Catch-22 and Iraqi Amnesty

I can't quite help myself. I've been reading Joseph Heller's masterpiece again. I saw it on the shelf and intended only to confirm whether I remembered the very first line: "It was love at first sight." I had remembered, and now I'm on page 200. I have a facility for remembering the prose of great books verbatim which unfortunately dispels much of the pleasure of multiple perusals. I would guess this is pass #6 or #7 through Catch-22, but the prose is such absolute perfection it withstands repetition, like listening to a great monologue from early Woody Allen.

Anyway, it's a disconcerting juxtaposition to read this brilliant parody of the insanity of war, even a war as just as World War II (the last one, I suppose, in which America wholeheartedly agreed to its necessity and righteousness) while occasionally watching C-Span coverage of Congress and reading on-line news reports. Yesterday the Senate argued at length about the language of a Senate resolution expressing the "sense" of the Senate about reports the Iraqi government of al-Maliki was considering granting amnesty to insurgents who had killed American soldiers. The Senators were posturing, thundering, and declaiming like mad to make sure they appeared to be the most outraged over such a suggestion. John Warner seemed to take the whole thing personally, as if that mane of white hair should have been proof enough that no one could possibly be more supportive of America's brave young men and women, and that if any ambiguity seemed to seep from the edges of the resolution...

Well, you see, that's the problem. The Senate, in expressing its "sense," does not want to be in the position of telling the Iraqi government what to do. We would never do that, because Iraq is a "sovereign" country that we set up and are dying to preserve. And as we set it up, defend it and die to preserve it, Maliki & Co. are trying to make peace with the unrelenting insurgents who attack them 600 times a week by letting them off the hook for killing the people who are dying to preserve the Maliki government.

So I'm wondering what the great, the incomparable, the brilliant, the one-and-only Joseph Heller would do with priceless material like this. Remember Milo Minderbinder? The entrepreneur who bombed the air base on Pianosa on a for-profit basis? Well, it really happened. It's called Kellog Brown & Root, and they furnish "services" to the military on a contract basis. They constantly short-change and cheat the military. They serve them substandard food and pad their invoices. If the Administration entered a contract with KBR to kill American troops, would Congress say anything about it? Wouldn't the Republican majority rise up and defend the Bush Administration's absolute right to conduct the war under the President's constitutional war powers in any way he saw fit? And if bombing American troops using American planes is part of that conduct, does Congress really have anything to say about it? Didn't they sign an Authorization for Use of Military Force in 2001? And if bombing American troops using American bombers isn't a use of military force, what is?

And Colonel Cathcart, who Yossarian kept saying was trying to get him killed by making him fly combat missions. Isn't Donald Rumsfeld the perfect Colonel Cathcart? Isn't he trying to get Americans killed by sending them in insufficient numbers with inadequate armor against an implacable foe who are so tenacious the government wants to tell them it's okay if you only killed Americans? Doesn't the American soldier have the right to say that his enemy is anybody who's trying to get him killed? And if some Clevinger, some unthinking grunt challenges the would-be Yossarian and tells him, they're not trying to kill you, they're trying to kill everybody, isn't the rational response -- what difference does that make?

Thank you, Joseph, for letting me see it was always thus. Contextually, the Iraq War is even crazier than World War II, of course. The entire exercise has become very similar to Captain Black's Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, where airmen were forced to sign nonstop loyalty oaths to eat, to get a parachute, to get a bombing map, to move about the base. The question now is who supports the troops? Maybe they shouldn't be there at all, maybe the whole project is insane, maybe we'll go bankrupt doing this forever, but that doesn't matter. Do you support the troops or don't you? You could say you support the troops by trying to get them out of Iraq, where the government you're fighting and dying to preserve says it's okay to kill you, but that's too complicated. And anyway, nobody cares anymore. Long ago everyone forgot why we're in Iraq. We call it the "central front" in the war on terror, but it's the central front only because we're there, and if we weren't there, it wouldn't be the central front anymore.

Gee, I can see how intoxicating it must have been to write the original Catch-22. All you have to do is open your eyes and see. And be an insightful genius, of course. The world is crazy.

And getting crazier. It now develops that Iraqi troops trained by Americans have used their training to kill Americans, including two soldiers from California in 2004. The Pentagon was a little slow in delivering that news to the parents of the soldiers killed by American-trained Iraqis. We may need another sense of the Senate on that one, that it's none of our business how the Iraqi government uses the training we give their soldiers, but our sense is that we'd rather they kill the insurgents with their training, even if the insurgents who kill our American soldiers will be given amnesty for killing us directly, although it's our sense we're not too crazy about that either.

Meanwhile, back in Pyongyang

Last week's post about Stephen Hawking concentrated mostly on one catastrophe in Hawking's Unholy Trinity, the looming possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect. I suppose Hawking is one apocalyptic horse shy of a full team for his Stagecoach to Hell, but give us time - we'll devise something. After all, we're the human race.

#2 horse on the list was nuclear annihilation, and this way out (which I think I might prefer to the Venus scenario) was given a sharp whip to the rump by Bush's Arch-Nemesis, North Korea's Tyrant-for-Life, Kim Jong Il, he of the rattling sabre and botanical haircut. As a California resident (for how much longer? yikes), I was pleased to see Condi Rice rise up and protest Kim's planned missile test. Maybe this is because Taepodong-II has an enhanced range of 9,300 miles, nearly reaching to Washington, D.C. Back when we all thought it could only reach California, Bush & Co. seemed fairly sanguine about the whole thing. After all, nuclear incineration of the West Coast could only improve Bush's grip on Congress. A major Blue State: Ka-BOOM! Just like that. Would Boxer & Feinstein be permitted to continue representation of a state where all their constituents were dead? How would Scalia handle that delicate Constitutional question?

But Kim added a little juice to the booster stage and now all bets are off. One of his nukes might hit Crawford, Texas, if I'm reading the range maps correctly. So Condi is sounding very stern, or as stern as she can sound, which is not all that stern. When I watch her on Meet the Press or at a press conference, I'm always taken with her diligence. She knows exactly what she's going to say and how she's going to say it. Of course, we know exactly what she's going to say and how she's going to say it. It's as if a Spelling Bee Champion has been elevated to the post of Secretary of State. I'll bet when she plays a Bach Two-Part Invention on the piano, it is absolutely flawless, note perfect, the time impeccable. Also, completely soulless. Just my hunch.

When I think about the various ways we seem to be hurtling toward catastrophe, I can't help but wonder: is it possible the rest of the world shares the perspective of the American Troublemaking Left? That this President and his team, including Note-Perfect Condoleezza, are in way, way over their heads? That they suck at their jobs? Do you suppose A-Jad in Iran and Kim in North Korea noticed what went on after Katrina, and FEMA's grotesque mishandling of the destruction of an American city? And then said to themselves: This guy is what we've been worrying about?

I never see the media discuss that angle, although, when you think about it, it's as obvious as the crook in Dick Cheney's smile. Or grimace, I've never been sure which. Media blather, when it comes to America's reputation in the world, is limited to the question of America's loss of "moral authority." There may have also been a loss, during the last 6 years or so, of another kind of stature. Simple respect for American competence in high places. I don't think Kim and A-Jad give a shit about moral authority, but pulling the lion's tail reflects a different kind of calculation. The idea you can get away with the unthinkable. Develop your own atomic bombs and the means to deliver them, for example. Test, right out in the open, a missile which can hit Omaha. I doubt that it's been lost on these guys that Bush, with the largest defense budget in the world, a budget which is many multiples of Iran's and North Korea's combined, nevertheless managed to strand the American military in an endless street fight in a wrecked country out among the sand dunes. He can't leave and he can't stay. He can't seem to make a good decision under pressure, that he's a choke artist, that he doesn't know what the hell he's doing, in other words.

The stakes have been raised very recently by the American threat to shoot Kim's Taepodong out of the sky, a suitably war-of-the-phalluses kind of image. Now that's what I call proactive intervention. And for those of you who may have forgotten, George has kinda been itchin' for just such an opportunity. Please recall that an early act of his leadership was to withdraw the United States from the ABM Treaty of 1972, which prevented the development of anti-missile missiles. What Bush had in mind was just this kind of moment: the threat of a "rogue" state (hard to think of many countries roguer than N. Korea) or terrorist group with its finger on a nuclear-armed Button. This is Bush as Gary Cooper, strolling confidently on to that dusty street at midday, while Laura looks on in that loving, Grace Kelly way. True, because of the poofy hair, Kim Jong Il looks weird standin' down there near the entrance to the saloon. Still: Bring it on.

One note of caution, however, and it relates to the point with which we began. Bush might want someone on his staff to re-read Steven Weinberg's "Can A Missile Defense System Work?" [http://socsci.colorado.edu/~parisr/IAFS_1000/Can_Missile_Defense_Work.htm]. The ABM has a spectacular record of failure even when 1) we know when the missiles are going to be launched, 2) we know where they're going, and 3) we know (1) & (2) because they're our missiles. Then again, Mr. Weinberg is a Nobel Prize winning physicist and part of the Reality-Based community. Irrelevant, in other words.

But suppose he's right? Suppose we aim an ABM at Kim's Taepodong (it's just fun to say) and miss? Do you realize how many times the vaunted Patriot ABM missed Saddam's crummy Scud missiles in Gulf War - I: This Time We're Stoppin? Every single time. I hope they rethink it. We don't need this. If you're going to shoot something, use a cruise missile to blow Jong's 'Dong up while it's still in the silo. I know it's not "High Noon," kind of like shooting the Bad Guy while he's still asleep. But it might be good to do something smart for a change.

Bush & Hitler's Line of Work

"See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." President George W. Bush.

"The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blasé young gentlemen, but to convince… the masses. But the masses are slow moving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them." -- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 185.

There are, to be sure, critical differences between the two leaders. For one thing, I'm not aware Bush ever wrote a book or manifesto, let alone a sentence with the reasonably felicitous and evocative phrase, "...to provide interesting distraction for blasé young gentlemen..." Nor is Bush an overpowering, mesmerizing orator, and his roots, unlike Hitler's, were patrician rather than plebeian.

Hitler went from a failed career as an architect and artist to the Beer Hall Putsch, which stamped him indelibly on the pages of German history. Bush meandered his way in an alcoholic haze through failed academic and business pursuits until he found his true calling, as a Hollow Man perfectly suited to makeover by the Image Machine responsible for choosing American candidates and presidents. Lacking a discernible character or any principles of his own, Bush was an ideal vessel for media manipulation, a sort of Human Hologram on which the Conservative Right could project any laudable quality they desired. Mostly this was done through simple acts of substitution; for example, for his obvious vapidity, they could insert "straight-talking." Or, better, "talkin." For foolishly stubborn intransigence, they could sub in "resolute." As to his clear penchant for pathological lying, they could explain it away as an aspect of his sense of "loyalty" to his "inner circle." Confronted with the man's sick enthusiasm for torture and for indefinite detention of Untermenschen captured in his neverending war on terror, the Right could applaud his steely determination to do the necessary in a time of crisis.

Bush lacks Hitler's subtlety, but Bush doesn't need it. He can use the word "propaganda" openly and can even brag about misleading the American public. As one obvious and oft-cited example, Bush deliberately created the impression that Saddam Hussein played a key role in the terrorist attacks of 9-11. When confronted directly with this ruse, Bush allowed us to see the man behind the curtain in ways his stylistic mentor would have avoided: "I was careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack on America." March 20, 2006. I suspect Goebbels did not have to worry nearly as much about Hitler's Fuss-in-Mundt tendencies. Bush's propaganda, repeated many times according to the Mein Kampf playbook, always gave the general impression that Saddam Hussein was mixed up, somehow, in the 9-11 plot. It never made any sense; there was never any proof; and none of that ever made any difference. So why was Bush being so fastidious about pointing out this trivial distinction between what he did say and what he says he didn't say?

This is where Rove has always had a harder job than Goebbels. Hitler - well, the Fuhrer you could trust with freelancing. Bush, on the stump, is likely to go sideways on you. Under pressure, trying to remember amidst the dense fog of lies he tells everyday about what the U.S. Government is up to, something he did say about Saddam and 9-11, the only thing that popped into Bush's subnormal cerebrum was Karl's admonition: "Always be careful never to say directly that Saddam ordered the attacks of 9-11." So Bush could, under the pressure of the moment, confidently remember that he must have avoided that. He was, for our amusement and dissection, reproducing faithfully and exactly how Rove talks to him when only the Inner Circle is around.

Hitler, I'm sure, would have simply made up another lie on the spot. He didn't really care whether he was lying or not. Neither does Bush, but his handlers have told him he's supposed to appear to care, so he does his best to fake it. He's punctilious that way. If you pay attention, it's all there. The man's trying to tell you -- this is how I've been programmed. I suppose it isn't really a cry for help. Hitler was made of sterner stuff, that's for sure, but then he was actually a soldier in World War I, saw combat, was wounded. He came up through the ranks the hard way and wore his ruthlessness as a badge of honor. See, it's the only way a guy like me could make it against those blasé young gentlemen. Hitler was a monstrosity forged in an iron crucible of aggrievement. Bush is from a cushy, pampered, authoritarian-lite tradition. It's difficult to think up an excuse for being like Bush, really. He is one of those blasé young gentlemen, yet he allowed himself to be molded into another Hitlerian monstrosity, while we stood by and let it happen.

What on Earth will we tell History is our excuse?

Living in Interesting Times

"It took all of human history until 1830 for world population to reach one billion. The second billion was achieved in 100 years, the third billion in 30 years, the fourth billion in 15 years, and the fifth billion in only 12 years. In 2005, world population exceeded 6.5 billion people, growing by nearly 80 million per year with virtually all of the growth taking place in the poorest countries in the world, where population already strains economies, environments and social services."

In 1950, not so long after I was born, the world population was only about 2.5 billion. My grade school memories seem to confirm I was living in a world with 3 billion people. Not so long after that, in the early 1960's, Paul Erlich began writing about a "population bomb" and the Malthusian concept of exponential growth entered the common lexicon. Erlich warned the world population would double every 35 years or so. In the rear view mirror, his mathematics look pretty spot on.

With the exception of the United States, the developed countries, the First World, have stopped growing. Did they get Erlich's message? I don't think that was it. I don't believe, frankly, that environmental concerns ever manifest themselves from the bottom up. The declining birth rates, to levels below population replacement, in Europe, Japan and (almost) the United States reflect other pressures. The disappearance of what I call Life's Margin of Ease. As life became more difficult in the First World, as its real standard of living began to decline, the citizens of the advanced West forwent family in favor of "lifestyle" advantages, a way of saying that materialism replaced kinship as the chief measure of wealth. For concerted action to be successful, it must be part of top-down, mandated policy. China's success in controlling a once-burgeoning population explosion, while Draconian in nature, explains its success in defusing its own Bomb. The rest of Asia, much of Africa, nearly all of Latin America, meanwhile continue on their Malthusian way. Children, for the most part, are what they have. Until someone makes them stop having them, they won't.

Which takes us back to our first graphic. These days, with the success of Al Gore's PowerPoint movie, the airwaves are abuzz with initiatives to arrest global warming, to hold CO2 concentrations at present levels. All language describing these efforts is in the future conditional. "We can begin to decrease emissions when..." "The technology is available now to start a transition..." While all of this talk goes on, Massachusetts-size chunks of Antarctica are breaking off and floating north, 80% of the world's glaciers are in retreat, and Hemingway, if alive today, might write "The Green Hills of Africa," but never "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."

The Keeling Curve continues to ratchet skyward, even as we talk, even as we dream of the transition. We all keep driving, keep heating and cooling our houses, keep blogging away on computers plugged into the electrical grid. No one, in America, is telling us what to do. They're busy with more important things. In Washington, they're concerned they might not get reelected, and would find themselves struggling among the hoi-polloi. No sense bumming the electorate with discussions of reality. Better to protect Americans from burning flags and marriageable gays, and above all else, to spend every dime we don't have on that stupid war in Iraq.

And high above Mauna Loa, the latest reading clicks up another notch.

The Problem With Liberal Illusions About Bush

The text for today's sermon is taken from the Huffington Post blog. These words were written by a well-intentioned University of Chicago law professor. Clearly, the sentiments expressed are sincere and the attitude they express admirable:

"It is time for President Bush to take a stand. Despite his cynical and exploitative support of a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage, he has long maintained that he is a compassionate and tolerant person who has no gripe against gays and lesbians, as such. He just thinks marriage is only for heterosexuals....I believe Mr. Bush truly holds these values, but thus far in his presidency has been too timid to act on them. As a lame duck with increasingly negative public opinion polls and a doubtful place in history, this is the moment for Mr. Bush to "go to China." He can restore his personal credibility and create a lasting legacy for himself as a moral leader by announcing his support for federal legislation prohibiting discrimination in housing, employment, education, and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation."

In the late 1930's in Europe, two attitudes prevailed concerning Adolf Hitler. One was embodied in Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time" pronouncement following his summit with Hitler in Munich, the other in Winston Churchill's "wage war" speech. We can leave it to history to decide which of these approaches was more effective. Perhaps Chamberlain was afflicted with that persistent liberal malady, a belief in the innate perfectibility of man. Churchill did not labor under such an illusion. He knew Hitler was evil and his intentions were debased. He would be defeated in one way, through superior power.

Is Bush like Hitler? I would suggest that they share one relevant characteristic: the relentless drive to accumulate power. In Bush's case, this has been manifested in many ways, from his fetish about secrecy; to his tendency to label large groups of people who may or not have done anything wrong "enemy combatants"; his enthusiasm for torture; his unprecedented and unconstitutional use of signing statements to eviscerate acts of Congress; his open defiance of federal law concerning wiretapping and surveillance of Americans; and his refusal ever to compromise on issues such as troop withdrawal, firing his Secretary of Defense or atoning for lies about WMD, Saddam's connections to 9-11 or the disclosure of Valerie Plame's identity by his immediate staff.

And in Bush's case, there is something paradoxical about this obsession. He is quite obviously a man of very modest intellectual "gifts," little strategic vision and poor judgment. The only apparent effect of his steady drive toward power is to potentiate the damage he can do to the United States and to the world.

Nevertheless, there it is. It is pointless to appeal to Bush's "better angels." They simply don't exist except as projections of decent people. It is difficult for normal humans to imagine a life devoid of a functioning conscience, where all decisions are subsumed under an overarching desire to appear powerful and to inflict damage to demonstrate that power. This is Bush's delicate psychological construct, and it explains everything.

For a most recent example, it explains Bush's recent trip to Baghdad. The man is getting a little desperate. Suppose the House of Representatives turns Democratic in November? Bush's remaining two years in office will become a living Hell and he knows it. He absolutely HAS to hold on to power until he can get safely out of office under the protection of a blanket pardon, such as that which Arlen Specter is drafting for him in the guise of "amending" the FISA law. Bush knows that Iraq is an irremediable mess. The ruse of a Camp David "retreat" was necessary simply to make it possible for him to go there, for the first time in nearly 3 years. He spent 5 HOURS there, in Baghdad's Fortress of Solitude, the Green Zone. It is astounding that the media do not comment on the jarring contrast between Bush's resumed "swagger" and the conditions under which this President was forced to visit his greatest foreign policy "triumph."

But these illusions are everywhere in the modern Fun House America, the House of Mirrors. But liberals, please: stop asking Bush to be nice. Stop asking him to be consistent and "compassionate." Stop asking him for anything. Tell him the way it's going to be by making his life that living Hell he so richly deserves.

Yo Mars, U ready for this?

"The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy Earth, world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.

"Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference."

San Francisco Chronicle, June 14, 2006

When Stephen Hawking, the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, begins sounding like a Doomsday nut, it behooves us to pay attention. You could say, without exaggeration, that our lives depend on it. Hawking is one of those seminal thinkers occuring on a semi-regular basis, say every hundred years or so, whose incomprehensible brilliance is paired with a paradigm-shifting imagination enabling outlandish predictions about remote and arcane phenomena in the Universe (black holes, for example) - that are then confirmed in the physical universe. Einstein, making up an entire new reality in his head, predicted that light would undergo bending by gravity, and then astronomers confirmed that just such a bizarre thing happened during the next solar eclipse. And Newton, whose chair Hawking now occupies at Cambridge, demonstrated that physical forces could be understood through the abstractions of mathematics. Heady company, to be sure.

My first, bar-stool reaction to colonizing Mars, the Moon or some distant Earth-like planet with a whole bunch of humans reflects, no doubt, the disillusionments of our age. Why take this sorry-ass show on the road? Haven't we sent one blue and white paradise to the FUBAR bin already? Leave the universe alone, goddamit. There might be nice animals on some likely candidate near Alpha Centauri.

Hawking seems to be talking about three likely catastrophes in the near term: nuclear armageddon, genetically-engineered viruses and the runaway greenhouse effect. He has appeared, in recent years, to devote considerable attention on this last disaster, a disturbing development when you consider how valuable his brain-time is.

I would describe the runaway greenhouse effect, or Venus Scenario, but I don't have the heart today. I don't even see the point. The United States of America, which would have to lead the way immediately with an emergency program to slash greenhouse emissions to mere fractions of current levels, is instead engaged in political games of gotcha concerning one, moderately populated country in the Middle East, an enterprise which is at bottom about releasing Iraq's one-trillion-barrel reserves of fossil fuels into the overheated atmosphere as soon as possible. And that, dear fellow humans, is the crux of the problem. Because of the egotistical demands of Homo sapiens, right here, right now, of the insecurities which must be dealt with, right here, right now, of the personality dysfunctions of one President, right here, right now, we cannot react to the danger that we may be hurtling toward a world, not so long from today, swathed in dense, steamy clouds of water vapor, where the oceans boil and dry up and tin and lead melt on the land. Where the skyscrapers will stand as mute tombstones above a world where all life has vanished, until they too ooze and melt away.

So don't worry, Mars. And goodnight, Moon. You'll be safe. Other Cosmo Men, Alan Guth, other big thinkers, seeing Hawking's (at last) exposed intellectual flank, have taken issue with his timing. We can't colonize the Moon in 20 years, or Mars in 40. Better to build subterranean caverns in Antarctica, hunker down beneath the rivers of melting ice. We can plan our Comeback there, just as soon as it's safe to go outside. A Green Zone for the entire Human Race.

Gee, I feel better already.

The Age of Vacuity

Let us return in time to those enchanted days before Muslim extremists hijacked commercial aircraft and flew them at several hundred miles per hour, fully loaded with people, jet fuel and America's destiny, into two tall Manhattan buildings, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania. Just for a moment, pretend it is September 10, 2001.

Are you there now? Okay, let me ask you a question: Are we at war? And if so, with whom?

If we are at war, why is Richard Clarke forced to run around like a man with his hair on fire in order to get even grudging attention from Condoleezza Rice, the nation's putative National Security Advisor, about al-Qaeda and the threat it poses? The Bush Administration, tough, macho, ruthless, has a different foe in its crosshairs: America's secondary school principals. Education is going to be held accountable so No Child Is Left Behind. Bush is the CEO President, after all, and his action list demands one high profile issue at a time, which he accomplishes in a methodical and efficient way, just as he learned to do when...okay, he never actually learned to do anything of the kind. But the way someone, probably the tubby guy with glasses and the nimbus of baby hair, told him that real executives get things done.

Bush is just happy to be President. All he really wants are three things: to relieve all rich people of the obligation to pay taxes, to go Poppy one better by invading Iraq again and toppling Saddam (this time), and to get reelected, something else Poppy couldn't pull off. Then call me a drinkin', snortin' ne'er-do-well, ya Poppy-injay!

Bush is not that interested in getting rich. Not really. You see what he makes, even today? Somewhere around $780,000, of which $400,000 is his Presidential salary. Which means he makes about $380,000 on his accumulations. Not exactly Big Rich by Texas standards, not at all. A man 60 years old, graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School, CEO of oil companies, an owner and president of the Texas Rangers, former Governor of Texas, beneficiary of many sweetheart loans from generous and probably bewildered older members of the Poppy-razzi, who couldn't quite believe what a colossal screw-up the Old Man's kid was - making less than a part-time plastic surgeon in the tonier sections of Dallas.

But before that mild digression, I was talking about Bush and the war on terror, and what Bush thought about on September 10, 2001. I think he was as indifferent to terrorism as he was to any other aspect of his new job. The conspiracy nuts have gone wild with Bush's Pet Goat moment, reading into it whatever they need to see. Such tea-leaf-reading is standard procedure in American hysteria. We're a spoiled people, and whenever anything goes wrong here, our entire sense of Self is thrown into disarray, and we become determined to find out Who Was Responsible. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Atta, and 18 other guys were responsible, that's all. KSM, the Gargling Informant, has "confessed" while in damp repose on his Jordanian waterboard. I think he was pissed off about his nephew Ramzi rotting away in SuperMax in Colorado, just like John Gotti did. And shit, the World Trade Center is still standing! Like Bush, the Sheikh is task-oriented, a box-checking freak. No Skyscraper Left Behind. So work yourself into whatever lather you want, and if you have Mommy and Daddy Issues, like most unbearably spoiled Americans, talk about "blowback" and spend your time figuring out how we deserved it.

Nah, Bush, on September 10, is indifferent to terrorist attacks. He sees them, if he "thinks" about them at all, as cyclical phenomena. The World Trade Center in 1993, the African embassies, the U.S.S. Cole. Timothy McVeigh, but he doesn't count. Too pale. Too local. Ditto the Unabomber. The reason is simple: there's not much point in thinking about them. You just get bummed out. If they happen, they happen. That's why the Bush Administration, which now proclaims, with astonishing chutzpah, its unique suitability to lead the War on Terror, paid no attention to field reports that Something Big was up. As Condi said, who ever dreamed they'd start flying planes into buildings? And if not that, they'd come up with something else we couldn't do anything about. In other words, the Bush Admin thought about terrorism in the same terms everyone else did. If it happens, it happens.

Think how easy it is. You want to blow a hole in the roadway of any American bridge? Drive a Ryder truck to the middle of the bridge, park, and detonate the load of fertilizer in the trailer. You want to freak America out and bring the consumer economy to a grinding halt? Pick ten big malls in exurbia and at Zero Hour, detonate ten car bombs in ten big parking lots. Does anyone seriously think that anything the Bush Administration, or any other political leadership, could do would have the slightest efficacy against things so simple?

It's an asymmetrical war, alright. An easygoing, freedom-loving, fundamentally lazy, essentially trusting American public, on one side, and guys with a huge sense of aggrievement, monomaniacal dedication and way too much time on the other.

America has been very lucky. Our principal foes, so far, have been a little on the dramatic side. Given to tactical histrionics. They plan for years because they think only something that plays well on TV can have a real impact on a populace geared to a 22 minute attention span, the length of a TiVo'ed sitcom. If it doesn't happen on TV, it isn't real. That's why the Iraq War can drag on forever. It isn't real. We never see it. That may be the result of Unintended Genius in prosecution of the war, to create a battlefield so dangerous, with no defined front, with nowhere Behind the Lines, so that no journalist can photograph the war as it happens.

The drama isn't necessary. America would be more effectively undone by the quotidian, by the sense we can't make our consumer rounds in complete safety. A burning skyscraper in America's richest borough is an image from a psychological distance. We can see that isn't us. It's happening to them. Unless, sad to say, them happens to be you.

So the Sheikh checked the box, eight years after his first attempt. And how about Clinton's War on Terrorism, huh? From 1993 to 2000, not a single attack within the United States by Muslim extremists, and his crack anti-terrorist operatives (the U.S. Border Patrol) foiled the Millenium Plot! Bush, so far, has kept America explosion-free for not quite 5 years. The American populace, which is not, in a broad-based sense, schooled in the scientific method or the interpretation of statistics, does not see the distinction between coincidence and causation, or the critical role played by just dumb luck. They think uploading Aunt Millie's phone bills into a vast database in Maryland will prevent a laid-off call center worker in Dearborn, Michigan from driving out to California and detonating a trunk full of Semtex in front of a Safeway in Culver City.

But it is a peculiarity of modern American life, as it is represented in public media, that no one requires anything to make sense anymore. Things get said and everyone pretends it makes sense. It's why we're all going crazy, at variable speeds. Reality is losing its integrity.

So thank goodness, so far, the world's terrorists, whoever they are, have chosen big impact scenarios, as they conceive them, as their attack of choice against America. We can survive those, blog those, make movies about those, attack each other about those, and live our lives around those. KSM & the Paradise Boys haven't quite figured it out yet. Their approach just sticks us with a lousy government, courtesy of an easily-manipulated American voting populace. That is the long term significance of their attacks against "symbols of American power." Those propel America into a narcissistic frenzy of Power Demonstration, the use of the army, navy and marines, the entire espionage apparatus, stealth bombers, aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, irrelevant wars, the wholesale rounding up of Arabs, the suspension of civil liberties and due process, the creation of a police state, the distortion of spending priorities, the dismissal of far more serious existential threats such as global warming and avian flu. All this for Something Which Has Already Happened, where 19 of the 20 perpetrators are already dead and the 20th, the Mastermind, is currently touring Eastern Europe courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

So, now we must endure the debate about who's tougher in the War on Terror. In other words, who talks tougher about something we've already let happen and are powerless to prevent from happening again. The America of September 10, 2001, is gone forever. We were curiously ready to say goodbye, I suppose. So ready that we collaborated with our government, with KSM, with our own fearful selves in letting it go.

The A Team at Camp David

Cue up the music. The posse strides confidently forward, led by the Prez himself, his simian arm-swing propelling him up the rise toward the row of microphones. The national park-like cabin is behind them. Bush has on a blue blazer and light blue shirt, no tie. Condi, to his left, is cross-dressed in a severe blazer of her own. Rumsfeld is wearing a parka with a crest. The stooped mound of Dick Cheney is to Rumsfeld's right, grinning lopsidedly. General Peter Pace, Negroponte, and of course Alberto Salazar fill in the second row.

In other words, the same group of hacks who have always screwed up Iraq have gone on a retreat. They'll come up with new ways to screw up Iraq, but in Maryland, not in Washington. Now they can video conference with Maliki, far away from the irrelevant influence of Congress, the undomesticated press, and the American People. You can imagine how spontaneous and free-flowing the talk will be under the masterful leadership of George W. Bush, who will fearlessly seek out dissent in order to optimize the marketplace of ideas. Also, to help him figure out who to shitcan next. The video hookup with Maliki should be deeply elucidating, as Bush congratulates Maliki on the routine appointments to his cabinet which only took four months. He may assure Maliki he's doing a heckuva job. Maliki will express his profound gratitude for this unsolicited show of support and for the American resolve in seeing through whatever the mission is at this point. All will agree that substantial progress is being made in Iraq, or so they hear, since no one can actually go outside in the street and look.

At night the crew will gather in the Camp David game room to watch Bonanza re-runs. There will be little talk, not only because of the arduous day spent video-conferencing, but because this crew has no interest in ideas, conversation, other people or the job of governing. Bush will chug an O'Doul's and hit the hay at 9. Condi, 15 minutes later. Rummy, Cheney, Negroponte and Gonzales will then break out the tequila and get wasted.

Tomorrow: Day 2 of the Retreat!

Alice Meets the Jester in the Ex-Checker

“And as in other years, the figures exclude the effect of the surplus being run by Social Security, which uses the excess to buy government bonds that it plans to use to pay benefits later in the century. The actual difference between non-Social Security revenues and spending projected for 2005 is $541 billion, not including the expected costs for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The actual spending gap in 2004 was $567 billion.” New York Times January 25, 2005

“When the U.S. annual budget for defense is compared with that of other nations, the true magnitude of U.S. defense spending becomes clear. The United States alone accounts for more than one-third of the world's military spending. U.S. defense spending roughly equals the combined spending of the next 18 nations and is more than triple the combined defense budgets of the remaining 142 countries in the world. The United States outspends both Russia and China seven to one. More important, the United States spends 54 times the combined amount spent by potential rogue state threats – Iran, Syria, Libya, Cuba and North Korea.” Analysis from the (conservative) Cato Institute

Wonderland was certainly a perplexing place. For a long time, the unpleasant chortles of the Mad Hatter and the gravelly voice of the strange, rotund man who used only one side of his mouth to say disagreeable things rang in her young ears. Alice felt lucky Wonderland offered refuge from encounters like that, though you might imagine a sunlit meadow would be an unlikely place for such a loathsome collection of individuals to disport themselves. She wondered if the Colon ever made its way to safety. It was curious the Hatter seemed to pay no attention to him, either while he was in distress or as he wriggled through the high grass to the safety of the forest. Alice wished him well.

For now, Alice found herself overcome by a ravenous appetite. She came upon another hole blocked by a short wooden door. This surely could not be the same hole she’d run down initially, since she was already in Wonderland. A sign on a rope hung over the knob: “Gone till we come back. Keepers of the Queen’s Ex-Checker.” That meant nothing in particular to Alice. She tried the door and found it opened onto a steep set of stairs leading to a murky basement of sorts. Intrepid as always, she started down, listening to the hollow echo of her steps against the stone walls. In time, she could hear metallic clinks and a murmuring voice. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she saw a diminutive man wearing a jester’s cap and green tights in a candle-lit corner. He was standing behind a long wooden table piled high with gleaming coins. On two hooks on the stone wall behind him hung two enormous burlap sacks. One was marked “Ours” and bulged heavily with its burden of coins. The other bag was marked “Theirs” and hung limply from its hook. It was apparently empty. The Jester had a large sheet of foolscap on the table and a thick pencil. He dropped coins in the heavy bag and made marks on the paper as he went.

“Hello,” said Alice.

“We’re busy here,” said the Jester.

“May I ask where I am?” Alice said.

“You can ask,” said the Jester.

“Who are you?”

The Jester made another mark and then looked up, frowning.

“If you must know, I’m the Queen’s Secretary of the Ex-Checker.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s the only game in town,” said the Jester.

“That’s not a very good joke,” said Alice politely.

“Who let you in?” said the Jester.

“The door was open,” said Alice.

“Didn’t you see the sign?”

“But you’re here after all,” Alice pointed out.

“True enough. We don’t like people to see what we’re doing.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m counting the People’s taxes.”

“It looks like an awful lot of money,” said Alice.

“It is, though it’s never enough.”

“Why is the bag marked ‘Ours’ so heavy and full?”

“That’s the money the Queen uses to run Wonderland, to defend it from its enemies and to provide for the common good.”

“Wonderland has enemies?” said Alice.

“You ask a lot of impertinent questions,” said the Jester.

“So I’ve been told. Why is the other bag empty?”

“That’s the bag that will be used to pay for the Queen’s subjects in their old age when the money in the Queen’s bag isn’t enough to do it anymore.”

“Oh, I see,” said Alice, though not really seeing.

“Maybe you can explain it to me then,” mumbled the Jester.

“Beg your pardon?” said Alice.

“I’ve got a lot of work to do,” said the Jester.

“So when will you start filling the bag marked ‘Theirs’?” Alice asked.

“Never,” said the Jester.

“But you just said…”

“Right, I did. Later, when there isn’t enough money in the Queen’s bag to pay for the retirement of the Queen’s subjects, the Queen will use the money in the People’s bag to make up the difference.”

“But there’s no money in the People’s bag and never will be.”

“You’re a smart little girl,” said the Jester. “Maybe a little too smart.”

This was certainly not the way she had been addressed back at school in Swansea. For the second time that day, Alice felt very homesick and afraid.

“It’s just when I did my sums…” Alice began tremulously. “What I mean is, I don’t see how adding zero to anything can make it any bigger.”

“It can when the Queen says it can,” said the Jester.

“Why don’t you put some of the money into the People’s bag now so you’ll have some later when you need it?”

“Because we don’t have enough as it is, silly,” said the Jester.

“But later on you’ll have more than enough so you can put some in the People’s bag?” said Alice hopefully.

“Heavens no,” said the Jester. “If anything, things will be worse than ever. So her subjects will love her more, the Queen requires them to pay her less now than ever before.”

“That seems rather shortsighted,” said Alice.

“It would,” said the Jester. “To you. That’s why you’re not the Queen.”

“Do the People know how dire the situation is?” said Alice.

“Oh my, yes. The Queen warns them every day. She wants to avert a crisis by acting now.”

“But not by putting money in the People’s bag,” said Alice, beginning to catch on.

“Of course not,” said the Jester.

“Although that would solve the problem,” said Alice.

“Indeed,” said the Jester. “But not without making Wonderland vulnerable to its enemies.”

“I forget what you said before. It’s been such a day. Who did you say were Wonderland’s enemies?”

“You might say they’re everywhere,” murmured the Jester.

“Can I just ask you one more thing?” said Alice sweetly.

“If it really is the last thing,” said the Jester.

“What’s the fastest way to get the Hell out of Wonderland?”

Dr. Phil and Jean-Paul Sartre at the Café Flor

The hypothesis is that the absence of meaning in life presents problems of motivation, daily function, and overall maintenance of mood. To an extent, the concept of existential psychoanalysis is a response to this phenomenon, an avant-garde recognition that the pervasive anomie of modern times (I use this term in the classic sense of a collapse of social structures governing life in a given society, with full credit to Emile Durkheim; I mean, mais non) has not been credited to the source where credit is due. An expanding chasm divides our philosophical thinking from the demands of modern life; our belated recognition of the origin of the ensuing crisis is perhaps attributable to Hot Trends in Absurdist Thinking: it was only recently that Meaninglessness went Mainstream.

Two reactionary impulses have been excited by this societal movement. The first is the deplorable resurgence of Old Time Religion, a desperate attempt to subdue nihilism and moral anarchy through the Faith of Our Fathers. This will not work; the genie is too far out of the bottle now and atheism has achieved a general currency which defies easy relapse into mythology. There is no going back to belief systems primarily based on a preexisting ignorance about life origins. The other is the Soothing Wall approach of the motivational industry. The italicized term is borrowed from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and is Fyodor’s admittedly derisive term for “men of action,” those misguided fools who are forever mistaking intermediate causes for ultimate ends, who do not realize that in their vain attempts to wrest some meaning for life, or some compensation for their pain, they are beating their heads against the wall.

The late-stage and decadent manifestation, or modern prototype, of the Soothing Wall was the New Age Movement, which borrowed many of the trappings and assumptions of old style religion (souls, spirits, karmic principles) while slyly avoiding contextual questions. It was the context of Old Time Religion which was vaguely embarrassing to New Age adherents, namely, the belief systems described in the Bible, Torah, or Koran, Sunday services, the quasi-psychotic practice of talking out loud to an unseen presence (prayer), but also including the huge capital investment in the mythology industry, running a varied gamut from the Vatican to the cathedral at Chartres to the simplest whitewashed and steepled Baptist Church in Pascagoula. Then, too, the sheer malevolent power of irrational, mythological thinking is deeply troubling to those who want to carry on religion under a different disguise and for gentler, pro-human purposes, who seek to dissociate themselves from the Crusades, or crucifixions, or large office buildings collapsing in a cloud of dust in lower Manhattan. New Age religion allowed the soul to live on; it allowed the spirit a kind of reincarnation as a feel-good ghost seeking to go with the flow.

I’m trying to imagine what would happen if Jean-Paul Sartre had looked up from his demi-tasse one fine morning in late spring, the Parisian heat held in abeyance for the moment by the dewy coolness along the Boulevard St. Germain, there at Le Maître’s favorite table at Café Flor, and saw the beetle-browed mass of Dr. Phil McGraw leaning toward him from the adjacent bentwood chair. Dr. Phil, with his perpetual look of bemused superiority, would first cast a few disapproving looks at the spiraling gray smoke from Sartre’s Galois, then wonder (still silently) at the Frenchman’s persistent need for caffeine stimulation, evidenced by the litter of drained cups on the round table. What’s worse: sweetened with sugar.

Who, I wonder, has the superior philosophical context? Granted, Sartre came around to the idea of something soul-like in his construction of the Engaged Man, although that always struck me as a disappointing, if understandable, cop-out. You know you’re right, Jean-Paul, I wanted to tell him. Don’t dress things up with this life-purpose bullshit. Still, Existentialism can seem a little sterile after a while without it (the essential problem with all philosophies constructed on Absurdity), and your philosophical arch-enemy Camus dealt with the first problem, the silent indifference of the Universe to Man’s quest for meaning, in the lapidary The Myth of Sisyphus. And you had to go him one better because otherwise that pushy little Algerian with the clumsy writing style wins out.

But now, through the vagaries of time travel, Simone is across the river in the Marais, and you’ve got this hulking American fixing you with his penetrating stare, declining, with a dismissive wave of his big paw, your ridiculous offer to purchase him a café-au-lait et brioche. He doesn’t need the first because he’s already “excited about his life,” and the second is contrary to his dietary principles regarding refined sugar and saturated fat. Sartre wants to mention that, nevertheless, the treats taste and feel good, as does the buzz from the stinky cigarette, and since we’re all on an express train to oblivion, why not enjoy them?

Thus the encounter between the Existentialist and New Age is fully joined. Dr. Phil has made a fortune by pathologizing the commonplace and pretending that life can be elevated to a plain it can never achieve, and where it doesn’t actually belong. Jean-Paul scratched out a basic living writing the truth about life, which is that it doesn’t actually mean anything and is little more than a string of incidents occurring on a more or less aleatory basis, upon which we impose a narrative we call our “life story,” but it’s essentially the same story as the rhododendron in the backyard or the banana slug crawling through the forest primeval. No doubt Fyodor would find Dr. Phil his ultimate Action Figure, a personality so tedious he would find himself missing the wet snows of St. Petersburg.

I conclude that Dr. Phil would fail in his earnest, or at least smug, efforts to get Jean-Paul “excited about votre vie,” and that the motivational mandarin’s aphoristic metaphors, such as “you don’t need a whisk broom to clean the sawdust from the Persian cat,” would be even more incomprehensible when translated into French. At Dr. Phil’s insistence that Jean-Paul “be honest with him,” Le Maître would assure the Texas huckster that there is nothing contrived or “defensive” about the Yawning Void of Meaningless in life, and that all of McGraw’s interim measures for debt relief, for getting damaged relationships up out of the ditch and on the road again, for going from a size 24 to a size 6 in twelve months, nevertheless meet the same inevitable fate as Beckett’s two gentlemen waiting interminably by the side of the road: nothing really leads anywhere.

Then turning the small café table on Dr. Phil, Sartre might, in this strange revenge fantasy, point out, dialectically and with great penetration, that Dr. Phil’s manic desire to get everyone to live like one Texas cornball possessed by narcissistic certainties was itself an extraordinarily elaborate defense mechanism against deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and pending mortality, but that it ultimately would not work, neither against Death nor against the virtually certain cancellation of McGraw’s syndicated talk show. With this, Sartre, with an elaborate formality thinly disguising the hauteur and arrogance just beneath the surface, would have resumed reading Le Monde.

We need a Defense of Sanity Constitutional Amendment

I must say something about Bush's defense of marriage constitutional amendment. I have read the proposed language; I have listened to a few minutes of Sam Brownback (R,Kans) on the Senate floor; I have fought off a wave of nausea. Brownback, a loyal White House ally on most obsessions of the loony right, spent his time talking about the relative superiority of two-parent households versue one-parent households. Income levels, emotional stability, iPods per capita -- all better in the intact family. Children seem to thrive, for the most part. Well, not entirely, Sam admitted. There are problems everywhere. But even Sam was forced to admit that his dazzling array of three-color charts and bar graphs seemed oddly wide of the mark. We are talking, after all, about homosexual marriage. The relative fortunes of children living in heterosexual marriages in various stages of disarray does not seem...what would Sam the lawyer say? Dispositive?

But it is, you see. More charts about what's going on in the Netherlands, where those relentless social experimenters have smoked themselves into such a state that just talking about the legality of same sex marriage has had a disastrous effect on the marriage rate. The Dutch aren't getting hitched, they're living in casual, Bohemian arrangements, and their kids - well, he didn't say anything about Dutch kids. Nor did he mention that the social phenomenon he was describing which is so different from, well - Kansas, is actually increasingly prevalent in European countries in general, France, for example, or in Italy, which is in some danger of becoming entirely unpopulated as the result of plummeting birthrates.

But Brownback's argument is a two-stepper which requires a mind as nimble, or at least as weird, as Senator Sam's. The Dutch experience proves that once you let gays get married, straights don't want to do it anymore. It's just, I don't know, ruined for them. And if they (Americans, now, try to follow along) continue to have kids while not marrying, it must follow that increasing numbers of American children will fall into chasms of poverty, despair, and emotional trauma.

This is what passes for argument on the floor of the Senate these days. We've got to ban gay marriage to avoid the Dutch Dilemma of Dissolution, a bacchanal of pot-smokin' and non-marryin' Netherlands Nihilism.

I prefer this argument to the polemic of reductio ad absurdum trotted out last time, that failing to "define" marriage will result in Equal Protection lawsuits contending that Americans must be free to marry their pet salamander, or that Fido should be allowed into the intensive care unit when his beloved wife-human is in extremis. The loss of interest argument is superior to those positions. Still very, very stupid, but better. There might, after all, be other reasons that Western Civilization (which would exclude Kansas, of course, and most of America) is fast losing interest in marriage. Indeed, there may be no way to legislate it back into existence. The Senate may not know that, but as the Pond-Dweller pointed out once before, the Senate is not exactly hip to current social trends. They may not have noticed that fewer than 25% of all Americans currently live in a traditional nuclear family. The nukular family, indeed, has undergone a sustained fission reaction. Americans may not share their obsession about gay marriage because Americans aren't that interested in marriage in general, particularly the young. In fact, that youthful cohort, America's future, would probably be indifferent even to salamander-human marriages. I mean, if you think it can work. Maybe that's what we need: The Give It A Shot Amendment.

U.S. Role in Iraq confused by military killing everybody

Baghdad, June 2 (UPI) -

Tensions in Iraq continued to escalate today with further news the U.S. military may be involved in the routine shooting, bombing and running over of ordinary Iraqi citizens.

"It's not just Haditha," said Mr. Maliki, current prime minister of Iraq and leader of the unity government, interviewed within the reinforced blast walls of his Green Zone redoubt. "It's a nationwide phenomenon. Women and children are being crushed under the wheels of U.S. military vehicles every day, or shot at routine checkpoints when they don't respond immediately to demands to stop. Ordinary Iraqis are afraid to stop because they become easier targets for rogue American elements."

American commanders in Iraq, speaking on a blanket grant of anonymity for everything they might ever say to anyone about anything at all, considered the situation problematic. "Obviously, the hostility of the government we're supporting presents an additional challenge to completing the mission in Iraq," said General Smith (not his real name) about Maliki's criticisms and several others he heard shouted at him while traveling in a fully armored Humvee across 25 feet of sandbagged terrain between his sleeping quarters and his bunker office in the Green Zone. "For one thing, we've got to re-invade Haditha and the Anbar area in general because of the growing strength of the Sunni insurgency there, but the resistance from Sunni elements within the unity government to our invasion of Sunni territory because of a fear ordinary Sunnis will be massacred by coalition forces attempting to root out the Sunni insurgency attempting to destabilize the unity government...I'm sorry, where was I?"

Reports from Basra, once considered a stable and functioning area in Iraq, were also discouraging, as British forces were charged with unjustified killing of Shiite citizens in this populous and increasingly anarchic zone. American reinforcements were ordered to Basra to re-stabilize the area and to raise the siege on British forces under increasing attack from Shia militias now almost fully in control of the streets. American forces were dogged here as well by rumors of American atrocities in the north and continued bad feelings engendered by routine American torture of Iraqis under detention, many of whom were considered by the local populace to be ordinary citizens rather than combatants.

General Joe Jones (not his real name, rank or sex), speaking from the relative privacy of the adjoining toilet stall within an underground Green Zone bathroom, attempted to place some of the difficulties on the length of the Iraqi conflict and the unrelieved nature of the strains placed upon the military. "By the third or fourth tour of duty by some of these marine and army units, a hair-trigger mentality sets in where they just shoot anything that moves, or run it over with their cars. On a net/net basis, facing a half-hearted criminal unit investigation which whitewashes the thing usually beats a bad guess which gets you blown into the next world when that pregnant woman turns out to be an unemployed Republican Guard vet with Semtex under his dishdasha."

Mr. Maliki stated that the growing concern among himself and those Cabinet positions in his government for which he has been able to find volunteers about the routine killing of ordinary Iraqis could definitely affect the "time line" for retention of American forces to stabilize the situation in Iraq. "At a certain point," Mr. Maliki said gravely, "keeping the coalition forces here to kill ordinary Iraqis or to kill insurgents before they can be killed by Shia militias, or to protect either of those groups from al-Qaeda terrorists, or any of those three from Iranian or Syrian infiltrators, becomes a matter of close judgment, and I do not want to get involved in cynical calculations of relative good where the stability of my government is concerned."

Colonel Anthony Jones (not his real rank or name, and concealing his civilian status) spoke for the coalition by video phone from a secure location in St. Tropez. "The current schedule for invading Anbar to root out Sunni insurgents may have to be accelerated in keeping with a growing sense the unity government may force our hand and require us to cut short our efforts to keep the insurgency from toppling the unity government," Col. Jones said. "We feel if we can stabilize Anbar again, while minimizing the killing of ordinary Iraqis, we can assure the unity government of a reprieve from insurgent pressure and prop it up against the pressures exerted by militia infiltration of Iraqi police units in Basra and the Iraqi south generally."

The U.S. military's stabilization efforts took place today against a backdrop of numerous car bomb explosions in and around Baghdad and the discovery of the bodies of 125 ordinary Iraqis, both Sunni and Shia, who had been kidnapped, tortured and shot execution style, their bodies then dumped in open fields.

Summing up the situation, General Smith admitted that a lot of work still remained to produce a stable and functioning democracy in Iraq. "The new time pressures obviously won't help," he concluded.

I think I've heard this song before

So what is the real reason for Condoleezza Rice's "stunning" reversal on talks with Iran to resolve the "nuclear crisis?" The known facts are few, but include:

1. A "condition" of multi-lateral talks in which the United States would participate includes the cessation of nuclear enrichment by Iran.

2. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (to which Iran is a signatory, but India, for example, is not) allows enrichment of uranium for civilian, peaceful purposes, primarily power generation. To wit,

Article IV

"1. Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with articles I and II of this Treaty."

3. Despite the "inalienable" nature of the right to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes, Condi contends that Iran succeeded in alienating its own right by conducting a clandestine weapons program; thus, an inalienable right of a signatory can be alienated if we need, for other purposes, to declare it alienated.

This is about all we know at this point. The Bush Administration, with its mania for opacity, rarely tells anyone, including decision-makers who need the information in order to make informed decisions, anything about anything directly relevant to the issue in question. Or at least, it never tells anyone anything true.

I would defy anyone with a security clearance lower than "Top Secret" to say a single incontrovertible thing about the "Iranian nuclear crisis." While various go-to experts, such as the ubiquitous Robert Baer, show up on "Hardball" and lay out the insider's take on what Iran "must" be doing, and the clear need to "take out" their nuclear capability, in fact, everything we hear is second, third or fourth-hand stuff that cannot be verified, or at least won't be by anyone who might really know.

Despite recent history in Iraq, the Bush Administration still persists, infuriatingly, in insisting it knows what it's doing and we should simply trust them. Here's what we know, based on the experience in Iraq:

1. They don't know what they're doing.

2. You can't trust them.

Indeed, if the intelligence on WMD in Iraq is any guide to the state of American foreign spying in general, the actual data on Iran is probably a dossier full of inconsistencies, fragmentary clues, confessions from drunks and pathological liars, political screeds from self-interested Iranian politicos, and rough drafts of screenplays written by Robert Baer and Richard Clarke. All of this rubble makes its way into the President's Daily Briefing (the PDB), which he stuffs into a briefcase and then uses as a coaster in Crawford while he plows through the latest Kinky Friedman opus.

I think that's how our foreign policy is actually conducted these days. Inconvenient truths, such as inalienable rights to enrich uranium to 3% U-235 for use in a reactor, are waved away through murky legalisms. The American people are told nothing substantive. Talks are "offered" on a "condition" the Administration knows won't be accepted, because the Persians think they haven't alienated the inalienable. The Bush Administration makes plans to test bunker busters in Nevada.

Yep, we've heard it all before. Bush has no plans to leave office without starting a war with Iran. He hasn't been "chastened" by events in Iraq, because he's unchastenable. He hasn't "learned" anything, because he's ineducable. And "Congress" is not going to do anything about it, because they're a collection of pathetic hacks and fakers.

So GWB, running out of time to fulfill his grandest of belligerent wetdreams, the use of a nuclear weapon in a preemptive strike, counts again on that One True Thing upon which he always relies: No one can stop him.

Is this any way to run a railroad?

According to the National Priorities Project, Congress has so far appropriated $285 billion for the Iraq war. There is no end in sight. The war appears to cost about $90 billion a year, or approximately $1.7 billion per week.

Not so long ago, Norman Mineta, Transportation Secretary and apparently nonpartisan water carrier for whichever administration is in power, scolded Amtrak by explaining,
"We cannot save intercity passenger rail service by burying our heads in the sand and simply shoveling more money into a system that cannot help but fail." Doubtless, the Bush crowd, who like spending money only on war and the rumors of wars to come, were pleased at Mineta's fine sense of selective budget restraint.

In 2002, David Gunn, a railroad enthusiast by inclination and successor to the otherwise thankless job of running Amtrak, surveyed the decrepit rail system, the worn-out rolling stock, and the company's chronic shortage of credit, and told Congress he needed $2 billion to bring Amtrak into profitable operations, to modernize the system (to at least Third World standards, that is) and to place it on a secure financial footing. The Bush Admin grudgingly conceded they could cut loose with $900 million, which Congress subsequently increased to $1.2 billion. Predictably, Amtrak has continued to languish, and the day may not be far off when passenger rail service in the United States is confined to a few favored corridors near New York and Washington D.C.

Amtrak, obviously, is just the wrong thing to shovel money into. Granted, rail transportation, in part because of its superior coefficients of friction (steel on steel versus rubber on asphalt), and its capacity (when optimally run, that is, like they do in Germany and France) to maintain steady speeds over long distances because of a dedicated road, is far more efficient and less insane-making than driving cars and trucks. Further, railroads can be electrified and offer this additional possibility of reducing greenhouse emissions, for example, by running them on nuclear generated electricity or carbon-sequestered, coal-fired plants. There is a future in railroads, in other words, which cannot be said with the same certainty about automobiles. Railroads are a great investment opportunity for the United States, as they were once before, in the 1800's, when America (yes, this country) had more total miles of railroad, more railroad miles per capita, and even more railroad miles per land area than any other nation on Earth.

But we don't think that way. It's one of the many ways that Congress and the American two-party system have simply ceased to help. It's wrong to say they're "irrelevant," as is often done, because they do spend a lot of money. If you work for (or better yet, own) a defense contractor, their spending habits may please you. If you wish they would do something, anything, that would be of some tangible, material, discernible benefit for the mass of the American people -- well, the Swimmer hates to disabuse you of this cherished fantasy, seeing as how it maintains your interest in Congress's brave tackling of crucial issues like enabling Visa to hound you into bankruptcy court, but you're going to have to be patient, and like the refugees in the opening scenes of "Casablanca" who want to board that plane for Lisbon -- wait. And wait. And wait.

The Immigration Battle, Deconstructed

Before we get too far along doing really ugly and unnecessary things, like building "3-phase" walls and starting a run on the concertina wire market, let us pause and consider the nature of the immigration problem in realistic terms.

1. The Liberal Position. Liberals have a terrifying fear of ever doing anything which seems mean, such as sending 11 million people "home" or denying anyone American citizenship, especially neighbors who have violated the law and have waited patiently for the inevitable American response, which is an admission we can never do anything mean.

2. The Conservative Position, Variation 1. The first variation of the conservative position is to supply America's businesses, including agri-business with non-organized, cheap labor which can be mercilessly exploited.

3. The Conservative Position, Variation 2. The second variation of the conservative position is simpler than the first. This position is that if we're going to have a lot of additional, highly fecund people living in the Southwest and elsewhere, we don't want them to be brown and poorly educated.

In support of the various "positions," the usual chestnuts are tossed on the fire. Such as, we're a "nation of immigrants." While true, this is a quality we share with virtually every country on Earth, other than perhaps a small region in what is now modern day Ethiopia. This conclusion seems compelled by the remarkable genetic science discussed in Spencer Wells's The Journey of Man, which recounts the haplogroup markers found in female mitochondria, and lead back to African Eve, great-grandmother (to the nth) of us all.

Or: raise the minimum wage, and Americans will do the work the Mexicans and Guatemalans do now. First - no we won't. Second - the illegals make easy multiples of the existing minimum wage.

Finally: we have to seal the border, because terrorists are pouring across the border all day long. We have to know "who these people are, and bring them in from the shadows." The terrorists are not pouring across the Mexican border. They're flying into U.S. airports using visitor's visas, just like the good old days. And no terrorist we need to worry about is going to come in "out of the shadows" so he can be an American citizen for the week or two he's alive before blowing himself up.

The one solution which neatly addresses all legitimate concerns with the least expense is obvious. Do nothing. Don't build an ugly wall, and don't grant citizenship to people who did not enter the U.S. through the existing immigration system.

The beauty of this system is that it's a proven winner for everyone. Businesses still hold their exploitative leverage, since the workers have no rights. The labor is cheap and abundant, and obviously satisfactory to the illegals who flock here to find it. The numbers are self-regulating, since only those who can find work will sneak in and stay. It's a "comprehensive" solution, and easy to administer, since it isn't. It frees up the Senate to take on more pressing matters, such as flag burning and gay marriage. Indeed, the farther away we keep Congress from matters of real consequence, the better for everyone.