcing things that are so trivially obvious in such grandiose ways that you lose sight of the idea that he's really saying things like "humans do breathe," or "grass does grow." I guess he's learned to operate within his own safety zone of competence, having come a cropper so many times when he's attempted to venture into the realm of abstract reasoning. He's been reduced to pronouncing on tautological verities that can neither be refuted nor...used for any constructive purpose.

It was suggested during the 2000 campaign that Bush might be dyslexic and that this disability offered an explanation for his linguistic howlers. However, when I pair up his "Is our children learning?," his penetrating inquiry into the state of American education during his first presidential campaign, with his later observation that "childrens do learn," a more unsettling inference seems to arise. Bush does not understand that "children" is a plural noun, like "men," "women" or "oxen." I will credit him with perfect parallelism -- the third-person singular verb "is" matches children, if you believe that "children" is a singular noun, and he demonstrates his consistency when he reveals that "childrens" do learn. "Do," as the third-person plural form of the infinitive verb "to do," again pairs up nicely with the new plural form of "child," "childrens," which Bush has constructed on the basis of his belief that "children" is a singular noun. Other sample sentences which we might hear in the future from Bush would include, in other words, such specimens as: 1. A children born into a family is a blessing. 2. One of the things we've got to do in America is to make sure our childrens have the same opportunity that I had when I was a children. 3. I travel around this great country and when I see a children in need, I ask, does this children have the tools he needs to succeed as a children from other generations has, and then what about his childrens?

I would yield in my analysis to a neuroscientist grounded in linguistic disability, of course, but this doesn't really sound like dyslexia to me. It sounds like a really stupid person talking. I don't know if Bush has ever been elected, actually, but it's pretty obvious that on two occasions four years apart, he drew so many votes that he got the horse shoe close enough to the stake to be declared the winner. Our childrens, and our childrenses's childrens, should be wary of that datum in planning their futures.

A Request to Congress for Assistance

Dear Congress:

You don't know me, and perhaps you're not very interested in my situation because I'm not a big campaign donor. I want you to know that I did give to the campaign of John Kerry because I was very concerned about the prospect of four more years of George W. Bush as President, a fear that I might add has been validated to a certain degree. I was a little disappointed that Mr. Kerry didn't actually spend all the money on his campaign, since that's why I gave it to him, but hey, you know? I'm just a citizen, not a powerful insider.

But that's not actually why I'm writing. This has to do with something that happened to me when I was walking home from school in 1959. I was in the fifth grade at the time, and this other kid (I'll call him "Dicky T.", because that's close to his name) ran up behind me and pushed me hard, which hurt. Then he challenged me to a fight, and we threw a few punches, the way kids in my neighborhood did, and a couple of them hit me in the face and really stung. I'm glad I don't have to get in neighborhood fights anymore. Around here, people just file lawsuits.

Anyway, here's the deal: I'm not trying to say that Dickie T.'s attack was completely "out of the blue," you know what I mean? It actually started that day on the playground when we were playing tetherball. Dickie T. and I were two of the better players and a pretty fierce rivalry had sprung up between us. I mean, sure - Rudy and Eric were good too, but I think they were playing kickball that day. So Dickie T., he was skinny (we were all pretty skinny in those days because of a high fructose corn syrup deficiency) and had this white hair and blue eyes and just looked sort of irritating, you know? A little bit like Eddie Haskell, not that I think someone should be condemned just because of the way he looks. Anyway, Dickie T. stood in the back of his half-circle and jumped up and caught the ball right where the rope connected to the eye-hook, and then flung the ball over my head and wrapped the pole and won the game. Okay, as you know, you can't do that. You have to hit the ball, not grab the rope. I called him on it. "You lose the game, Dickie T.," I said, "because you cheated." We were too young to know what taking umbrage was, but if we had been older, that's what Dickie T. would have taken, and he said so, or in effect that's what he said, because he said, "You wanna make somethin' of it?"

I always hated hearing that. Nothing good ever followed it. Anyway, the bell rang, fortunately, and we went back to class, and that was it. I thought. Until I got blindsided later that afternoon. So here's my request. I saw where you guys took Move.On to task for exercising a First Amendment right to free speech because you didn't like what they said. I didn't know you could do that kind of stuff! Now I see where maybe you're going to do another censure resolution against Rush Limbaugh because he said Iraqi veterans who oppose the war are "phony soldiers." Why should he be allowed to say stuff like that? What kind of country is this? So while you're at it, could you add an earmark or a rider or whatever you call it to one of those bills or motions and censure Dickie T.? You know as well as I do that you can't grab the tetherball the way Dickie T. did that day, and you sure as heck shouldn't run up behind another kid and shove him in the back and then start a fight when you're the one in the wrong. Dickie T., if you ask me, never really paid a price for that, other than a couple of feeble punches from another eleven year old, and that's nothing. But a Congressional censure - I'm not sure where Dickie T. is these days, but can you imagine how surprised he'll be when he finds out he's been taken to task by Congress? He probably thinks Congress just concerns itself with big issues like war and balancing the budget and healthcare and doesn't get involved in private controversies where it shouldn't be taking sides.

We'll show him. Thanks for your help with this.

The fall of previous Fascist Dictatorships

Everywhere there's lots of piggies
Living piggy lives.
You can see them out for dinner
With their piggy wives,
Clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon.
--George Harrison, "Piggies"

I've been reading a superb new book about post-war Italy called "The Fall of Mussolini," by Oxford historian Philip Morgan, which recounts, among other things, the colorful period toward the end of World War II and its bloody aftermath in Italy. The Italians, with the operatic and grandiose tendencies which adorn their culture, dealt with the problem of Fascists and German collaborators with the kind of direct brutality, and disregard of judicial nuance, which makes an episode of "The Sopranos" seem like a Neil Simon comedy. There is the fairly well-known case of Mussolini himself, who, after his dramatic rescue by German commandos from his mountain top hotel "prison" in September, 1943, was installed by Hitler in a gilded cage in the town of Salo, on the shore of Lago di Garda in the north. The Allies eventually crossed the Gustav Line and then the Hitler Line in the north, and in April, 1945, Mussolini was spirited away from his "capital" by a German SS convoy, heading toward the neutrality of Switzerland. Alas for Il Duce, his lame disguise of a German helmet and reading glasses did not fool the partisans who ambushed the patrol near Lake Como. Along with several confederates and his mistress, Clara Petacci, Mussolini was taken to a farm house and shot, along with the other captives. The bodies were taken to Milano, where Musso and Clara were hung upside down in the Piazzale Loreto, and the well-documented (and photographed) desecration of the bodies took place. For the Italians, it was a necessary catharsis.

This was far from the only instance of reprisal and vendetta, however. It was a national phenomenon. Among many other episodes, there is the notorious storming of the prison at Schio, in July, 1945, where the partisans short-circuited the legal process by picking out the Fascists they considered appropriate for rough justice and shooting 54 of the prisoners, including 13 women. The principle of omerta, with which we're so familiar because of Francis Ford Coppola movies, prevented any legal action against the perpetrators, who were considered heroes in any event.

Mussolini was in power for 21 years between 1922 and 1943, when he was removed from office by fellow Fascists (including his son-in-law, Ciano), and the Third Reich lasted 12 years. It seems very likely, however, that both regimes could have survived indefinitely if Hitler had not initiated World War II. Finished totalitarian states create their own inertia by closing off the means of effective opposition. Another example, of course, is the Soviet Union, which existed as a dictatorship from 1917 to 1991. I think it's reasonable to say that none of these regimes disappeared because of internal democratic forces. Germany and Italy were conquered from without; the Soviet Union collapsed because of internal rot.

As I have said before, I don't think the USA is in that class of Great Tyrannies of History; however, it is clear that since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 that the United States has drifted increasingly toward an authoritarian, militaristic, right wing form of government, a process broken only briefly by that most talented and unprincipled of huckster/gasbags, William Jefferson Clinton, and if anyone can figure out his true political beliefs, drop me a line. I've always been curious. America's governmental style has been called "corporatist," which makes the most sense; the influence of big money on national priorities is unmistakable, and both parties, to stay in power, must play the fund raising game with all its attendant corruption. Along the way, we've learned to tolerate breaches of the Constitution and civil liberties which would have been unthinkable 30 years ago. The Fourth and Fifth Amendments (unreasonable search and seizure; due process) survived the war against the Nazis and the Japanese Empire, but apparently will not remain intact after an attack by 19 Arabs hijacking four airplanes.

The Republicans pushed this thing so far that they lost seats in both the House and Senate in 2006; however, let us never forget that George W. Bush actually received a majority of votes in this country in November, 2004, not even 3 years ago. Parse it any way you will, but that represented a vote with full knowledge of the fraudulent basis of the Iraq War, the Valerie Plame disclosures, Guantanamo, Jose Padilla, Abu Ghraib, the torture regime, and so much more. And even when the Democrats were given power, we saw that their predilections turn out to be very similar to their Republican brethren. They will spend any amount on defense (more than the combined defense budgets of the rest of the world) while paying lip service to other national needs, and will do nothing to remedy the dire fiscal problems of the USA, with its collapsing dollar and exploding national debt.

So I don't think the American people are going to vote their way out of these trends. That says something fairly profound about the nature of democracy; countries change their fundamental nature more by cataclysm than by evolution, once reactionary processes set in. When it happens, it might be good not to appear too prosperous or powerful, as the Italian Fascists learned to their abrupt horror in post-war Italy. The peasantry might not know how to vote, but they know who's been feeding at the trough of corruption.

Hidden Agendas Nos. 12 and 35

If you are, like your faithful correspondent (by which I mean I write what I write in good faith), possessed of a skeptical turn of mind, you probably often find yourself these days muttering imprecations concerning the current Congress, which has been in office since January, and is now entering its 9th full month in "power." Some of your sotto voce comments might take the form, "what the fu'?" This is entirely understandable. There has been no change whatsoever in the course of the war in Iraq, other than an escalation of both the cost and commitment of soldiers. Congress has now been asked for an additional $190 billion for the "global war on terror," meaning the ongoing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a betting man would not go in heavy against Bush getting exactly what he wants.

So we have to face facts at a certain point. While the Democrats have gotten fairly proficient at throwing skeet into the air for Bush to blast out of the sky with his trusty veto-gun, it's becoming obvious that the "majority" party will only nibble around the edges of the war debate. We have seen "nonbinding" timelines, and "nonbinding" benchmarks, and troop rotation rules, and now the Biden amendment, which will advance "soft partition" as governing U.S. policy, and several other ideas which, aside from not passing or getting vetoed if they do pass, would not make much difference to Bush's policy of endless war in any case.

I'm sitting at a pine table with my feet up, my keyboard in my lap and the green trees of an American suburb visible through the window. No "insider" is calling me on the phone to give me the real story; thus, it seems unlikely that a casual observer such as myself could deduce something which is not already apparent to legislators who do this kind of thing for a living. The Democrats know that they were given a majority on a platform of ending the war. They have not ended the war, nor do they intend to end it. Reading one or two things I wrote last March, I actually thought they were going to end the thing by denying Bush any funding without a binding timetable on withdrawal. That is not the case. So the Democrats are playing a game in which they pretend to vindicate their November "mandate" by tossing up a bewildering array of proposals to "affect" the war without actually ending it in the cynical belief that no one will notice that the war is still going on; or, they hold the even more cynical view that if we don't like it, we can pound sand, because there's no one else left to vote for.

As Hardy once said to Laurel (many times, actually), "Isn't that a fine turn of events?" So moving along with this deductive analysis, which I'm starting to get into, we reach another branching point. Do the Democrats not believe the polls that an overwhelming majority of Americans want to see this war ended as soon as possible? Or, do the Democrats actually represent someone else other than the people who put them in office?

As to the polls: come on. How clear can things get? So we're left with the second point - the Democrats represent the same interests as the Republicans, but they work from the other side of the street. Thus and therefore, we have a public Iraq "debate" which is for voter consumption and mollification, and which is full of angry attacks from Mr. Mumbles, who brings in cots and catered food for one night while he makes the Republicans suffer for their intransigence, and the eye-batting derision of La Diva Pelosi, who says stuff like "this is the President's war, and he's accountable for it," then lines up another appropriations bill for the President's war, which is to say, she does his accounting for him.

So the answer is maybe simple, and was pronounced by Alan Greenspan just the other day. The one thing that can be salvaged from this fiasco is a preeminent place for American Big Oil in Iraq. That's it, game, set, match. Whoever pulls us out of Iraq now, "prematurely," forfeits our first-in-line position. How would you like to be called on the carpet by the CEO of Exxon and forced to explain that one? "We paid good money for you, Congressman," he would roar, "and this is what we get for our trouble!?" How it must haunt the dreams of our corrupt solons. We've spent close to a half trillion dollars over there, gotten 4,000 soldiers killed, destroyed everyday life for the Iraqis and gotten about 700,000 of them killed, too -- and now we're just going to leave? And then what? The Chinese, Russians and French sashay into Baghdad and cut those production agreements and lap up all that petroleum? I don't think so. So there's your inside-the-beltway conversation, the real debate - how to placate the American public while you work for the people who finance your campaigns and bankroll your think tanks (where you'll go to work after you sell your votes). You can't very well announce that the Americans dying over there are getting blown up so Exxon and Chevron won't lose their place in line. It doesn't sound much like Omaha Beach, does it? It sounds like the U.S. military is in the same mercenary position as Blackwater, and that's a lousy recruitment tool. It's better to talk about bringing freedom and democracy to the heart of the Muslim world, even if no one could possibly believe there's any chance of that now.

So we're going to be in Iraq for quite awhile, I think, because Maliki has not come across with that "hydrocarbon law" (drafted by an American lawyer), which may mean Bush will have to find someone else to head up the Iraqi sovereign government, and even with that bill, we'll need huge numbers of troops to make oil exploration and development feasible. Wild, huh? That Nader, though - what a crock he was.

The Go Code for Iran

Turgidson:

The duty officer asked General Ripper to confirm the fact the he had issued the go code and he said, "Yes gentlemen, they are on their way in and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country and our way of life, I suggest you get the rest of SAC in after them, otherwise we will be totally destroyed by red retaliation. My boys will give you the best kind of start, fourteen hundred megatons worth, and you sure as hell won't stop them now. So let's get going. There's no other choice. God willing, we will prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. God bless you all." Then he hung up. We're still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir. "Dr. Strangelove," by Terry Southern, Stanley Kubrick, et al.

Suppose, sometime in January, 2009, President Bush gives the go code for his 1,200 target bombing campaign against Iran. He doesn't ask for Congressional approval; at this point, Bush has nothing but wholesale contempt for both parties, and for the simplest of reasons: they don't agree with him, he's right, ergo - they're stupid. Apparently, the strategic planning for the Iran war has already been done. The targets are identified, although we can be sure, based on recent performance, that American intelligence is way, way off, and that many of the bombing sites will prove to be hospitals, business parks and residential buildings. Whatever. It's a TV show, not a real war, unless you happen to be within the blast radius of one of the very real bombs that falls on Iran.

If you look at sources like globalsecurity.org, one of those techie websites that look on with a barely-constrained fascination at American military might, you get the general idea that an American bombing campaign can't really start until we get about two more carrier groups in the Eastern Mediterranean. I know this bums Bush out, because it's such a dead giveaway. General Ripper, in "Dr. Strangelove," had the incomparable advantage of building on routine. The B-52s were always at or near their fail-safe points, so giving the go code, suddenly and without warning, guaranteed surprise and "total commitment." Sterling Hayden peerlessly depicted a general with a virtually foolproof scheme for defeating all safeguards while being absolutely batshit crazy. It is one of the most singularly frightening performances in the history of cinema, because General Ripper, you sense intuitively, is the natural and credible outcome of a system premised on an insane theory. If you want to defend yourself with men trained to respond affirmatively to instructions to destroy the world, then you must accept the certainty that among their number will be those who will be enthusiastic about destroying the world. Common sense tells us that is the case. And if they are enthusiastic, they will find ways to bring it about, with or without a direct order.

So even if Bush lacks all of Hayden's charisma, and, ultimately, his element of surprise, so that the bombing campaign over Iran will be his usual dreary and hamfisted exercise without the redeeming theatricality of "Dr. Strangelove," when he gives the go code without Congressional authorization, I have little doubt his orders will be carried out. On what basis would the generals say no? From a reading of the Constitution, which vouchsafes the power to declare war to Congress? That was forfeited long ago. From the War Powers Act? Bush has demonstrated over and over again, with the enabling casuistry of David Addington and others, that he will take whatever pieces of paper Congress has already given him and stretch them to the breaking point. Congress has given him two more-or-less open-ended Authorizations for Use of Military Force; Addington could find the go code in them with the papers face down and his feet on the desk.

As time has gone on, it has become increasingly apparent that Bush is as mad as a March hare. No one, maybe not even God, has any influence over him anymore. He's brought in a bunch of short-timers to nominally fill the roles of the original Cabinet incumbents, but they don't mean anything to Bush. Our warmongering, fiscally irresponsible President has run this country the same way he ran those few businesses he could get his hands on during his "civilian" life. Straight into the ground. He can feel it now. That familiar sensation of absolute, irredeemable failure. So he has very little to lose. The one constraining factor, I have always thought, is Bush's morbid fear of being tried as a war criminal. He's worked hard to maneuver his way out of that, probably the only disciplined and consistent course of action he's taken while President. He started with the Detainee Treatment Act and built upon it with the Military Commissions Act, two pieces of legislation which putatively deal with all these Afghans and Arabs the U.S. has rounded up over the last 6 years. I don't see any evidence either of these laws has anything to do with actual practice, but they were useful as excuses to pass exoneration provisions for violations of the War Crimes Act which might otherwise have reached all the way to the Oval Office.

But bombing Iran? That's not covered, as far as I can tell, by either get-out-of-jail-free card. An offensive attack against another sovereign nation in violation of international law. So I come back to the idea that serial pardoning will mark the final days of the Bush Administration. As for the 99,000 acre ranch in Paraguay, which some observers are convinced is at Bush's disposal -- it's kind of like that .45 caliber pistol which General Ripper reveals to Captain Mandrake by tossing aside a file folder. The paranoid believe in security in depth.

The wheels of the machine go round and round, round and round...

Mario Savio was a physics grad student when he gave his electrifying speech on the Sproul Steps (now called the Mario Savio Steps) on December 3, 1964. I sometimes think that the odd mixture of mechanical images and poetics owes its structure to the duality of his intelligence: a fierce moral warrior and a brilliant mathematical mind. Not to mention courage. "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part..." "Heart" and "part" rhyme; but the rolling periodicity of the sentence is pure poetry anyway. And it was extemporaneous. "...and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."

The peroration (there was a little more after this, so I use the term correctly, I think) is emblazoned on a placard, with a picture of wild-haired (but not scruffy) Mario above it, in the Free Speech Movement Cafe on the Berkeley campus. You can buy a panini in there, and a Free Trade coffee, and look at the undergrads text-messaging, listening to their IPods through ear buds, talking on the ubiquitous cell phones, tapping away on their laptops. What is going on in the country now is infinitely worse than the issues Mario Savio was concerned about, but he was always a canary in a coal mine, as the quote in the masthead demonstrates. I think of him in the same way I regard Henry David Thoreau and Mark Twain, two other visionaries who saw that America was becoming badly out of balance in the contest between God and Mammon. The students are concerned about other things, how to compete in a "global economy" and building on the peerless academic records they needed to get into Berkeley in the first place. Those obsessive and compulsive habits, absolutely essential for the elites in our society, provide an inertial guidance system that propels them through school without the derailing distractions of "issues" and "protests." Those were the "indulgences" of Mario's (and my) generation. Yet everything has its price. We've allowed an authoritarian regime to run the country into the ground, to traduce the Bill of Rights, to fight endless, nonsensical wars, to waste all its treasure by directing most of the money to war profiteers and cronies. That's what the Bush Administration is doing, you know. That's their business plan. They own the machine and that's the way they run it. And who is around to tell them the machine cannot be "worked" that way? Mario died fairly young. No one took the torch from his hand.

The Democratic Congress possesses a powerful spanner to throw into the works, a crowbar to jam into the wheels and cogs and levers of the machine. They could say that Bush can't have any money for his colossal exercises in mismanagement and brutality. That's all they would have to do. How much less courage would that require than Mario's bravery in standing up for the rights of Berkeley students to organize Freedom Riders for the Civil Rights Movement on the Cal campus? That's what he was doing, you know. It was not some idle question of being able to "speak freely" on the campus that animated his movement. The Regents didn't like what he was doing because they sympathized with the racism of the Deep South. Think about that for a moment. Mario was up against that kind of obscurantism and bigotry. Don't believe for a moment that the California of 1964 wasn't capable of such attitudes. He took it on. How amazed he would be that the modern Democrats, with so much more power, with the whole country behind them, with the "passive" strategy available of simply not scheduling a vote on funding -- can't "indicate" to the Little Emperor that the game is up.

Wherever you are, Mario -- you did what you could, brave spirit. It sure as hell isn't your fault. No one can say you didn't have the courage of your moral convictions.

Reframing Our Franchise Nicknames

I was recently on one of those long drives you take periodically if you live in California, on a north-south axis appropriate to the overall shape of the state, in an inland valley of the kind that marks the topography of this corrugated land. Rolling through town after town of prefabricated recognition, the roadside towers announcing you are about to pass the same exact set of retail outlets you passed ten miles ago. A college buddy and I hitchhiked this route nearly forty years ago, south from Berkeley into the Salinas Valley, past San Luis Obispo, through Santa Barbara, all the way to the desert/sea confrontation of Southern Cal. Things were different even then, towns had what we called "character," and one burg was somewhat distinguishable from the next. That's all gone, of course. And it made me think, while I was driving, of the ideas of one of the more illuminating thinkers of our time, George Lakoff of my very own Berkeley, a polymath who has combined the disciplines of politics, neuroscience and psychology into the concept of "frames" or "framing," with the powerful insight that humans tend only to see what is included in a narrative frame. It is the way we organize our thinking, consciously or not.

If you are a Baby Boomer, like me, I would surmise that you walk around in modern America with a very distorted view of the country you live in. Your frame was established long ago when America was very different, and you are probably taken by surprise every day by some new and distressing development that sounds so foreign to your concept of this nation. So, chaotic thinker that I am, I began to realize that the names we assigned long ago to our sports teams really originated in a different America, and while for historical purposes, out of a respect for tradition, we stick with these names, they too are misleading. Take an example: the Pittsburgh Steeelers. We don't really have a steel industry anymore. There was a time when Pittsburgh, with its access to coal and iron ore, and its three rivers for transporting them, was an ideal place for steel milling. But like most smokestack industries, that's gone overseas. The name, however, suggests some robust commercial activity that has in fact vanished. This confuses and retards, in its own small way, our coming to terms with ourselves. Not fatally, but every little bit hurts. I suggest a new name: the Pittsburgh Mortgage Brokers.

Similar thinking can lead to a rebranding of all the New York teams, the Yankees, the Mets, the Knicks, the Jets. How about -- the New York Hedge Fund Managers? Moving down to Houston, home of Enron, and Vinson & Elkins (which gave us, in a way, Alberto Gonzales) and Arthur Andersen's most notorious field office -- I suggest the Houston Assholes. Given our militaristic tendencies (also a leading industry, and we need to cherish those), we could change the Golden State Warriors to the Golden State Preemptive Warriors. A warning to those who think the oil under their soil belongs to them and not to us. San Diego Padres -- cute, historical, but not au courant. Let's go with the San Diego Illegal Immigrants. Given the national mania for caffeine, and Seattle's somewhat dubious claim to preeminence, I would suggest the Seattle Baristas. The Washington Nationals - almost, but better, in honor both of warrantless surveillance and Larry Craig's restless foot syndrome, is Washington Tappers. Green Bay Packers - do we actually pack anything anymore? Instead, more descriptive would be Green Bay Call Center Operators Are Standing By. In honor of the shuttered industries of Motown, I would rename all the teams, the Tigers, Pistons and Lions, the Detroit Layoffs. Not neglecting the perfervid, crazy South, and all it's done to completely fuck up America, how about the Atlanta Evangelical Whacko RightWing NutJobs? A more colorful boxscore than "Braves" or "Hawks." Dallas & Fort Worth, which used to have some Southwestern charm, but have mutated to a blobby metroplex with all the bail-outs from the northern rust belt: I would go with the Texas Displaced Northern White Trash.

It's easy once you get started. Lighthearted, yet also deeply informative once you're into it. Where do I live, really? What in hell, really, is going on here?

The Iraq of a Grasshopper's Dream

It's one theory of reality: nothing actually exists as we imagine it. We and everything else in the Universe are simply artifacts in the dream of a grasshopper sleeping in a warm meadow in another universe. We move through his dream, live our lives within his dream, perish when his dream says it is time for us to go, and vanish into the nothingness we were before he began dreaming us. It might seem unlikely, but you cannot disprove it. We have no way, in considering an ontological argument, to transcend the severe limits of our own consciousness. Cogito, ergo sum? Or I am only to the extent I think I am?

I don't know whether Bush really believes what he is saying about Iraq because I can't inhabit his consciousness. I would say that he seems an unusually obdurate man; it would be good, just once, to see him abandon the staged situations, the Q&A with handpicked interlocutors, and really engage in an argument with someone, maybe on the floor of the Senate, where the conversation goes back and forth and we actually have an opportunity to gauge the empirical basis for these things he says. Bush is so relentlessly controlled in format. No one ever has the chance to delve deeply into his premises or analysis. Is he afraid and insecure? Does he buy that far into his own arrogance?

I'm not trying to be arch or condescending here. I sometimes feel for the guy, I have to say. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein was not the worst thing a world leader has ever done. Hussein was an immensely cruel and insanely barbaric tyrant. Despite pictures of Saddam shaking hands with Rumsfeld in the early Eighties, Hussein should always have been our natural enemy. We should not have countenanced his despotism, and it is too bad that our addiction to oil forced us to do business with him. Yet Bush ordered an invasion into a culture that is vastly different from America, and about which he knew little. He operated on the basis of naive assumptions about the essential similarities among people everywhere, an insular and provincial ignorance which typifies many American attitudes about the rest of the world. Maybe he was right to hope the Shia would not only forgive the Sunni for the depredations of the Saddam years, but would let the disputes about the rightful place of Ali in the line of caliphates dating from the 600's go too, all for the sake of peace and prosperity in Iraq. Wishing didn't make it so. He needed to understand that clearly in 2003 and he didn't. He unleashed an unrelenting Hell in Iraq.

I wonder if he understands that this Iraq he talks about, from all reports, must be in a state of near anarchy. Extrapolations of the 2006 Lancet study, undertaken with the assistance of epidemiologists and statisticians at Johns Hopkins, place the number of violent deaths in Iraq, over and above baseline expectations, at more than one million Iraqis. Add to this number the two million internally displaced Iraqis (victims of sectarian and ethnic cleansing and refugees from violence) and two million Iraqis who have left the country (many of whom were the country's professional, business and economic elite) and you reach a number which represents 20% of the Iraqi population at the time of the invasion. If the same thing happened, proportionally, in the United States, a total of sixty million people would be displaced, driven out of the country or murdered. Then consider the well-documented stories that chronic shortages of electricity, gasoline, water and basic services, such as garbage collection and medical treatment, torment those who are still there, and that unemployment affects at least half the populace.

How can Bush talk about Iraq, give a speech on national TV, without mentioning any of these incontrovertible facts? How can he possibly talk about "success" in Iraq? His Iraq may exist in the dream of a grasshopper, or in the reverie of a boll weevil chewing away on cotton on a farm somewhere in central Texas, but it doesn't exist in the Middle East.

President Drymouth Advances to the Podium

I'll certainly tune in tonight to listen to George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States of America, lay it out for us on this whole Iraq situation. I'm a loyal citizen, after all, taught in my civics or social studies or whatever we called them classes in elementary school about the demands of citizenship. I need to be informed, and the man who is briefed daily on this obviously critical situation in Iraq is clearly the guy who can fill me in. So I'll watch, trying my best to ignore all the incredibly irritating tics, mannerisms, mispronunciations and affected sincerity which we've come to expect from our Chief Executive.

My main question is probably also your question: why is he giving this speech? Put another way, who is the audience? It can't be the American people, as I usually think about those 300 million souls. George W. Bush long ago stopped caring about the American people, if he ever cared. If you think about his life, its main focus is to avoid all real contact with us. He lives inside multiple layers of insulation, and his announced goals, upon retirement, are to retreat inside various fortresses, such as the Crawford "ranch," and to reduce his interaction with the American people to the vanishing point. People bug George. He doesn't like them. He likes riding his bike and going fishing with Barney. All his "friends" have left the White House now, and it must seem increasingly bizarre to him that he goes on being President, month after month, year after year, with the end still so far away.

So he's not talking to us. We all know what he's going to say anyway. The surge has begun to work, but there is still much to be done. President Maliki is making slow but steady progress toward political cooperation, but he needs more breathing room to put together a functional coalition government. Conditions have improved, and if they remain on this track, he can foresee a draw-down of perhaps 30,000 American troops by next spring. He'll remind us that he's aware of the pain and sacrifice endured by America's brave men and women in Iraq, that he's grateful for their service, but that we must be patient while we complete the mission in Iraq, the central front in the global war on terror. We must not forget that the world is a dangerous place and America has many enemies who would do us harm if we are not vigilant...I wonder if at about this point, his own mind wanders off and he finds, on coming to, that he has been reading from the TelePrompter for 5 or 10 minutes without realizing it. You've had that happen to you many times, right? You're in a conversation, or in class, and you realize you haven't been consciously present for...how long has it been? It's weird, isn't it? I'll bet it can happen during a Presidential address too. I'll bet it happens tonight. Let's look for it!

I don't think Bush is addressing his fellow Republicans. This war could be the end of their political careers, and they don't believe his Panglossian evaluations for a minute. The Saudis? There's a chance, but he talks to them privately all the time. He doesn't need TV for that. So it's not us, it's not the Republicans, it's not the Saudis. The Iraqis? No, I don't think so; why would they listen to this guy who's never really been to Iraq?

Okay, so is there is no audience. Why's he doing this? Because it's what Presidents do? Because he's bored? Because he's....? Okay, so we've reached a new milestone in George's presidency. He's now doing things for no reason whatsoever. He's doing them to do them. It makes the time go faster. Something is solipsistic about this, isn't it? George has completely personalized the office. He's going to do things now, not to get anything done, not to accomplish missions (he can't get anything done anymore), but to pass the time. To get from here to sometime in January, 2009. He can't spend the whole time on vacation; he's already broken the record for that. At a certain point, a President who is always on vacation begins to disconcert an already very nervous populace, even if we're glad he's away. When he's in a foreign country, though, really weird things start happening, such as calling the Australians Austrians. Early in his Presidency, he thought the Swiss Guard were Swedish. He walks into doors, or off the sheer drop of a stage, or runs his bicycle into a group of Scottish policemen. So we need to keep him around where we can keep an eye on him. So that's the answer to tonight's riddle: we'll know where he is, what he's doing, and it won't do any harm because it doesn't mean anything at all. That's why I'll watch: to relax.

Comrades, Let's Not Get Hysterical Here

"Two officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews in recent days warning - for the first time - that Beijing may use its $1.33 trillion (£658bn) of foreign reserves as a political weapon to counter pressure from the US Congress. Shifts in Chinese policy are often announced through key think tanks and academies. Described as China's 'nuclear option' in the state media, such action could trigger a dollar crash at a time when the US currency is already breaking down through historic support levels." Telegraph (UK), September 8, 2007.

[the following is a transcript of telephone call from Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson's office, intercepted by the NSA as part of its routine monitoring of overseas calls]

Hi? Mr. Hu? No, it's a terrific connection! Huh? Heck no, no one's listening in! That's just for terrorists.

I'm saying your name right, aren't I? It's Hu Jin-Tao, I know, but you put your first names...oh never mind, even the President got it right. How tough can it be? Ha ha. He's a card, isn't he? What will he do next? Like that whole dust-up about melamine in the pet food. Sheesh. Okay, so Rover's evening meal tastes a little like IKEA furniture. Is that so bad? And everybody's little darling Tiffany curled up next to her lead-based Barbie -- maybe ten or fifteen IQ points, tops. Who's counting? If an American loses IQ points, can you even tell? Ha ha! We elected Bush! Ha ha ha!

No seriously, Mr. Hu, and I mean this sincerely...hey, do you know that Abbott & Costello routine? It's hilarious! Hu's on first? Get it? Oh, they would kill you with that, Mr. President. Really, I can find a CD for you...what am I talking about? You guys have already bootlegged it! No, that's another lousy joke. But on this nuclear option thing, Mr. Hu. You know...this is starting to make people nervous. Now I know, I know -- Congress likes to talk awful tough about fair trade and exporting jobs and labor standards and environmental stuff and blah blah blah. Even putting a tariff of 27% on Chinese imports because you guys won't let the yuan float up against the poor old hammered dollar! You know, so the things we make and sell to you will be cheaper, you know, things like...like...well, you know, stuff we make. Okay, so we make all of "our" stuff in factories in your country. Still, the idea is...huh? No, I'm not babbling! I don't think so, anyway.

Look, can I be honest for a minute? Just between us "comrades." Get it? Oh yeah, we love to laugh here in the States. Yeah, I know, I know - when I laugh these days it sounds like I'm strangling. You've got us a little on edge with this "dump-the-T-bills" stuff. That's getting way out there, right? I mean, come on. Sure, maybe we shouldn't have put a couple of wars on our Chinese credit card over the last six years or so, and maybe, when a country's standard of living is going downhill, that's the wrong time to double the size of the houses and buy cars the size of a Sherman tank, using all that money you send back to us after we send it to you to buy all the stuff that you make and we make in your country...huh? The tinkling noise? Oh, I guess I can tell you, Mr. President, I poured myself a little snort from the office bottle. I'm feeling a little nerved-up. Huh? Sure, he used to drink a lot. Not anymore. What? Yeah, he was running businesses while he was drunk, I'm sure... No, I see what you're driving at. Sure. Couldn't agree with you more. It looks like he's been running the country the same way. But that's all in the past. Tell you something else that's in the past, Mr. Hu. All this "trade sanction" talk, and tariffs and complaining about a little pesticide in the Meow Mix. We're friends, and friends cut each other some slack. So forget about all that. And that 1.3 trillion in Treasury bills you guys own? Why not leave it right here, where it's safe and sound. I'm sure you guys feel right at home here. It's almost like you own the place. What's that? Gotta go? Sure, you've got a big country to run, I understand. But I'll tell you who's on first for me, Mr. Hu. You, comrade. My pal! So just between us, Mr. President, no rude surprises, okay? You stay in touch...

[line went dead at this point in transcript]

David Vitter, the Gift That Keeps on Giving

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — A former New Orleans prostitute who will be featured in Larry Flynt's Hustler magazine appeared at his office Tuesday to accuse Sen. David Vitter of having a sexual relationship with her in 1999. Wendy Ellis told reporters that Vitter visited her two to three times a week for sexual relations between July and November 1999.

"Abstinence education is a public health strategy focused on risk avoidance that aims to help young people avoid exposure to harm. These programs have been shown to effectively reduce the risks of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases by teaching teenagers that saving sex until marriage and remaining faithful afterwards is the best choice for health and happiness." from Sen. Vitter's letter of June 21, 2007, to Sen. Max Baucus, Chairman of the Senate Committe on Finance.

Dear Senator Vitter,

Not to worry, David. Noted political commentator and sex impresario Larry Flynt has accurately doped out your situation. While your Republican colleague Larry Craig was quickly and mercilessly shown the door because of his wide stance and restless leg syndrome, your situation is very different. You're a freshman senator from a state with a Democratic governor. Craig, by contrast, represents the reddest of red states, Idaho. Moral censure of Senator Craig, therefore, is appropriate because his replacement will be named by a Republican governor. In a senate where the margins are so razor thin, where there are Republicans, Democrats and Joseph Lieberman, there has to be a limit to all this tiresome moralizing, right, Senator McConnell?
Personally, I would hate to see you go, David. Whenever the American political scene gets a little too dreary, out clatters another skeleton from your voluminous closet.

Maybe you don't personally make all those best choices for health and happiness, but you're faithful in your own way. The latest ho to blow the whistle on you, who apparently just passed a lie detector test and appeared on the Dan Abrams Show with that rascal Larry Flynt, uses the name Wendy. That's so...sweet, because that's your wife's name. Maybe it was a cry for help, or you were just being sentimental. However, I have to raise a delicate question, which you may know the answer to better than I, given your extensive work in the Abstinence Program. It Depends (I'm sorry about the lousy pun) on the precautions you took, but the ho says you were dropping by "to do your business" (sure, cold and mercantile, but what do you expect from a ho?, Senator) two to three times a week for four months. So if she's telling the truth, you were unfaithful to Wendy with Wendy perhaps as many as 50 times. Might there be an element of...risk there, Senator, of the kind you want the nation's youth to avoid? Could you unwittingly have been bringing a little of Wendy Ellis home to Wendy Vitter?

My guess is that Wendy Ellis, as opposed to Wendy Vitter, is not an adherent of the Abstinence Program, and paid no attention to your sound advice about monogamy. I guess what I'm saying, Senator, is that it's unlikely you were her only john, although, in fairness to you, I would wager that you were her most distinguished john - not only a United States Senator, but a major proponent of the Abstinence Education Program, Section 510 of the Social Security Act, which your almost unbelievably sanctimonious letter to Senator Baucus describes as "critical in supporting communities who wish to promote good and healthy choices for our nation's adolescents."

When I was one of the nation's adolescents fumbling around in the back seat of a 1965 Mercury Comet, I didn't have an Abstinence Program to steer me right. I'm not absolutely certain it would have done the trick, tell the truth. There is only so much that education can do when confronted by the forces of nature. I sense you know what I mean. Maybe this latest embarrassment will blow over soon. This gal could be an opportunist, despite the passing grade on Flynt's lie detector test. She's going to do a spread in Hustler, of course, and she'll be paid. That looks better for you, as you fend off another round of sordid accusations. I'd say your chances of keeping your seat are excellent, unless too many more revelations hit the airwaves. What might finally do you in is if Larry can get enough gals together to do a Girls of Senator Vitter issue. That probably wouldn't help a lot with Wendy #1, either. Anyway, go back and read your June 21 letter one more time. If it can stop a horny nineteen year old boy from making a serious mistake, it just might work for you.

Senator Diaper Weighs in at the Petraeus Hearings

I thought General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker showed admirable restraint when Senator David Vitter asked them for a "bottom up" analysis of the pacification of Anbar Province in America's 51st and most important state, Iraq. Petraeus, in particular, seems like a classic alpha male, a man among men, a natural leader, and I suspect he fought hard to suppress images of Vitter, as the Senator asked questions in his lisping, simpering fashion, lying swaddled on a bed, kicking his chubby legs in the air while a team of ho's slapped the Johnson's Baby Powder off their hands. Say what you will about the General's political ambitions and his aim-to-please-Bush approach to analysis of Iraq, he showed a lot of class in keeping a straight face despite the contempt that must have roiled his otherwise highly disciplined thinking. The General's name will not be found on the D.C. Madame's list, and I am confident Petraeus changes his own shorts.

So America's strategic defense seems to be in good hands as long as we have real men like General Petraeus willing to serve the country, and his willingness, furthermore, to submit politely to softball questions from Senator Diaper, while causing me to snort coffee out my nose while I watched, assures me that the continuity of this great Republic is a mortal lock. I guess. Of course, we have to keep in mind that the Iraq War has nothing to do with anything, and that General Petraeus presides (by default, since Bush has deputized his Commander in Chief role to his newest favorite guy) over the stupidest, most wasteful, most suicidal adventure in American history. And Congress just cannot stop talking about it.

I suppose Marshall McLuhan had a bead on this a long time ago. We can't even see "Iraq" anymore in its proper context. The constant repetition of the words "Iraq" and "Iraq War," and the endless train of images on television, together with the barrage of news in the big dailies and on the Internet, have created an Entity (The Iraq War) that dwarfs our capacity to conceptualize it. The important subtext of the message in the media is simply that, that Iraq is something we must talk about, all the time, it must dominate all discussions, it must set all our priorities, that regardless of its actual importance to the reality of America, we must continue, for years and years, to live under its tyrannical reign of dominance.

And Iraq, really? It's a country somewhere in the Middle East, east of Syria, west of Iran, north of Saudi Arabia, sharing a border with Jordan. It has a lot of petroleum under the ground. The population is less than the state of California, and seems to be declining steadily. It is a country now in the process of accelerating dissolution. It has evolved, with American intervention, from a police state with basic functionality to an anarchic shooting gallery. If I were an Iraqi, I'm not sure which state of being I would prefer. It's entirely possible I would choose the present over the Saddam years, but I would not see either life course as a lucky accident of birth. But we could leave Iraq tomorrow and the only effects for us would be completely positive. We all know that. We would immediately begin saving money, lives, our sanity. We would lessen the international threat of terrorism. Even the Great American Booboisie know that, which is why 70% of us want it to end. Congress could end it. And it won't. Members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, prefer the political calculations of maintaining power and winning the Iraq game, the game called "level of violence" in Iraq. That is what everyone now talks about, what Petraeus testifies about, what the analysts write about. Everything in the United States, the collapse of the housing market, the tanking economy, the falling bridges, the ruined city of New Orleans, the gargantuan national debt and trade deficits, the declining standard of living for about 90% of the populace -- all this is subordinate to whether in fact the monthly body count of Shia and Sunni in four provinces of Iraq is higher this month than during the same period in 2006.

Somewhere Over the Benchmarks

The Labor Department reported today that the U.S. sustained a net loss of 4,000 jobs last month, despite an earlier estimate the economy would increase payrolls by 100,000. The unemployment rate stayed the same, since 600,000 people "left the job market," whatever that means. Lost their minds? Turned to a life of crime? The stock market reacted by plunging about 200 points on the bellwether Dow Jones. Financial experts with a vested interest in pimping the vitality of the levitated economy, which depends entirely now on a positive outlook among American consumers (as does the rest of the world's economy -- it's all up to you Mr. & Mrs. Smith: are you going to buy that four-piece sectional or not?), were quick to point out that none of these numbers means anything, that all is well, that the economy is strong and "robust" (everything these days is robust), and we should not panic and think that the American economy (and thus the world) is headed for a Depression, because Bernanke may lower the discount rate by 50 basis points later this month and that should take care of everything.

I don't see how there can be any inherent strength in the American economy left, in my admittedly undegreed opinion (I mean, I have a couple of degrees, but they're not from the Stanford Business School). The USA built a Potemkin village of an economy by mortgaging all of its real estate through the use of recycled dollars returning from China, but I'm wondering if Bernanke can actually resort yet again to the same strategy in the face of a cratering U.S. currency. He may have no choice, of course, because Bush, who hit the 500-day mark today (so my National Nightmare Clock tells me), is going to look more ridiculous than usual asking for another $50 billion to invest in Iraqi oil futures on behalf of Exxon, Texaco, et alia, if it appears that the U.S. is about to go belly up. Not that it would deter him in the slightest, but I'm thinking that even this most unconscious of leaders (who apparently thought, while he was in Australia addressing APEC, that he was in Austria speaking to OPEC) must have some sort of upper limit for cognitive dissonance. You have probably noticed by now that Bush is not the most original of thinkers. If U.S. military occupation in Iraq is not working, his go-to solution is to increase the size of the U.S. military occupation. Thus, flooding the economy with cheap money by means of running $800 billion trade deficits in tandem with half-trillion dollar budget deficits, all against a national debt of about $9 trillion, is Bush's sole economic initiative for what you might call the American People. The upper echelons of large American transnational corporations, which are Bush's actual constituency, are interested also in the American populace as a segment of their world market.

I don't know what you call this system of government we've evolved into (even though I do have a degree in that subject). "Fascism" gets thrown around, but I've never thought that was apt. That's just American overreaction, a precious tendency to overvalue our troubles. Fascism, in the good ol' Hitlerian and Mussolinian way, always involves guys with thick necks and big boots beating the crap out of the domestic citizenry. I'm reading the second volume about the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans, Cambridge historian and personal hero (he was the principal defense witness in the David Irving trial), and he makes a very interesting point. Up until the Great Depression of 1929 and following, the Nazis were a marginal political party in Germany, controlling less than 3% of the seats in the Reichstag. After the bottom fell out of the German (and world) economy, the Nazis made their move, and Hitler complemented his political intrigue in Berlin by rounding up the Communists, Social Democrats and Centrists, beating and torturing them, and cramming them into concentration camps. Now that's what I'm talkin' about.

From a historical perspective, the acute danger to the United States probably will follow in the wake of Bush's misrule in the U.S. His indifferent approach to America's real problems, which are now beginning to surface definitively, has laid the groundwork for a very regressive and authoritarian regime. I will credit Bush with helping us get used to the idea of disappearing freedoms. The middle class is sinking beneath a tsunami of debt, our educational standards are going to hell, more and more people lack healthcare, and the looming nightmare of Baby Boom retirement en masse, seen against a backdrop of unsustainable debt, means the entitlement programs, on which most retiring Americans will depend for basic solvency, may evaporate.

When and if those distressing trends reach full materialization, we will see just how "resilient" our constitutional form of government is. I suspect there is going to be the same sense of injured pride and resentment as was found among the Volk in Deutschland in the early Thirties. A once-great power, still armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, now humbled by a failed war and a rusting economy, will look around for scapegoats. That could get very dicey. Anyone wishing to write a dissident blog under those conditions might want to reconsider. Bush is not Hitler, after all. Bush is a spoiled dilettante with no sense of mission and no real agenda, except for self-aggrandizement. Hitler was the real, horrific thing, and the possibility exists that somewhere out there in the vast American hinterland there is a charismatic lunatic with just the right combination of ruthlessness and fanaticism to take advantage of what America may become, and to summon the aggrieved populace toward a dark future.

George Bush's Iraq, or Why Studying Matters

A friend and witty observer of the geopolitical scene writes to the Blogmeister here at the Pond:

"...as a loyal reader, could you please let us know how L. Paul Bremer the sixteenth is the chosen fall guy for Iraq going to hell. it all woulda worked out if we had only kept all major thugs in their positions of power; i think that's the message. instead, the way it is being put forth, L. Paul (sorry! maybe he's L. Paul the fifteenth - forever getting my Yale legacies and bow ties all mixed up) got on his cell (this was in pre-IED days, that mahvelous acronym even David the Latin General Petraeus had never heard of before this REALLY FUN INVASION for guys like General P)...anyhow L.Paul the thirty-seventh gets on his cell and in perfectly fluent Arabic, at least from the script MacKenzie consultants put together for him - with a part of their fee being generously provided by America's favorite flag-wavers - Halliburton, Inc. - so L. Paul the twenty-ninth says in arabic to nine thousand Iraqi generals and colonels and majors longing for freedom and a chance to go to the Super Bowl, L. Paul the ninth, he says, "you're fired." If we only could have stopped him! Then every single one of those longing-for-freedom generals and colonels and majors would have written go-to-the-ballot box pamphlets so Iraqis living in Vancouver, Canada could weep over the wonders of democracy. Plus, this sacred Army that L.Paul the twenty-second fired would have made sure no damn sectarian religious violence ever would have taken place, they would have got the oil up and flowing, and all the girls in Iraq would have become fashion models, as there most certainly would have been a military ban on burkas." (Reprinted without permission.)

As we anxiously await General Petraeus's doctored-up and bowdlerized report, which has been seditiously anticipated by the GAO report and by a leaked and undrylabbed version of the Pentagon report (that is, a version prior to a working-over by the Bush Fantasists, maybe like Philip Cooney, the petroleum industry lawyer who rewrote James Hansen's too-dismal dispatches on global warming, edits which have probably been of scant comfort to Yucatan residents during this hurricane season) - we might, moving past this digression, consider this colorful kibbitzing, centering as it does on what I like to think of as the central fallacy of the Grand Misadventure in Iraq, the If Only We Had Fallacy. The IOWH Fallacy has served as the central thesis of a whole shelf of books on Iraq, such as, most notably, Thomas Ricks's fine book "Fiasco," the title saying practically all there is to say. Ricks's book, as do such movies as "No End in Sight," goes into excruciating, exhausting, eye-crossing (was looking for that 3rd "e") detail about the key "early mistakes" of the Iraq Occupation. If only we hadn't disbanded the Iraqi Army, if only we hadn't de-Baathified the government, if only we had guarded the Baghdad Museum and not just the oil ministry, if only we had listened to General Shinseki, if only we hadn't hired 22 year old American interns to occupy such positions as Minister of the Iraq Economy, if only L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer had not been such a predictably wussy Ivy League silver-spoon bowtie-wearing horse's ass.

Here's the relevant If Only: if only we hadn't invaded Iraq. Stop right there. Now it's true that makes for a short book. I could write that book; in fact, I just did. "If Only We Hadn't Invaded Iraq," by Waldenswimmer. The book would consist of a cover and maybe a title page. Reporters such as Thomas Ricks, or the fine duo of Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor, who wrote "Cobra II," which is like "Fiasco" only with more footnotes, are more market savvy. They saw through the financial problems of the one-page (one-line, in fact) book, and realized that their talk-show appearances would have been severely limited. Casual buyers at Borders and Barnes & Noble (soon, I understand, to be Barnes&Borders or Borders&Noble, which might lead the way to consolidation of a lot of things: WalMart + CostCo = CostMart; General Motors + Chrysler = General Chrysler; McDonald's + Burger King = King McDonald - why do we have all those meaningless choices anyway? And then why not simply consolidate all these outlets into one enterprise called The American Company Store, and sell everything there, and be done with it, once and for all? another digression, of course, leading us back to our buyers at Borders/Barnes...) would browse the "New Nonfiction" table, pick up the book, read it in its entirety, and put it back down. Wouldn't that curtail sales? You betcha it would. So you see, Ricks (a Pentagon reporter for the New York Times with many valuable "contacts") and Trainor, a retired general, of course, really don't dwell on what you might otherwise think is a pivotal issue, invading a "sovereign" country in violation of international law, a "nation" of warring tribes which have not gotten along for about 1,500 years, which are still having homicidal arguments about things that happened, oh I don't know, in 732 or so, a country held together by baling wire and duct tape and the police state apparatus of Saddam Hussein -- and an invasion, furthermore, on the basis of fraudulent evidence about nonexistent weapons and completely bogus connections to 9/11 - it was the way we did it that matters, and especially allowing a guy who wears construction boots with his pinstripe suits and repp ties, all beneath that fashionably long mop of thick Waspy hair. Are we clear here?

What bullshit. What a waste of paper and celluloid. What a colossal waste of money for everyone who bought those books or saw those movies. True, they demonstrate the incompetence of the Bush Administration. Also, lying in the tropical sun all day will demonstrate for you the skin-damaging properties of solar radiation. We didn't need Iraq to prove Bush doesn't know what he's doing and that he's indifferent to everything except corporate cupidity; Katrina did that for us. The focus on "Bremer's mistakes," as my witty correspondent points out, simply confuses the issue. The invasion and occupation of Iraq were never going to work under any circumstances. We could have sent one million troops; we could have guarded all the armories; we could have sent an American Legion of Museum Curators to personally babysit every last precious antiquity in the Baghdad Museum; we could have kept the Iraqi Army completely intact; we could have avoided throwing all the babies out with the Baath water. And Iraq would look precisely as it does today. Iraq was centrifugal destruction waiting to happen. The essential difficulty is not described in the books written after the invasion (with the notable exception, perhaps, of Peter Galbraith's book The End of Iraq) but in all the books written about Iraq before the invasion which Bush & Co. never bothered to read, such as David Fromkin's "A Peace to End All Peace." In this, the fiasco in Iraq is the perfect metaphor for modern America.

I hope, Aurie, this answers your question. I return now to the Bean Field and to working on the re-fi of my subprime mortgage.