What happens when the executive branch is allowed to operate in secrecy and without constraint? This was answered in 1976, by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church:

The natural tendency of Government is toward abuse of power. Men entrusted with power, even those aware of its dangers, tend, particularly when pressured, to slight liberty. Our constitutional system guards against this tendency. It establishes many different checks upon power. It is those wise restraints which ‘keep men free. In the field of intelligence those restraints have too often been ignored.

The three main departures in the intelligence field from the constitutional plan for controlling abuse of power have been: (a) Excessive Executive Power.

In a sense the growth of domestic intelligence activities mirrored the growth of presidential power generally. But more than any other activity, more even than exercise of the war power, intelligence activities have been left to the control of the Executive.

For decades Congress and the courts as well as the press and the public have accepted the notion that the control of intelligence activities was the exclusive prerogative of the Chief Executive and his surrogates. The exercise of this power was not questioned or even inquired into by outsiders. Indeed, at times the power was seen as flowing not from the law, but as inherent, in the Presidency.

Whatever the theory, the fact was that intelligence activities were essentially exempted from the normal system of checks and balances. Such Executive power, not founded in law or checked by Congress or the courts, contained the seeds of abuse and its growth was to be expected.

(b) Excessive Secrecy.

Abuse thrives on secrecy. Obviously, public disclosure, of matters such as the names of intelligence agents or the technological details of collection methods is inappropriate. But in the field of intelligence, secrecy has been extended to inhibit review of the basic programs and practices themselves.

Those within the Executive branch and the Congress who would exercise their responsibilities wisely must be fully informed. The American public, as well, should know enough about intelligence activities to be able to apply its good sense to the underlying issues of policy and morality.

Knowledge is the key to control. Secrecy should no longer be allowed to shield the existence of constitutional, legal and moral problems from the scrutiny of all three branches of government or from the American people themselves.

(c) Avoidance of the Rule of Law.

Lawlessness by Government breeds corrosive cynicism among the people and erodes the trust upon which government depends.

Here, there is no sovereign who stands above the law. Each of us, from presidents to the most disadvantaged citizen, must obey the law. As intelligence operations developed, however, rationalizations were fashioned to immunize them from the restraints of the Bill of Rights and the specific prohibitions of the criminal code. The experience of our investigation leads us to conclude that such rationalizations are a dangerous delusion.

As you can see, the Committee pointed its finger at the government, the public and the press.  Attitudes needed to be changed all around.

This is yet another parallel between modern times and the the Vietnam War era (I realize that that war had ceased by 1976).  Many other parallels were detailed by the movie “War Made Easy.”

The above passage is analyzed in more detail at Common Dreams.

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against the government in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, finding that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay have the right to file habeas corpus petitions in federal court. This decision strikes down a key section of the Military Commissions Act, the horrible piece of legislation passed by Congress in October 2006 that sought to condemn detainees to indefinite imprisonment with no real right to challenge their detention.

The MCA provided only for “Combatant Status Review Tribunals”, a farce trial that makes a mockery of the protections given by the Constitution to an accused person. Detainees are tried before military officers, rather than neutral judges. In these tribunals, they have no right to a lawyer, they can be barred from seeing the evidence against them, and they cannot call witnesses in their defense. In a number of cases, when the first CSRT concluded an inmate was not an enemy combatant, the government simply ignored the ruling and convened a second one to reach the decision it preferred.

These inquisitorial, rigged “trials” give further evidence of why the writ of habeas corpus is so vitally important. For over 700 years, it’s protected people against arbitrary and capricious imprisonment by their government. By forcing the government to publicly show the reasons why it has detained someone before a neutral magistrate, habeas corpus turns imprisonment into a tool of justice, rather than a tool of tyranny.

The U.S. Constitution provides that Congress may suspend habeas corpus, but only in cases of “rebellion or invasion”, when it is vital to protect public safety. Clearly, neither of these conditions is in effect at the moment. Thus, the MCA’s suspension of habeas corpus for detainees was unconstitutional, and the Court was absolutely in the right to strike it down.

The prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have been in detention, in some cases, for over six years without ever being given the chance to prove their innocence. The Bush administration’s attempt to put them into a legal black hole, beyond the reach of all law, is anathema to everything the American justice system stands for. It’s long overdue that this injustice was corrected. If any of these detainees are terrorists or have committed war crimes against the United States, then let the government prove that in a court of law. Our justice system has served us well against those who would harm us for over two hundred years, and it will continue to do so. On the other hand, if any of these detainees are innocent - a very likely circumstance, given the dragnet-like way in which they were swept up - then their detention is an outrageous evil, and they should immediately be released.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, concluded that neither the President nor Congress may “switch the Constitution on or off at will“. The Court rejected the legal fiction that, because Guantanamo Bay is technically part of Cuba, the detainees have no recourse under the U.S. Constitution.

This is a great victory for due process and for the American legal system, and a bright day for friends of liberty everywhere. The only dark spot on this decision is that it was by a narrow, 5-to-4 majority. (Scalia’s dissent begins “America is at war with radical Islamists” and goes on to cry about how the terrorists will kill us if we don’t lock people up indefinitely with no trial. I am not joking.) If John McCain is elected president and has the chance to make the next few appointments to the Supreme Court, the fragile constitutional bulwarks which still stand against arbitrary government power will be in extremely serious jeopardy.

Barack Obama has, for all intents and purposes, clinched the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Hillary will jocky for position in before the upcoming convention. Much speculation has been thrown about as to whether or not she’ll be a vice presidential nominee. I am dubious of that. Dubious that Obama will risk bringing her perceived “baggage” on board, dubious that she would accept. I think it would be a hell of a slate, though, one that has only a single precedent (yes, there is a precedent) but with the roles reversed.

In 1872, Victoria Woodhull—a feminist, a suffragist, a newspaper publisher, a Wall Street player, a spiritualist, and free lover—declared her candidacy for president of the United States. It was a serious bid, make no mistake, and one which virtually split the Women’s Suffrage movement in two. Those who ought to have been her natural allies—Susan B. Anthony chief among them—couldn’t stand her. They attempted to bar her from conventions, they denounced her in their own press, they threw obstructions in her path. Why? She was…immodest.

But the Women’s Suffrage movement was torn. They needed Woodhull because she understood how to work the system. She was popular, with men and women. She understood how money worked. She brought a lot with her, so they were forced to include her in their January 1872 convention as a principle speaker and as one of the “leaders” of the Equal Rights Movement. As Anthony told the convention “Now bless your soulds she was not dragged to the front. She came to Washington from Wall Street with powerful argument and with lots of cash behind her, and I bet you cash is a big thing with Congress.”

Woodhull was one of six women who appeared before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on January 12. Their purpose was to push forward a Declaratory Act which would grant Woman Suffrage by vote of congress. They had twenty thousand signatures. That evening, suffragist and spiritualist Ada Ballou put Woodhull’s name forward as a candidate for president, leading the Equal Rights Party. In May, the Party was officially chartered and Woodhull named as its candidate at Apollo Hall in New York City.

It was a progressive party by any stretch of the imagination. Twenty-three planks formed the Party platform—covering education, suffrage, social and industrial reforms, several of which resonate down to the present: graduated direct taxation, regulation of monopolies, labor laws, and a merit-based civil service to replace cronyism.

Because the Suffrage Movement has always been joined at the hip to Abolition (among other movements), Victoria Woodhull chose Frederick Douglass to be her running mate.

However, it was a publicity choice, one unfortunately not backed by the candidate in question. Douglass did not accept. He was committed to U.S. Grant and the Republicans and had been present at none of the Equal Rights Party events. Woodhull chose to ignore this little problem and ran with Douglass the presumed vice presidential candidate.

By June the Party was deep in debt with donors bailing out. By September it was over.

The Declaratory Act to grant suffrage failed. Anthony and Stanton blamed Woodhull and her “precipitate” bid for the presidency. Not to mention that Woodhull’s “free love” and spiritualist philosophies were unwelcome by the serious-minded and abstemious main line suffragists, who saw sex and booze as the twin shackles binding women to a second-class status (the Temperance Movement, founded the following year, joined suffrage and temperance and led ultimately not only to the 19th Amendment granting women the vote in 1921 but also to the 18th Amendment—Prohibition—which is the only amendment to the Constitution ever to be repealed).

Short-lived as it was, the Woodhull-Douglass ticket has become part of our national folklore, more for what it represented than for anything that it actually accomplished. But a closer look shows that the ideas fueling this ill-fated bid were as progressive as anything one might imagine today. It was, after all, the Equal Rights Party—and Victoria Woodhull was deadly earnest about that. She sought to unchain everyone from the bonds of the past—materially and spiritually.

I have noted in the last several months the word “Progressive” coming to the fore, replacing Liberal. McCain uses Liberal—expectedly, as a cudgel—but Obama, when he says anything like that at all, says Progressive. For a long time, the Right has held a rhetorical high ground and dominated the discourse by controlling the language. It has taken the Left all this time to realize that people react in often Pavlovian thoughtlessness to language and labels and to start using some of those strategies. Most people on the Left tend to believe people are not so simplistic, but time and again we are shown that our expectations of other peoples’ intellectual capactiy are in error. That and the fact that neuro-linguistics tells us this response is anything but simple.

Bush has damaged the country. Badly. To some extent, this is because he has blindly followed his Party line—something conservatives are supposed to be above. Mostly, this is due to his shortcomings as a leader. He doesn’t Get It.

And of course he was handed a raw deal with 9/11. Make no mistake, any president would have had problems dealing with that. We were unfortunate enough to have a mediocre intellect in the White House at the time, but the fall out from that was daunting.

McCain is not a Bush clone—not on any kind of one-to-one basis. But he is bound to a Party that has evolved into what it is under the influence of ideological positions which are untenable. To become the Republican Party of, say, Eisenhower, they must divest themselves of a cumbersome element of what they perceive as their power base. They cannot do this if they win.

In order for the Democrats to become a new kind of Party, one capable of dealing with the coming 90 years, they must have a focus. Progressivism may be it. Different from doctrinaire Liberalism, Progressivism is potentially a causal-based, reality-centered mind-set that could be flexible enough to utilize liberalism and conservatism as need be, something doctrinaire Liberalism could never do.

Obama has rhetorically held himself to be above the usual fray. The minefield of race was a proving ground for him. It is possible that he may be the locus for a resurgent progressivism which could free us from the left-overs of both the Cold War and the Fundamentalist crusades and catalyze the creation of a new American ethos.

But he’d better be damned careful who he picks as his running mate and how he manages his cabinet. Because that’s where the difference will be made.

Would Hillary Clinton be a good choice? She understands the nature of national politics in a way that maybe Obama, in his youth, does not. She could be a powerful resource—Obama’s version of LBJ. But she could also be a weight, binding him to 20th Century Politics As Usual.

Stay tuned.

This is a fascinating video, which I learned of at Daily Kos.

Now that we’ve dragged some of those wacko preachers out into the limelight, maybe it’s time to focus those cameras on the bigots.  Sunshine is great disinfectant.

You may have heard that the California Supreme Court has ruled that the state has no pressing interest in inquiring into the gender of two people wishing to declare their undying love for each other.

And this time, couples might might end up with something more than a souvenir like this one (the marriages conducted San Francisco’s 2004 spring and summer of love are alas, still null and void.) As Mark Morford writes in the San Francisco Chronicle:

It might not be such an easy trick this time. This is the good news. It is the twilight of the Bush Endtimes and the right wing hate machine is no longer the nasty Hummer of bloviated pain it once was. What’s more, there’s this pesky thing known as a $3 trillion war. There is brutal economic recession. There is environmental collapse. Really, who cares about happy gay people getting married when it costs 4 bucks a gallon to get to Wal-Mart? Priorities, people.

What’s more, it was one thing for an uppity and slick San Francisco mayor to try and make a name for himself and enter the gay history books by allowing all those happy gay people to stand in the rain back in 2004 and get married in City Hall, only to have it all annulled by the courts.

But it is quite another when a powerhouse seven-member Supreme Court — six of whom are moderate Republicans — of the largest and most potent state in the union says, hey, you know what? It appears we’ve had it wrong all along. It appears there is actually nothing the slightest bit wrong or unlawful or even dangerous about allowing people of the same gender to buy overpriced formalwear and drink way too much champagne and dance to crappy ’80s power ballads in the Chardonnay Room of a low-rent winery up in Napa, and call it a wedding.

Who can argue with that? Hell, to this very day, cultural conservatives still have no idea exactly why they hate gay marriage. There is still zero articulation. There is a complete lack of fact or understanding and I have yet to meet a single person of any political stripe who can adequately explain exactly why gay marriage is so dangerous, or who’s threatened, or how. Same as it ever was? Yes. Only now, their misunderstanding feels quite a bit less dangerous, and far more pathetic.

Finally, this is the funniest response to the ruling I’ve seen yet. The joke isn’t exactly new, but they do it so well and they’re just so darn cute!

I spotted this video on one of Eddie Roth’s posts at The Platform.

In the April 24, 2008 edition of Nature (available online only with a subscription), it is reported that the Swiss Federal Government has issued guidelines to help granting agencies “decide which research applications deeply offend the dignity of plants.” Those studies that fail to treat plants with “dignity” won’t be funded.

This is not a spoof report.  It is real, and this new requirement has many scientists wondering what it could possibly mean to consider the “dignity of plants.”

The Swiss Ethics Committee has offered little guidance to this point, but suggests that genetic modifications causing plans to “lose their independence” by “interfering with their capacity to reproduce” could be suspect.  This leaves many plant geneticists wondering whether there is now a problem with traditional plant hybridization.  For instance, roses require male sterility.  The article raises the question of whether the development of seedless fruits is now unethical in Switzerland.

This article leaves me wondering what new ethics guidelines we’ll see next.  Perhaps there will be a new law requiring the ethical treatment of non-living things, such as rocks, clouds or spoons.  Perhaps there will be new labor restrictions imposed to keep us from abusing our computers by constantly giving them keyboard commands or by making them work more than forty hours per week.

The disturbing part of this story is the reactions of so-called medical professionals to this couple’s situation and decision.

Now there are two ways to look at this. The one that might make more sense (though certainly no more palatable) is that these physicians et al are concerned with Insurance issues. What’s covered here? How does malpractice potentially enter into it? And while these folks are relatively well off and can carry their own expenses, what kind of precedent might be set here that will spread to the uninsured or Medicaid?

Unpleasant, but it would give a dimension to it that we could wrap our disgust around.

The other way to see it is as an example that, much as we might as a society wish to see ourselves as maturing, getting beyond such primordial reactions (namely—”Ugh! You different! You die!”), it turns out not to be true. That what we have is a facade and as long as no one really tests it, we can be what we think we are, at least to ourselves.

My reaction to what this couple is doing was initially (and continues to be) “Wow, cool!”

But I may well be in the minority.

I’ve spent a lot of time studying Republican political anatomy.   You see, I’m not only an armchair anthropologist, but I’m a social neuro-surgeon (a brand-new expertise, created today).   After careful review of all available relevant data, I have developed a precise chart (click on the thumbnail below) detailing each of the major features of the modern Republican brain.  

No, you won’t find “Iraq” on this anatomical diagram, even though it reveals each of the major neural substructures found in the modern Republican brain.  That’s because the modern Repubublican has developed relatively recently.  No specialized “Iraq” module has thus had time to evolve. You will nonetheless find each of the brain structures that, working together, compel the instigation of multiple fear-induced, needless, destructive, ineptly planned, corrupt and potentially non-ending military conflicts in the Middle East. 

Whenever sufficient numbers of these malignant features are found in the brains of those who hold substantial political power, one can expect the atrophy of an entire country, absent immediate and dramatic political resuscitation. 

Without further ado, here it is.  Just click on the thumbnail for all the gory details:

If you’d like to review some fascinating and rigorous psychological data of what it means to be a conservative, check out this post regarding a study by Frank Sulloway or this post considering the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

It’s easy to call Cookie Thorton a madman. No one in his or her right mind would walk into a civilized city council meeting and open fire - we can all agree on that. But by writing this week’s shooting in Kirkwood off as the aberrant act of a crazed mind, we are left coming up empty when we ask why. Platitudes will abound, only God can know why these innocent people were taken from us, they will say. My sympathies lie with the families and friends of all the victims, including Mr. Thorton. He snapped, that much is obvious. My challenge to investigative journalists is to examine this story deeply - from all sides - until the underlying truths can be pried free and examined openly. Hopefully, we can all learn from the complex tensions that plague the Kirkwoods of our world.

Kirkwood is a robust community, straddling the older inner suburban ring and the vast newer suburban sprawl fanning out from St. Louis. It is one of the last bastions of great older housing stock, vast Victorians and cozy brick cottages all on substantial lots and connected by sidewalks and parks and schools. New construction has been squeezed in, too, with condos popping up as well as the random new home over a razed lot. Its town center thrives with shops and salons, restaurants and coffee houses. A popular community college, a hospital and a busy recreation center, complete with a theater, ice rink and a swimming park full of fountains and activities, add to Kirkwood’s stability and appeal. The southern edge has become a retail mecca, with not only a Sam’s Club and a Wal-Mart, but also a Target right next door. Strip malls connect them and face another row across the road.

I don’t live in Kirkwood, but I go there to shop and eat. I have a good friend who moved there from the city; oh, and my shrink’s office is housed in one of the many medical buildings scattered around the hospital, so I do visit now and again, let’s say. My friend loves living in Kirkwood, and I know many others who feel the same. A co-worker grew up there, and happened to be back there the night of the shooting, enjoying Ben and Jerry’s with her family right across the street from City Hall. She was visibly shaken as she recounted the story to us the next day - not so much by the hour or so they’d been locked down inside with their treats, but more by the identity of the shooter. She knew Cookie, she said. When my friend was in school, he’d married her P.E. teacher, and would stop by now and then to visit. He’d play games with them, getting them active and laughing. He was just wonderful, she said. We all loved him. I’ve heard that more than once these last few days. He was delightful, so kind. A great guy. Wow. What happened? Did he succumb to some lurking mental illness, some defect that can’t possibly affect any of us “normal” citizens? Or was it something else?

Cookie Thorton lived in Meacham Park, the one part of Kirkwood that most citizens don’t want to mention. Meacham Park is run down. It doesn’t fit the Kirkwood image. The houses are tiny, the yards not typically landscaped and sometimes hardly mowed. Many are rentals, and by and large, the residents of Meacham Park are poor. And as is too often the case, they are also mostly black.

I visited one of these residents regularly a few years back. She was the foster mom of a baby I represented as a CASA (Court-Appointed Special Advocate), or Voices for Children as they are now called in St. Louis. This woman was lovely, big and loud and full of life. She loved that baby with all her heart, and I clearly remember wishing that all foster kids could have the privilege of being cuddled by someone like her as they waited for their lives to be sorted out by the grown-ups supposedly in charge.

Her house was small, but it was clean and tidy. She managed to get by on a minimal income; she’d moved there so that her own kids could go to the Kirkwood schools for a good education. They got by with a lot fewer things but as much love and laughter as you’d find in any of the sprawling Victorians rising only a few blocks away. Sadly, they also got by on a lot less respect than is given to those for whom success is measured by the weight of their possessions.

Meacham Park made headlines in 2005 when Kevin Johnson shot and killed a police officer in his patrol car. Johnson was just recently sentenced to the death penalty. He did kill a cop but I’m not sure how the fact that his younger brother had just died that same day didn’t somehow ameliorate the sentence. Especially since his brother had collapsed at home, and according to some witnesses, the police were slow to respond. Johnson believed they didn’t do enough to help. Maybe they thought he’d collapsed because of an overdose, or because he’d been fighting. Maybe they responded just fine and were only perceived to have not cared. Regardless, Johnson felt like they didn’t give what was a legitimate medical emergency (the brother died of a heart ailment) its due. He was distraught and in his grief needed to blame someone. He made a horrible, cold decision to “take out the first cop he saw.” He didn’t think, he acted irrationally. One of the officers provided a target for that grief, and now Johnson is scheduled to join his brother in death. All of it, senseless. Johnson had been in trouble with the law before, and I am not, in any way, defending his actions any more than those of Cookie Thorton. He caused great grief to an entire community, and he should pay dearly for his actions, absolutely. But until we look hard at the underlying problems here - the tension between minority residents in a low-income neighborhood and the powers-that-be in their town - I fear more of these episodes on the horizon.

Meacham Park residents are certainly not all steeped in a mentality of violence, nor is the violence in our fair municipality concentrated there. But I’d be a fool if I said that it doesn’t exist, and we’d all be fools to deny that the ready access to firearms in this country makes acting upon emotional outbursts potentially more violent and permanent. I believe, as a culture, we’ve taken our right to bear arms (which I support in its basic form) to an absurd extreme, but that remains another debate for another time.

Cookie Thorton apparently had owned an asphalt business. According to his brother, he’d been promised a slice of the redevelopment work in the area a few years back, presumably when the strip malls and box stores went in. A goodly amount of work for an asphalt guy, what with the flat roofing and the expansive parking lots to cover. He didn’t get it, though, and without the work he believed the city fathers had promised him, how could he afford to find himself a space for his business? So he parked his trucks at his home, providing an open target for an annoyed city government. My guess is that he’d complained about not getting the work, maybe even loudly. We do know that he was a vocal complainer, doing so loudly and bitterly and eventually bizarrely once the spat began in earnest. He felt slighted, he complained, and my guess is that the city decided to quiet him by citing him for parking commercial vehicles in a residential area. Uh-oh, you can’t do that! City ordinances prohibit it, and he was breaking the law. Cut and dried, that’s what that is.

Those city ordinances are designed to protect the appearances of neighborhoods, we all know that. Who wants a big ol’ asphalt truck hunkered down in their block? I wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. But what was Cookie to do? Sell his trucks and lose his business? And if he’s paying fine after fine to the city that promised him work and didn’t deliver, how is he supposed to save up for a business lot onto which he could move the trucks? No one, it seems, could find a compromise.

Again, easy to say who’s right and who’s wrong here. Cookie broke the law, the city tried to enforce it, he fought them and lost, he should just shut up and deal with it. Right? He certainly shouldn’t have taken the action he did on Wednesday night. But what?

Have you ever tried to deal with a local bureaucracy? Merely by mentioning this to people, I’ll wager you’d hear story after frustrated story. I know I did. One woman told me about her husband’s business being tortured by a city council upset with his business partner. Her husband had poured piles of money into rehabbing old property and revitalizing another inner suburb here by opening a popular and thriving restaurant, but his partner managed to aggravate the council. My friend and her husband felt completely battered, cited and fined and slowed down by one minute detail after another. Code violations were being selectively enforced, as other developers got away with sidestepping them one after the other. And once the offending business partner was bought out and sent packing, the council suddenly had no more time to mess with them and, poof, it all went away.

Another friend told me about the hoops he was required to jump through when trying to sell a small house in a faltering suburb, an area in which property values were falling and people were consistently moving away. His house failed inspection for the most inane reasons, while the homes of elderly neighbors who were being moved to nursing homes were consistently passed in the exact same condition as his. The last straw for him was grass - the house would have passed save for a bit of grass in the driveway. He went to city hall and engaged in a shouting match with an inspector, his frustration blazing. He said he totally understood the feeling of frustration Cookie Thorton must have felt. He felt it that day. The security guard came in ready to haul him away, but realized he was only venting, and let him have his say. My friend is a fairly small man, Caucasian and clean-cut. I wonder, had he been shaped or colored otherwise, would it have played out the same way? I’m not sayin’. Just wondering . . .

Another friend impeccably rehabbed a house in the city, across the street from mine. He had French doors installed on the front of the second story, leading out to a small deck over the front porch. Our volunteer “block captain” turned him in to the city for code violations, for not maintaining the historical integrity of the structure. The house had been boarded up for years, mind you, a real eyesore on an otherwise pleasant block. And nearly every other rehabbed house up and down the street had been changed in some way that violated the historic building code - wrong windows, glass blocks, you name it. But she turned him in because the old door hadn’t been French. And when she was questioned about it, she stated that it wouldn’t be fair to turn the other people in, because they couldn’t afford to pay the fines or make the changes. But this guy, well, he’s in the media so he can afford it. She said this with a straight face, as if anyone in her right mind could see her logic and would agree that equal enforcement of the rules made very little sense.

So much for cut and dried. So much for winning if you play by the rules, losing if you don’t. You win if you don’t piss them off, that’s all. If you do, well, God help you.

Personally, I think Cookie Thorton was driven to his insane end not by mental illness but by cultural illness. Not by overt racism but by the insidious intolerance of those who struggle by those who do not, resting precariously on a base of generational racism on both sides. Mayor Swoboda of Kirkwood, who as of this writing is fighting for his life in a local hospital, certainly did not deserve to get shot - nor did anyone else that night. Disputes should be able to be solved in other ways, civilly, not by “going to war,” as Cookie’s brother said he did. The mayor has a reputation in some circles, though, spoken quietly several times over the past couple of days, for being intolerant of those who didn’t agree or go along with him.

Cookie most assuredly didn’t go along. He wanted to be treated fairly and he believed that he was not. He pushed against the system and the system pushed back, hard. He lost first his dignity, then his free-speech lawsuit, and finally, apparently, his mind. And now none of it can be returned to him, nor can the lives of his victims be returned to their loved ones. He will be vilified, without a doubt. But I hope that somehow, beyond that blame, we might also finally hear his side, and learn some hard lessons from this tragic, senseless episode.

Was he really promised work that was not delivered? If so, why? If not, what happened that made him believe he had been?

Who did get the work he thought he was getting? Were those contractors connected to anyone in City Hall in any way? How many contractors on those jobs were minority-owned and/or Kirkwood-based businesses?

What was the basis of other disputes he had with the city - did any of them have any merit?

Were the parking violations for which he was cited the only ones being enforced? Are code violations typically enforced equally between Meacham Park and the rest of Kirkwood?

These are some of the questions I hope the media will strive to answer - not to lay blame for these deaths anywhere but at the feet of Cookie Thorton - he and he alone took those lives. Rather to determine if any of his frustration was justified, and if so, to begin a real and public discussion on changes that might mitigate such feelings in the future.

I believe this kind of discussion would be much more productive, if also more painful, than whether or not metal detectors should be installed in the city office buildings. If our laws are not enforced consistently and fairly, the laws shouldn’t exist in the first place. If enforcement is used not judicially, but instead to silence, drive out or otherwise harass citizens on the fringes of our communities, we step away from democracy into a chaos that will ultimately swallow us all.

I just found another interesting article at the U.N. Observer. It reports on the recent dismissal of a suit for damages filed by prisoners being held at Guantanamo:

In a 43-page opinion, Circuit Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that applies by its terms to all “persons” did not apply to detainees at Guantánamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law. The Court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that “torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants.” Finally, the Court found that, even if torture and religious abuse were illegal, defendants were immune under the Constitution because they could not have reasonably known that detainees at Guantánamo had any constitutional rights.

Oh, and did you hear about January 12 mass arrest (80 people) at the United States Supreme Court? I didn’t either. Maybe the corporate media was too busy covering Britney Spears.

Personal anecdote time.

Yesterday (Sunday) we went shopping.  We stopped at Office Depot to buy a new chair.  As we approached the entrance, I spotted a friend of ours and called her name.  We gathered outside the entrance to chat.

As we talked, a man approached us, begged our pardon, and asked for a personal opinion.

“Do any of you know what that is?” he asked, pointing across the parking lot.

That is a tower under contruction adjacent to a one-story building that used to be a bank and is now The Islamic Community Center.  We’ve been watching the tower rise for months now, a very careful construction project because it is at least fifty feet tall, maybe more, a fluted column with other motifs on its white surface.

“Oh, it’s a minaret,” our friend said without missing a beat.  Of course I thought makes perfect sense.  “For call to prayer,” she continued.  “Which is beautiful if you’ve ever heard it.”

“Do you think that’s appropriate?” the stranger asked.

“Why not?” I asked.

“You know the first one is at five in the morning,” he said.  “I just wonder what the neighborhood around here will think.”

I turned around and from where we stood we could see three church steeples.  “Probably no more than they think of the bells ringing on those.”

“But not at five A.M.” he said.

I looked at him.  “What the problem?  Bells are okay but a muezzin isn’t?”

“Well, this is a christian community.”

“I live in this community and I’m not a christian.”

He looked at me oddly.

“Get a petition up to shut down the bells ringing,” our friend said, “and we’ll back a ban on call to prayer.”

“I just wonder if anybody was asked what they thought,” this guy said in a huff and started to walk off.

“Evidently,” I said, “or they wouldn’t have gotten a permit to build the damn thing in the first place.”

He didn’t answer, just stalked off.

It won’t surprise me in the coming months to have a canvasser show up at my door now with a petition to have hearings on whether Those People should be allowed to make noise in This Community.

What part of tolerance don’t folks understand?

Oh.  I forgot.  As long as it’s not where we can see or hear it, we’re as tolerant as anyone.

Bhutto is dead.

One tries to be understanding, patient, tries to embrace the tolerance so thoroughly rejected by those who condemn out of hand, with no chance for counterargument, the possibility of dialogue.  Comes a point where one has to simply acknowledge that some people, in some places, just don’t share anything in common with us.

We have tried to explain the Jihadists by looking at history, pointing out where they have just cause to be angry with the West, outraged at what has been done to their people, and that the response can be understood from some exterior position that refrains from taking sides.  Suicide bombing as a cultural aberration can nonetheless be comprehended from the perspective of the political outsider who sees that the only weapon available to those with no voice is sometimes the loudest, most irrational shout imaginable.  We see the situation in the Middle East and shake our heads at the repeated injustices committed over and over again in the name of oil or power or faith, which may in the end all be one and the same.

But the simple truth now seems to be that any political or moral validity these movements may at one time have possessed has been squandered in a mindless lemming-like inability to allow for anything other than the preprocessed, spoonfed insanity of their religious convictions.  The act of destroying those who are not One Of Them has become a self-perpetuating series of negations, a denial that anyone can have any authority to negotiate, to make policy, to attempt reconciliation, to render the situation rational.  Only Allah may be “in charge” and anyone else who attempts to command a plebiscite to accomplish anything that in the least way deviates from the perceived path of the righteous must simply die.

Which in the end will be everyone.  Under such a program, no one may be in charge.

And since Allah chooses to be silent in the present day, the natural condition of such a polity will be subsistence and terror.  All progress must cease by this program.  Everything must be rendered down into a basic mortal pabulum that has no definable shape, no direction, no possibility of Becoming.

These people are insane.  Perhaps not clinically–there may be no organic component to their madness–which makes it all the more terrifying.  They value nothing by which common ground can be found or common cause be made.  Even their leaders probably cannot control them, once the zeal and the arrogance that has no Self at its center takes hold and they believe they are acting according to divine will.

There is no political future in that path and it is abhorrent to all we hold dear.  One may deride the West for many failures to live up to its own promises, criticize us for our lapses in conscience, but in the face of such utter nihilistic perversity one has to admire the things we cling to as noble and true and precious, at the base of which is the assumed freedom to simply have a different opinion.

The genius of the United States and modern Europe lies in the fact that when we have an election, regardless the outcome, we Go Home.  We do not riot.  We do not overturn the Constitution.  We do not have coups.  (One can argue these points, but in the end they are largely true.)  How does one teach that to a nation that seems incapable of accepting differences of opinion?  We see it time and again, when elections here or there or some other place are declared, by someone, to be not the will of the people, the cities burn, the leaders are shot, the military is called out, and democracy is kicked in the balls again.

Bhutto may not have been able to save Pakistan from itself.  But now we’ll never know. A plebiscite of one decided for the whole country.

And people wonder why religion in politics is such a Big Deal.

Here’s how Christina Page addresses this question:

• 98 percent of American women have done it.
• 37 million Americans are currently doing it.
• Most of the GOP candidates oppose it.
  What is it?

“It” is using birth control.   The GOP candidates have made it clear that they oppose the right of women to choose abortions.

The GOP candidates have not yet been forced to explain their generally ridiculous positions on this incredibly important issue of whether birth control should be freely available to consenting adults.  It’s time for this free ride to end.  They should be forced to take a position.  Why?  Honesty on this issue will reveal their ambitions to destroy additional personal liberties in order to hang onto the votes of fundamentalist zealots (I know that this is redundant).  Here’s how Page explains her position:

These guys [GOP candidates] may try to outdo each other on anti-abortion rhetoric and explain, unflinchingly, how doctors will be thrown in jail when Roe fails (an inevitability in their minds). But it’s the contraception question that really scares them. Because once the presidential debate focuses on how the candidates plan to alter the average American’s sex life (made possible thanks to family planning) it is lifted from the pink ghetto of “woman’s issues” and becomes a concern of male voters too.

For more evidence regarding the prevalent GOP position that birth control should not be freely available to American adults, see these previous DI posts:

Beware Claims of Pregnancy Resource Centers

The Bush administration relishes unplanned pregnancies - new evidence.

Focus of religious organization: Ban all birth control

Bush’s new head of family-planning programs opposes birth control

Protecting pharmacists who refuse to fill valid prescriptions for legal drugs

Those abstinence-only programs are really bringing down the teen pregnancy rate . . . or are they?

Conservatives: Stop having sex for the pleasure of it! 

Special proms for prepubescent fundamentalist girls 

It’s that time of year again, when we gear up for the rewards (or disappointments) promised in our celebrations of the Yule Season. Christmas Time! Days of saccharine movies, maudlin songs, a hope for fluffy white snowfall that is somehow miraculously easy to drive through and falls only on grassy areas, and the group psych-up to the kind of good cheer and fellow-feeling that it wouldn’t kill us to feel a bit of all year round. Time for the Peanuts Christmas Special, anticipation of another day of overeating, getting together with people, some of whom we never see for the rest of the year, and an almost forced sincerity.

Don’t get me wrong, I think a lot of this is great stuff. Christmas when I was a child was magic, and if we require visual and aural mnemonic cues to trigger some of that long ago wonderfulness, what harm? Personally, I don’t like It’s A Wonderful Life, but I do like the Peanuts cartoon–even if I’m not a christian, it says something important about the lost meaning of Christmas. My favorite Christmas song is Emerson Lake & Palmer’s I Believe In Father Christmas, but I have to confess that the dynamics of some of those old carols really get to me. Music works regardless of the adapted message and the people who wrote those understood human response to awe and joy.

And the presents! My word, if ever there was a season in which material gain has achieved the level of virtue, it’s Christmas.

But.

(You knew there’d be a but. Of course. So here it is.)

A couple remarks to my last post and Dan’s piece on A Christian Nation caused me to do a little rethinking. I linked Christmas to an unhealthy preoccupation with religious issues. I should clarify, and while I’m at it make a recommendation.

I believe the insistence that our public institutions be made to reflect our world view is perfectly understandable, natural, a human thing. But how can that happen when we don’t all agree on what that view is? This seems like a no-brainer to me.

States in the south have been made to remove any emblems of the Confederacy from their public symbols and buildings. Many people in those states see this as a violation of their right to express their view. As far as it goes, they have a point.

The place where the contention begins is in what that view actually is. Most of the rest of the country see the Confederate flag as, among other things, a symbol of racism and slavery. For the people in Mississippi and Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas, and so forth, it is a symbol of States Rights and an unwillingness to bend to federalism. (Pretty much where is broke in the Civil War, in fact—most southerners, the vast majority, did not own slaves, and probably many of them didn’t care for the institution, but they really resented the North telling them how to live.) This may be splitting hairs, but on slimmer details catastrophes have occurred.

How does this relate to Christmas? Very simply. The reality of Christmas is that it has become a secular holiday. I don’t care what the iconography implies, Christmas is a time of family reunion, generosity, good food, and a celebration of what we consider best in each other. In m opinion, that’s pretty spiritual. After all, the actual meaning of the New Testament story has been transmogrified by our community needs into an idealized representation of what it means to Do Good Unto Each Other. We don’t need to believe in a deity to Get That.

And it hasn’t been about salvation for a long time. The essential religious message, for better or worse, has been “revised” into a secular message that basically comes down to “You done all right for a year now, it’s time to set aside being Scrooge and enjoy Giving.”

No one doesn’t get that. And for most of us, that’s what all the lights and the trees and the holly and the mistletoe and, yes, even the manger scenes is all about. Mary didn’t get a baby shower, so the Wise Men show up to give the kid a Good Start. The meaning is abstracted out by decades of ritual celebration so that the underlying theological message is, well, optional.

On that basis, we really shouldn’t get all bent out of shape over some Christmas decorations in or on or around public facilities. We risk becoming institutional Scrooges by standing on the letter of the law here.

The problem, though, is for those people who insist that what most of us see as the “meaning of Christmas” (whether we consciously recognize it or not) is in Error, the issue isn’t over the decorations but what they insist the decorations mean. (It’s not over slavery, it’s States Rights.) And our response…

Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Because when confronted by what we think Christmas means, a lot of people waffle. When pressed, they realize that what Charlie Brown rails against every year as the Commercialization of Christmas is kind of cheap and sordid. It’s not that they don’t believe that that’s what Christmas is, but that they don’t want it to mean that. They get embarrassed into admitting that, yeah, it’s the religious message that’s important, isn’t it?

And as soon as they admit that, the trouble begins and we’re in court arguing about removing another manger scene from in front of City Hall.

To paraphrase (or butcher) the Bard, Coal In The Stockings of Both Your Houses!

The commercial element will be there no matter what. That’s inevitable since it is, as they say, a time of giving.

What the manger represents in my mind is, today, a representation of the Ideal Family being visited by those who wish it well, strangers bearing gifts to the less fortunate, or to those who have special reason to celebrate. It does represent a kind of peace motif. It has become something other than its original intention. We have made it so, and that symbol is not a bad thing.

The tree was never a Christian symbol in the first place, nor most of the rest of it. Christmas is one of the most retrofitted, adaptive holidays we have, which is why it has clung to our cultural fabric so long and so strongly.

But it is, as such, secular.

This makes it like school prayer. A moment of silence to allow students to indulge their faiths is not an endorsement of a particular religion, but an acknowledgment that people have faith. But it’s their business. People privately will take what meaning they want from the symbols of Christmas—that’s the nature of symbols—while publicly we acknowledge the Community Message of the holiday. Once a year we try to recover what joy we found as children wrapped in the warmth of a group celebration that revolved around Giving. Giving of gifts, sure, but also of time, of attention, of love, or consideration, of Presence.

Christmas is not a Christian holiday except for those who choose to see it as such. It is Our Holiday, whatever world view we might hold. We’ve made it that way. The main character for Christmas to us is not Jesus, but Santa Claus. If I choose to explain this by saying that he was one of the Three Wise Men, that’s as valid a notion as any other. (I don’t, actually, but you see what I mean.)

So my solution for this silliness is to urge people to simply accept Christmas for what it has become and stop insisting that it must be Something Else for everyone. Once we publicly acknowledge that Christmas is a secular holiday—and that we’re okay with that—we can stop inflicting our petty religious-driven politics on everyone else and get to the thing that’s most important.

Being together.

Listening to a talk show at work yesterday, I heard some fall-out from the recent suicide of the young girl who had been “duped” on MySpace.  When I first learned of this tragedy, I ran through a series of thoughts about the dangers posed by the interfaces we use these days, which put us often too early and unprepared into contact with things in another era we would simply have had no opportunity to encounter.  This girl was a casualty of the wavefront of experience that comes now in new forms and through media that never before existed.  

I never once thought it was her fault.

How could you?  She’d been deceived.  Inexperienced, unwitting, she invested a bit too much, and it put her over the edge to discover that what she thought was “real” was in fact a deception.

History is full of examples of people committing suicide over things with only marginal reality.  Especially among adolescents.  We’ve learned in the last decade a great deal more about brain development than ever before, and one of those things is that adolescence is the time of some of the most intricate and fragile growth–physically–within the brain.  The hormone storm that is unleashed at the onset of puberty, the growth spurts visible in every other part of the body, the physiological changes of emergent sexuality and secondary sexual characteristics, all have their equivalent in cognitive development.  It makes perfect sense after the fact, but for a long, long time we blithely assumed that adolescents were more or less just like adults.  Instead we find that, because of the rapid and complex changes they are going through, teen-agers who appear out-of-control, impulsive, overly-sensitive, clueless, clumsy–in short, borderline insane–really are all those things and it is the responsibility of the adults around them to set guidelines and provide aid to get them through this period to the other side and (hopefully) “normality” and sanity.  (When this fails, we have all manner of screwed up adult.)

Which is why holding a teenager responsible for not behaving like an adult is absurd on its face.

And consequences of this journey can run the gamut from perpetual clumsiness to neuroses to schizophrenia to manic-depression to suicide.

It is one of the challenges of our new awareness of these things to take actions to mitigate the worst effects and to do what we can to ensure a healthy mind in the emergent adult.

Something like this tragic suicide occurs, though, and when we listen to what comes after we discover how unlikely that is for some people.  Many people emailed this talk show to express their opinion that the dead girl “got what was coming to her.”  It was somehow her fault.

When we tease through this senseless reaction, we come to the bottom line opinion that what she was doing on MySpace was something she shouldn’t have been doing, something that is to some people Bad.  In fact immoral.  Evil.  That she reaped the rewards of an inappropriate indulgence.

This is pathetic.  But rather than condemn it outright, maybe we ought to take a look at this and see where it comes from.  This echoes similar responses to other events, like rape.  “She shouldn’t have been out that late, she shouldn’t have been with Those People, she shouldn’t have been dressed Like That.”  We’ve heard all this.  After enough of it, you’d think the poor rapist had absolutely no choice but to attack That Female.  It was all her fault, she brought it on herself.

Blaming the victim.

This happens to men, too, but in less obvious ways.  (more…)

Okay, perhaps I’m being a bit harsh. But I found some videos on YouTube purporting to show simple homemade tricks for getting power from essentially nothing. The culprit calls himself HouseholdHacker These are very slickly directed and composed, very amateur-looking videos, full of straight-faced monologue and how-to demonstrations, illustrating nothing real.

Sure, the videos seem to show how to power a 25″ TV from a single AAA battery, or an iPod from an onion. But I — as an individual who actually has a clue about how electricity works — am puzzled at the number of responders who actually try these things an