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.

Deadwood, Washington DC

Let us return briefly to those glorious days, circa 1977, when I was employed in the Bank of America Building, working as an associate attorney for The Firm With Three Names which occupied the 33rd and 34th floors, on a full-floor basis, with panoramic views of the Golden Gate, the waterfront, the Bay Bridge, and of course the south of Market area, which in those days was still mostly an unregenerated slum. A big firm, with a lot of work, in a thriving legal market which could support a lot of outside counsel, before insurance companies and banks and corporations went increasingly in-house to control costs. When America was still King, sort of. Everyone wearing wool suits and white shirts, silk ties and leather wingtips. Drinking, carrying on, being unfaithful, sexually harassing.

How I hated it. I thought it was sick. Yet, obviously, other lawyers thrived. There are always humans who not only can handle a heirarchical structure of associates, partners, committee chairs, and professional associations; who navigate successfully through the shark-filled shoals of company politics; who seek and relish wins, promotions, peer-group approbation; yea, verily, and way more. There are people who positively must have all of this. So if life in a big firm slowly extinguished all life outside it, hermetically sealed off normal emotions, relations, made one's life, essentially, into Life In The Firm, then so be it.

Over time, of course, there were regrets among those who stayed the course. Looking back, all they could see was The Firm. And, given the vicissitudes of the market place, the particular lawyers at The Firm With Three Names cannot even say that, since the place imploded under pressures of competition and the in-house movement. But what I want to talk about right now is that curious cohort of lawyers known as "deadwood," in the argot of big firm partnerships as they existed way back when. By and large, these were lawyers who had worked hard for decades, got to the top of the pyramid, were wealthy and financially set, and had lost all interest in the practice of law. They had become nonproductive, objects of resentment among the hotshot trial lawyers twenty years younger who were doing all the hard work and maintaining the firm's reputation. The Deadwood put in minimal hours, kept a clean desk, left often before 5 pm, drank at lunch, and became expert only in the art of Delegation of Everything to associates and junior partners. They had long ago given up attending continuing education of the bar courses and often betrayed, in discussions of cases, an astounding ignorance about changes in civil procedure and substantive law which had occurred, say, in the last 15 years or so. Yet they assumed, for the most part, that they were still thoroughly professional, still up-to-date, still oh so au courant.

Which brings us to Washington D.C., 2006, and to the U.S. Senate. The Senators have an average age of 60.4 years. Some Senators are much older than this (Akaka, Byrd, Lautenberg, Specter, Warner, Kennedy, Grassley, Hatch, Stevens who are all in their 70s and 80s), and only a few are much younger (Obama, Sununu). For the most part, the United States Senate is an Old Man's Club, and membership is practically guaranteed to any incumbent who chooses to run. There are no term (and certainly no age) limits. And another similarity with the Deadwood brigades of the 1970s: most Senators are lawyers. A very large Deadwood law firm could be formed out of the Senate, beginning with Shelby (age 72) and Sessions (59) of Alabama, continuing through Stevens of Alaska (82), on to Dodd (62) and Lieberman (64) of Connecticut, to Biden (61) of Delaware, through Kennedy (74) and Kerry (62) of Massachusetts, to Sarbanes (73) of Maryland, to Levin (72) of Michigan, to Cochran (69) and Lott (65) of Mississippi, to Hillary Clinton (59) of New York, to Specter (76) of Pennsylvania, to Hatch (72) of Utah, to Warner (79) of Virginia, to Byrd (89) of W. Virginia. Had they remained lawyers throughout their lives, most of these Senators would be very old and tired men, and most likely Deadwood.

Instead, the 55 lawyers of the United States Senate are the majority cadre of one-half of America's bicameral system. The Senate, in fact, is almost bereft of any legislator who had a pre-Senatorial life as something other than a lawyer or lower-level politician (Boxer, Collins, Richardson, Nelson of Florida, many other career "public servants."). Maybe one way to explain Bill Frist's ascension to Majority Leader is that his background is somewhat sui generis. He actually did something in the real world at one time, as did Chuck Hagel (investment banking), Lautenberg (computerized payroll company), Kohl (department store) and Salazar (rancher and owner of a Dairy Queen). Frist must seem like a total exotic to someone like Biden, who entered the Senate at the age of 29 after the briefest of legal careers (but which he nonetheless talks about as if it were yesterday).

If you want to understand why the United States Senate was unable to come up with an immigration bill, after months of wrangling, that was anything other than a reprint of the 1986 Amnesty Bill, you need look not much farther. These guys and gals are a spent force. They are Deadwood. They are way, way past their prime.

And something else. It is inevitable that these Senior Citizens carry with them a visualization of the modern world, an image, that is based upon America in the 1950s, that halcyon period when America stood astride the world in Rhodesian fashion. They don't get it. They don't understand what's happened in China, in India, in Kuala Lumpur, they don't grasp the implications of an America running its affairs on energy policies appropriate to the Eisenhower Administration, but way way out of date for a country currently importing 14 million barrels of oil a day at $70 per barrel. They don't understand, as they head down to the infirmary in the Capitol Building, that America's health care system does not consist of Ol' Doc Robbins ridin' his buggy over to the Hawkins household to look in on l'il Timmy, to make sure that sore throat is comin' along.

These Ancient Mariners stand in the well of the Senate and deliver the most excruciatingly boring speeches in the history of modern oration, and to what effect? Why do they use this outmoded form of persuasion? No one listens. There are only two votes in the Senate that matter: cloture votes, to end debate, and...okay, only one. Because the other vote is to pass or defeat another completely useless and irrelevant piece of legislation.

Is it any wonder Senators, as a preface to every mind-numbing utterance they rise to make, fall all over themselves to praise, lavishly and nauseatingly, the sterling qualities of every Senator who has had anything to do with the matter at hand, reassuring all of us that they are all such good friends. Of course they are. They've got the greatest scam going, guaranteed, high-profile employment, a large staff of toadies, an expense account, and a gullible public which for the most part still credits them with functionality and relevance.

Or maybe I'm wrong about that last point. The public's 20% approval of Congress, which includes the Senate, is not really "for the most part." Maybe the increasingly desperate posturing and play-acting now on view via C-SPAN is an indication they realize their cover is being blown. That the junior partners, the American public, are tired of supporting their nonproductive ways. That the little black dog has pulled back the curtain to reveal a couple of bridge games at a retirement home and not much else.

The Haditha Massacre: A Prehistory

Venturing where none but fools should venture in, I offer this time-saving prehistory of the Haditha Massacre story, as it will be covered by the media.

Step One: Melodic Modulation. This has already been largely accomplished. The military and Congressional war heroes (John Warner, John McCain) change their tune from one of skeptical derision of media stories about a "massacre" to concerned utterances that something went terribly wrong in Haditha.

Step Two: Construction of the Context. Ironically, a brief resuscitation of the Iraqi war effort will be achieved during this phase, in which the valiant cause shouldered by America's Finest is spun at the best Fox/MSNBC/CNN hagiographic RPM. Batter up at Hardball, as Chris Matthews, with one of his characteristic high hard ones which telegraphs none of the answer he seeks, drills Marine Lt. Colonel Faustian Granite right in the ribs: "Colonel, we know the kids, they're great kids, I go to Bethesda every waking moment I'm not in the studio, they're under tremendous pressure, and it's like Vietnam, how do we know? ya know, the good guys from the bad guys, you can't, fish in the sea, Chinese Revolution, Mao, the whole thing, they snap, they see their buddies go down, I was never in the military, never been in anything rougher than a pillow fight, but we sit in judgment, how can we do that? they're the ones with their asses on the line, and I know I talk rough, but I'm a rough guy who really asks the questions no one else dares ask." Colonel Granite: "I think that's right, Chris."

Step Three: Obfuscation of the Moral Imperatives. This step is handled with one Rumsfeld press conference. "Where is it to be, the bad or the good, in time we see it everyday, good golly Moses, you'd think we use them for target practice, instead of the careful, painstaking discrimination of things we don't know yet must know, in the midst of chaos, order, of a high degree, of a physics like probability."

Step Four: Sanitization Through Senate Hearing. John Warner and Nelson or Whatever (Jay, I guess) Rockefeller convene the Committee. Levin and McCain are there, along with several other Senators who can't phrase questions designed to elicit answers. Moral outrage, demands for accountability, where does the buck stop, chain of command, blah, blah, blah.

Step Five: Down the Memory Hole. The squad leader and two of the trigger men are singled out for court martial, prosecuted and sentenced to short stretches in the stockade. The Iraq War continues.

Coalition of the Clueless

I don't know when I first started noticing it. It's definitely an artifact of the Bush Administration, so I suspect sometime after January 2001. At some point, in any case, public officials began saying stupid, illogical things without any sort of media challenge. And the inanity would be repeated until it gained the force of conventional policy, of doctrine. It's hard to describe the phenomenon with any more precision than that. I don't know exactly what to call this development. I do know that over time it can make you crazy with a simmering rage and frustration.

A classic example is the oft-cited bromide that the war in Iraq is justified, in part, because if we fight them there, we won't have to fight them here. No one has ever tried to explain why this should be the case. Deconstructing each part: who are "them?" Arabs? Muslim fundamentalist terrorists? Rotary Club members? Supposing Iraq has something to do with 9-11, how would a battle against Sunni insurgents and roving militias of various sectarian stripes in Iraq exempt us from fighting "them" here? The 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and Egypt; the "masterminds" were expatriate Saudis, Egyptians and Kuwaitis. Why would fighting Iraqis make it impossible for 19 other Saudis & Egyptians and the same, at-large masterminds to come up with another plot? Wouldn't it, in fact, be easier, given the war in Iraq? Aren't we in the midst of doing something of such colossal irrelevance, of such massive depletion, of such catastrophic self-destruction, that another 9-11 is actually more likely rather than less? If we have 133,000 troops fighting "them" over there, don't "they" actually have fewer of "us" to fight "over here?"

And then today. Bush & Blair at the podiums. What about Poland? Bush probably wanted to ask again, but in a different way this time. What about Spain and Italy? Nah, it's just the Anglo-American Feel-Good Team still hangin' in there. Bush had a new one for the Suspension of Sanity Hall of Fame. It went something like this: with the "unity government" now in place, the Iraqi people now know when an insurgent blows up a bomb, it's a strike against all of the Iraqis, because they're now part of a united Iraq. Bush said this with his usual masterful imbecility, pausing to make sure we got it, that the nuances sank in. His eyes sweeping the room like arrogant search lights, the smirk barely controlled. He's got us now. Now whenever we read about a bomb exploding in Baghdad, or Ramadi, or Kirkuk or Mosul, or in all those places, often on the same day, fountaining the green-black sewage which runs freely in the streets of the unelectrified, water-barren environs of Iraq's cities --whenever this happens, the Iraqi people will know it's now a strike against all of them, because a cabinet has been chosen for the unity government of Iraq.

Just once how I wish some reporter with a good set of nuts would raise his hand, stand, and confront this silly President of ours with one riveting inquiry. "Mr. President," he could ask, "just what in the fuck are you talking about?"

school's still in

If this keeps up, maybe I'll just enroll. Something I never really grokked 1966-70: Berkeley is really a beautiful campus. The fresh spring air, I find, is even nicer without the tear gas. The coeds (I suppose they're still called that) are yet more beautiful, in their halter tops and jeans skirts, than the Blue Meanies of the Oakland Sheriff's Department, with their azure jumpsuits (I wouldn't use "azure" to their face), smoky riot shields and black truncheons. No doubt the protest years were unique, stimulating, inspirational. I realize now, as I walk the wide paths near the Life Sciences Building in the cool air, that it would have worked wonderfully just as, you know, a college.

Amazing what an "all-volunteer army" will do. We faced the draft and a meat grinder called Vietnam. It concentrated the mind wonderfully, reminded us that we were, after all, the parties with "standing" to raise a ruckus. That we'd better do it ourselves, since if we didn't, who would? History, I submit, has proven us correct. The narcoleptic American society of 2006 just lets it all happen. We blog about it, we read other blogs about it, but mostly, if Jamaal and Jose want to toss in the wrench at Jiffy-Lube and give military life a spin -- hey, dudes, nobody made you. It's the Pentagon's private affair, and they've got their own mercenaries to enforce America's business plan.

But such thoughts weren't really on my mind as I stopped by the Free Speech Movement Cafe for a decaf cap. Or capp. See how cosmo I've gotten? I didn't know that when I was an undergrad. Of course, I didn't know anything. Over to Benjamin Ide Wheeler Hall for Day Two of the China-USA Climate Change Forum. I just had to hear Amory Lovins, the "soft energy paths" guy of the Rocky Mountain Institute. As a bonus, there was Peter Schwartz of Smith & Hawken, formerly a rocket scientist (literally - studied fluid dynamics), formerly at SRI, formerly everything. Essentially, he and Amory are brilliant for a living. I didn't know what Amory would look like, but I should have known. Nebbishy, thick black walrus mustache, glasses, balding, designer/nerd shoes, short, abrupt, supremely confident. When he was done with his half hour, you really wanted to ask: where's the problem? Let's get on with these carbon composite cars that get 111 mpg running on switchgrass booze and move on to the next thing! Why was Inez Fung, the Lawrence Berkeley Absolute Whiz on all things globally warmed so bummed yesterday? Why did she begin her talk on the science of climate change, which she commands with a mastery Michelangelo brought to that church ceiling -- why did she say she was "worried. Very worried"? Amory to the rescue!

Maybe it was because of something Peter Schwartz said. There were two people left in America who aren't sure about global warming. Unfortunately, they're George Bush and Dick Cheney.

So for two days in a row, I'm left scratching my head. How, exactly, did we get in this predicament? The problem is real, the solutions are not only here, but exciting! capable of reversing America's balance of trade problem! fun! interesting!

And on the news, a car bomb exploded in Baghdad, killing 8 and wounding 15.

a day at Berkeley

It was like old times, spending a day on campus. The occasion was the China-USA Climate Change Forum at Wheeler Auditorium. Al Gore was going to attend, bringing along his movie, but a union strike kept him off campus. After a couple of hours of the forum, I thought that was just as well. It didn't need any politicizing or Hollywood treatment. The scientists in attendance did fine without the glitz, without the carefully calibrated emotionality of the professional pol. Al's got his act, but it would have been out of place today. How nice just to listen to Steven Chu, Nobel Laureate, Director of Lawrence Berkeley, lay out in one clear, twenty-minute Power Point the state of global warming science, the scope of the problem, the solutions at hand. Questions I'd wondered about, he answered. Yes, the United States has the hectares to continue feeding the world, thanks to the Green Revolution, while converting land now kept fallow because of government subsidies to cellulose farms, with enough ethanol-making capacity to fuel the American car fleet several times over. All of it can be done. The Chinese are working hard as well. They see the problem. The US produces 25% of the greenhouse gases, the Chinese 20%, so if those two countries get their acts together, we're well on our way to a sustainable future.

The Chinese recognize they're being asked to take a route different from the USA, to pass up the glutton phase and go directly to green responsibility. They know they have to. As one eminent Chinese scientist put it, if China used paper at the US per capita level, we would need "four Earths" to supply the trees. To run their cars at the US level, "three Earths" to supply the oil. We've got one Earth, and we need to share it.

One good thing about Bush's War. It's kept the U.S. military pinned down in Iraq, it's true. But it's also kept Bush pinned down. He's blown all the money, seriously damaged the military. He's wrecked the Republican Party. By the time he's through, in January 2009, he will have spent almost all his years attacking Afghanistan and Iraq. Those will be the signature features of his Presidency. We will have to look back on those eight long years as the woodshed period, the sabbatical, when the best brains in the USA, China and elsewhere kept thinking, kept innovating, without any help from Bush or Washington, DC. He was busy sending young men off to die a long way from home. And he did it mostly in the service of his private demons. So to American soldiers who left a leg or arm or your vision or your sanity in Iraq - that much was accomplished, and it's not trivial. To the families who lost a son or daughter - I'm sorry, but that will have to do. I don't believe there's anything else to show for it. But by answering the call of duty, by obeying your Commander in Chief, you avoided even worse mischief at his hands.

Except, perhaps, that we've also learned you can't elect an obviously unqualified man as President. We can't afford that again. Let us never elect a guy again because we think we'd like to have a beer with him, and for no other reason. That's not enough, and I think most of us are at the point where we know in our hearts that would be one bitter drink anyway.

I had lunch at the Free Speech Movement Cafe. I appreciate the gesture of these young students, and their tribute to a generation that passed here quite a while ago. All of us, including this studious, quiet group now at Berkeley, waited this clown out, for eight long years. Maybe we had that luxury this time through. Time will tell. But remember what a contemporary of mine said so long ago, just in case it happens again:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Rest in peace, Mario.

Blogging: The Hidden Agenda

Admittedly, it's all a ploy to get Working Assets to notice me and give me a book deal, like they gave Glenn Greenwald for "How Would a Patriot Act." The editor, Jennifer Nix, lives just down the road in Sausalito. How can she not notice another lawyer churning out verbiage about Bush outrages? I'm right here, Jennifer.

Let me say a few words about Glenn. My facts are based on reading the Chronicle article about him and Working Assets. The piece ran a couple of weeks ago, and that's all I'm going on, that and reading Unclaimed Territory, his blog, ever since. I won't give you the URL because you're reading me right now. It's a nice blog and says all the right things about the NSA/FISA violations, Alberto "The Torque" Gonzales and his threat to prosecute journalists for violation of the Espionage Act, the Iraq War, etc. All the stuff you read on the Huffingtonpost.com every day, in other words. Jonathan Turley and Bruce Fein, even John Dean, have covered this stuff to death, and reached the inevitable conclusion that Bush gets up, every morning, every day of the week, and resumes violating the law, committing felonies left and right. No lawyer who went to an accredited school, took Con Law and passed the bar would have much trouble figuring out that Bush doesn't have a leg to stand on. Every legally trained person knows it. The only reason there is even a hint of controversy is that we have an utterly gutless Congress, including the faux-brave Arlen Specter, who pretends to be exercising oversight but is actually falling all over himself to amend the FISA law to accommodate Bush's law breaking. Imagine that.

Cop (outside bank): Come out with your hands up!
Robber (from inside bank): Not until I shoot the rest of these people, take all the money and do anything else I want!
Cop: Why can you do that?
Robber: I have the absolute right to do it!
Cop: Who says so?
Robber: I do!
Cop: How about we amend the Penal Code to make what you're doing legal? Would you come out then?
Robber: I'll think about it! (Bang! Bang!)

A first, in other words. Congress is utterly hopeless. We have been fully transformed into a system of men, not laws. But I was talking about Glenn Greenwald. He is praised for not being a "name caller," and for writing long, lawyerly arguments. Also, he spends most of his time in Brazil, according to the article.

Okay, let's take a look at my blog and me. I live right here in California. My passport expires in July, and since I'm so disorganized and lazy, I'll probably wind up trapped here under the Bush tyranny. I can write long, lawyerly arguments as well as the next lawyer who hates being a lawyer. I have to say, though, and maybe this is name calling and will turn Jennifer off: Glenn's writing is a little sententious, and I don't mean the first meaning, "terse and energetic." I mean the subsequent, probably incorrect definitions, such as "pompous, overblown and full of aphorism." This is something lawyers who hate being lawyers do. It's all they know how to do, actually, write sententious prose based on secondary sources. I don't have any "sources" in the White House and I doubt Unclaimed Territory does either. The blogosphere is just people feeding off those felons-to-be, the ones with sources, real journalists, who now face rendition and probable water-boarding in Jordan as the result of revealing that the CIA runs a gulag of prisons in places like Jordan where they do water-boarding. I wish water-boarding were a fun thing, something you did behind a speed boat with a tow rope, but I don't think so.

Anyway, lawyers write like that because I think litigating attorneys, pound for pound, have to do more writing than any other profession, including journalists and novelists. Hey, I've purged my "closed files," lined up 20 or 30 banker's boxes in a parking lot, representing maybe just a decade's worth of work, and ordered their shredding. That's a lot of writing, even if only half of it was me. The other half was some other shmuck practicing law, "opposing counsel." I've got all their originals, or did, till they went to the landfill or back to Strathmore. Dostoevsky? Tolstoy? Pikers. You could take all their combined works, add Herman Melville, and fit it into two of those boxes, with room left over for my billing records, 1982-85. Now I'm not saying anything about quality. That's the point. To churn out all that pablum, all those letters, memoranda of points and authorities, briefs, discovery documents, all that "costly nonsense" (Dickens, Bleak House), you have to write fast with ready-made phrases, like gluing strips of words together. "Apparently opposing counsel seriously contends..." "Assuming this is not another instance of disingenuousness..." you sneer. On and on.

Hey, if you've ever read Scott Turow, you know how this stuff translates into lawyers writing fiction. His prose actually reads like a brief. If he wants to get the idea across that a lawyer is emotionally devastated by the revelation his wife has been unfaithful, he'll describe his protagonist with the fanciful name, Rusty Thornbrick or something, as follows: "Elias Ortega y Gasset, his wise and patient counsel, delivered the hammer blow as gently as possible. It didn't help. Rusty was emotionally devastated by the revelation his wife had been unfaithful."

So I don't know about bloggers writing legal arguments on the Web, unless, of course, they truly think of an original point that has simply been overlooked. And really, Jennifer, as you read back through my posts, can't you see some of those? And that title: "How Would a Patriot Act." Too cute by half, if you ask me. Mine would be more subtle, something like "The American Fourth Reich: Life Under Der Fuhrer Bush," something that doesn't betray my bias too quickly.

So that's what I'm aiming for. Just a book deal. A good friend from Berkeley days, so faithful a friend that he has won the coveted Croix d'amitié for lifetime achievement in friendship, has as much as implied that my blog is little more than a self-indulgent exercise in vanity. It is so much more than that. It is the desperate cry of the currently non-practicing lawyer: please, please, don't make me do that again! No more glu-lam sentences, no more dreary numbered pleading paper! No more legal bullshit. Free-form bullshit, Jennifer. Where do I sign?

thoughts on a rainy Sunday evening in May

Seasonally, I suppose, I'm in the September of my years. Assuming that favorable genetics and good luck might yield a man 80 years, or about 30,000 days, I've used up about 21,000 so far, or 2/3 of the allotment. Translating that into a 12 month year, I'm in about the 8th or 9th month, or August/September. I haven't seen a horoscope of day-counting, which is remarkable given the general consuming interest in all things occult. What I mean is, I suppose you could count days, translate the days into the sort of fraction I've just calculated, and figure where you are against that 30,000 day approximate allotment. So although I'm an Aquarius, maybe right now I'm in the Virgo with Libra rising stage of my life. Here's a reading from the LA Times for Libra today: "We dance around the ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows." -- Robert Frost

I can't get much out of that either. Nice, though, to come across something from Frost I hadn't seen before. As the years go by, you learn things just as well as in your youth, I've found. And it's always knowledge tempered with the wisdom of experience, so you're not so quick to credit something you read with infallibility just because it's in print. You've learned that people write and say things for all kinds of reasons, and authoritative assuredness is not often the motivating reason. Quite often it's a projection of what someone needs to believe for very personal reasons. As an immediate example, if someone told me exactly what that Frost quote was supposed to mean for me, right now, I would view it with a high degree of suspicion. Look at all the assumptions built into the interpretation: that this "moving through horoscopic stages" thing I've just made up has some validity, that astrology means something despite the precession of the equinoxes, that the positon of constellations at the moment some guy was born in a rural area in Decatur, Alabama on a cold February morning in 1948 is decisive in his day-to-day reality.

Although I admit - I am a classic Aquarian, as I understand the type. Idealistic, artistic, somewhat aloof, more intellectual than emotional. Yet -- harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding...

I have learned that there is something to this idea of "stages," even to the Gail Sheehy concept of passages. Intuitively it sets in, around 40 or so. You learn that things go away and never come back, that they belong to a certain age, an appropriate energy level, to an enabling naivete. I could cite many examples but I won't. You know what I mean, if you're in July or so. Leo or thereabouts.