Aragoto or Wagoto?

"Kabuki theatre" is now used so often to describe political discourse that I was forced to look it up. I always have the sneaking suspicion that a term which comes into general usage by the unlettered boobs populating the legislature and pundit class loses its original meaning, and the talking heads employing the word have only a foggy notion of what they are trying to say. It just sounds hip and au courant to say "Kabuki theatre."

Kabuki theatre is a form of highly stylized, traditional Japanese drama, and comes in two varieties, "rough" (aragoto) and "soft" (wagoto). Of the two, aragoto is the more stylized and mannered, using outlandish costumes, exaggerated gestures and histrionics and bombastic forms of speech. Wagoto is more realistic and natural.

My guess is that politicians and the usual experts mean aragoto, if they mean anything at all, and that their implication is that whatever political maneuver they are denigrating was not in good faith and was solely for dramatic effect. So I think I was right: they don't know what they really mean by "Kabuki theatre," and they would be better off borrowing a term, say, from shadow plays from the Czech tradition, or that weird Indonesian puppet thing that I remember from "The Year of Living Dangerously." Some of that, if I recall correctly, involved the shadows of puppets. Now we're getting somewhere.

Rushing to the podium yesterday to discharge his latest load of unbearable anxiety, President Bush accused the Democrats of "political theatre" in passing a military funding bill laden with deadlines and troop-readiness and veterans' care baggage (not to mention spinach and shrimp). Unfortunately, he didn't use the term "Kabuki theatre;" that's disappointing, because I would just love to hear him attempt the Japanese word. What Bush wanted was the money. He was not interested in all these carps and codicils which La Diva Pelosi presented to him after her massive exercise in cat-herding with the Democratic Mob in the House. So Bush engaged in some aragoto of his own, claiming that the Democrats were endangering the troops with their off-Broadway shtick, and that they ought to close after one night.

Face twitching, eyes downcast, upper lip stuck to his front teeth (the surest sign of Bush's anxiety-caused dry mouth), Bush warned that he would never take this $124 billion unless he got it his way, neat and clean, so that he would be free to squander it as he wished. It was his second tantrum in the space of four days. It's comical that Bush cannot control himself for even an hour when he feels thwarted; he has to rush out right now, whereas more artful and effective negotiation requires a sang-froid which is beyond him. What W doesn't get is that thwarting and taunting him is getting to be something of a blood sport among his opponents. They enjoy seeing him bug-eyed, twitchy and spitting his words. It's a fun kind of aragoto.

Especially when he can't do anything about it. Bush demanded that the Democrats reverse course and give him his $100 billion with no strings attached, so the troops will have the resources they need to roll around Baghdad and Anbar until they hit a roadside bomb and die. The Democrats aren't going to do that. Bush's veto means that he will decline to accept the money that would keep him rolling in war-cash until September 2008, nearly the end of his era of misrule, but that's not good enough for W. War Profiteering 'R Us in Bushland. Do we all realize that every time Bush demands another $100 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan that he is asking for another 3.3% of the entire $3 trillion federal budget? Well, he is.

Bush now faces this awful prospect. His duty as the Commander in Chief means that he has to plan for the safe and orderly extraction of the American military from Iraq with the money on hand. Bush never plans anything. He just does the next stupid thing and then asks for more money to keep the stupid thing going. That was another curious feature of Bush's appearance at the podium yesterday, backlit with the beatific smiles of the military mannequins behind him. He showed absolutely no cognizance of the reality that this Iraq madness has already been underway for four solid years, and that all the reasons for the dumb thing have proved nonexistent. Yet not a flicker of shame or remorse in those haunted, angry eyes. In some ways, a bravura piece of aragoto all in itself.

The Desk Murderer

Paul Slansky, who writes occasionally on the Huffington Post, and contributes regularly to The New Yorker, is one of the more colorful and devastating of the Bush-bashers I've read. He really hates Bush, and you can feel it in such passages as the following from the Post:

"What's obvious to all but the willfully blind is that Bush truly enjoys hurting people. His every action is designed to inflict pain, from that loathsome habit of giving people nicknames - hey, media suck-ups, it's not cute, it's contemptuous, a bully-boy saying, "I think so little of you that I'm not gonna call you by your name, I'm gonna call you what I want to call you" - to the cavalier decimation of a nation. Bush's utter heartlessness is breathtaking, though no more so than the mainstream media's craven refusal to even acknowledge it, let alone to truly do its job and relentlessly point out every instance of his wanton malice."

Over the top? I think it's possible it is. I'm not emotionally inclined to give Bush the benefit of any doubt at this point; I simply think such descriptions, in a perverse way, give Bush too much credit. It ascribes a purposefulness and over-arching design to Bush's malfeasance that I simply don't think is there. The language describes a monster in the Hitler or Stalin mode, and Bush lacks the discipline and vision to operate in such a league. I think it would be fair to say about Hitler, for example, that "his every action [was] designed to inflict pain." A human being who establishes a goal of exterminating an entire race of innocent (and ethical, humane and unusually productive) people is a person of "breathtaking heartlessness." Hitler's decimation of the Jewish people was "cavalier," to say the very least; so was Stalin's liquidation of intellectuals, the religious and his political opponents.

I think Bush's "wanton malice" arises from an interpretation of the results of his carelessness and incompetence, and his general indifference to his performance and effectiveness, rather than from Bush's personal motivation to sow destruction. I don't think he cares enough to cause the damage attributed to his intentions. Hannah Arendt, in her consideration of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, coined an apt phrase for the "banal evil" flowing from the actions of a morally indifferent human. She called such a functionary, whose quotidian actions relating to matters of career or ambition inflict human devastation, a "Desk Murderer." She could not find in Eichmann the malignant heart she was expecting to discover. He was a man of limited intellect and vision who simply did what he was told, which was to work on the logistics of killing Jews, and gave the matter very little additional thought.

Bush strikes me as just such a morally vacuous and emotionally empty human being. His main career goal was to get elected President and to settle old Freudian scores about his wastrel young life, the failure to fulfill the promise vouchsafed by his manifold advantages of family and fortune. The actual "content" of his presidency (spreading American democracy in the Middle East, protecting Israel, whatever else he pays lip service to) does not matter to him. He demonstrates this indifference on a daily basis, such as his casual abandonment of the Mideast peace process. The true meaning of the Walter Reed scandal, where Bush "heartlessly" allowed returning veterans to be dumped in a mold-ridden hovel, is related to this carelessness, as is his "response" to the Katrina aftermath or to the looming criticality of climate change.

Bush is a trembling mass of anxieties with almost no internal resources for dealing with them. His psychological functions are devoted to maintaining his sobriety and sanity, and there is nothing left for dealing with "externalities." He doesn't know how to grasp a problem, dissect its details and formulate a solution. He's an empty suit and a Desk Murderer. Whatever their motivations, writers like Slansky make Bush, in a paradoxical way, much more interesting than he really is. It would be difficult to imagine a man with less on the ball than Bush. As far as I know, he never says anything interesting or funny. He doesn't write anything. I'm not aware of any intellectual interests in his life (classical music or drama, e.g.) or of any personal talents in the arts he has developed (painting, playing a musical instrument, woodwork). He occasionally talks about reading through a syllabus (Camus's L'Etranger, for example) that is usually covered in first-year university literature classes. There is no evidence that any of the "disciplines" he actually "studied" at Harvard or Yale ever inform any of his decisions, or assisted him in any way in his private sector "career."

The overreaction to Bush which we see in Slansky and many others is the conditioned revulsion which decent humans feel after too much exposure to an irritating personality. Without question, Bush is an uncouth, intellectually gauche, defensively smug jerk. Almost all Americans are very, very sick of him, but this is no reason to install him among the pantheon of great heartless tyrants of the modern age.

The deal with executive privilege: a short primer

"However, neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high-level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances. The President's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the courts. However, when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises. Absent a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets, we find it difficult to accept the argument that even the very important interest in confidentiality of Presidential communications is significantly diminished by production of such material for in camera inspection with all the protection that a district court will be obliged to provide. [418 U.S. 683, 707] " United States vs. Nixon (1974) 8-0 vote, with Rehnquist abstaining.

A privilege, in the law of evidence, relates to matters which are assumed to be relevant or "probative" of some fact in dispute (tending to prove or disprove the issue, in other words), but for reasons of public policy are suppressed or excluded from public disclosure in a trial. A common example is the attorney-client privilege. No one doubts that information passed along from the perp in a robbery case to his mouthpiece might be "probative" as all get-out; nevertheless, to promote the "effective representation of counsel" we permit these conversations to remain private.

The Constitution does not actually provide the Executive Branch with an "executive privilege." By contrast, state and federal rules of evidence specifically enumerate the privileges (attorney-client, priest-penitent, etc.) by statute. One would think that Alberto Gonzales, who doesn't even concede the existence of habeas corpus despite its explicit reference in the Constitution, would dismiss the idea of executive privilege out of hand (one wouldn't actually think that - it depends on whether it serves the purposes of his career sponsor, George W. Bush).

President Bush, in his usual unlettered, Cliff-Notes manner, has made the "broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations," which the Supreme Court said, ordering Nixon in 1974 to turn over the tapes to Leon Jaworski, deos not get the job done. In his brief statement and Q&A on Tuesday, Mr. Bush did not claim that his conversations with Rove and Harriet Miers, among others, involved "military, diplomatic or sensitive national security matters." There might be two reasons for this. One is the usual explanation, that Bush doesn't know what he's doing; the second is that the White House has figured out the brouhaha about U.S. Attorneys doesn't involve such sensitive matters, for the same reason that Nixon's tapes related to nothing more than the "bunch of burglars" described by Senator Sam Ervin in the Watergate hearings.

On the other hand, Bush's real counsel on this one, Fred Fielding, has been around this block before, including the Watergate claims of executive privilege. Notice that the Supreme Court was not talking about turning over witnesses and e-mails (blessedly, there were no e-mails in 1974) to Congress. Chief Judge Warren Burger was discussing production of tapes to the district court under the protection of a preliminary "in camera" (secretly, in chambers) review by a federal judge. These may prove crucial distinctions. The Senate "lawyers" (Chuck Schumer, et al.) are painting with the same broad brush as George W. Bush. United States vs. Nixon is not exactly in point, and it's probable that the wily Fielding, recognizing that he will have home field advantage with the anti-democratic Supreme Court packed by his own client , has chosen his conditions (private interview, no transcript, no oath) carefully to play to his intended audience. Scalia, Alito, Roberts and Thomas can be expected to jump on the distinction between an in camera inspection by a district court judge and the "show trial" for which Schumer and the Democratic Gang are salivating, and Fielding has established conditions parallel to a judge's in camera review. While it's an open question who will prevail, I am always pessimistic these days when the ultimate outcome is dependent on this particular Supreme Court acting in the interests of the people.

A failure to communicate

The popular cable news shows, like "Hardball" and Tucker Carlson's show, are having a hard time finding a conceptual niche for the issue du jour, the firing of 8 United States Attorneys by the Justice Department. They keep tripping over the concept of presidential discretion; the President, they say, can fire U.S. attorneys for a good reason or for no reason; therefore, they argue, the only problem Gonzales has is that he didn't quite state things accurately before Congressional committees when he described the reaons for their cashiering. He said they were performance-related. This turns out not to be true.

Since polls demonstrate that most Americans get their information, and the bases for their "opinions," from such cable news shows (more than from networks or newspapers), it is small wonder that the public gets so confused about political issues. If 74% of the American populace believed that there was a connection between 9/11 and Iraq before the March, 2003 invasion (as appears to be the case), then the inability of the mass media to explain or educate the public on such fundamental facts must bear a heavy responsibility for their ignorance. Something simply doesn't happen, something important is completely lost in the process of video images speaking words in the rectangular box about huge issues of the day. What we have here, as the chain gang boss said in "Cool Hand Luke," is a failure to communicate.

The U.S. Attorney "scandal" can actually be exlained with an economy of verbiage. Succinctly, you might say. While it is true that U.S. Attorneys can be "terminated at will," such latitude is limited by the rule that they may not be terminated for an improper reason, such as the unwillingness of a given U.S. Attorney to hew to a partisan political program. That constitutes an unethical and unconstitutional intrusion into the judicial process. A parallel concept is found in discrimination law, where a job (or housing) may be denied for "any" reason (employment "terminable at will"), but not for a racist reason (for example). People like Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson simply cannot enunciate such a principle. It isn't actually that difficult, but it is beyond them. Their broadcasting imperatives are driven by the "entertainment" principle, and so the focus must be on whether Alberto Gonzales "lied" to Congress. Of course he lied, just as he lied earlier about the extent of NSA spying on Americans. The more important issue behind his lying, however, is why he lied, and this, as I say, is beyond the pundits.

In part I think this is because the style of television reporting requires (in the view of network execs) the repetition of certain superficial catchwords ("lying," "scandal," or [omigod] "prosecutorgate") and any attempt at "depth" is frowned upon as non-entertaining and "technical." Thus, the principle (analogous to discrimination law) described above cannot be used because of its "complicated" form. It is a true statement, it is the actual issue, but it is not infotainment, so it is rarely articulated.

Since the proper functioning of a democracy depends upon informed choices by an enlightened electorate, you begin to wonder how much longer this whole enterprise can go on. The connections and networks in the "organic society" (in Max Weber's phrase) become ever more intricate and technical as electronic communications and data storage, among other scientific frontiers, push forward. Feeling the hopelessness of trying to explain the political and economic artifacts engendered by this complexity, the information is dumbed down to generalized descriptions for mass consumption, but the "generalizations" are often not even related to the underlying factual matrix, as the above case in point illustrates. The decision-makers, such as Congress members and the President, recognize that the battle for public opinion is actually fought on the virtual terrain of this substituted "reality," and thus simplify and distort the issues they are dealing with to conform to the characterizations of the mass media, so that a congruence with public "opinion" can be achieved. Thus, Bush yesterday in his press conference emphasized the "resignations" of the attorneys and the "discretion" he enjoys to hire and fire "at will." Chris Matthews reacted in a telling way: he admired the President's "toughness" but caviled at the the President's "insincerity" in praising attorneys he had terminated. The real issue, as noted, was not even part of the discussion.

The Strange Moral Calculus of the Democratic Leadership

In essence, this is the oft-cited "power of the purse" in Article I of the United States Constitution:

Section 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

Without money, George W. Bush cannot prosecute his war in Iraq. He's asked for another $100 billion or so for Iraq and Afghanistan for the coming year. Only Congress can give it to him. If Congress says no, the war will soon be over.

Senator Russ Feingold sees this issue clearly. So do Representatives Lynn Woolsey and Maxine Waters of California. It is not really a complicated issue at all. It takes close to $2 billion a week to run the Iraq war. Unless Congress exercises another Article I power and borrows the money from the Chinese and Japanese and then gives the money under Section 8 to Bush, the President will have to close down his failed war once and for all and bring the troops home.

Either house of Congress can shut Bush down on this point. All they have to do is say no. Nonbinding resolutions opposing the "surge," bombast and thundering oratory, even of the over-the-top Joe Biden variety, will not make the slightest difference, will not dissuade Bush for a moment, so long as Congress writes the check Bush is asking for. He will take the money and go about his gruesome business, oblivious to the meretricious outrage of the Democratic leadership.

The Democrats prefer to make the issue bewilderingly complex, speaking of "benchmarks" or "performance standards," or "reporting schedules" on progress in Iraq. This micromanagement is probably indeed violative of the President's powers as Commander in Chief, and the timidity of the Democrats in forgoing their real power sets them up for this telling objection from the other side.

Or they engage in the duplicity of buying into Republican talking points about "abandoning the troops in the field," even though they know this makes no sense. The Democratic leadership insults the intelligence of the Americans who restored their majority by pretending the cash-flush Pentagon cannot possibly fly the American military out of Iraq with the billions already on hand.

Considering only the Americans in theatre, and leaving aside the Iraqi casualties which the presence of American soldiers enhances and exacerbates, there are over 150,000 American soldiers currently in danger of being shot, blown up, captured and mutilated, or grievously wounded in ways which will make their future lives an awful ordeal. These soldiers constitute one side of the equation we are considering. The other side of the equation is comprised of the political calculations by which Democrats determine which of their modes of evasion will make them look good in '08, will allow them to escape responsibility for a bloody aftermath in Iraq, or will serve some other, strictly political end.

And while they play these political games, tomorrow and every day that this war goes on, American soldiers will have to suit up, mount their vehicles and roll down bomb-infested streets, or walk the neighborhoods of Baghdad and Anbar province door to door, and wonder if this is the last day on Earth they will see the sun in the sky. Their calculations are primal and basic: will I survive this war for as long as they keep sending the money that makes me stay here?

Eenspector Georges W. Clouseau Wahs Naht On Zee Case!

"To assist the Committee in its investigation into these issues, I request that you provide the Committee with a complete account of the steps that the White House took following the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's identity (1) to investigate how the leak occurred; (2) to review the security clearances of the White House officials implicated in the leak; (3) to impose administrative or disciplinary sanctions on the officials involved in the leak; and (4) to review and revise existing White House security procedures to prevent future breaches of national security." Text of part of letter dated March 16, 2007 from Henry Waxman, U.S. Rep., (D-Los Angeles) to Joshua Bolten, White House Chief of Staff following yesterday's "Plame" hearings.


George W. Bush must have great fun at Henry Waxman's expense. Behind closed doors, of course, with the other Administration bullies around to regale, Bush must search his meager vocabulary for the stinging words of derision appropriate to this bald, diminutive, buck-toothed, bespectacled Jewish son of a Los Angeles pharmacist who represents his native city in the House of Representatives. It is true that Waxman, who does indeed look like a rabid chipmunk wearing a pair of magnifying glasses, is not possessed of movie star looks.

However, after watching Mr. Waxman preside over the Valerie Plame hearings yesterday morning, televised in their entirety on C-Span, I think Georgie Boy had better laugh while he can. He is in deep, deep trouble. Of course, Bush is always in trouble, but this is different. Not to be excessively dramatic, not that I would say something corny like "mark my words." But -- mark my words. In the Watergate scandal, it was the almost incidental disclosure by Alexander Butterfield, a White House subordinate, that Nixon taped everything said in the Oval Office that led to Nixon's disgraceful departure. Bush may just have had his "Butterfield Moment." Friday morning, we heard from Dr. James Knodell, Director of the White House's Security Office. Dr. Knodell clearly did not want to be there. I would describe his facial expression as that of a man who has been severely constipated for two weeks and felt, just before being sworn in, the sudden and extreme urge to go. He apparently did not know he would be appearing before the Committee until Thursday, when the White House must have concluded they had to send somebody to answer questions about the White House's "response" to leaks of classified information (Waxman would not take no for an answer), and sent this mild-mannered bureaucrat who used to think he had one of those enviable government jobs. Good pay, no responsibility.

Dr. Knodell had an awful morning, because he saw, after a few game evasions, that he was going to have to tell the truth. Fortunately for him, he's a career civil servant with, no doubt, a secure pension. He's going to be unpopular back at the White House, where loyalty always trumps honesty and ethics. It was, he admitted, standard procedure to investigate leaks of classified information from the White House. Executive Orders required that anyone involved in the leak of classified information report himself to Knodell's office. It was also standard procedure to initiate an investigation where it was suspected that White House personnel were involved; since Novak's column of July 14, 2003, identified "two Administration officials" as his sources, and since the Washington Post followed soon after with a description of "two top White House" aides talking to about six reporters, this was not exactly a leap of faith.

Knodell grimly admitted that there was never any investigation whatsoever. No one turned himself in. No one lost his security clearance except Scooter Libby, upon indictment. Not a single piece of paper exists in any investigatory file, because there is no file. The Director of White House Security, charged with protecting classified information from unauthorized disclosure, has not done anything about the gravest breach of security of the Bush Administration to date.

For a while, Dr. Knodell halfheartedly tried to hide behind the White House's standard evasion, that there was "an ongoing criminal investigation" and it was not the practice of the Security Office to run "collateral investigations." Unfortunately, his co-panelist, Bill Leonard, head of something called the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives and Records, contradicted this easy out. There is no such practice, he authoritatively said. The primary responsibility for determining the ongoing propriety of giving security clearances to White House personnel lies with Dr. Knodell's office. As one would assume. (Mr. Leonard, indeed, appeared so genuinely outraged by what the White House had covered up that he fell all over himself to help the Committee get to the true, fetid bottom of this mess.)

So when Inspector Georges promised in 2003 to "get to [that same] bottom" of the Plame leak, how did he intend to go about it? Ah, I think I just figured it out. At the moment he made his specious pledge, as he impersonated once again a man with the faintest trace of moral probity, he had already gotten to the bottom of it. He knew who had done it, because he was in on it. Zoot alors! Eye haff zahlved zee case!

Bush's Hombre de la Bolsa

Alberto had a good run. I think it is true, as argued forcefully by Sen. Charles Schumer, that the Attorney General's basic problem is that he fundamentally misconstrues his role as the head of the Department of Justice. Instead, Gonzales has always seen himself as Bush's mouthpiece, a wily, malleable and often devious advocate for Bush's bad idea-of-the-week. Such jobs have a built-in short life expectancy, as many Bush loyalists are learning, one by one.

In 1996 George W. Bush, then recently elected Governor of Texas, was summoned to jury duty on a drunk driving case. This presented, of course, a matter of extreme delicacy for Bush, as indeed almost anything which requires Bush to disclose something about his early life inevitably does. Bush went to the court house with Alberto, his chief counsel. Prospective jurors do not usually report for duty with a lawyer in tow, it should be noted. Accounts vary, but the most likely scenario is that Alberto called for a meeting in chambers with the judge and lawyers and advanced a novel argument. It was possible, said Gonzales, that Bush, as governor, might someday be called upon to consider a pardon request from the DUI defendant; thus, Bush's service as a juror presented a possible conflict of interest. Again, in the most believable scenario, the defense lawyer did not want Governor Bush, a "law and order" type, on the jury anyway, and Bush was excused.

The questionnaire Bush was required to complete in connection with his jury duty also posed some ticklish dilemmas. Among other uncomfortable questions, the form wanted Bush to disclose whether he had ever been a defendant in a criminal matter. Actually, he had. In 1976 he was arrested and convicted of a drunk driving charge in Maine. This part of the form was left blank. In his confirmation hearings for Attorney General, Alberto explained to the Administration's nemesis, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, that this was a "frequent practice" on such questionnaires.

Both arguments that Gonzales was willing to make for his single client were, of course, utterly absurd. It is characteristic of Alberto that he will say any fool thing Bush needs him to say to get Bush out of a tight corner. Since Bush spends most of his life in tight corners, this is an exceedingly valuable quality in a Bush retainer. It has led Alberto, for example, to argue for Bush's rights to walk all over the Fourth Amendment and the FISA law, restricting (indeed, criminalizing) warrantless wiretaps. Alberto led the way on torture, lining up a posse of similarly ethically-compromised lawyers to sign off on violations of the Geneva Conventions, which Alberto called "quaint."

Alberto gained further notoriety recently in Senate testimony by advancing the head-scratching argument that the Suspension Clause of the Constitution did not imply the existence of a preexisting right to the "ancient" writ of habeas corpus. The Suspension Clause reads as follows:

"The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

Reacting to my own patriotic impulses, I have considered how I might assist George Bush's reactionary agenda of eliminating American freedoms. My first target begins at the beginning, the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. This "quaint" provision reads like this:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Notice that this weakly-worded amendment does not positively state that freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly or petition actually exist. It just says Congress can't abridge them. But that hardly means the government has to recognize or protect them, any more than it has to recognize or protect the writ of habeas corpus.

Pienso que yo puedo ser un hombre de la bolsa tambien. Not that I want to brag. It's just clear that my extension of Alberto's argument is far more powerful than his puny abolition of the writ of habeas corpus. Hell, that just wipes out any hope for foreigners. Mine strikes at the true enemies of the Administration, the American people.

A funny thing happened after getting to the Forum 2,051 years ago today

I wonder if the assassination of Julius Caesar on March 15, 44 B.C., would have been viewed differently were it not for the plays of William Shakespeare. Not to mention Dick and Liz. After all, Marc Antony's "friends, Romans and countrymen" speech is difficult to counter. The delicious irony of the refrain, "but Brutus is an honorable man," outclasses any prosaic recitation of Caesar's self-aggrandizing moves to consolidate power after he crossed the Rubicon. It's worth bearing in mind, however, that Brutus, Cassius & Co. viewed themselves as the ancient Roman equivalent of the German generals who tried to assassinate Hitler with a bomb; that is, as engaged in tyrannicide, not a coup.

It's 2,051 years later and the imperial pretender who walks all over the American Constitution and violates statutes (or signs "statements" vitiating the effect of new ones which inconvenience his autocratic designs) is in no similar danger from his own Senate. For one thing the Star System of the old Hollywood studios is gone; who would play Mr. Mumbles (Harry Reid) and La Diva (Nancy Pelosi)? Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston? I don't think so either. The modern American Senate is full of the Boy Emperor's (in Chalmers Johnson's descriptive term) enablers who are aware of Bush's numerous outlandish high crimes and misdemeanors but consider it impolitic to do anything about it. I have thought since November 2006 that the importance of impeaching George W. Bush is less about the immediate benefits of removing a dangerously incompetent leader with totalitarian instincts from office than it is about the cleansing and expiatory effect of reaffirming the Constitutional rule of law. If we tolerate, for example, the wholesale violation of the Fourth Amendment and the FISA law by Bush and his cronies, and allow them to cloak the true extent of their invasions in secrecy; if we permit Bush to maintain a vast gulag of CIA prisons in foreign countries where "terrorist suspects" are routinely tortured in violation of the Geneva Conventions; if we buy into the patent nonsense that "enemy combatants" can be jailed indefinitely without judicial recourse by a specious analogy to the treatment of Japanese and German soldiers during a conventional war with a finite duration; if we aid and abet the continuation of a war started on false pretenses under the color of an "authorization" that is clearly no longer even putatively applicable; if we do all this, and considerably more, then we are saying that from now on we will tolerate the concept that Presidents can act illegally without any consequences other than pointless "criticism" or the occasional demand that some subservient official be symbolically canned by the Administration.

I do not understand why Nancy Pelosi believes that impeachment must be "off the table." The clearest case ever presented for impeachment now exists. The House Judiciary Committee would probably need five or six months to air out all the misprision and illegality in which Bush & Co. have engaged during their first six sordid years.

Yet I suppose the Democrats are going to let it ride. They are so enmeshed in Beltway politics and personal careerism that they have lost sight (with a few blessed exceptions, such as Patrick Leahy, Barbara Boxer and Russ Feingold) of the big picture. If this neglect persists, I am concerned a terrible price will be paid down the road. The original idea that no President is above the law will be lost as the "precedents" established during the Bush Administration cohere into fixed tradition. Exceptions to Constitutional principles for "national emergencies" and "dire threats" will be seen as routine and tolerable, and Americans will get used to the idea of police state tactics and "necessary" curtailment of liberties. A terrible mistake, anticipated many times in history. Brutus and Cassius saw it coming in their own day. They just needed someone writing better lines to vindicate their legacy.

Godless Liberal(s) Invade(s) Congress

"Secular groups Monday applauded a public acknowledgment by Rep. Pete Stark that he does not believe in a supreme being, making the Fremont Democrat the first member of Congress — and the highest-ranking elected official in the U.S. — to publicly acknowledge not believing in God." Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2007.

Well, there goes the neighborhood. Also, my own cover story for not running for office. In The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, he makes the point that a higher percentage of Americans voice their unqualified opposition to an atheistic candidate for President than for any other defining characteristic in a standard survey. Americans who have no qualms about voting for a woman or a minority for President draw the line at voting in a heathen. In Dawkins's view, in other words, a substantial majority of Americans demand that the President, first and foremost, be delusional. Certainly no one promoting deism in politics could have much to complain about in the last 7 years.

If Pete Stark is the "highest-ranking elected official" in the U.S. to renounce belief in God, then I suppose that none of the other 434 Representatives and none of the 100 Senators has ever done likewise. Thus, we're at the point where either (1) not one of the other nonbelieving 534 members of Congress has the courage to proclaim his/her apostasy, seeing it as political suicide; or (2) there is no such person; they all believe in God.

I was recently in a conversation about such beliefs where I was described as an agnostic, and I found myself saying, "beyond that." "Atheist?" she asked. "Beyond that too," I responded immediately. I wonder what I meant. Maybe something along these lines: If you tell me that thunderclaps are caused by Thor throwing his hammer while being carted around in the sky in a chariot drawn by his two goats, I will, of course, honor your belief and nod gravely in the way that my politically correct, respectful generation tends to respond to declarations of arrant nonsense. We're so-o-o nice and afraid of giving offense. If, however, you ask me whether I share this "belief," I will think (though probably not say) that the question is simply not meaningful. There aren't "two sides" to this "question." You believe something nuts and I don't think about it.

I liked Steven Weinberg's response to a religious group who asked him to participate in a "constructive dialogue" with religious thinkers. He declined, saying he maybe believed in a dialogue, but not a "constructive dialogue." Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist probably best known for uncovering the cause of Reality (barely an exaggeration), has the right idea, if you ask me. What can science learn from religion, other than the importance of science as an escape from obscurantism? I don't see much difference between positing the idea of a god creating the Universe with lightning bolt-like conjurations and Thor throwing his Mjolnir and making the dogs run under the bed. The Biblical God is an update of the Nordic Thor; modern religion simply retreats before the advance of science by making God murkier and more ethereal, and doing away with the vaudeville routines of burning bushes and parting seas.

I suppose, if I'm running for President, I can finesse the point by telling the truth and saying I find the question of belief meaningless, along the lines of the above meandering explanation. I doubt it will work. Americans are intolerant of vacillation on matters of belief. They much prefer a straightforward declaration of lunacy.

Unapologetic Cassandra-ism; or, Foreseeing the End of the American Republic

Cassandra was a good-looking gal, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, who was so alluring to men that Apollo himself came on to her and granted her the power of prophecy. Cassie, however, could not dig the Greek God's action (he wasn't Yanni, after all). So her power, in effect, became a curse. It did not stop her from predicting the fall of Troy, however, and she added yet another cliche to our always-burgeoning trove with her "beware of Greeks bearing gifts."

My old prof at Berkeley, Chalmers Johnson, has now completed his Cassandra-ish "Blowback" trilogy. The last volume, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" warns us that the military-industrial complex sitting at the very center of American life acts as a kind of Trojan Horse full of devastating potentialities that threaten the Constitutional basis of our democracy. If we're lucky in a society, we find among ourselves a few brilliant polymaths with that rare capacity to take it all in, to contextualize recent history, to describe the interplay of the moving parts of our governmental and social apparatus. Noam Chomsky, for all his unquestioned brilliance, seems (to me) simply too stridently "off" to offer much help this way. It's as if he never much liked the United States in the first place. His rants have no capacity to redeem because they are nihilistically devoted to complaining as an end in itself. When someone is absolutely insistent on never placing one's country in a broader context of mistake-prone polities, but attacks unmercifully every failure and peccadillo, I think of motivations such as "Daddy" issues as the root of the emotional antipathy.

If, on the other hand, you essentially like America, once served it as a Naval officer and CIA analyst (like Prof. Johnson), and are just disappointed in how screwed up it's gotten, then Chalmers may be the sort of Cassandra for you. I think there's a reason so many of us are nostalgically drawn to tales of World War II. Say what you will about America's questionable decisions during the War (internment of Japanese, the firebombing of civilians in Germany and Japan, the use of atomic bombs at the end), one could at least say that if these were mistakes, they were errors made under tremendous threats to our survival, and there is no doubting the overall moral righteousness of our cause, especially when compared to the evil intentions of Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini and even of our "ally" Stalin.

Chalmers Johnson writes about the problems engendered by never leaving the wartime economy of World War II, the "Keynesian militarism" of the military-industrial complex. He lays it out so it is plain to see. The United States has become a New Sparta, or in his formulation, the New Roman Empire, the republican nature of which foundered after 44 B.C. when Rome sank into a series of military dictatorships. We're dominated by our military institutions, and they are threatening the Constitutional basis of our country. The same thing happened to Rome. There are many facts and figures in "Nemesis" to support the thesis. The United States has at least 737 military installations, many of them large bases and airfields, worldwide. Adding up all the money spent through all agencies (e.g., the nuclear bomb budget of the Department of Energy, and the budgest of the many intelligence agencies), the United States spends 3/4 of a trillion dollars a year on the military and on defense of the country. This is 50% of the discretionary spending of the federal government (outside of entitlements) and more than 25% of the total federal budget. Using this figure, it can be said that the United States spends more money on defense and intelligence (and "homeland security") than the rest of the world put together.

Of course, we can't afford this. We're giving up all kinds of social programs (universal health care, for example, or useful mass transit) that other civilized nations take for granted. We borrow the money at a reckless pace to keep it all going while our manufacturing base for everything except weapons and munitions is shipped overseas (3 million jobs lost since 2001). Everyone agrees that the trade deficit, the national debt, the looming bankruptcy of the entitlement programs are "unsustainable," but we keep trying to sustain them anyway. In one of many lapidary moments, Chalmers Johnson explains that Keynesian economics has been short-circuited in America's militaristic world. The idea was that the government could stimulate short-term development to avoid recessions by taking on deficits to finance, e.g., public works programs which increased employment and the free flow of money; and then, in prosperous times, to retract such programs and to use tax revenues to pay down the deficits created.

The foxes, however, have completely taken over the hen house. There is no brake on spending on the military because militarism is now what the United States does. Congress does not "oversee" the process except to enable it. (Note that the planned response of the Democrat-controlled House Appropriations Committee to Bush's request for "supplementals" for Iraq and Afghanistan is to give him more than he asked for.) It's why we're always at war. It's why we spend more and more on defense even when it's completely irrational, for example, to keep beefing up the standard military when we see our main enemy as disparate groups of Islamic militants engaged in "asymmetric warfare," where a large standing army and lots of overkill bombs are inappropriate and probably useless. Yet when you have all these hammers, every problem looks like a nail.

One effect of reading the book is to understand that George W. Bush is at the extreme end of a gradual process of evolution toward a militaristic, anti-Constitutional movement which has gained momentum over the last 50 years. He did not come out of nothing; the ground was prepared by all the Presidents since World War II. His Manichean, apocalyptic tendencies (and limited comprehension, which makes him susceptible to easy manipulation) have simply quantumly pushed things in a direction they were already going. He's made clear the central thesis of "Nemesis," that a militaristic nation intent on foreign adventurism and domination cannot also maintain a free democracy at home. Not in Ancient Rome, and not now.

Bush's Libby Problem, Continued

"[W]e've had leaks out of the administrative branch, had leaks out of the legislative branch, and out of the executive branch and the legislative branch, and I've spoken out consistently against them, and I want to know who the leakers are." —George W. Bush, Chicago, Sept. 30, 2003.

Of course, in some ways it would be helpful if Bush could adopt some simplified lingua franca, like Swahili or Esperanto, to express himself while a seasoned translator stood by to put the gobbledegook back into English. As it is, we have to deal with the raw feed, and it's not easy. It can give you a severe headache. For example, Exhibit A above, in which Bush reveals his apparent ignorance that the "administrative" and executive branch refer to his own Executive Branch or "the Bush Administration," and are one and the same, and that it's not necessary to mention the legislative branch twice to make the point about leaks. This quote is from the same Q&A in which Bush made the careful comments quoted yesterday about his determination to do the "appropriate" thing for anyone found to have leaked "classified information." The contrast between the prefab phrasing and Bush's usual hopeless confusion is telling. When he's coached to thread the needle (to avoid jail time, for example) he can nail his lines.

What is also striking is Bush's professed ignorance, on September 30, 2003, of "who the leakers are." If he hadn't learned the identities of the leakers long before September 30, 2003, how could Bush's ignorance have continued past October 1, 2003? Karl Rove, who certainly monitors every word his balky student utters, knew who the leakers were on September 30, 2003, because he was one of them. Ari Fleischer was also one of the leakers and he met with Bush at least daily. And Dick Cheney, who confers with Bush constantly, could have told him about Scooter Libby, because it was Dick Cheney's idea for Scooter to leak like a water bed after a porcupine pot party.

The grounds for impeachment are there, if diligently developed. It seems apparent that the Democratically controlled Congress, led by faint hearts like La Diva and Mr. Mumbles, are too timorous to impeach Bush on the really big high crimes and misdemeanors, like torturing prisoners of war, denying due process to American citizens, spying in violation of the Fourth Amendment and the FISA law, spending money authorized for Afghanistan on illegal preparations for war in Iraq --all of this overwhelms them. Too big and scary to debate in the open, except for a few valiant souls like Russ Feingold, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders. But delving into this mystery, smacking as it does of a whodunnit, of a who knew what when -- this seems always to be the kind of simplistic coverup which undoes the incumbent. Nixon might have attempted to subvert the Constitution by playing off the CIA against the FBI, but it was something much simpler, the tape-recorded proof that he knew about the break-in at the Watergate almost immediately after it happened, that drove him from office.

Pull on one end of this skein of deceit and misdirection and it will unravel. Fitzgerald has "finished his investigation." Congress can take it from here. Maybe the able John Conyers will pick up the twine and begin yanking on it. For one thing is certain: Bush knew that members of his own office and Dick Cheney's office were in on the ground floor of these ruinous leaks. He knew it either before it happened (as part of the planning for retaliation against Joseph Wilson), or he knew almost immediately after. And he certainly knew well before September 30, 2003. Squeeze the right people, make some deals, and the story will come out, and the unfinished narrative, in which the active participants detail the ways in which Bush was informed of the leaks as they happened will emerge, and that story can be compared to all of Bush's clumsy obfuscations before the mantra of "ongoing investigation" shushed him up.

Scooter Libby was a sacrificial lamb, given to the mob in expiation for greater misprision behind the scenes. The thinking was that the liberal media could be placated by conviction on a few minor felony counts for which Libby will never spend a day in prison. Unfortunately, as almost always, the conniving Cheney read his critics right. Cheney is almost never right in the real world, but in the realm of Washington politics, where he only has to intimidate the amazingly fainthearted Democrats, his calculations usually carry the day. There is only a slight chance the co-opted wusses of the Democratic centrist wing will rise to the challenge, but if they do, a means for removing both Bush and Cheney will emerge.

Bush's Current Libby Dilemma

George Bush has enormous problems with verb-noun agreement, as you may have noticed. Given that there's usually a 50% probability of getting it right, it's astounding how often he comes up with ungrammatical clunkers like "Is our children learning?" So it would not surprise me if his version of Bill Clinton's famous evasion, "It depends on what the meaning of is, is," were to come out, under Bush's brutal ministrations, "It depends on what the meaning of is, are."

We may soon see how adept GWB is at artful dodging. Take this quote:
"I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action." [Bush Remarks: Chicago, Illinois, 9/30/03]

From my own review, this is probably Bush's most definitive pronouncement on the Valerie Plame matter. There are others to choose from, and we could throw in the categorical denials from Scott McLellan that Libby or Rove was involved in talking to reporters about Valerie Plame. But McLellan is a serial, compulsive, unapologetic liar himself, and one step removed from Bush. Further, to avoid ratifying his mendacity, the Bushies retired McLellan from his job; he was useless at that point anyway, because he was fully depreciated during his handling of l'affaire Plame.

I've been a lawyer for a long time, and I've observed hundreds of witnesses in depositions and trials deal with critical, "jugular" issues in litigation. By that I mean the fulcrum point in a case. It might concern liability; it might concern state of mind; it might concern when someone first kenw some crucial fact. When opposing counsel is saddled with a witness or client who has a tendency to wander, to ad lib in disastrous ways, who's maybe not all that bright to begin with, he coaches his client to recite carefully prefabricated sentences to cover this critical ground. Bush certainly fits the description of such a client-control problem. Bush himself once inadvertently disclosed the exact content of one of his coaching sessions. As he finally, at long last, admitted that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11, he stated, with evident pride, that he "was always careful to say that Saddam did not order the attacks on 9/11." On that one point, you can take him at his word.

With this as primer, review the quoted statement above. Notice anything peculiar about it?

Good for you. You either are, or would have made, a good lawyer. It's all in that phrase "leak classified information," isn't it? I used to be a State Bar grader, and for spotting that issue, I can almost assure you of a bar card. In this coached phrase, Bush does not actually talk about Valerie Plame's identity as an undercover agent for the CIA. This is not surprising, because it was critical, at the end of September, 2003, a full 2-1/2 months after Robert Novak's exposure of Valerie Plame to the general public, to leave Bush some wiggle room. Let us be realistic: does anyone actually believe that in late September, 2003, George Bush did not know that Karl Rove, his chief political apparatchik; Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff and also Assistant to the President; and Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's Man Friday in the State Department, had been singing like Heckel & Jeckel to anyone in the press who would listen?

Of course Bush knew. What we learned during the course of Patrick Fitzgerald's curiously circumscribed case was that the Bushies, in a hysterical rush to counter Wilson's damning disclosures in the New York Times, went so far as to declassify important intelligence information on the order of the President. That's the first clue. The second clue is the noise made by the Right Wing echo chamber attempting to establish that Valerie Plame was never covert or undercover at all, that her "classified" status was either nonexistent or had been rendered de facto nugatory.

Bush's handlers foresaw the day when Bush's denials could become severely problematic. So they created an out for him. Compare his first statements about Valerie Plame, in the immediate aftermath of the disclosure, with this lawyerly script. To avoid being tarred with an accusation (perhaps as an unindicted co-conspirator) of obstruction of justice with his misleading, and dishonest, characterizations of Administrative intent, Bush engaged in a parsing of words that created a loophole. We will see that loophole exploited in the coming weeks.

Scooter Libby's Tragedy

Even in the liberal euphoria over the conviction of I. Lewis Libby, I remain somewhat contrarian, because I am still of the opinion that he was, indeed, a sacrificial lamb. And a sacrificial lamb who was not nearly so culpable as the people higher up whose positions Libby decided to protect.

I'm sorry his lawyer didn't follow up on his good instincts; in his opening statement, he told the truth when he described Libby as a "fall guy," the one set up to take the rap for the misprisions of Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and George W. Bush. According to the account of the loquacious juror who has described the deliberations of the jury, Ted Wells's claim resonated with the jurors. That's the way they saw it too. They were waiting for evidence they could sink their teeth into. But in the final analysis, Wells blinked, or his client (following his inclinations toward omerta to the end) would not allow him to prove the claim. I don't know which it was. Clearly, the decision to portray Libby as a flunkie sent to do a dirty job and then abandoned when his journalist sources blew his cover story -- that's a major fork in the road. If you go down that road, if you take the Vice President, maybe the President, directly on, your life will never be the same. Wells knew that. I think that's why he sat, immobile, his face in his hands, while Fitzgerald tore his defense to pieces. The jury wasn't going to buy this "faulty memory" routine and Wells knew it.

He had a better case to make. His pitch was the time-honored strategem of jury nullification. Give the jury the red meat they want and they'll overlook the law. There was no doubt that Libby lied, several times. Yet it is also true, no matter how strenuously Fitzgerald argued to the contrary in his own press conference (he doth, in fact, protest too much), that the lies did not amount to a legal hill of beans. Who on God's green Earth cares whether Libby learned about Valerie Plame's job at the CIA on June 12 or on July 13? Fitzgerald again today would not answer one fundamental question: did anyone do anything wrong by disclosing classified information or the identity of an undercover agent in the summer of 2003? If so, why didn't you charge them? And if they didn't do anything wrong, if it was perfectly legal to tell anyone and everyone who our undercover agents working on weapons of mass destruction are -- if that's your position, Mr. Fitzgerald (and you won't tell us it isn't) then WHO CARES when one of the guys in the Bush Administration who's doing the blabbing also makes up a story about when he first heard about it? And this sanctimonious stuff about the integrity of the "system" and the search for justice, how it all depends on truth-telling, and the rest of it- please. A couple of hundred million 1040's will be signed under oath in the next six months or so. What's the over/under on instances of perjury in that pile of paperwork, Mr. Fitzgerald? Fifty million? One hundred million?

I don't think Scooter Libby is a bad guy. It's just my sense. I think he's a good and ethical man who was working for a bad and unethical man, and he threw his life away burning the trail which would have led back to Cheney's manipulations. Yet even in that misguided act of loyalty he failed completely. It all came out anyway. One thing that speaks well for Scooter Libby is that he's such a lousy liar. Under the oppressive heat of a federal investigation, all he could come up with was "I forgot." The thing he forgot was himself, who he once was, and for that he'll pay a terrible price.

Libby Jury Begins Second Year of Deliberations

from Washington Post, February 26, 2008
by Dana Priest, Post Senior Reporter

Jurors in the Scooter Libby trial began their second year of deliberations today, apparently still unable to reach a unanimous decision in the case. Court room observers indicated that the eleven remaining jurors are still in good spirits and remain confident they will be able to reach a verdict soon. Judge Reggie Walton again expressed his reluctance to declare a hung jury, given the hard work of the jurors over a time period now about twelve times longer than the trial itself; although, as often in the past few months, he displayed a note of asperity about the continuing requests for "clarifications" and "deliberation materials" which have become a distinctive feature of this jury's approach to the case. Judge Walton, who sequestered the jury in a local three-star hotel about six months ago to shield them from the continuing problem of exposure to media reports, indicated that the mounting expense of housing and feeding the jurors, as well as devoting his entire docket to this one case, was beginning to try his patience. While he applauded the meticulous attention to detail which has characterized this jury from the start, he sighed audibly and drummed his fingers at the latest list of questions, which included (according to a court room source) a question whether the "ment" at the end of "statement" (a reference to the false statement count, apparently) was significant in assessing guilt, and whether it was Louis the XIV or Louis the XVI who was King of France at the time of the Reign of Terror. This second question was apparently to settle a bar bet between two jurors.

The "materials" listed in the last requisition of the jury included a Nikon digital camera, four rolls of duct tape, an overhead projector, eleven leather ottomans, a 42" plasma television, a case of 2002 Pouilly-Fuisse, a box of Dove Bars, four calling birds and three French hens, and the complete works of Daniel Defoe. Judge Walton, in consultation with lead prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and Libby's counsel, Ted Wells, took the request under advisement.

Scooter Libby, meanwhile, who voluntarily submitted himself to confinement ten months ago ("to make better use of the time") is nearing the probable end, on the basis of credit for time served, of any sentence likely imposed following an unfavorable verdict.

In other news, the U.S. Congress passed a nonbinding resolution demanding that the President declare which of the four wars now raging, against Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, was his favorite.

The Springer Green Room and the Reelection of George W. Bush

"America is the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without creating a civilization in between." Oscar Wilde

I confess that I am sometimes transfixed by fleeting glimpses of the "Jerry Springer Show." There I am, surfing through, when suddenly I see Jerry's industrial-chic set, the dull green colors, the propellers turning slowly in their cages behind the "guests" -- and some obese woman with long blonde hair, wearing a bad-idea short dress with a plunging neckline, is boo-hooing to Jerry about her no-good boyfriend who she strongly suspects has been sleeping with her aunt. For some reason the fat blonde with her blurred features and uncertain dentition has taken off her shoes, and her fat feet are flat on the floor, up there on the raised platform before the howling mob which is Jerry's studio audience. And of course next up is the aunt, who is an older version of the first slob, stringier hair maybe, and a bad dye-job at that -- she charges on to the stage, also wearing a short skirt, and then immediately shucks her shoes, and without preliminaries she charges the first gal, her niece, I guess the story line has it -- and they wrestle and throw each other to the floor while the body guards halfheartedly pull them apart, and black-out squares keep us from seeing the exposed tits and ass which the audience - now chanting "Jer-ry! Jer-ry!" --can see plainly, in all their immense immediacy. Every other screamed word from the brawling aunt and niece is bleeped, as they spit epithets at each other, call each other whores and sluts, all the while throwing wild punches and pulling the other's hair. And then, of course, the boyfriend himself, with his burr haircut and tattoos and a forehead two inches high, and his dentition only a distant memory -- he walks out to screams of excoriation from the crowd, who've gotten the word on this slimebag. The aunt hugs him nonetheless, says she loves him, and the betrayed niece, her face a ruin of tears and smeared mascara, starts screaming at him, why, why, why?

Why indeed? Often, in these stories, we hear there are one or two children involved, maybe the first tub o' lard and the boyfriend were blessed with issue, or maybe it was the aunt all along, and the first blonde has been, unwittingly, raising her own cousin, somehow mistaken about her own pregnancy and delivery.

In the Chronicle today, I read that the American nuclear family, for the first time in our history, has fallen below the 25% mark. People living as husband and wife with children in one home now number about 23% of the American populace. Increasingly, this kind of family life is the exclusive province of the well-educated and well-off. Marriage and children are luxuries which most young Americans simply can't afford, if they were inclined to consider the lifestyle in the first place. Children might happen willy-nilly, from any kind of union at all, long-term or in passing, maybe incognito. Maybe the first reunion of the family would happen in the Jerry Springer Green Room.

It's not all a waste of time, to spend ten minutes with Jerry & the trailer park folks. I'm convinced that more and more of us, those of us who consider ourselves educated, aware, well-read, walk around with a vision in our heads of a fantasy America which either never existed, or has been so transmuted by the last forty years that it may as well never have existed. The columnists in the few major newspapers left (the New York and Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post), the ever-shrinking major weeklies, like Time and Newsweek, pitch their stories to this fantasy America, one peopled by a vast population of well-educated, well-adjusted Moms and Dads in good-paying jobs, their children at sleek, high-functioning schools, with money in the bank and their finances under control, the car paid for, the lawn mowed, the house clean, their lives tidy. And then, lumbering to stage center, upsetting this idyllic reverie, is the 230 lb., 5 foot 2 inch harridan with the maroon tank top and jeans skirt hiked up over her thong, her dirty blonde hair flying as she throws her sister-in-law to the ground for sleeping with her toothless husband while the two of them were working the night shift at Wal-Mart and thought she wouldn't never hear about it -- well, now she knows, you whore, you skank, you slut, you god****, m************ b****, and you can have his scraggly ass 'cause I done changed the locks on the double-wide anyway!

When I gaze upon such things, I think: even if they don't exist quite that way, even if some of it is done for effect, these people are still so absolutely devoid of self-esteem, so clueless, so obtuse, they are willing to allow themselves to be portrayed as hopeless losers in front of a national audience for what probably isn't much money, even to them. And a calm tranquility descends upon my perfervid soul. For in such moments of Trailer Park Satori, I see it. I see my own delusions, the sociological maya of my imagining, why I beat myself up asking the same question as the skanky blonde fatso: why, why, why?

Bush was appointed in 2000, as we all know; he didn't win the popular vote, and his brother cheated down in Florida to put Bush in position to allow two members of the Supreme Court with serious conflict of interest problems to stop the recount before Gore could win the electoral count outright. We know that. But 2004 - Bush got millions of votes more than Kerry, and 53% of the total. And this happened after Bush had been in office for four years, and his incompetence, his clownish bungling, his intellectual and emotional ineptitude were obvious for all to see. He started a war on completely false information before the campaign for reelection was even underway. Well, all those residents of that fantasy America we conjure, that we pull out of the clear blue sky -- they surely could have seen it. And there is only one problem, the dilemma definitively, irrefutably, crushingly presented by November 2004 -- that America, if it ever was, could not possibly exist anymore. The great majority who returned Bush to office in 2004 believed that Saddam Hussein was the principal cause of 9/11. They thought the guy who allowed 9/11 to happen in the first place was the best guy to protect us from the terrors, which he described in his fractured English, still to come. They were enthusiastic about voting for a candidate, here in the 21st Century, who maintains "the jury is out" on whether evolution theory is accurate or not, who does everything he can to retard America's scientific progress, who has made the U.S.A. a worldwide pariah with his bestial approach to prisoners of war, who is almost singlehandedly responsible for America's benighted "response" to the looming catastrophe of climate change.

Oh yes, the Green Room has its cognates, its counterparts out there in the Real World of Modern America. Epidemic obesity and diabetes, plummeting literacy, a huge cohort who use America's emergency rooms as their primary care physician. People completely wrapped up in the business of scraping by with crap jobs and crappier living conditions. And the response of the Bushies, as always, is PR: to hide the steady growth of the underclass with misleading statistics which conceal the growing disparity between the Haves and the Havenothings.

America goes on changing nonetheless. There's a new show on now, and the Americans on the program inhabit the United States from sea to shining sea. The people who play are taking one last drag before stamping the butt on the Green Room floor, knocking back one more Red Bull to juice up for the combat ahead, fluffing the mullet before charging out the door to the arena. They're getting ready to kick off those shoes and have at it.

Thinking about the Beats

The first time I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road was at the suggestion of some guy I hung out with in Honolulu during one of those summers, way back when, when I used to spend the breaks between Berkeley school terms in the Islands. A family thing, and not really part of the story. This guy was over there doing the same kind of thing, killing time between semesters in the most dissolute way he could find, with a buddy from San Francisco State. They were self-styled intellectuals of a sort, and had the kind of buddy chemistry which necessitated that both of them act like pretentious assholes most of the time. I was a sucker in those days for that kind of thing, or maybe it was just homesickness for conversation different from the simplified talk, often in pidgin, that went on between me and the locals, who probably resented (justifiably) my presence in the Islands in the first place. Anyway, one of these guys was working his way through Kerouac's classic novel, also a kind of buddy story. He talked about it a lot while I was driving them around Oahu. It occurred to me after a while that the car I had access to was the whole point of the "friendship" from their perspective. He (the shorter and more self-consciously intellectual of the two) talked mainly about the hipster language in the book, the "gone chicks," everything being "way cool," everyone needing to "split" all the time. In some ways he was making fun of the style, I suppose, the way he made fun of everything. One dull Sunday they finagled me into driving them to a polo match on the windward side of Oahu, which I grudgingly did, but then when they began getting drunk and snotty, as always happened, I excused myself by saying I needed to use the outhouse, then got in the car and drove back to Honolulu. They must have had a hell of a time trying to get back to Honolulu themselves, which they tried to tell me about not long after in an angry telephone call. I just laughed and hung up. I wasn't actually afraid of two fake intellectuals from San Francisco State. The locals? Sure, often. But not those two guys.

But I've found, as you have, that even out of disappointing liaisons in life you learn things, you pick up things of value. And so after a few years I bought a copy of Kerouac's book myself. That was my introduction to the Beats. Unconsciously if unwillingly influenced by the wise guy of a few years back, I focused at first on the colloquial and disheveled style of Kerouac's writing, which led me away from the point. I was a little too formalistic and doctrinaire in my approach to art in those days. My cousin, the ace novelist from Santa Cruz (via common ancestors from the Cumberland Gap), straightened me out on the significance of the Beats. My cousin was about the same age in 1955 as I attained in 1970, so while my reference points were Hippie, his were Beat. He explained his admiration for Kerouac (and he really would not brook my trivial carping about writing style) by talking about what it meant to hear dissenting voices during the Eisenhower Era, how all of society talked about the perfection of modern (increasingly suburban) American life, when just under the surface, a sensitive soul (like Kerouac) could plainly see that things were going terribly, terribly wrong. He wasn't the only one. Lewis Mumford, writing in The City in History in 1961, described an America where post World War II development left an "end product [as] an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set." So deranging was this forming lifestyle, in fact, that Mumford blamed it for the insanity which led to the nuclear arms race. Nuclear annihilation, indeed, could be seen as a suicidal escape from the oppressions of Modern America.

As is my habit when encountering something new and interesting, I read lots of the Beats after that. My first run-through of Tropic of Cancer impressed me as the best novel I'd ever read. It was almost miraculous in its evocation of time and place. And then Miller's dark counterpart to Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie, Henry's own book about touring America called The Air Conditioned Nightmare. For one thing, the title could simply not be improved upon. I realized my cousin had been influenced by these writers in his satirical vignettes about modern America, in his Charlie Bates stories. "Gas Mask" concerns Charlie's encounter with the Ultimate Traffic Jam on an unnamed Los Angeles freeway, a gridlock so final, so finished, that he eventually abandons his car, lowers himself by rope from the freeway, rents an apartment in a nearby high-rise, and watches his immobile car through binoculars. A new life, a love interest, also come about while he lives in this state of deracinated anomie. Indeed, how can you better describe the rootless nature of American life than through such a brilliant parody?

In My Dinner with Andre there is a riveting moment in the long conversation when Andre talks about the Sixties as the final convulsion of a society rebelling against the forces of standardization and commercialization, the reduction of the landscape to a tacky "crapscape" (Jim Kunstler's matchless epithet) of chain stores, fast food joints, big box outlets, the whole American Trail of Sorrows. The rebellion failed, as Andre noted, and eventually Americans "became the keepers of their own prisons." We became collaborators in our captivity, a kind of cultural Stockholm Syndrome. Almost all of us do it now: consume too much, pay too much attention to celebrity, fill the seas, the skies, our minds with garbage (as Pete Seeger sang), encourage our kids, above all, to "make it" in American society. We live in a country which is dominated completely by Big Business which owes its primary (only) loyalty to the global network of trade. The sense of a commons is so attenuated that we sit complacently by as more and more Americans fall into poverty and out of the medical system. A mercenary army fights endless wars, and their deaths are significant only as political footballs for parties competing for the plum jobs available at the public trough. Calls to patriotism have turned to ashes in the mouths of hypocritical legislators who are simply looking for manipulative angles.

One might say that it is those who stand at the cusp, at the interface, between eras who see things most clearly. There is a moment, a twinkling, when the horror can be appreciated because the culture being abandoned is still visible, still around, as its evil successor begins to materialize. Such were the Beats. Eisenhower himself, now a kind of patron saint of America's conformist age, became something of a Beat in his final warning about the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex. It is here now, in force and in all its menacing glory. A charter member of the corporate ruling class received 53% of the popular vote in the last presidential election. The government is now in the full-time business of spying on its own citizens, compiling dossiers, subjecting them to "mathematical algorithms" by an elite and secret class of apparatchiks with no accountability. No amount of money spent on defense or in ongoing wars seems too great for Congress, even if Social Security, Medicare and the federal government itself are headed toward bankruptcy. Instead of making decisions (the nominal reason for their election), the legislative freeloaders idle away their hours passing nonbinding resolutions.

The Beats, in fact, were on to something. But now there is really no one left to Howl, to go On the Road, to point out the Nightmarish tenuousness of our decadent life. No one, at least, who can influence matters decisively. I suggested to my able cousin at one point that Charlie Bates make a comeback, that he turn his satirical gifts to the vexations of the Bush Era. Plausible, it might have seemed, as a suggestion. But not really possible. The broad audience is gone; it exists only as an illusion in the minds of those who remember that golden era of American dissent. Change in these United States will not come about through peaceful evolution or through hortatory satire. The body politic will fall apart through degenerative processes already well underway. "A throe, an eschatological heave," said another quasi-Beat, Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night.

Copy + paste = blog

Sometimes a blog can write itself:

"The European Union and the United States were at similar greenhouse-gas emission levels in 1990, but between 1990 and 2004, the EU economy grew by 32 percent and the greenhouse gas emissions went down by almost 1 percent compared to 1990 levels. By contrast, the U.S. economy grew by 52.6 percent between 1990 and 2004, but its emissions grew by 15.8 percent and are projected to increase to 32.4 percent above 1990 levels by 2010."

John Bruton, European Union Ambassador to the United States, February 28, 2007, special to the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Researchers say [narcissism] scores have risen steadily since 1982 when the first of some 16,475 college students across the United States completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI). The survey asks for responses to such statements as 'If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,' 'I think I am a special person,'and 'I can live my life any way I want.'"

"Twenge said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favour self-promotion over helping others. In addition, the study says narcissists 'are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviours.'"

"Researchers cite the 'self-esteem movement' of the 1980s, saying self-confidence building has gone too far."

Associated Press, February 27, 2007.

Any questions?

Das Leben des Anderes

"The Lives of Others" deserved to win Best Foreign Picture, if you ask me (and you didn't). Set mainly in the pre-Glasnost days of East Germany, the movie tells the chilling story of Stasi (State Security) instrusion into the lives of a group of talented artists and intellectuals in an unnamed East German city before the fall of the Wall, and of the destructive effect of surveillance on sanity and human happiness. A fascinating character study, and a timely reminder of the dangers of trading freedom of speech and association for an illusory "state security."

Which brings me, as so often, to the question of America's move to the Right. Joe Conason is out with a book called "It Can Happen Here," a play on the title of Sinclair Lewis's (unreadable) old novel "It Can't Happen Here," (meaning also that It Can Happen Here), which is about the slide toward Fascism under Bush. I think we're at the point, actually, where we can say with some confidence that American liberal democracy will outlast Bush, and the "photo finish" I talked about the other day (liberal democracy versus January 2009) comes out of my own despair over the unnecessary destruction of American institutions that Bush introduced as part of a disorganized and hapless approach to seizing power for the "Unitary Executive."

Conason organizes familiar material using a Sinclair Lewis outline, trotting out the Lewis line about "Fascism coming to America wrapped in a flag and bearing a cross." I think books like his are part of a vital and healthy dissent, and essential to preserving the ideas of the Founding Fathers so that when Bush at long last leaves town, we can remember what we used to be about. It's interesting, however, to contrast what a finished totalitarian state, as depicted in "Das Leben," looks like compared to Bush's fumbling attempt to undermine American liberty. In the GDR (East Germany) an astonishing 200,000 citizens were offical informants for the Stasi, out of a population of about 15 million. That's penetration; that's serious intrusion. People were routinely arrested and imprisoned for saying things that sounded anti-state. The East German apparatus grew, naturally, out of Nazi practices as supplemented and made more "humane" by Soviet security techniques. These people were deadly serious about repression.

Bush is sometimes compared to Fascist leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini, and this is of course the most immediate historical parallel that comes to mind. The situations are distinguishable, however. Hitler came to power out of an intense, personal and monomaniacal desire to rule supreme. He had unquestionable gifts of organization and motivation, and he was animated by a malignant ideology of hate and violence. He had been imprisoned; he had been debased and made a political pariah after the Beer Hall Putsch; he had fought and been wounded in World War I; he had come out of a difficult Austrian background of failure and marginalization, and was attempting to seize power on the big stage of German resurgence.

Bush, on the other hand (and it's our saving grace), is not really like that at all. Instead of a fire-breathing, highly ambitious ideologue armed with ruthless motivation, he's a homegrown product of America's decadent period. He came out of privilege and limitless money. He had no ambition for 40 years except to get drunk and deranged on booze and coke. By the time Hitler was 43, he was Chancellor of Germany and head of the Nazi Party, and he achieved this lofty pinnacle beginning from rural poverty and without political connections. Bush's father had been, among other things, President of the United States. Bush is not talented, except as a content-free vehicle in the service of corporate interests. He has no idea what he's doing. He's not charismatic and he doesn't motivate anybody. Unlike Hitler's Germany, America under Bush continues to lose ground economically and in its relative standing in the world. If he's a Fascist, he's the laziest and most disorganized Fascist in the history of the movement. But as I say, we are fortunate that it is so.

I recall after 9/11 that British citizens, in particular, sometimes sounded skeptical about America's over-the-top reaction to this single event of invasion. They were, of course, prudent and circumspect in their grumbling, but the idea was simple: America needed to get over itself. Britain had been bombed nonstop by the Luftwaffe from 1940 until Hitler finally turned his attention to the East. Night after night, all the major British cities took a pounding, thousands and thousands of civilians died. Day and night, the whole country was engulfed in flames for nearly a year. And when the Russian invasion failed, Hitler experimented with his V-2 rockets on those same British Isles with devastating lethality.

A group of Saudi and Egyptian nut cases flew commerical airliners into office buildings in New York and into the Pentagon. We had clear warnings that it was coming, but the federal government was too lazy and incompetent to react. Bush, seeing a political opportunity for reelection, seized on the attacks and immediately divided American history into "before" and "after" 9/11. "Everything changed." The American electorate, ignoring the inconvenient observation that this inarticulate faker was the one who failed to react to the warnings in the first place, bought into the story line. This is typical of American hysteria. In a similar way, the changes wrought by the "Mayberry Machiavellis" are hyped and exaggerated. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales - they love pushing people around for political effect, such as Guantanamo detainees and Abu Ghraib prisoners, but with occasional notable exceptions early in their reign, such as Jose Padilla, they lay off American citizens. East Germany, as a police state, was the real deal, run with characteristic German efficiency. Its purpose was to perpetuate power. Bush, Cheney and the gang piss all over America's noble traditions without anything, really, to show for it. All the violations of due process, the intrusion of NSA spying, the squalor of the signing statements, invading Iraq, the elimination of habeas corpus for the helpless, the torture -- all of it, it's for nothing. Bush & Cheney's sole agenda is to redistribute tax dollars of ordinary Americans to big business with military connections, and they do this through exaggerating nonexistent threats from irrelevant countries.

In some ways, our overreaction to this, the comparison to great Fascist regimes of recent history, parallels the hysterical overreaction to 9/11. We take ourselves, our precious selves, oh so seriously. America does face serious external threats, such as the danger of a terrorist nuke, but about those threats we do almost nothing. It's boring, unglamorous work. Who cares about port security, or X-ray machines for cargo holds, or enforcement of Nunn-Lugar? How can that thrive on the front page? When Bush leaves office, the blogosphere will contract by 50% and we'll be left with all those niggling, real problems that were neglected during our orgy of Fascism Envy. A spoiled, indolent and seriously overweight populace will have to look then for the Next Big Thing to distract them.

Apocalypse How?

"These people are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States ... and we're going to have no one to blame but ourselves." -- Michael Scheuer, former head of the C.I.A.'s bin Laden unit, to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, February 19, 2007.

That isn't really news; it's sensational and au courant, but not really news. The Nunn-Lugar Act was passed years ago to deal with the very real threat of a nuclear weapon falling into the hands of terrorists, and many experts, such as Graham Allison at the Kennedy School at Harvard, have offered in Senate testimony the probability estimates of an actual detonation. In late 2004, the guess was that the chance of a nuclear explosion somewhere in the world was 70% over the coming decade.

It's difficult to be more precise, of course, or even to know what to do with a probability estimate such as that. We could usefully contrast it with survival statistics in cancer research, for example. If we say that the five-year survival rate for a given type of cancer is 70%, then we can test the estimate by seeing how many survivors are around five years later. With sufficient numbers in the sample and standard scientific controls, the guesstimate can be affirmed or refuted. With a single, discrete event like a terrorist nuke, it's difficult to quantify, refute or affirm in the same way. Logically, any probability greater than zero during a given 10-year period would be affirmed by the actual event. Only if the prognosticator said the chances were, on one hand, zero; or at the other extreme, 100%, could we definitively say whether the guess was right or wrong.

So the purpose of such a probability estimate is to give us a general feeling. Should we be scared shitless, or is it just a Hollywood scenario pitch? If scientists with lots of data at their disposal start throwing around numbers like 70%, what do you think? In terms of my own street cred, I was, a long time ago, lead counsel for the intervenor in the Diablo Canyon licensing proceedings, through which Pacific Gas & Electric sought from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission a green light to operate twin megawatt reactors built on an active earthquake fault in Avila Beach, California. Part of the proceedings required me to execute an Affidavit of Nondisclosure forbidding me to divulge any information acquired through my review of classified information in the clean rooms maintained on site at PG&E. That's been easy, and the silly nature of hyped-up classification was one of the two lessons I learned from the litigation. The other was that the NRC provides no real oversight of the nuclear industry because the appointees to the Commission are all industry hacks calling in political favors. As it was then, so it is now; the difference is that the blogosphere now extensively covers Bush's continuation of these corrupt practices, so that we have, for example, coal industry lobbyists in charge of America's "fight" against global warming.

Those are valuable lessons to learn at the callow age of 32. The federal government is (a) thoroughly, utterly corrupt, and hides many of its mistakes through (b) abuse of the classification process. For purposes of thematic continuity: these sad factoids relate to the existential danger posed by terrorist nukes. How bad is the danger? The information is all classified. And who's in charge of protecting us? Hacks, such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who don't know their ass from a hot rock.

Those who are privy to the information necessary to blow us to kingdom come include Islamic extremists, even if you, loyal American citizen, are not among the favored, in-the-know cohort. The basic information relevant to building a nuke is available now on the Internet or in public libraries, although the generalized diagrams or details are insufficient for a workable device. A terrorist would need either (1) an actual, assembled bomb, or (2) the materials to build one with, assisted by a bomb-making physicist.

If I were devising a Hollywood scenario, I would go for Door #2. One thing I learned (but not from classified sources) back in those glory days of within-the-system radicalism is that a standard commerical light-water reactor (such as those at Diablo Canyon, San Onofre, or dotting the landscape all over France) produces about 500 pounds of plutonium per year. About 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of plutonium is all you need for a good, solid, serviceable 10-kiloton bomb (in the Trinity shot ball park). In all the controversy over Iran's "nuclear program," we keep reading about Condi Rice's insistence that Iran "stop its uranium enrichment" as a condition of bilateral talks. Sometimes I actually wonder to myself: are Condi, Bush & Cheney so stupid they actually don't know? Uranium enrichment is the long way home. The United States undertook uranium enrichment as part of the Manhattan Project for one very simple reason: there were no nuclear reactors around to produce plutonium. But they undertook this extraordinarily complicated process because they had to. You can't find plutonium in a mine (except in infinitesimal quantities as the result of "natural reactor piles" sometimes found in uranium deposits). You make it in a reactor. A light water reactor uses U-238 (the plentiful kind) enriched to 3% (or more) U-235 (the highly radioactive isotope), all of it packed into long, cylindrical fuel rods. In the course of producing heat, through the neutron flux in the reactor core, the U-238 is altered (through a couple of chemical intervening steps) to Pu-239 - Plutonium. This silvery metal from Pluto's dark realm must be extracted from the spent fuel rods in a reprocessing plant by chemical means. The United States doesn't do this anymore, but France, England and (ahem) Russia do.

There's your weak link: Russia and all the former Soviet republics, particularly those with significant Muslim populations. This is where we're paying a terrible price for George Bush's anti-social personality disorder. His inability to get along with people has transmogrified into a global, existential crisis. Hate to say it, but it's true, folks. Bush's weird personal problems have succeeded in alienating Russia, which has strong connections to Iran, and the "crusade" bullshit he uses to galvanize America into unnecessary wars has polarized Muslim sentiment against us. His abrogation of the ABM treaty without bringing Russia along on a joint venture to develop a "missile shield" against rogue nation nukes; his enlisting of former Soviet Republics into NATO, and stationing new missile sites on Russia's border; and his adamant refusal to "talk" to Iran unless they cease doing something they don't need to do in order to become a nuclear threat - all this stupidity has added immeasurably to the danger.

We need the assistance of every advanced civilized nation on Earth to help us counter the threat of a terrorist nuke. We can't afford to be at odds with a country (Russia) which poses no threat to America's safety, yet which possesses not only finished nuclear weapons but tons of raw plutonium. We have to talk to everybody, all the time. There is no upside to this silly posturing, this Axis of Evil crap. It is the ultimate zero-sum game: one mushroom cloud here in the "homeland," and our days as a viable polity are over. We need to pull for that 30% chance it won't happen, and we need January 2009 to happen as soon as it can.