Radical Pantheist

Impeach Obama

2010-06-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

Virtually all of my progressive friends have looked puzzled when I showed them how I’d cut the word “Bush” off an “Impeach Bush” bumper sticker, and stuck “Impeach” over the red-white-and blue sunrise logo on the “Obama ‘08” sticker, still on the tailgate of my pickup, so that it reads “Impeach Obama.”

I didn’t actually vote for Barack Obama. Being a traitor to both my race and my gender, I voted for Cynthia McKinney, the African American Green Party candidate, who was also most closely aligned with my own political principles—the only truly satisfying way for me to spend time in the voting booth in recent years. But being a realist, I also wanted Obama to win, lesser-of-two-evils-wise; and so I helped my local Democratic friends campaign for him, and even wrote columns on my blog giving him qualified support, for his “transformative” potential—although always leavened with suspicion of his corporate ties and his fealty to the “war on terror” (I called him “the Lion of Afghanistan”).

I wrote Obama off after three months of his presidency. Even at that point, he had already proven himself worse than my lowest expectations of him, and had stolen whatever glimmers of hope he had raised in me with his stirring campaign rhetoric. But I kept the bumper sticker on the truck anyway, just to annoy the local racists, and resigned myself to the one-corporate-party status quo. I quit writing the blog not long after I lost any hope in Obama—not seeing much hope in the blogosphere either—and began seeking other avenues to effect change.

It didn’t occur to me that Obama was worth spending any more attention on (I avoid listening to him now, feeling the same kind of disgust when I hear him that I used to experience with Bush) until the Gulf oil massacre. I use that term because, if there were ever a crime of “ecocide,” this would be it. And from my observation, it seems Obama has done everything in his power to make it worse. That is to say, it has become more apparent each day this crisis passes (and as I wrote over a year ago in my last blog post), that the 21st-century American presidency has no true power, beyond that allotted by the corporate/military dictatorship that actually rules America. Obama, the living embodiment of the new multinational order, is the perfect spokesmodel-in-chief, bowing obsequiously to every corporate command. Like all modern presidents, he has a job that gives him plenty of time to play golf.

Depending on how the lessons sink in, the Deepwater Horizon explosion can almost be viewed as a blessing, in the way that it has exposed the rot at the center of American government, and the nest of serpents feeding on democracy’s corpse. This episode, in all its apocalyptic horror, starkly reveals how government and corporate interests have become so intertwined that you can no longer see the line that is supposed to separate them. Two months into this tragedy, and the question of “Who’s in charge—BP or the government?” still lacks a clear answer. Corporate secrets have become a national security issue; and the American people, no matter how total the destruction of their livelihoods and way of life by a corporation seemingly immune to public accountability, are “out of the loop.”

The rudiments of totalitarianism are evident throughout this most recent application of the Shock Doctrine: the (and let’s call a spade a spade) conspiracy between government and industry to keep the American people in the dark; the use of state power and law enforcement agencies at every level of government to give primacy to corporate interests; the unembarrassed restriction of freedom of the press and freedom of movement; the police state mentality pervasive around the Gulf coast; the silent, defeated submission of the proles.

I suppose it is the immensity of this disaster that finally moved me to get out my scissors and slap the “Impeach” sticker in front of Obama’s name on my tailgate. But even as I laughed at myself for the utter frivolity of my gesture, I had to think: why not impeach Obama? Didn’t I want Bush impeached, for his multiple violations of the Constitution and the rule of law, and to restore accountability to the American government? And has Obama pursued justice on a single one of the issues that I thought Bush and his henchmen should be held responsible for?

Obama’s failure in that regard alone should technically justify his impeachment, for his violation of his presidential oath to uphold the Constitution. But to make matters worse, the Obama administration is regularly, even in his own bureaucracy, referred to as “Bush’s third term.” In other words, especially in matters of foreign policy and national security, Obama continues to commit many of the same crimes of state that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should have been—were this an actual constitutional republic—impeached for. And, at least in the case of his approval of execution of American citizens without due process, Obama’s own constitutional violations exceed Bush’s.

Wouldn’t it be hypocritical to demand Bush’s impeachment, and excuse Obama’s own constitutional crimes? If I think Cindy Sheehan is correct in identifying Obama as a “war criminal”—which I do, from his torture policy in Afghanistan, to the doubtless ongoing electronic surveillance of the American public’s private business (I couldn’t care less about the legal fig leaf they slapped on that)—then shouldn’t I be demanding that Obama, too, be held accountable for his flaunting of the constitution, his betrayal of his oath, his ongoing deception of the public?

The objection from my progressive friends is easy to imagine: impeachment of Obama would be playing right into the hands of Tea Party fascists, and give them an opening to turn the federal government into the theocracy they so desire. And this objection can’t be dismissed lightly. As an official philosopher opined recently in the New York Times, the insensibility of the Tea Party is a form of “nihilism,” a blindly destructive element swirling in the current of our present political culture—the violently authoritarian mentality at the root of our ancestral colonialism, reborn again. Not to be trifled with. The wholesale abandonment of critical thinking, and the disruption of public meetings, are far too resonant of the early Nazis for comfort. Sinclair Lewis was right: there is no longer any doubt that fascism, American-style, carries a cross and waves the flag. Hitler’s base constituency was rural conservatives.

But I think we have to look at this strategically. In the first place, impeaching Obama is the right and principled thing to do. And we who advocated for Bush’s impeachment remain open to the charge of hypocrisy, as long as we’re still protecting our guy, if we think he’s committed the same crimes. We fall into the moral sewer with Rush Limbaugh and his ilk.

Secondly, if the Republicans recapture the House of Representatives this November—which must be regarded as at least an even possibility at this writing—how long will it be before some conservolibertarian hotshot introduces articles of impeachment against Obama, thus setting the impeachment narrative, and ignoring the true crimes of which Bush and Cheney were also guilty. In an economic climate as volatile as this, anything could happen then—including race war, because African Americans would quite correctly see an element of racism, on vivid display ever since the inauguration, in any Republican impeachment effort.

(To put this into personal context: a white leftist’s call for impeachment could just as easily be seen as racist. To argue my defense, I would point to the fact that, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, I was writing a regular column in West Virginia’s oldest newspaper, in which I called for Bill Clinton to do the honorable thing and resign, for lying so flagrantly to the American people. I soon reversed myself, when the Republicans impeached, because in my opinion his lie didn’t amount to “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The point being, I’ve also taken a public stand against a white Democratic president.)

One of the ways that a Republican impeachment effort could play out would be a repetition of the Clinton storyline, with a public backlash against the GOP for overreaching, and the triumphant re-election of Barack Obama in 2012. Is that what we really want or need?

The third strategic consideration is the one most germane to me. There is a growing consensus across the political spectrum, left to right, that the American government is broken, and needs fixing. The white men of property who constructed the elegant Newtonian machinery of government in the US Constitution, with its elaborate checks and balances, were extremely wary of the unwashed public, and kept that wariness in mind throughout their deliberations in that hot Philadelphia summer of 1787. They didn’t leave many avenues open for a direct public challenge to the government. The power to impeach, initiated as it is in the lower house, the people’s house, is one of those few avenues.

Over two centuries later, with the walls of corporatism closing around us and the republic imperiled, we would be fools not to avail ourselves of every opportunity left to “get our country back.” That’s something we all want, even if we have different ideas about what it means. In any event, we can never actually go back, because, in so many ways—socially, economically, culturally, ecologically, and certainly politically—the old America is over. It’s dead. We can only go forward.

Starting from where we are today, in any direction, to rebuild a government that is responsive to the people, will be a multi-step process that will need all our input to get there. For me, the idea of President Biden is just a first, hopefully sudden step.

Maybe then—especially if the impeachment process begins on the left—the power elite will start taking the peasants seriously. And the sooner that happens, the better.

Constitution 2.0

2009-05-05T11:47:00.000-07:00

Around the time of my last blog post, over two months ago, I had a remarkable email correspondence with two friends, which started me on an inner political journey that led to a vision of America reborn. To realize that vision, we can keep the Preamble and the Bill of Rights, but everything else in the Constitution needs an upgrade.

Both of my email correspondents are (like me) boomer generation and lifelong progressive activists. But unlike me, they are both women. They also share the characteristic (perhaps not that unusual in the internet age) that I’ve never met either of them face-to-face.

Our conversation began around the subject of 9/11 truth, and how a strategy for the truth movement could be expanded to address a more comprehensive agenda, and become a larger movement for social and political transformation in the US (as I wrote about in my recent essay, “9/11 truth force”). It concluded about a week later with the consensus, arrived at independently by both friends, that the political change America really needs is impossible under the current circumstances. Only an extreme national crisis will break the media spell that still holds most Americans in thrall, and make change possible.

I was somewhat surprised how similar my friends’ opinions were. But since they mirrored my own—especially about, as one friend put it, the “hidden backroom corporate control that’s taken over the world”—I wasn’t really that surprised. It’s an opinion found all over the blogs, and out in the Zeitgeist. Where I disagreed with my friends was in the appropriate course of action. I wondered if this difference might be a gender thing.

Answering my rhetorical question about how to shovel frogs into a wheelbarrow, they both spoke eloquently about the difficulties of organizing, both at the national and local levels, in a culture as fragmented as America. Their stories sounded quite familiar, suggesting that there is a national core of activists with similar experience and outlook. And both my friends have taken the same path, in light of the circumstances—choosing to work on the issues that mean most to them until the world, of necessity and its own accord, changes.

When one of them expressed some frustration about finding outlets for her writing, I suggested she start a blog. Her reply echoed a feeling I’ve long had about the internet. She said there are already “enough activists talking to each other.” The problem is breaking through to the majority of Americans who still get most of their news from the propaganda arm of the military-industrial complex, the corporate media. She doesn’t find blogging “useful.”

Although there are many arguments to the contrary, on one level she is right, as I myself have previously written. There is already more information (and certainly more opinions) on the web than any one person could possibly read, and is all the information we need to move the country in a progressive direction. What is lacking is a concentrated action component, beyond single-issue and electoral politics, to create that movement. And here is where I disagreed with my friends, and why it might be a gender thing.

Whereas they—with an entirely logical view of the relative hopelessness of the new age of “hope,” the fragmented character of 21st century American consciousness, and the thankless difficulty of grassroots organizing—think we need to wait for a national crisis for the American people to awake, I (in my male way) think that we should already be about the business of creating the butterfly that will emerge (hopefully) when the national cocoon splits open. We should be building a grassroots progressive infrastructure that gives people something to turn to when the top-heavy political and economic institutions collapse, and America needs to rebuild a more decentralized government, and is looking for guidance to chart the future.

My immediate fear is that “the crisis,” in the form of gradual economic implosion, is already upon us. Yet we present no real progressive alternative for people to rally around. If the “liberal” Obama fails, to whom will average Americans turn? This could easily be a recipe for fascism—real fascism, not the smiley-faced kind we have now—coming soon from a tea party near you.

The email conversation presented me with a dilemma. From the very first article I wrote for the internet over five years ago, I have been discussing strategies for organizing a national progressive movement, and the need to rebuild American government from the ground up. For the last seven years, I’ve been part of a nonpartisan and non-ideological local movement here in Hampshire County, West Virginia, to rebuild and decentralize our own county government (a movement recently stopped in its tracks by an Orwellian ruling from a corrupt WV Supreme Court), and writing about that.

It seemed my friend was right. From my experience, what use was blogging?

Around the time of my email conference, I had a lot of extra work around the farm, and my 60th birthday was coming up, so I decided to take a break from the blog and think about why I should continue this seemingly fruitless effort, beyond entertaining my friends, indulging my ego, and contributing yet another offbeat frequency to the white noise of near-infinite cyberspace. Mostly though, I wanted to figure out why there is no national movement (outside some fringe websites and the Green Party) thinking about creating a post-imperial American government, to take the place of our long-lost republic when the Empire finally, inevitably (and perhaps soon) collapses. How could I help to make that happen? What more could I say or do?

A big part of the political problem is Barack Obama. Although a number of my more mainstream liberal friends still want to give him a chance, I think I’ve seen enough. I still admire his many gifts, and totally recognize the difference between a Democratic and a Republican president in how they can affect issues I believe in. I also agree with Glenn Greenwald that the release of the CIA torture memos was an act of courage, and another example of Obama’s strategic brilliance—he had to know that the memos themselves would generate their own momentum. But mostly due to the diminished power of the modern American president (whose sole function in post-democratic America is serving as the mouthpiece-in-chief of the military industrial complex and its corporate sponsors), and his own too cautious and deceptive nature (or is that realism?), I think Barack Obama is personally incapable of delivering a change that I can truly believe in.

It’s not entirely his fault. Because I have lost my faith in this American government, no individual man or woman could ever bring it back—however much “hope” they offer.

But let’s face it: looking at the poll numbers at this point, most Americans—and most progressives—want Obama to succeed. And more importantly, they accept that the paradigm that the corporate media creates is the proper one in which to measure “success.” Most Americans and most progressives believe in their hearts that the Constitution still works, and that the American government is still legitimate. They don’t recognize that six decades of the national security state have turned their beloved Constitution into a piece of trash—“a goddamned piece of paper,” as George W. Bush is reported to have described it. And Obama isn’t treating it much better.

American democracy truly died when the national security establishment murdered John F. Kennedy. And until more people start admitting that to themselves, and wake up from their media-induced hypnosis, we will be trapped in our ever-present downward spiral of Wall Street thievery, environmental destruction, media brainwashing, rampant militarism and random planetary violence, all legitimized by our nostalgic faith in a no longer functioning document.

No matter what single-issue progressive battles we may win, the fact is, we have already lost the war. Real democracy is gone, and won’t ever be recovered on the federal level. Washington is occupied territory, swarming with the enemies of the people.

I enjoyed my break from the blog. The spare time that I usually spend researching and writing, I used instead to practice music and yoga, two other activities I’ve done most of my life that I find just as fulfilling, and that enriched the time around my birthday with the renewed (and comforting) realization that you never reach the end of learning, especially about the cosmic architecture of the human body. But I continued to ponder the question of how to change the American government like a Zen koan.

Towards the end of March, I learned that Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst turned progressive hero, was going to be speaking at Shepherd University, a little over an hour from here, on the subject of holding the Bush administration accountable for torture. I’ve admired him since he first entered the progressive universe some years ago, and since his subject was a perfect illustration of the government’s dysfunction, I decided to go and put my question to him. Figuring it likely that I’d only get one chance to ask, I spent the week formulating the question in my mind.

When I arrived at the lecture hall, I was greeted by a couple of members of the local chapter of Amnesty International, co-sponsors of McGovern’s appearance, who were passing out index cards on which to write questions he would answer after his talk. This was disappointing, because I had to skip some of the nuances in my question, and the prologue, in order to fit it on the card. Here’s (approximately) what I wrote:

“The issue of not holding American officials responsible for the crime of torture is, like single-payer health care or, here in West Virginia, mountaintop removal, a symptom of a deeper problem—the failure of democracy. Here again, the will of the majority [this was before the recent CBS and ABC polls showing 6 in 10 don’t want torture investigated] is thwarted by a corrupt and dysfunctional government. Isn’t it time for the American government to be replaced? Is a Constitution written for a pre-industrial society of 3 million citizens adequate to govern a post-industrial society of 300 million?”

After returning the question to the Amnesty people (and making sure they could read my handwriting), I went to use the restroom. When I washed my hands, I recognized the guy who was using the sink area to sort out papers. It was Ray McGovern.

If I’d had my wits about me, I would have asked him if this was the best the university could do for a Green Room; but instead, I just kidded him about his last-minute preparations for the talk. He smiled and introduced himself, and I introduced myself, and just to make conversation, I told him I was sorry I didn’t have space on the card for the prologue to my question, and he said, “Well, why don’t you just give it to me now?”

So I said, “Okay, here it is: besides our gray hair, you and I have several other things in common. We’re both veterans; we both worked for the CIA; and we both want a new investigation of 9/11. The latter two characteristics we share with former CIA agent Robert Baer.” With a broadening smile, he nodded and said, “Yes, yes,” when I came to the part about Baer, and then I gave him a thumbnail version of my question, which seemed to intrigue him. He said he’d give it some thought, and would answer after the talk. We chatted briefly (though I never got around to telling him that my job at the CIA was as a part-time, low-level clerk and manual laborer while I was in high school) and then I excused myself to go get a seat.

It was easy to see why McGovern was a popular briefer at the CIA. He has an Irish storyteller’s flair, and a kind of leprechaun persona that allows him to mimic the identities of the subjects of his stories and jokes. At the same time, his argument was well organized (and laid out in his recent articles on torture) and he was able to convey the serious nature of the crimes and the depth of his own outrage. He also possesses a spiritual calm and sense of compassion I’ve seen before in those who have, in whatever form, seen “the light.”

The audience of about 100 people was about two-thirds students, and one-third baby boomer progressives. After the talk, most of the students, who’d been assigned the lecture, got up and left, leaving us old folks to hang around for the questions. Mine came up about third. He stumbled a few times on the barely legible handwriting. When he came to the end, he said, “This is a good question.”

I wish I had been taking notes, because I don’t want to mischaracterize his answer. But he essentially said that, even though he has serious problems with the way the government currently operates, he won’t give up on the Constitution. Like many liberals and progressives, he sees the Constitution as our only protection against the wealthy and powerful, the last refuge of the rule of law and people power against the corporate state.

In all honesty, I wasn’t surprised at his answer—because it is the mainstream progressive consensus. Most of those who have publicly challenged the Bush administration’s practice of torture have done so in defense of both international law and the US Constitution. And there is a very legitimate concern among progressives that opening up the Constitution to changes at this time, especially in an Article V Convention, will only open a Pandora’s Box of corporate-friendly delegates stripping away what few protections individual liberty and the public good have left—a concern I wholeheartedly share.

I was more interested in how he answered a couple other questions. When asked, “Was 9/11 an inside job?” he went on at great length in defense of the 9/11 truth movement, and several times emphasized the importance of a new investigation. He was vague about his own view of what happened on 9/11, except to say that he doesn’t go as far as David Ray Griffin, with whose work he seemed quite familiar. (Wanting to avoid the stereotype of the irrational truther, I resisted the urge to call out, “What about the physical evidence?” A week later, the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal published an article conclusively proving the existence of a high-tech military-grade nanothermite explosive in the dust of the World Trade Center. I regret my reluctance to speak.)

McGovern’s other answer that interested me came in response to an audience member who expressed his doubt that there would be any meaningful prosecution of the torture perpetrators. McGovern grimly replied that he shared the questioner’s doubts—which struck me as ironic confirmation of my question’s premise of constitutional dysfunction.

When the talk was over, I told him I was disappointed in his answer, because I think the Constitution has, unfortunately, failed. We agreed to disagree. I recommended, in support of my opinion, that he read the book I was carrying, “Democracy, Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.”

Author Sheldon Wolin, a political science professor emeritus at Princeton, attributes American-style totalitarianism to a “schizoid condition” in the American public, found, for example, in the now-rebranded Global War on Terror, “a war without mobilization, a war where the citizenry is a potential target but not a participant.” The public’s schizoid condition, he continues, “…is strangely reproduced in domestic political matters. While the war on terrorism induces feelings of helplessness and a natural tendency to look toward the government, to trust it, the domestic message of distrust of government produces alienation from government. The people are not transformed into a manipulable mass shouting “Sieg Heil.” Instead they are discouraged, inclined to abdicate a political role, yet paradoxically trusting of their ‘wartime’ leaders.

“The domestic message says that the citizenry should distrust its own elected government, thereby denying themselves the very instrument that democracy is supposed to make available to them. A democracy that is persuaded to distrust itself, that applauds the rhetoric of ‘get government off your backs,’ ‘it’s your money being wasted,’ and ‘you should decide how to spend it,’ renounces the means of its own efficacy in favor of a laissez-faire politics, an antiegalitarian politics, where, as in the market, the stronger powers prevail. What is revealed or, rather, confirmed is that the consummated union of corporate power and governmental power heralds the American version of a total system.”

Fascism: the union of state and corporate power. That is, our present de facto system of government: a corporately “managed” democracy. Not the real thing.

McGovern said he’d check out the book. And speaking of books, I thanked him for recommending (in his recent article, “Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President”) the book, “JFK and the Unspeakable,” by Jim Douglas, which I’d been intending to read for months. He asked, “Have you read it?” I said, “Not yet, but I mean to” (I finished it last week), and he vigorously encouraged me to read it. Since the central thesis of the book is the CIA’s role as assassin—on behalf of the national security state—in Kennedy’s murder, I took it as a serious recommendation coming from a patriotic CIA veteran like McGovern. But again, I was struck by the irony—he knows that Dallas was the coup d’etat that turned the Constitution into a moot point.

While looking over my library last week, I came across my autographed copy of “Shadows of Hope: A Freethinker’s Guide to Politics in the Time of Clinton,” by Sam Smith, the lifelong editor and publisher of The Progressive Review. The inscription reads, “We’ll miss you but know you’ll keep the faith.” Sam and I had been working together for a few years in the early ’90s on local drug policy reform in DC, and I was getting ready to move to West Virginia.

I agreed with Sam politically on pretty much everything but Bill Clinton.

Our allies from the national drug policy reform movement were telling us in meetings that the Clinton campaign people were advising them to keep quiet during the campaign, and after the election they could work together on reform (which, of course, turned out to be a blatant lie). I was convinced at that time that Clinton was a closet progressive (sound familiar?). But Sam was infinitely more skeptical, seeing Clinton as just another corporate tool. As we all know now, Sam turned out to be right—just as he’s been right about Obama.

When I noticed “Shadows of Hope” on the bookshelf, I had a small epiphany about how the Democrats have substituted “hope” for genuine populism in their presidential campaigns—Clinton as much as Obama. “Hope” is all they have to offer, really, because—as we now know, after the first hundred days of Obama—they are proscribed by circumstances from ever offering any real “change.”

At this point, I’d like to confess that I may have something to do with the Democrats’ marketing of “hope.” What I’m about to tell you has never appeared in print before, although I told a few friends about it at the time (I don’t remember if I ever told Sam). But here’s the story:

After Clinton was nominated in August 1992, there were a lot of articles in the media about how open the Clinton campaign was to ideas from the grassroots. So I decided to contribute an idea. Then-president George Bush (it’s like a nightmare that never goes away, isn’t it?) was running for re-election on his foreign policy credentials, especially his Gulf War victory and the collapse of the Soviet Union. I wrote a memo that I delivered to Frank Greer, who was advising Clinton, by dropping it off with the receptionist at Greer’s office off Pennsylvania Avenue. The memo suggested that Al Gore (who, as a senator, had more foreign policy chops than the governor of Arkansas) start questioning Bush’s “success,” especially in light of the corruption that was emerging in Russia, and Saddam Hussein’s unimpeded slaughter of the Shiites in southern Iraq at the end of the Gulf War.

The last paragraph of the memo begins: “This is a campaign of hope against fear…”

Since I was a known radical around DC at the time, I told Greer in my cover letter that it would probably be better if I stayed anonymous. So I wasn’t surprised that I never heard from him. But the weekend after I dropped off the memo, both the Washington Post and the New York Times mentioned that Clinton’s stump speech had a “new ending,” featuring the phrase, “hope against fear”—which, as I recall, the Times even used as a pull quote. The campaign had changed other language in my sentence, but kept the rhetorical triplet construction. And shortly thereafter, Gore started getting more aggressive about Bush’s foreign policy.

Pleased with my success, I sent the campaign another, shorter memo about a month later, via the same route, with some tactical suggestions. They appeared to implement just about everything I suggested, but I still never heard back from anybody, which was fine with me. My band played at the Montgomery County MD Democrats’ Clinton Inaugural Ball—probably my greatest moment of happiness with our “two-party” political system.

There are a couple of reasons, besides the remarkable synchronicity, that I think I may have contributed the phrase “hope against fear” to Clinton’s stump speech (and almost two decades later, Obama still uses the same phrase). The first is that the natural opposite of “hope” is “despair,” not “fear.” It’s not that you don’t see “hope” and “fear” rhetorically paired (especially since 1992), but it was theretofore a relatively unusual juxtaposition of terms, and suspiciously coincidental that Clinton started using it just a few days after I sent the memo.

The second reason is more subjective: it’s one of the odder patterns in my life that I have been the sometimes anonymous contributor of memes to public consciousness. This incident fits that pattern. For example, the slogan, “The war on drugs is a war on people,” is the title I gave to a pamphlet I wrote in 1989 for the National Pledge of Resistance, who distributed it widely. I still hear that expression verbatim on the radio from the mouth of an occasional talkshow caller. The first use of the slogan “No blood for oil” in the Gulf War that I am aware of (it had been used in an earlier Middle East crisis), was to accompany my cover art for the September 1990 Washington Peace Letter (a drawing of leaking oil barrels emblazoned with a skull and crossbones) which was reproduced on a button distributed nationally by progressive propagandists Donnelly Colt. (I actually wanted the button’s caption to be a question, “Blood or oil?” But I was wisely overruled by the ever-militant Lisa Fithian, a brilliant woman who was then coordinator of the Washington Peace Center, and who later went on to national renown as a strategist for Justice for Janitors. She insisted on “No blood for oil.”)

Additionally, it seems to me that out-of-the-mainstream theorizing became ever-so-slightly more respectable when my first internet article, “Paranoid shift,” was republished at the top of Tikkun’s homepage, under the headline, “George Bush’s conspiracy.” The term “Charlie Brown Democrats” gained popularity after it appeared in my 2004 essay, “21st Century American Revolution.” And more recently, the theory advanced in my article, “Obama and 9/11”—that Obama’s personal awareness that the CIA killed Jack Kennedy colors his presidential decision-making—has already become conventional wisdom at a number of blogs.

Yet for all the small influence I’ve been able to exercise (for what it’s worth) with my writing and meme-planting, I have been frustrated in the extreme that no one seems to have taken up my call for a new Constitution—a persistent theme in my essays over the past decade. This leads me to the sad conclusion that I just haven’t made the case. And neither, apparently, has anyone else.

I can only conclude that a subject of this magnitude requires a book-length treatment to be considered seriously—perhaps the book that I have started and abandoned (for various reasons, none particularly good) so many times over the years, about why we need a new Constitution, and how we get there.

Accordingly, I’ve decided, for the immediate future, to quit writing the blog on a regular basis, in order to put my writing time and energy into finally finishing that book, and making the case I think needs to be made. I may pop up at the blog on occasion, when I’m feeling particularly outraged, or need to express a sense of impending peril. But for the next six months, at least, I’ll be working on organizing my collected thoughts and research on the subject of a new Constitution into a readable book form.

So why do we need a new Constitution?

If the generation of Americans who formed our Constitution were transported through time to the early 21st century, Federalist and Antifederalist alike would be horrified at the government their work had wrought.

Instead of a federation of independent states, where power arises from local political machines, and political independence is based on the economic independence of citizens, ninety percent of whom are self-employed farmers, merchants and artisans (as they were in 1790), the founding generation would see a massively centralized federal empire, its standing armies spread across the globe—a government with little decent respect for the opinions of humankind; a government where power flows from the top and every president is, as Bob Woodward says, “surrounded by a phalanx of CEOs,” and where ninety percent of American citizens toil in debt slavery for corporate masters, to slake the greed of the power elite.

Even the Antifederalists would be shocked at how their warnings about the evils of centralized power have been so fully realized.

They would see a government presently scrambling to rescue the preceding administration from answering to the rule of law and to the precepts of the Constitution and international treaties, the sovereign law of the land. A government continuing the Bush Doctrine of military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, and including in its cabinet a held-over Secretary of Defense who has served as a Bush family operative in many intelligence and defense capacities over the years, including as CIA director. A government answering to the same finance, energy and defense interests that every administration since JFK has loyally served. A government that, in all ways, unites corporate and state interests.

The founding generation would be hard pressed to explain how their intricate system of checks and balances could be so easily packaged and sold off to the highest bidder. They’d be scratching their heads over a judiciary branch that entertains the absurdity that a corporation—a dangerous entity that needs strict control (Thomas Jefferson wanted a constitutional amendment to that effect)—should have the same rights as a “person;” or that the Bill of Rights has so little relevance to post-9/11 America. They’d be flummoxed that the government has expanded in such a way that the legislative branch would include a Senate where a minority of the US population would control a majority of the votes, and a Representative would have more than 22 times the number of constituents stipulated in Article I (30,000, because the Framers thought 40,000 was too many). In other words, every citizen has less than 5 percent of the representation in Congress the Framers intended.

The nation’s founders would be most disturbed, however, by the change in character of the executive branch, and by the imperial nature of the 21st-century presidency. A president who has assumed legislative power, in the declaration of pre-emptive wars—where the intelligence has been “fixed” to suit the policy—and judicial power, in affixing “signing statements” that give the executive’s interpretation of law priority (“If the president does it, it’s legal.”), resembles more the tyrants whose dictatorial power the Framers feared, than the president they modeled on the relatively modest George Washington. They’d be most astonished to hear that two sociopaths, who share the characteristic common to all serial killers of a history of ruthless cruelty to animals, had occupied the offices of president and vice president of the United States.

On the other hand, it is not surprising that the financial descendants of the colonial aristocracy who wrote the Constitution should have spent the past two centuries consolidating their wealth and power, and frustrating the promise—widely held throughout early America, as Alexis de Tocqueville discovered—that political equality would eventually yield, as a natural consequence, economic equality.

In “Democracy, Inc.”, Sheldon Wolin gets to the root of why popular movements for reform in America are so often frustrated, even with a sympathetic president. He traces it to a strain of elitism inherent in the very notion of “republican” government (echoed today in the right wing talking point that “America is a republic, not a democracy”). Wolin follows the intellectual development of “republicanism” from Machiavelli, who never argued “in defense of popular participation, much less of democratization of politics,” but nevertheless “favored the people [rather than aristocrats] as a reliable ‘foundation’ for power principally because they did not demand much,” to the 17th-century English civil wars, where “advocates of republicanism proposed a blend of Machiavellian competence with Puritan notions of an ‘elect’ to produce a new variant of elitism.” It was this elite concept of republicanism that migrated to the New World and, Wolin says, “dominated” the formation of the American republic.

“With the possible (and ambivalent) exception of Jefferson,” he writes, “the American republicans were steadfast critics of democracy. When they decided that it was time to draft a new constitution, they treated as axiomatic that a modern political system had to make concessions to democratic sentiments without conceding governance to ‘the people.’ Accordingly they composed a masterful translation of republicanism that drew a line indicating what was to be allowed and what excluded from the democratic aspirations aroused by the struggle for independence from Britain.

“While they recognized the ‘people’ as a political presence, they proceeded to dilute the potential of democratic power by constraints intended to filter out any grand schemes. An elaborate system of checks and balances, separation of powers, an Electoral College to select the president, and, later, judicial review were designed to make it next to impossible for popular majorities to institute policies actually in the interests of the majority…The framers of the Constitution were the first founders of modern managed democracy.”

The reason corporations have taken over the people’s government? It’s in our national DNA.

There have been brief flurries of popular democracy throughout American history—the Jackson era, the Populists and Progressives, the New Deal, the Sixties—but the steady trend has been the concentration of wealth and power. As historian Michael Lind has observed, Progressives made a devil’s bargain a century ago when they agreed to the growth of the federal government as a check on Big Business, rather than checking the power of corporations at that early stage by more strictly regulating monopolies. Twentieth-century American history is thus a story of continuing centralization of power, and the rise of what sociologist C. Wright Mills called “the power elite”—the omega to the Framer’s alpha. The counter-revolution. The overseers of the present American empire, the fallen republic turned “managed democracy.”

In response, it is our duty, as citizens, to move onto the next phase of democratic evolution, and exercise the franchise opened to us in the Declaration of Independence, and change our government.

We have been left the means to get there, in Article V of the Constitution. But unfortunately, there’s a hitch, as Wolin notes further into his discussion of the nation’s founders: “The republicans assembled at Philadelphia demonstrated their grasp of how, in a popular government, the electoral system could be stacked so as to prevent its being used to promote a populist agenda, and nowhere more clearly than in the provision governing the most crucial power a democracy can have, the power to change its constitution. Article V stipulated that an extraordinary majority was required for constitutional amendments: a two-thirds vote of both houses and ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures or by three-fourths of special state conventions. That naked empowering of minorities amounted to a subversion of the Constitution’s grandly democratic preamble, “We, the People of the United States…do ordain and establish this Constitution.”

Changing the Constitution is obviously an enormous challenge. Yet I can’t think of another time in my fairly long life when there has been such a palpable yearning among the public, across the political spectrum, for some kind of political breakthrough that will rescue the American people from the seemingly inevitable and unconquerable tyranny of corporate power. But although serious people like William Greider and David Korten are talking about restructuring the economy, I don’t see anyone in the progressive arena (at least on my radar screen) talking about restructuring the government in a fundamental way. It’s a discussion that needs to happen, and soon.

So what would a restructured American government look like? I think there has been a progressive consensus about that for quite some time. There are a lot of ideas in Sam Smith’s book, “Shadows of Hope.” The central argument that Sam and other progressives have been making for decades is that governmental power should be decentralized, and both politics and economics should be more locally based. In one final theft from Sheldon Wolin, let me quote what he says in his concluding chapter:

“Democratic political consciousness…is most likely to be nurtured in local, small-scale settings, where both the negative consequences of political powerlessness and the positive possibilities of political involvement seem most evident. Further, a vital local democracy can help to bridge the inevitable distance between representative government and its constituencies. There is a genuinely valuable contribution which democracy can make to national politics, but it is dependent on a politics that is rooted locally, experienced daily, and practiced regularly, not just mobilized spasmodically.”

A new Constitution should embody the principle that government is rooted in the people. The only way to get to that new Constitution is to start generating ideas about what a reborn America will look like, and to have a national discussion about it, just as the post-revolutionary generation of Americans did.

Of course, I have my own ideas about what to include, that I’ll be developing in my book. But just to get the discussion started, I’ll give you a quick sketch.

The Constitution, you will recall, was written to replace Articles of Confederation whose relative freedom threatened the fortunes of the new nation’s elite. I think America needs to return to the original vision of a confederation of states. The federal government should provide policy guidance and oversight, but the central engine of government should be the state.

Like Benjamin Franklin and other early American fans of the Iriquois Confederacy, I also think the federal legislature should be unicameral, which would be more democratic. A House of Lords—our present Senate—only institutionalizes the notion of elitism. The federal legislature could have one representative per half-million constituents, elected by state. This body would not be much larger than the current House of Representatives, but each citizen would have both more representation (a current representative has about 680,000 constituents) and more voice in the process, because there would only be one legislative house.

Since the primary function of the federal government will be policy and oversight, the executive branch can be replaced by a prime minister and a legislative committee system to oversee a vastly reduced bureaucracy, appointed by the legislature, whose responsibilities would essentially be coordinating and auditing state government functions—especially those under federal jurisdiction, like the environment and national defense. The legislature would also appoint a federal judiciary to decide on legal issues between states.

State governments would be modeled on the federal government, as a confederation of counties with a unicameral legislature. Administration of government would primarily take place at the county level. The states would be responsible for organizing state militias, and ensuring that state resources are distributed fairly. Taxing power would be shared by the state and counties. Every county should be self-sustaining in both their food and energy needs, to guarantee economic, and thus political independence.

Obviously, there are many points to be made about each of the proposals I’ve raised here, that I’ll save for the book. But I wanted to illustrate the range of potential for real governmental change that is open to us, if we will only open our minds to the possibility.

So how do we get there?

This returns me to the opening conversation in this essay, between me and my two friends whom I’ve never really met.

The problem of progressive politics is the problem of American society at large: it is fragmented and based in a culture of deceit and virtual reality. For example, as a 9/11 truther, I think progressives like David Corn, Norman Solomon, and Noam Chomsky, among others, owe me an apology. On my side of the argument, I’ve got a peer-reviewed scientific article in the Open Chemical Physics Journal, with astounding electron microscope photographs, which proves the existence of cutting-edge military grade explosives in the World Trade Center. They’ve got the Bush Incompetence Theory.

There’s no argument.

Yet a tour through the progressive blogosphere finds that most on the left still live in the false paradigm that 19 lucky Arabs forced the American empire to institute a virtual police state and initiate needless wars purely in response to the 9/11 “blowback” from imperial foreign policy. There are occasional whisperings that Khalid Sheik Mohamed, the so-called “mastermind” of 9/11, was tortured to elicit false testimony. But rarely is the next logical question ventured, even in the firestorm of controversy around the “torture memos.” If KSM testified falsely, what really did happen on 9/11?

The biggest political problem we face today is that democracy is predicated on an informed public. By contrast, despite (or because of) an information glut, the American public is generally uninformed, disinformed and misinformed. We have a corporate media system so tightly controlled that the only appearance outside the internet of the news that scientists have proven that the World Trade Center was brought down by controlled demolition was in Dr. Steven Jones’ hometown paper, the Deseret News. This is a level of media control that Stalin would have killed for. We will have to find alternative means to create an informed public.

What the 9/11 truth movement brings to the table is not only a truth that, once registered, may shock the public out of its cognitive dissonance and into an awareness of its real predicament, but the fact that truthers span the political spectrum. The fact is, where American elites have been particularly successful is in keeping the political left and right at each other’s throats, and thus blind to their common enemies. Even when protesting the same bailouts and bankster protection racket recently, the left and right held separate events, with Bill Greider in the left corner and Glenn Beck in the right. This “divide and conquer” elite strategy must be transcended.

Where the political transformation of America must begin is at the local, I think even at the precinct level. I realize this sounds like a cliché, but it is only through face-to-face community rebuilding that a sense of national purpose can be genuinely shared, and political differences overcome. We may communicate across cyberspace, but the human need for companionship can only be fully realized when verbal and nonverbal communication come together. This will also be the only way to circumvent the surveillance state, the 21st century’s Big Brother. Power does not surrender easily.

The political goal, however, must be the transformation of state governments. The states are the constitutional key to real change in America. Once the states reflect the genuine democratic aspirations of the people, change at the federal level can happen naturally. Of course, state and local governments both currently reflect the massive corruption at the federal level, which inevitably oozes downward. But changing state governments is, I believe, a more realistic and realizable goal than changing the federal government—which, as I said before, at this point seems to me beyond redemption.

I’ve been an idealist all my life. And despite the Democratic Party’s abuse of the term, I still believe in hope, which is pretty much all we’ve got left, politically. Where “fear” is the natural opposite of “hope” is in the annals of humanist psychology. Psychologists recognize that fear of the future prevents the human animal from hoping.

The politics of the national security state and the American empire is the politics of fear. The only way the people can reclaim America, and bring about another “new birth of freedom,” is by turning our hope into the will to change. Once we do that, the process of transformation can begin.

Hope and paradox

2009-02-25T05:35:00.000-08:00

Being an idealist by nature, I’ve always been a sucker for hope. The idealism is pretty tarnished by now—to the point where hope is really all I’ve got left. I certainly no longer have any faith in the institutions where faith should naturally reside, especially in the institutions of government.

So it was with a kind of wary hope that I watched Barack Obama’s speech to the joint session of Congress last night—the non-state of the union. It’s been years since I watched a presidential speech, unable any longer to abide the insult of the illegitimate presence of George W. Bush standing where an actual elected president was constitutionally required. To tell the truth, I found the contrast reassuring.

Despite my misgivings about Obama, who has become the black Bill Clinton that I feared he would before the election, I cannot help but admire the man. He seems to have an amazingly focused intelligence, without Clinton’s psychological baggage, but with the same gift for politics. He’s the first president since JFK who I think I would genuinely enjoy having a beer with—if that’s still the standard by which we’re supposed to judge presidents.

He may also be the best that progressives could have hoped for, under the circumstances of an utterly corrupt political system. I sympathize with the view of my fellow radicals that Democrats and Republicans both work for the same puppetmasters. But after eight years of Bush, I don’t think that anyone can honestly say anymore that there are no differences between the two parties. The old saying is true: the difference is that Democrats think the corporate slaves should be treated humanely, in contrast to the ruthless exploitation that Republicans favor.

That seemed to be the message of the speech last night, as Obama highlighted the most popular components of his stimulus package and budget plans, to raucous standing ovations from the left side of the room. It was hilarious to see the dawning realization in the Republicans’ faces that they were getting punked; and by the end of the speech, they were standing up and applauding themselves, in opportune moments, just so their misanthropic ideology wouldn’t be completely obvious to the viewing audience. Even totalitarians have to cater to public opinion sometimes.

The dilemma for me, as a radical, became clear when Obama was talking about how important it was to save the present economic system. It was ironic, because I found myself in the same situation as the Republicans, but from the other side (triangulated again!). Here I am watching Franklin Delano Obama trying to save a capitalist system whose priorities are ravaging the Earth (I cringed when I heard him say “clean coal”) and inflicting untold suffering upon humanity (e.g. Afghanistan), and probably needs to crash and burn before the phoenix of a better system can rise from its ashes. Yet I also know full well that the impending collapse of the present system is already causing many people to suffer even more all over the world, and could easily lead to global chaos and a more militant fascism than what we already experience.

I suppose this makes me a gradualist. I’m not Rush Limbaugh; I don’t want Obama to fail. Yet at the same time, I don’t want him to completely succeed, either. I want him to be the pragmatist that he says he is, and come to the realization that the “change” he’s offering is not enough of a change to meet humanity’s real needs.

But of that, I have little hope.

9/11 "truth force"

2009-02-17T10:23:00.000-08:00

One of the central elements of Mahatma Gandhi’s strategy to free the Indian people from British colonialism was what he called “satyagraha,” a Sanskrit word that is most often translated as “truth force.” What he meant by this was that those who seek justice should embody the truth in their actions.

The strongest element in the campaign for 9/11 truth is the very fact that we have truth on our side (and however “9/11 truth” became the consensus slogan of the movement, it was brilliant marketing). Seven years of independent research and investigation by thousands of concerned patriots, expert and amateur alike, have turned up enough evidence to make the official story of what happened on September 11, 2001, look highly implausible—and prosecutable.

Up to this point, most of the efforts of the 9/11 truth movement have been geared to educating the general public about the facts that refute the official story—the mysterious inaction of the US military; the inscrutable behavior of the chain of command, from Bush on down; the weird “coincidences” in both airline and World Trade Center security; the unexplained global stock trades on companies affected by the attacks; the deliberate confusion of US intelligence; the official attempts to hide the truth, from destroyed video and audio tapes, to manipulation of data in government reports, to profligate use of the “state secrets” privilege; and perhaps most important, the physical evidence, now in the hands of independent scientists, of controlled demolition of the World Trade Center.

It seems to me that 9/11 truth has reached a certain point of saturation in the information environment. The Internet has all the sites one could wish for to find all the information you would need to make the case for 9/11 truth. The Journal of 9/11 Studies, WTC7research, and other sites provide the scientific background. 911Truth.org has the authoritative expertise on other aspects of the case, backed up by at least hundreds of other sites (covering the whole spectrum of credibility). Patriotsquestion911, together with all the professional organizations for 9/11 truth, from architects to whistleblowers (and most recently, religious leaders) give 9/11 truth a necessary respectability among elites. 911blogger and others provide the latest news and grassroots networking capability.

(I don’t intend to slight anyone with this list. These are sites to which I’ve gravitated, personally, based on my individual understanding, whose possible imperfection I freely grant.)

Where the truth of 9/11 has trouble, as “truthers” (official name of 9/11 truth advocates, as certified by the New York Times) are exquisitely aware, is penetrating the corporate mainstream media, from which the vast majority of Americans still get their “news.” As most truthers are also aware, however, the corporate media—which many of us refer to as the Matrix—essentially function as the psychological operations arm of the Empire (the global power elite), and thus cannot be expected to cooperate in their own demise. This is where truthers have the advantage over mainstream American progressives, who seem constantly frustrated and bamboozled by the fact that media are not delivering on the expectation of the nation’s founders that the press would serve as a watchdog over government. Truthers know that 21st century media and government serve the same masters; most progressives still want to believe that the press is “free.”

Regardless of the virtual corporate media blackout of 9/11 truth, however, a substantial number of Americans have serious doubts about the official story. Zogby and Harris polls found that about four in ten think the Bush administration was complicit in the 9/11 attacks. About seven in ten think that, whatever the truth of 9/11, the government is hiding information about what happened. The 9/11 truth movement, in films, articles, pamphlets and grassroots street demonstrations, has succeeded in raising enough doubts about the official story to wound the Empire, which has begun striking back A film reviewer in Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times wrote last month that 9/11 truth (which he called “counter-knowledge”) could turn out to be a bigger threat to global monopoly capitalism (which he called “liberal democracy”) than “the authoritarian onslaughts of Stalin and Hitler.”

As a truther, I take that as a compliment.

I’ve been writing about 9/11 truth since shortly after the attacks happened—at first, in my regular weekly column in the Hampshire Review, which is published in one of the reddest counties in the red state of West Virginia (and where, as you might imagine, I was often derided, until I quit the paper in early 2003, as a “conspiracy theorist”); and for the past five years as a contributing writer for Online Journal. My writings have appeared at dozens of websites (both “conspiracy” sites and progressive/alternative sites like Common Dreams and Buzzflash), and I still write occasionally for mainstream media (most recently last month, in the Charleston (WV) Gazette).

For my whole adult life, I have also been a political activist working on peace and social justice issues. I have organized at the local, state and national levels. I have dealt with mayors, city and county councils, state legislators, members of Congress, and local, state and federal law enforcement agencies. I have canvassed, petitioned, phone-banked, licked envelopes, edited newsletters, chaired committees and meetings, marched, carried signs, organized demonstrations, served as a demonstration “peacekeeper” and nonviolence trainer, spoken to crowds, been interviewed on local and national television and radio, drafted state law and official resolutions, sued the West Virginia legislature, and once was arrested, tried and convicted for praying in the rotunda of the US Capitol—a conviction overturned by a full US Court of Appeals.

I present these “credentials” not as a boast, but as a “letter of introduction” to a 9/11 truth community who may wonder why someone who has not been particularly associated with 9/11 truth activism would presume to suggest a political strategy for the movement—which is the purpose of this essay.

Any strategic assessment of the 9/11 truth movement must begin with where we are today, in the context of a global world order which obviously, after seven years, doesn’t want the truth revealed. At this point, it seems to me, the movement has been successfully marginalized by the US political establishment, cordoned off into one of the single-issue ghettoes that keep any mass movement for fundamental change in American politics from coalescing. In this respect, it is similar to the movements for peace in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the movement for a single-payer health care program, or most especially, the decades-long effort to reveal the truth about the JFK assassination, which—no matter how many facts continue to come out, as more government documents are declassified—cannot escape the taint of being “ancient history,” and thus of no real relevance to average Americans.

The genius of 21st century American fascism (sometimes known as “neototalitarianism”) is that, by allowing dissidents to say anything they want on the Internet and in small-circulation publications (and only rarely in corporate media), the illusion of political “freedom” is maintained in the minds of the American majority, who thus have little awareness of the degree to which their fundamental rights have been curtailed. So they can watch their jobs being shipped overseas, and know that they are being blatantly and regularly lied to by government and business, and even have their hard-earned tax money transparently extorted by the trillions, yet still retain their faith (or “hope,” in the present case) in the basic integrity of the American political system.

Americans are politically paralyzed by both cognitive dissonance and by what psychologists call “learned helplessness,” the result of years of having one outrage after another foisted upon them, without there ever being any real accountability. So, as many truthers have discovered, the most common reactions of average Americans, when presented with the facts of 9/11, are either, “My government would never do that,” or, “Okay…but what can anybody do about it?”

A good question. The usual answer, and the rallying cry for the 9/11 truth movement, has been the demand for a new, independent investigation. But is this enough?

What virtually all the movements for progressive change in America and the world have in common is a common enemy: a global power elite (numbering in the thousands, perhaps—a tiny fragment of humanity’s billions) with neototalitarian systems of government acting as frontmen, and working in league with a vast underworld nexus, operating outside any concept of law. Both communism and capitalism are obsolete, left back in the 20th century. We live, for the first time in human history, under a system of global fascism—the natural end state of capitalism, as George Orwell predicted.

It’s also the Brave New World Order that Aldous Huxley envisioned. The mass populations of the post-industrial world are kept entranced not only by Prozac and other widely-consumed drugs (both legal and illegal), but by an imperial “bread and circus” so hypnotic that people spend their entire non-working lives interacting with its technology, mindlessly munching on genetically-modified snacks. The next time you want to start a revolution, try walking around the aisles of Walmart and evaluating your fellow working class insurgents. You’ll notice they’ve gotten a little flabby. I often say, if the Roman Empire had television, we’d all be speaking Latin.

So, as any progressive activist working today knows, these are the biggest challenges we face: global fascism and a barely conscious public. In light of that, I ask again: should the demand for a new investigation of 9/11 be the ultimate strategic goal of the 9/11 truth movement? Or should that demand be seen as a necessary first step toward a broader strategic goal of transforming a global system of government that manufactures endless 9/11s, in its efforts to retain power among an existing power elite (who may fight among themselves, but nevertheless work together to preserve the structure of the present global economic order)?

The reason I ask this question is, the goals of a movement should determine its strategy.

If the goal of the movement is a new, independent investigation, we’re already moving in the right direction. Public awareness of the inadequacy of the 9/11 Commission report is building—similar to the eventual public conclusions about the Warren Commission’s investigation of the JFK assassination, but helped along in this case by the doubts expressed by the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission themselves, by revelations in recent years about information withheld from the commission, and even by “limited hangouts” in the corporate media, like Philip Shenon’s book about the commission’s internal dynamics. A few days ago, a column appeared in the mainstream blog, Huffington Post, calling for a new investigation, and even raising questions usually seen only on 9/11 truth sites. Most importantly, perhaps, we have a new president who, early in his candidacy, expressed his support for a new investigation (see the second part of my essay, “Obama and 9/11,” for details).

Where efforts have been lacking, from what I’ve observed, are in the courts and in legislative bodies. On the judicial side, this has less to do with the activities of victims’ families and other activists than it does with judges who have used “national security” as an excuse to keep government secrets hidden. You cannot eliminate the possibility of corruption or threats to personal safety being the underpinning of at least some of these decisions, but whatever the reason, the pattern is one of general obstruction in the judiciary.

On the legislative side, although there have been a few profiles in courage at both the national and state levels, there hasn’t been much activity. In the Congress, GOP Representative Ron Paul and Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich have been most closely associated with 9/11 truth, but both have stepped back from their initial statements on the subject. Once again here, their behavior suggests an element of coercion—which would hardly be surprising, in this political environment.

But the failure thus far to achieve significant results in exposing 9/11 truth in either the judicial or legislative arenas (or the corporate media) offers a clue why a new investigation should only be seen as a step toward a broader strategic goal. It’s easy to imagine that a new investigation may prove to be only slightly more satisfying than the 9/11 Commission report, because it will be taking place in the same political context as the last one. Over the past few decades, America has witnessed any number of investigations of its government’s dark side—from the Church Committee’s report on CIA abuses, to hearings on BCCI and Iran/contra, to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s never-to-be-completed report on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction—that slaked the public’s thirst for action without ever getting any real accountability. And there are plenty of secrets about 9/11 that can be exposed without revealing the underlying rot.

What makes a new investigation problematic, under the present circumstances, is the same thing that makes the truth of 9/11 so difficult for many people to accept: if the consensus position of the movement—that the US government conspired to stage false flag attacks on the American homeland, and that fact is being covered up by a complicit mass media—is true, then America can no longer be considered a democratic republic capable of self-investigation. The institutions of government are simply too corrupt.

This is a truly frightening thought. I think that even many truthers are in denial about the depth of corruption in American government, because it threatens the very foundations—political, economic, social and even psychological—on which most of us have built our lives. When we accept the truth of 9/11, we see clearly the enormity of the challenge we face to return our nation and world to a society based on principles of justice. It is daunting.

So I think, in order to be ultimately successful in its goal of exposing the truth of the 9/11 attacks to a skeptical American public, and having those facts accepted, the movement will have to address the underlying primal fear that 9/11 truth will, by definition, raise—the fear that the institutions by which we order our public lives are no longer valid, and the constitutional dream of democracy has become a totalitarian nightmare. It is a fear that bubbles not far from society’s surface, and is getting more difficult for the power elite to contain.

As is often said, 9/11 truth is the key that can unlock the chains that bind us to a world order that has condemned humanity to a future of exploitation, suffering and mass violence (not to mention environmental catastrophe). We thus have in our possession what may be the missing link that can bind the multiple movements for peace, social and environmental justice, human rights, and a thousand other issues that have labored separately toward what is in reality a common goal.

So my suggestion is that the 9/11 truth movement expand its focus beyond the immediate near-term goal of a new investigation, to the broader strategic goal of working to build a new global society, to transform America and the world. By expanding our strategic vision—while at the same time keeping a focus on 9/11 truth—we will open ourselves to collaboration and cooperation with the millions of other people who are increasingly aware that there is a cancer at the heart of the world’s political economy that must be removed if humanity is to survive. We are, by the very nature of our movement, radicals. And the world needs a radical change.

We can be that change, as Gandhi suggested, by fully accepting the meaning of 9/11 truth and becoming a global “truth force.” And with luck, perseverance, commitment, and faith in our fellow human beings, perhaps the truth will indeed set us free.

Holding pattern

2009-02-11T08:53:00.000-08:00

The past week has been extremely busy for me, and I'm still working on the next magnum opus--which, by the way, no longer has the title "9/11 truth revolution." Someone reminded me after I posted that there is a specific group with that name, and my essay is directed at the strategy of the movement as a whole. I hope to finish it this weekend.

Sorry about any confusion, and thanks for your patience.

Detour

2009-02-06T09:46:00.000-08:00

It’s been extremely interesting to monitor the paths of both parts of “Obama and 9/11” as they wormed their way around the internet over the past week. In the process, I discovered that if you google “michael hasty holy earth,” you can get access to the whole collection of columns I wrote for the Highlands Voice, the monthly newsletter of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, at the turn of the millennium.

As you can imagine, most of the columns have an environmental theme, but fellow radicals (pantheist and otherwise) might enjoy “Potemkin democracy,” (February 2000) which also discusses the work of the sociologist C. Wright Mills, author of “The Power Elite.” It may also be the first time I used the word “fascism” to define the American system of government. Well…maybe not.

At any rate, I hope you’ll find these diversions entertaining until I’m back in a few days with my next piece, “9/11 Truth Revolution.”

Heartbreaking news

2009-02-04T09:00:00.000-08:00

It may be in the Hampshire Review this morning, but there is some sad, though hardly unexpected, news about the lawsuit that the Committee to Reform Hampshire County Government brought against the West Virginia legislature (in which I am a plaintiff).

The battle is over, seven years after we began the campaign to change our county government, as the WV Constitution allows local citizens to do, in Article IX, Section 13. Last week, the WV Supreme Court voted 3-2 to decline our petition to rehear the case, which they had decided on December 12, 2008, in favor of the legislature, reversing three separate circuit court decisions in favor of us, the plaintiffs. It was a “political” ruling, which you can read more about in my posts, “Reflections on a lawsuit” (9/29/08), and “Supreme Court injustice” (1/26/09). You can read all the legal documents in the case at the Historic Hampshire website (www.historichampshire.org/hamphist.htm).

It’s ironic, because the two newest justices on the court, Margaret Workman and Menis Ketchum, voted to rehear the case. If it were not for the grave illness of the court’s other “liberal” member, which kept him away from the bench both last week and when the case was heard in October, we may very well have won, and true democracy would still be alive in West Virginia. Article IX, Section 13 is one of the most democratic provisions in any state constitution in the country. This is a major loss for the people of this state.

* * *

I’ve been gratified by the very thoughtful comments that have come in about “Obama and 9/11,” both here and on other sites where it has run. I want to congratulate that sly guy “viddal,” who figured out that what I really wanted to do was send a letter to Obama, and this was just my way of doing it. Your prize is, I answer your question about the quote from the film reviewer.

He is Antony Beevor, who wrote a column in the 1/18/09 London Sunday Times (a Rupert Murdoch publication, I believe) inspired by the 9/11 truth movie, “Loose Change,” in which he spoke of the phenomenon of “counter-knowledge,” which he defined as “the propagation of totally false legends,” and gave as an example, “the 9/11 attack on New York was orchestrated by the Bush administration.”

He went on to write, “Studies of internet sites reveal an unholy alliance between left-wing 9/11 conspiracy theorists, right-wing Holocaust deniers and Islamic fundamentalists.” (And if you extend the logic, that means that truthers are ultimately also in alliance with the CIA. May the circle be unbroken.)

Beevor concludes, “It may sound alarmist when one talks of their attempts to fragment proven reality. Yet the effects of counter-knowledge and pseudo-history might develop a bigger threat to liberal democracy than the authoritarian onslaughts of Stalin and Hitler.”

Gosh, thanks, Mr. Beevor! Especially if by “liberal democracy,” you mean “global fascism,” which—since you’re working for Rupert Murdoch—I think you do.

I wanted to bring attention to one other comment, from Ivan Hecko, whose comment is worth reading in its entirety because he is a disciplined thinker and who, because he lives in Slovakia, knows whereof he speaks when he gives, in his concluding paragraph, “a small final remark concerning the present ‘freedom of the media’ in the US: during the so-called communist regime the censorship of all the media was absolute. Yet the percentage of people who knew what was really going on in the country was much higher than in the US today.”

Munch on that, boys and girls.

* * *

Finally, if the Matrix really gave us the news, the biggest story on every network today would be the interview that George Washington, the indispensable man, published at his blog, with Terrell E. Arnold, former Deputy Director of the Office of Counter-terrorism and Emergency Planning at the US State Department, and former Chairman of the Department of International Studies at the National War College. Arnold thinks that the “collapse” of the World Trade Center violated the laws of physics, among other astonishing things. I found GW at www.911blogger.com, which also linked to the Online Journal version of “Obama and 9/11 2” yesterday. Thanks, guys.

Obama and 9/11 2

2009-01-30T08:58:00.000-08:00

Imagine yourself within the mind of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States of America. You are a man who knows how “the system” works.

This knowledge has been accrued at hard struggle, and by a remarkable and unique ability to adapt to any environment because you spent a lifetime as an exotic specimen in every environment, from Kansas to Kenya—both African and American, Muslim and Christian, black and white. But you always displayed your native nobility—tribal nobility on your father’s side; nobility of spirit on your mother’s—and you were, with rare exceptions, accepted on your own terms. You were born under the sign of Leo, the lion, the natural leader; and your intelligence was honed with great discipline, under the influence of strong women.

Because your upbringing instilled in you a generosity of spirit that is natural to liberalism, and firsthand understanding from your grandfather of what motivates a man to risk his life for his country and an African father’s sense of freedom, unencumbered by Jim Crow oppression, you are a natural idealist who believes in the promise of America.

But you are also—with laser-focused intensity—a realist. A “pragmatist,” as they say. And no one knows better than you how much danger you are in.

It’s not just the racist crazies, one of whom could always, unexpectedly pop up through some weird quirk in the security system. But that’s only a distant possibility. You know, better than anyone, I suspect, that your greatest danger is what “the system” will do to protect itself, to what lengths it will go to protect itself, if certain lines are crossed. And you know exactly what lines you cannot cross.

Perhaps you didn’t always know this, at least to the degree that you know it now. But you were born in the ‘60s, and grew up with your mother’s hippie sensibilities, and you knew from personal experience that America’s promise wasn’t always delivered, that there are some worms in the apple pie. But you have always been adaptable, and you decided early on to adapt to the political environment, in order to do the work that you felt in your deepest soul called to do. Down the rabbit hole you went.

You would have learned, from the very beginning in Chicago, that what happens on the surface of American politics is usually not as important as what happens on a subterranean level. You learned early on that ex-governor Blagojevich was right, that what he was doing to trade your seat was not intrinsically different from “business” that goes on in every state capital, every single day. You know very well that American government lives on bribery, the true mother’s milk of politics, and that the business of America is most definitely business.

You know that whether anything happens from your “indiscretions” depends on whom you cross. You know the example of Eliot Spitzer, who tried to use the office of New York governor to interrupt the sub-prime Ponzi scheme before some major players had cashed out. We’re all under surveillance—especially politicians. J. Edgar Hoover lives in 21st Century America. You know that.

As an intellectual, you know that it is now said even in polite company like the New Yorker that “everybody” knows that this is a government of, by and for the corporations. Just like Alan Greenspan told us that “everybody” knew Iraq was all about oil. How wouldn’t you know this, Barack, when among the rare handful of documents made public about Dick Cheney’s infamous Energy Task Force (April 2001) were maps of Iraq’s oilfields? It’s well established that Bush instructed his counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke to try to connect the 9/11 attacks to Iraq. Clarke just didn’t want to hear the unspoken command. The wily old bureaucrat.

As a new president, you know firsthand the phenomenon that Bob Woodward described in his first book about the Clinton administration, The Agenda, of how a new president is immediately surrounded by “a phalanx of CEOs.” You know that the informal relationships among those CEOs are more important to what official policies are adopted than whatever is publicly said by the infinitely replaceable spokesmodels of the American political hierarchy—executive, legislative, and judicial. Including you.

You know—as the presidents Roosevelt and Wilson admitted they knew—that behind the American government is a secret government, intertwined with wealth and ancient legacies and the military industrial complex. Eisenhower knew that, too. And you especially know that Abraham Lincoln was far more worried about the bankers behind him than he was about the rebels in front of him.

As an obviously learned scholar of American political science, you know the work of the sociologist C. Wright Mills, who, in the early years of the national security state, defined those who rule America as the “power elite,” who are “in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure.”

You know Mills went on to talk about the centrality of celebrity culture to the power elite’s power, which was “of a consequence not before equaled in human history,” and how this power was concentrated in “the economic, the political and the military domains.” Mills then said, at the dawn of postwar expansion, “As each of these domains becomes enlarged and centralized, the consequences of its activities become greater, and its traffic increases. The decisions of a handful of corporations bear upon military and political as well as upon economic developments around the world. The decisions of the military establishment rest upon and grievously affect political life as well as the very level of economic activity. The decisions made within the political domain determine economic activities and military programs. There is no longer, on the one hand, an economy, and, on the other hand, a political order containing a military establishment unimportant to politics and to money-making. There is a political economy linked, in a thousand ways, with military institutions and decisions.”

Mills agreed with Ike. And, as you know, if you don’t know C. Wright Mills, you don’t know America. Psyops would never let a subversive like Mills get the media platform he got in the ‘50s, today.

When you were on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, you confirmed your analysis that bankers count more than politicians in foreign relations, and you wooed bankers with your practicality and charm, to further your ambitions. Because your beautiful wife is on the board of directors of the Chicago branch of the Council on Foreign Relations, you are aware that if you sit at the intersection of wealth and foreign policy, you can see the currents of the future. You know the connections between Wall Street and the Central Intelligence Agency predate the Agency’s creation, in directors like Allen Dulles and Bill Casey, and that the CIA serves as Wall Street’s Praetorian Guard.

You know that, just as there is a secret government within the US government, there is a CIA within the CIA—still intertwined with ruling class good ol’ boys, and involving the same nexus of oil, drugs, Mafias of every sort, terrorists, arms dealers and Cuban exiles—but more military. More corporate. More 21st century. You know it’s exactly like the high-level CIA insider told the Spytalk blog: Langley is just a Potemkin village of plump middle class bureaucrats, most of whom have no idea of what the fuck is going on, protecting their own little bureaucratic turf, and with the sole purpose of backing up the president’s official story, whatever that may be. As you know very well, that’s not the real CIA.

You know—even if he doesn’t remember it—that George Herbert Walker Bush, the namesake of CIA headquarters, was in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the day Jack Kennedy was murdered.

Now that you’re getting your presidential daily brief, you know it is true that the US government, like many governments, engages in “false flag” terrorist operations, staging terrorist attacks that are then blamed on an enemy, to further foreign policy goals. You know the most famous example of US false flag terrorism was “Operation Gladio,” which was coordinated with NATO allies for decades in postwar Europe. A bomb in a train station in Bologna killed eighty people, and was attributed to Italian leftists. Just about the time you were born, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff offered Kennedy a plan called “Operation Northwoods,” to stage terrorist attacks on American soil and connect them to Fidel Castro, to justify an invasion of Cuba after the failure of the Bay of Pigs. JFK turned them down.

The generals never liked Kennedy. And neither did the organizers of the Bay of Pigs, who despised him for their embarrassment.

You have always wondered, ever since it happened, why the military response on the morning of September 11, 2001 seemed so…confused. You had always heard that the Pentagon was “the most protected building in the world.” You’d think that, a half hour after two airplanes had both struck bull’s eyes on the jihadists’ favorite target, and there were reports of as many as thirteen hijackings in the air, Andrews Air Force Base, right next to DC, might have had something scrambled. Especially since that’s supposed to be one of their missions. And why were so many military and intelligence, and even FEMA exercises scheduled on that very day? What a coincidence!

It’s always interested you that the plane (or whatever it was—Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the Office of Special Plans, went out right after it happened and didn’t see any evidence of a plane) that hit the Pentagon, hit the section that held the records of the missing $2.3 trillion that Secretary Rumsfeld had just reported to Congress the day before. Another amazing coincidence! Just like the coincidence that when World Trade Center Building 7 for some mysterious reason collapsed on the evening of September 11th, twenty minutes after the BBC had reported it had fallen, it took with it the records of the Security and Exchange Commission investigation of those old Bush family friends, the Enron Corporation.

Vladimir Putin wasn’t merely joking when he told a state dinner that the KGB always kept a careful eye on Texas.

You know, because of your familiarity with the relationship between foreign policy and corporate interests, that Enron stood to gain greatly from the oil and natural gas pipelines that would flow from the Caspian region through Afghanistan to the power plant that Dick Cheney was acting as Enron’s rep for in India—if only the Taliban would give the contract to an American corporation, Unocal (represented by Bush mobster and future ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad). The Taliban were escorted around Washington in the summer of 2001 by the niece of a former CIA director, and were essentially given a choice of a “carpet of gold” if they chose Unocal, or a “carpet of bombs” if they stuck with the Argentinians.

No deal had been struck by September 11th.

You always found it strange how your predecessor had just sat there that morning, reading “My Pet Goat” with those kids. Maybe he was struck by some kind of unconscious premonition that someday in the not too distant future, he himself would be a lot of people’s pet goat. But he had to know what was going on. The Secret Service was plugged into the FAA-NORAD loop before the first plane hit the building, which happened before Bush entered the classroom. He is often a good liar, but not when he said his first thought was, “What a terrible pilot.” Please.

You know all about the multiple warnings that were coming in from everywhere. You know that George Tenet and Dick Clarke were running around with their “hair on fire” while George Bush couldn’t be disturbed from his vacation, telling his CIA briefer informing him that bin Laden was “determined to strike in the US” that he had “covered his ass,” and Junior walks off to clear brush (and what fool clears brush in August?). You know from the Moussaoui trial testimony that the FBI got all kinds of warnings that were smothered by supervisors who were later rewarded with bonuses. You know the National Security Agency had all the information anybody needed. You know at least as much as Jersey Girl Patty Casazza knows, that even the FBI knew the date, target and method of the 9/11 attacks.

You know September 11th was no “surprise.”

But what do you do with that knowledge?

You’re trying to do the best you can, and you know you can do a lot of good things. Within limits. And you know what those limits are.

As a patriot, you hate what the Bush mob has done to America, to its reputation and to its sense of identity. As a constitutional lawyer, you are in agony over the gross violations of the Constitution and of every principle that it stands for, over eight years of Bush mob malfeasance. As a human being, you recoil at the Bush mob’s gross violations of all bounds of human decency, and the way the psychopathic brat “president” treated living humans no better than the frogs he used to blow up by sticking firecrackers in their asses, in his backyard pond in Midland, Texas. But you can maybe go after a few Addingtons and even a few Roves, but what else can you really do?

Because you know that the Bush mob acts as the enforcement arm of their patrons, the rulers of 21st century Earth. And you know the Bush mob will do whatever those patrons ask.

September 11th is a “national security” issue. Just as the British film reviewer wrote in the London Sunday Times recently, if the truth of 9/11 gets out, it will essentially destroy the present world order. And the once and future New World Order will not allow that to happen. And it is the duty and responsibility of the President of the United States of America to maintain the national security.

You know that.

You know, just by watching the media in that same careful way of yours, that they can write any story they want. It’s global irregular warfare on a total information battlefield. You know the world has been divided into the fiefdoms of global corporate warlords, like in the movie “Rollerball,” with ever-shifting borders and alliances. You know you may have the left wing of the New World Order behind you, in people like Warren Buffett and George Soros and Ted Turner and the Clintons, and even the left wing of Skull and Bones, because they’re as scared shitless about global warming as you are. But the Bushes have the media, thanks to George Senior, as CIA director, refusing to give the Church Committee the names of hundreds of CIA asset journalists. And they have the military industrial complex, with which they’ve been intermarrying and profiting for generations. And most importantly, in this case, they have the mob—all the mobs. They are the mob.

A chance meeting of a private contractor and an ex-KGB sharpshooter now doing business in the Russian underworld, and you know you’re history. Blamed on some patsy—Muslim, no doubt. Like Sirhan. Assassination? Their stock in trade.

You see Sasha and Malia standing there, beautiful in their photogenic sorrow, like John John and Caroline, iconic emblems of another century of lost hope and disillusioned innocence.

What do you do?

You know, life is funny.

When I started writing this essay, I thought that Barack Obama had to be a 9/11 truther, because he’s too smart not to be, given all the evidence that’s out there, and knowing (at least what the media tells me, which seems authentic in this case, and from his books) that he is a consumer of a broad base of information.

But I didn’t know that Obama was a 9/11 truther until the first part of this essay was posted at 911 Blogger, and commenters replied with some very interesting information. (Just goes to show the value of networking.)

Early in 2007, when then-Senator Obama could still be approached by a couple guys from Student Scholars for 9/11 Truth with a video camera, and asked about re-opening the 9/11 investigation, Obama replied, “I think that we need to investigate a whole range of options, although I have to admit that, some of the issues I understand that you guys have raised, I’m not entirely confident.”

Of course, the most important clause here is, “we need to investigate.” But Obama’s also providing some revealing information about what he already knows. He’s familiar enough with the 9/11 truth material that he can say that he’s not “entirely” confident with “some” of the issues the movement has raised.

For Christ’s sake, neither am I.

More stunning even than the SS911T video, however, was a letter that Obama sent in February 2007 to an Infowars supporter. It’s worth quoting in full:

“Dear Penny,

Thank you for contacting me regarding your belief that the US government was complicit in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. I appreciate hearing your passionate views on this matter.

While I do not believe the US government was complicit in the attacks, I do think it should be held accountable for the unacceptable mistakes it made in the run-up to that terrible day. The blunders that occurred prior to the 2001 attacks were inexcusable and often outrageous. The series of clear warnings about the potential use of hijacked planes as weapons is just one example of why the “surprise” of 9/11 should have been anticipated. In my view, proof of government complicity is not necessary when making the argument that the US should accept some responsibility for what happened on 9/11.

Thank you again for writing.

Sincerely,
Barack Obama”

Why would he put the word “surprise” in quotation marks, if he’s not a closet 9/11 truther?

So here’s my take on Barack: I think he’s basically a good guy who wants to do the right thing, but he’s also a pragmatist who has proven beyond measure that he knows how the system works. I think he’s a guy who has chosen to live within the limits set by imperial power, because he knows what that power is capable of when crossed—especially with a guy as popular, and thus dangerous, as Barack Obama. He is a guy who makes compromises with the Empire every day, just like most of the rest of us, including me. He is a guy in an impossible situation. I can’t honestly say that I know what I would do, myself, in his circumstances.

But I also know, based on an excellent portrait drawn of the early Obama by John Nichols in the Nation, that he is, at heart, a progressive who will do the right thing when pushed by the public. So I know that, just like he always says, what Obama does is not as important as what we do. It is our job, as a 9/11 truth movement, to apply the public pressure that will make Obama do what he already wants to do.

He knows, as well as you and I know, that a new, truly independent investigation of September 11th needs to take place. We need to hold him accountable to what he’s already said.

Supreme Court injustice

2009-01-26T12:48:00.000-08:00

While I'm working on the second part of "Obama and 9/11," I thought you might enjoy reading an op-ed I wrote for the Charleston Gazette a couple weeks ago, but waited to post until they published it, which they did yesterday in the Sunday opinion section. I've already received an angry email from the West Virginia Association of Counties.

Update: Well, the misunderstanding with the Association of Counties has been resolved. And you can now find the Gazette's edited version of this op-ed, with its headline, "Hampshire's 'quiet revolution'," online at www.wvgazette.com/200901260368. Also, I'm sorry I neglected to mention that all the legal documents in this case can be found at the Historic Hampshire website, www.historichampshire.org/hamphist.htm.

Last month, in its ruling in the case, Committee to Reform Hampshire County Government v. Richard Thompson, Speaker of the WV House of Delegates, and Earl Ray Tomblin, President of the WV Senate, the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals essentially repealed one of the most truly democratic provisions found in any state constitution in the United States.

Article IX, Section 13 of the West Virginia Constitution allows the citizens of a county to choose the form of government under which they exercise their local democracy. Under this provision, if ten percent of county voters present a petition to “reform, alter or modify” their county commission, and a majority of the county, voting in a referendum, agrees, the Constitution clearly stipulates that, at that point, “the Legislature shall…reform, alter or modify the county commission…and…create another tribunal.” The word “shall” connotes a mandatory duty.

For most of the state’s history, the Supreme Court upheld the intention of the constitution’s framers to give West Virginia citizens the “indubitable, inalienable and indefeasible right” of self-government at the local level—as it said in its Taylor County Commission v. Spencer decision, which also says, “the Legislature is obliged by the constitution to vindicate the desires and designs of the voters of the county.”

In 2004, for the first time in West Virginia history, the Legislature failed to meet this requirement, after Hampshire County submitted a valid petition. In 2005, when the Legislature again refused to pass a bill enabling county citizens to vote on the proposed reform, several Hampshire County residents (including myself) sued the Legislature in Kanawha County circuit court.

Over the course of three separate hearings, the circuit judge decided in our favor on every point. He ruled that the changes our petition proposed (specifically, electing members of an expanded county council by district) were constitutional; that the Legislature has a constitutional obligation to give county citizens a vote on the proposed reform; and that this obligation extends beyond the Legislature to which the petition is submitted.

When the Supreme Court accepted the Legislature’s appeal in early 2008, I knew we were in trouble. The Legislature’s brief was a how-much-spaghetti-will-stick-to-the-wall mishmash, raising issues that had never been litigated at the circuit level. It was a Hail Mary pass whose arguments were easily deflected in the response from our attorney, WVU constitutional law professor Robert Bastress.

My suspicions about our plight were elevated shortly after the Supreme Court hearing in October, in a conversation with another attorney, a friend who has been a close observer of the WV Supreme Court. He told me that, historically, the Court’s decisions were made either “on principle, or on politics,” and our case would likely fall into the “politics” category, so “don’t get your hopes up.” When I replied that he was probably right, since our chief opponent in the legislative process had been the Association of Counties, he just rolled his eyes and said, “Well, there you go.”

I think this is the key to the hidden subtext behind this five-year struggle for our “indubitable” rights. In all the numerous and absurd arguments the Legislature has made for not fulfilling its constitutional duty, its lawyers have raised questions about the constitutionality of virtually every provision in our petition, with one glaring exception: our petition calls for drastically reducing the salaries of the council members, in order to make the reform revenue-neutral.

Of course the Association of Counties was alarmed. If Hampshire County can reduce official salaries, what’s to stop other counties from doing the same thing?

“Politics,” indeed.

Appropriately enough, the Supreme Court decision to quell what a Shepherd University history professor called “the quiet revolution in Hampshire County” was written by Justice Brent Benjamin, who, as a recent Gazette editorial noted, “has become a national symbol of questionable justice.”

Benjamin’s written opinion is as nonsensical as the Legislature’s appeal, but with an Orwellian twist. It claims to be upholding the Spencer precedent, while it completely overturns the real meaning and spirit of that decision. If this decision holds, the fundamental constitutional right of West Virginia citizens to govern themselves at the county level will be left to the whim of legislators who will never have to answer to the citizens whose rights they deny—as it has been for the past five years.

That is why we have filed a motion for the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision. Perhaps, with two new members on the Court, we can get a decision based on principle instead of politics.

But we still don’t have our hopes up.

Obama and 9/11

2009-01-25T14:58:00.000-08:00

Although I was as happy as most Americans that Barack Obama took the oath of office last week, rather than his Republican alternative, there is a major reason that he did not get my vote in November, which went instead to Cynthia McKinney: Obama is unlikely to re-open an investigation into what really happened on September 11, 2001—an investigation that needs to happen.

According to polls, about four in ten Americans are suspicious that the Bush administration was complicit in the 9/11 attacks—either by deliberately ignoring intelligence that warned an attack was coming and allowing the terrorists to strike, to gain public support for the neoconservative foreign policy agenda of increasing American military power in the Middle East; or by actively coordinating the attacks themselves, for the same reason. As Time magazine, in a rare acknowledgement of the 9/11 truth movement, said: “This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality.”

It’s easy to understand, however, why a majority of Americans have such a hard time getting their minds around the idea that their government may have some involvement in such a horrendous crime. Americans are conditioned from an early age to think of themselves as “the good guys,” living in a “democracy”—which, however imperfect, has always been primarily motivated by the desire to advance the core national principle of “freedom,” both at home and abroad. And the actions of the government are closely monitored by a diligent “free press.”

It’s a civics class myth. Yet this myth has the emotional resonance that comes with also being at the heart of what sociologists call America’s “civil religion.” And the myth was especially encouraged among us presently living generations of Americans, the citizens of the post-World War II national security state—although there has obviously been a greater public distrust of government since the Vietnam War and Watergate. The Bush administration brought this distrust to new heights, lying about everything to genocidal effect. But still, many people want to believe that the Bush mob was just too incompetent to have pulled off a sophisticated attack like 9/11 (although non-state actors living in caves in Afghanistan, half a world away, were perfectly capable).

There are many reasons why a political sophisticate like Barack Obama would not want to give too much attention to the unanswered questions of 9/11 (Of the hundreds of questions submitted by the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, whose passionate persistence was ultimately responsible for the creation of the 9/11 Commission, only a small percentage were addressed by the Commission’s report). And there are two basic possible foundations for Obama’s thought on this subject, though his thoughts could range across the spectrum of possibilities between the two poles: that either he accepts the official story of 9/11, or he doesn’t.

Let’s speculate, just for argument’s sake, that Obama’s views are like those of mainstream liberal/progressives on the subject of 9/11 truth. In this view, “conspiracy theories” only serve to distract the public from the systemic rot at the heart of the global capitalist system and of its chief enforcer, the US military-industrial complex. These liberals would like to think that the Bush administration was just too incompetent to pull a complex operation like 9/11 off. And besides, too many people would have to be involved, and somebody would have spilled the beans by now, and the media would be all over it.

Obama could even go as far in his thinking as Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, who have basically said that, even if Bush and Cheney and their henchmen were responsible for 9/11, it would be just another crime to add to a long list of crimes that have, in certain cases, also killed thousands—like the lies that, like a spider’s web, entrapped the American military in Iraq. 9/11 could just be standard operating procedure for the Empire, another “false flag” attack, like the Tonkin Gulf situation in Vietnam, staged to enlist public support for expanded military operations abroad; and a search for 9/11 truth will in the end be as fruitless as the search for the truth of JFK’s assassination. And even if, as with JFK, a majority of Americans come to believe that the US government is the prime suspect, nothing will ever come of this belief.

I’ve had a number of conversations with liberal 9/11 truth skeptics, and my general impression has been that the primary reason they are skeptical of “conspiracy theory” (aside from their fear of ridicule) is that they don’t know very much about the subject.

In the first place, their defense of the official story is built upon the utterly illogical premise that, even though Bush and company have lied about virtually every matter of executive branch responsibility, from science to intelligence to defense contracting to politicization of the Justice Department, on this one issue—9/11—they are telling the truth. How much sense does that make?

And every other point in the “liberal” defense of the official theory (i.e. Arabs in caves outwit stupid Bushies) is subject to serious question. Bush’s incompetence? On the contrary, it could be argued that Bush and Cheney accomplished everything they wanted to while in office. The biggest asset that went into Bush’s so-called “blind trust” when he entered office in 2001 was Exxon stock—a company that has seen world record profits ever since the Iraq invasion. And Halliburton stock has also soared.

The traditional Bush family interests, especially the defense and energy industries, have prospered mightily. A compliant media let Bush and Cheney do whatever they wanted for eight years, whatever the law might say, and are still on full guard, trying to protect them from investigation and prosecution. And Bush, in an Oedipal frenzy, vastly outdid his father’s measly half a trillion dollar savings and loan taxpayer ripoff, with trillions of dollars stolen from generations of taxpayers, and redistributed with unprecedented arrogance directly into the pockets of the wealthiest cronies of the power elite—no questions asked. Bush played his dumb smirking redneck schtick to perfection.

On the other hand, as David Ray Griffin notes in his latest book, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, Bush’s incompetence, as such, is on ready display in the fact that there are so many glaring holes in the official story—from the lies told by the military and CIA to the 9/11 Commission, so egregious that the co-chairs considered asking for federal indictments; to the violations of fundamental laws of physics in the official explanations for the unprecedented “collapse” of three steel-framed skyscrapers in one day—the only steel-framed buildings in history to “collapse” due to fire.

Also, the “need to know” compartmentalization of American intelligence guarantees that only a few key people, and possibly some outsourced mercenaries, would need to know the full story of the 9/11 operation; and either patriotism, bureaucratic groupthink, fear or money would keep everybody else in line. The few whistleblowers, like the FBI’s Sibel Edmonds, who had the courage to destroy their careers for the sake of truth, have been easily turned into “non-persons” by a corporate-controlled media coordinating their broadcasts with a Defense Department psychological operations agenda, a dynamic revealed by the New York Times in its analysis of conflicts of interest among “independent” TV network military “analysts” (more accurately, Pentagon propagandists).

But it’s their lack of knowledge of significant 9/11 details that, in my experience, usually leaves liberal 9/11 truth skeptics in dumbstruck confusion, when confronted with facts.

In the first place, they’re generally unaware that 9/11 questions go way beyond “theory.” There is hard, cold physical evidence, from the microspheres of melted steel found in every single sample of dust from the World Trade Center (and which the US Geological Survey said needed to be further investigated, and never were); to the melting and “sulphurization” of the steel beams of WTC Building 7, as reported by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and which the New York Times called “the biggest mystery” of 9/11—and which was also never investigated further.

A few weeks ago, after the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) corrected its years-delayed draft report on the destruction of WTC7 (which was never hit by an airplane), to finally concede that critics of the original draft were correct that the 47-story building collapsed at free-fall speed (a concession ignored by corporate media), there was a discussion of the report at the website Democratic Underground.

The first reply to the original post was a snarky comment about “Bigfoot” causing the collapse, which initiated a sometimes ugly debate between defenders of the official story and 9/11 truth advocates. The “Bigfoot” commenter kept repeating, “Go read the report,” and giving the NIST URL. I was surprised that no one thought to tell him, on a site as tuned-in as DU, that he may as well have been saying, “Well, go ask George W. Bush,” since NIST is just a branch of Bush’s Commerce Department. Like I said, we now know about outright lies, especially lies about science, coming from every Bush-era executive branch agency, from EPA to CIA. Why would NIST be exempt from this pattern?

Not only that, but anyone can watch a Youtube video of one of NIST’s lead investigators, engineer John Gross, lying through his teeth in a public forum, trying, in answer to a question, to deny the existence of molten steel in the WTC rubble (since the NIST report, like every other government report, had to acknowledge that the fires barely got hot enough to weaken steel, much less melt it, and then only for brief periods). In the clip, he archly maintains, “I didn’t see any molten metal,” and claims ignorance of contrary accounts from numerous other eyewitnesses (including the WTC’s lead engineer), video of heavy equipment pulling molten metal out of the rubble, fires that smoldered at the site for months, and satellite thermal imagery.

NIST admits in all its WTC reports that it never investigated for the possibility of explosives in the buildings, even though that is standard procedure in fire investigations, and in spite of the questions raised in the USGS and FEMA reports about unexplained phenomena in the WTC steel, and in spite of the testimony of hundreds of eyewitnesses (including over a hundred firefighters) who said that they heard explosions in the buildings. An ABC report on the day of the attacks said that the FBI was initially working on the hypothesis that bombs had been planted in the World Trade Center.

Where liberal skeptics really freak out, however, is when they hear about the eerie “coincidences” related to WTC security in the weeks before the 9/11 attacks, “coincidences” greatly underplayed in the corporate media—about the mysterious workmen upgrading the WTC electrical system, laying cable for a company owned by a Skull and Bones fraternity brother of the Bush family; about the unprecedented complete “power down” of the WTC complex the weekend before the attack; about the removal of bomb-sniffing security dogs from the WTC the Thursday before the attacks—dogs who never returned to duty; about the CEO of the company in charge of WTC security being George W’s cousin, Wirt Walker, who was also joined on the company’s board of directors by Bush’s brother, Marvin; about the millions (perhaps billions) of dollars made on unprecedented stock trades in the days right before the attacks, made on companies directly affected by the attacks, by traders whose actions were declared “innocent” and whose identities were kept secret by a 9/11 Commission staff who otherwise judged the source of funding for the 9/11 attacks to be “unimportant,” and who worked under the direction of a White House mole secretly communicating with Karl Rove, despite his assurances to the contrary to the Commission’s co-chairs.

Considered together, these “coincidences” are enough to generate a case of cognitive dissonance—and often do—among those who want to believe that “the system” still works.

It is the cumulative weight and seriousness of the questions that remain about 9/11, however, that lead me to think that Barack Obama is not in fact a skeptic of 9/11 truth. He’s much too smart to ignore the obvious contradictions in the official story. But that scenario opens up a pretty complicated can of worms, which I will explore in the next installment of this commentary.

Blind rage

2009-01-12T10:01:00.000-08:00

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
- Dylan Thomas

For over a fortnight, the world has watched in helpless rage as Israel has conducted a virtual massacre of the Palestinian residents of Gaza, using state of the art weaponry supplied by American taxpayers.

Nearly 900 Palestinians have been killed and 3700 wounded in this brief period. United Nations observers estimate that forty percent of these casualties have been children—hardly surprising in an area where half the population is under the age of fourteen, and where Israeli forces, despite their denials, make no distinction between civilian and military targets, herding refugees into so-called “shelters” that they then proceed to bomb.

During this same period, thirteen Israelis have been killed, including four civilians who were victims of Hamas rockets.

Of the millions of words of commentary that have been dedicated to this issue over the past couple of weeks, one of the quotes I’ve seen most often used in reference to the endless cycle of violence between Israel and its Muslim enemies comes from Mahatma Gandhi, himself the victim of fratricidal violence during the troubled birth of the independent state of India, where the relationship between Muslims and Hindus remains unsettled today, over sixty years later. Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

But does the darkness descend even faster, when it’s a hundred eyes for an eye?

Israel’s disproportionate (and indiscriminate) response to the Hamas rocket attacks—which evidence now suggests were themselves a response to Israel’s calculated violation of a six-month cease fire—were telegraphed months ago by General Gadi Eisenkot in the Israeli daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth:

“We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective these are military bases. This isn’t a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized.”

He may not have realized it at the time, but the general’s words are, for all practical purposes, a confession that the “crimes against humanity” of which Israel now stands accused, were premeditated. A letter published last week in the Times of London, and signed by 70 international law experts, including Richard Falk, the UN’s special observer for human rights in Gaza, lays out the charges.

The letter says that Israel’s “invasion and bombardment of Gaza amount to collective punishment of Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants contrary to international humanitarian and human rights law. In addition, the blockade of humanitarian relief, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and preventing access to basic necessities such as food and fuel, are prima facie war crimes.”

Of course, as virtually every commentator in America’s Israeli-occupied corporate media is required to concede in the name of “even-handedness,” the Hamas missiles, however inaccurately targeted at Israeli civilians, also constitute a war crime. But the issue of proportionality cannot be avoided.

And I think this is where the element of “rage” plays such an important role, and not only in preventing any real solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because of what Arab-American Institute president James Zogby has rightly described as the “pathological” state into which both sides have descended out of a sense of impotence to stop each other’s violence.

But international rage at Israel’s actions may also move the world into a much more dangerous position—that is, the final abandonment of international law as the basis for relations between states. At what point does international law become meaningless, if it is routinely ignored by the powerful? At what point does the world cross over into anarchy? Are we close to that point? Or have we already crossed it?

I think this is the real danger posed by both the US Congress’ resolution of “unwavering” support for Israel’s de facto genocide in Gaza, and by Barack Obama’s apparent legal relativism when it comes to enforcing international law at home—that is, if he doesn’t hold the Bush war criminals responsible for their actions.

This is a precarious moment in human history. There is a point at which blind rage can become all consuming.

Holiday hiatus

2009-01-07T10:50:00.000-08:00

It hadn’t been my intention to suspend writing this blog for so long. But like with everything else that’s happened since I started the blog almost four months ago, the break has been a learning experience.

It confirmed that this blog is not my highest priority. With family tragedy and the rush of the holidays combined with the backlog of chores on the farm, I realized that my real life is more important to me than the virtual and mysterious world of cyberspace, however important I think my thoughts must be that they should be shared with a global anonymous audience.

This is not to diminish the work of bloggers who put in time every day building networks and organizing progressive communities, or simply stating their opinions on the issues of the day. But as a personal choice, it’s more important for me to have enough firewood to keep the house warm and to meet my other family responsibilities, than it is to add another daily frequency to the internet’s white noise. I just don’t have enough time to do everything I want to do. And I’m a slow writer.

As I’ve said before, I think that everything that needs to be said is already being said somewhere on the web. The missing component is concentrated consensual action. There is plenty being done, and being organized, on many ad hoc levels, that have an effect in moving the nation and the world in a progressive direction—witness the election of Barack Obama, who, whatever his multiple connections with the military-industrial complex and the New World Order, is an improvement over the current puppet.

But the real change we need, as I’ve also said, goes way beyond electing the liberal wing of a post-democratic, post-constitutional government. And I don’t think you need to hear my opinion every day to make that happen.

I will, however, continue to express my thoughts here from time to time, hopefully a couple of times a week. I do like the freedom of being able to say whatever I want to say that comes with a blog. But I most enjoy doing more substantive pieces, and those take more time than I can usually spare in a single day. Hopefully, this will be a realistic compromise with my schedule.

In light of the fact that I won’t be writing every day, I’m finally going to activate an email list to let you know when I’ve got something new up. If you haven’t already, drop me an email and I’ll put you on the list.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year, and thanks for reading.

International criminals

2008-12-21T08:35:00.000-08:00

There is pressure building on the incoming Obama Justice Department to somehow adjudicate the war crimes committed by the George W. Bush administration, starting at the top. The political problem is that these crimes also implicate leading Democrats, thereby rendering true justice nearly impossible.

This is another compelling piece of evidence for the fact that we are living under a post-constitutional government, no longer responsible to the rule of law. If we don’t hold our leaders to the same standard of justice as the rest of America’s citizens, or any other of the world’s criminals, I don’t see how anyone could argue that this is a functioning democracy. Equality under the law is democracy’s cornerstone.

But in our post-constitutional, post-Bush v. Gore age, we already know that the judiciary is just as politicized as the other two branches of government. And under a political system dominated by the military-industrial complex, there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as a war crime. Americans were torturing people in Vietnam and Korea. The officer in charge at the My Lai massacre, where hundreds of women and children died, served three years of house arrest.

The defense industry protects its own, and always has.

It’s hard to see how a president could get a fair verdict in this country, in any case. As David Sirota notes, “presidentialism,” which confers on that office an elevated, almost sacred character, is a basic element in America’s civil religion. We’re all brainwashed with the idea that the president is somebody who needs rows of heavily-armed storm troopers lining Pennsylvania Avenue to protect him—rather than somebody like Thomas Jefferson, who walked alone back to his roominghouse to have lunch with the other boarders, after his inauguration. We’ve given the president the “emperor” status suitable to an empire. Where would you find a jury of his “peers,” outside of the establishment accessories to the crimes, like the Democrats?

To spare ourselves the national agony of suffering through either the exoneration or trial of the Bush war criminals, the United States should join the International Criminal Court and turn them over to that body. The justice would be at the very least poetic, given Bush’s unrelenting opposition to the ICC. But putting Bush and company before an international tribunal would also help repair exactly the damage that was done to America’s international reputation with the barbarous scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Handing the criminals over to the ICC would mean, in a way that no other action would, that this nation hereby agrees to abide by the international rule of law. It would allow America to once again take a place among civilized nations.

It can also be a rallying point for those who think that we cannot have a full restoration of the rule of law in this nation without some accounting for those who led America down a very dark path. If it is politically impossible to put war criminals on trial in this country (except for low-level “bad apples” who made the mistake of filming themselves in the unfortunate act of following orders), then the only resolution is to turn them over to the international community, for the sake of justice. That’s the direction a President Obama needs to be led.

America needs to rejoin the international community by recognizing the global jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. That act alone has the potential to mark the beginning of the end of “American exceptionalism.”

It could also mean the beginning of justice for American war criminals.

Free Muntadar al-Zeidi!

2008-12-15T08:25:00.000-08:00

At a personal level, the past week has been an eventful one, both positive and negative.

On the positive side, I finished (mostly) the remodeling project that occupied so much of my time last week; our now-traditional gathering with friends to trim our Christmas tree was a pleasant success; and my band, the Time Travelers, had a great time performing at a Christmas party in Maryland.

The negative side included a ruling from the West Virginia Supreme Court in favor of the state legislature, which, barring a reconsideration by the court, will end our five-year effort to change the government here in Hampshire County (I’ll be writing more about this later this week); the sad and unexpected news that another one of the original plaintiffs in our suit passed away recently; and the call last night from my mother informing me that my brother-in-law, who’s been seriously ill for some time, had finally succumbed to his illness.

It’s the personal side that puts the rest of the world, with its daily sturm und drang, into perspective, and reminds you of what is truly important in the world. But especially for those of us with a political bent, sometimes the world can provide the kind of escape from personal tragedy that we need.

For example, this morning I read the news about the shoe-throwing incident in Baghdad, where an Iraqi journalist delivered what in the Arab world is the ultimate insult of tossing his shoes at George W. Bush. I could only be grateful to Muntadar al-Zeidi for expressing so graphically and bravely what most of the world feels about the greatest living war criminal, and for a few moments anyway, lifting me out of my personal grief.

Let me conclude this post by joining with his independent news organization and all those others throughout the world calling for the immediate release of this courageous hero. He's an inspiration.

Timeout

2008-12-11T06:08:00.000-08:00

For those of you who have been wondering where I've been the past few days, I'm in the middle of a remodeling project that, predictably enough, has turned out to be more complicated and time-consuming than I expected, and has to be done before guests arrive on Sunday.

So I'll be back on Monday the 15th, opinionated as ever. Seeya then.

Cold war

2008-12-06T15:27:00.000-08:00

It was 14 degrees when I walked the dogs this morning. The temperatures have been below average for most of the past month. Inevitably, this has local skeptics pooh-poohing the idea that global warming is happening, which only reinforces the notion of referring to the changes in Earth’s climate as “climate change.” At this point, anyone who predicts how this will play out, no matter how credentialed he or she may be, is just guessing.

Similarly, in a world where an infinite number of variables come into play, there’s really no predicting how a given state action will determine the future, either. The most devastating example of unintended consequences in recent history is the US action in Afghanistan in the ‘80s, where the CIA essentially created the network of Islamic holy warriors who eventually morphed into Al Qaeda.

There’s an excellent summary of the history of US intervention in Afghanistan at the website Information Clearinghouse, written by one of the leading scholars of American imperialism, Michael Parenti (www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21387.htm). I was going to excerpt some of it today, but it’s worth reading the whole thing to get Parenti’s view of just how tragic a story it is, and to understand why it represents the truly evil impulses at the heart of American foreign policy.

A cold war, indeed.

Torturous ambiguity

2008-12-04T09:15:00.000-08:00

You have to give credit to the power elite. They will do everything in their power to protect their prerogatives, to make sure their operatives don’t wander too far from the reservation—which is to say, too far to the “left.”

Corporate media have, since the presidential election, been full of congratulations about the “centrist” inclinations Barack Obama has demonstrated with his cabinet choices and other decisions, including his hints that he would forego his campaign rhetoric about repealing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy and enacting windfall profits taxes on the oil companies—more post-election “pragmatism.” Mainstream pundits are also happy that Obama is “standing up to his base” on the progressive left. See Clarence Page’s latest column at the Chicago Tribune for yet another giddy example of that trend.

I have a couple of things to say about that. First, I don’t think that “the left” was ever truly his base, although most of us, including me, were happy to see him elected over John McCain. (He was my fourth choice among the Democratic candidates, after Kucinich, Edwards and Richardson. I never trusted, and still don’t, his Wall Street connections.) Secondly, I wonder how large his personal base (the 10 million email addresses the media gushes about) actually is. I’m still getting emails from the campaign, which started after I visited the campaign website one time. I never signed up for anything. How many other non-Obamabots like me are on that email list?

At any rate, to return to my point: if Obama is indeed the sly progressive fox in the military-industrial henhouse that we’re hoping he turns out to be, in spite of the early indications, his strategy is being vindicated by the media reaction to his overt moves. A good example of why this is the case is the “controversy” being stirred up (on NPR this morning) about his intelligence adviser John Brennan, a former CIA official who asked not to be considered for the position of Director of Central Intelligence in a letter last week, because questions were being raised on “the left” about his association with the torture practices of the Bush administration.

The NPR report said that he was asked to write the letter by the Obama team (which an unidentified spokesman denied). The “controversy” has been created by “responsible” voices in the national security establishment who are objecting to Obama’s “capitulation” to the left.

Torture may turn out to be the issue where the dividing line is clearly drawn between progressives (and, to be fair, their allies on this issue among principled members of the establishment) and the Obama administration. It’s difficult to tell in this interregnum limbo between the election and the inauguration when, as disenchantment grows among progressives, more mainstream liberals and Democrats are asking us to hold our fire. They’re right that he isn’t president yet.

But it’s discomforting, at the very least, that Obama is holding his cards so close to the vest on an issue that is as clearly defined as torture. The public reaction from the Obama team to their meeting yesterday with former military officers who want a change in the torture policy was disturbingly noncommittal. It’s hard to see how he can hope to restore America’s standing in the world, or even make any progress toward reducing terrorism, if he is going to be ambiguous about clear violations of international law.

To illustrate just how important this issue is to any expectation that America will be able to redeem itself in the eyes of the world, or why a clean break from the Bush policy is so critical, consider this confession from a special operations intelligence officer, quoted by law professor Scott Horton in Harper’s, from a (surprisingly enough) Washington Post op-ed:

"I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for Al Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me–unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans."

If Obama indeed asked Brennan to withdraw his name from consideration as DCI, that has to be taken as a good sign. If corporate media, already setting the stage for exoneration of Bush and Cheney for their many crimes, don’t like it, so much the better

Cassandra complex

2008-12-02T07:30:00.001-08:00

One of the most common complaints among progressives is that we seem to never get credit for having been right about important issues. This complaint has had a breath of new life in the wake of Barack Obama’s appointments of Iraq War hawks to his national security team. People like Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald are asking, where are the cabinet positions for those who opposed the invasion of Iraq in the first place?

I’ve had the personal experience of this phenomenon myself, as I’ve written earlier. Before the war started, I was writing about the lack of evidence for Iraqi WMDs, and how intelligence was being manipulated. With few exceptions, this was not a story getting much play in the corporate media, which had been beating the war drums from the beginning. I watched in horror as the inevitable unfolded. The only surprise for me, when it turned out there were no WMDs, was that none had been planted after the fact.

The phenomenon of having your predictions disregarded has sometimes been referred to as the “Cassandra complex.” The name is derived from a character in the Iliad. Cassandra was the sister of the Trojan hero, Hector, and was so beautiful that she attracted the favor of the god, Apollo, who granted her the gift of prophecy. When Cassandra demurred from his attentions, Apollo turned the gift into a curse. Cassandra was still able to see the future, but no one would believe her warnings, and she could do nothing to change the unfolding of events. A curse, indeed.

What prompts today’s post is a rare example of progressives getting credit for being right. I’m reading the new book by Andrew Bacevich, “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.” Bacevich is a retired Army colonel, and professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He’s also a longtime opponent of the Iraq War who’s had the tragic experience of losing his own son as a casualty in that conflict, and a clear-eyed realist about American imperialism.

Last night I read this passage:

“Many Americans remember the 1960s as the Freedom Decade—and with good cause. Although the modern civil rights movement predates that decade, it was then that the campaign for racial equality achieved its greatest breakthroughs, beginning in 1963 with the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Women and gays followed suit. The founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966 signaled the reinvigoration of the fight for women’s rights. In 1969, the Stonewall Uprising in New York City launched the gay rights movement.

“Political credit for this achievement lies squarely with the Left…Pick the group: blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, working stiffs, gays, the handicapped—in every case, the impetus for providing equal access to the rights guaranteed by the Constitution originated among pinks, lefties, liberals, and bleeding-heart fellow travelers. When it came to ensuring that every American should get a fair shake, the contribution of modern conservatism has been essentially nil.”

It would be nice to think that some of Obama’s new national security team would be taking Bacevich’s views about the rot at the heart of American foreign policy into account. Too bad he’s a fellow Cassandra.

High old times

2008-12-01T07:31:00.000-08:00

As a contribution to our discussion here about drugs and spirituality, I submit for your consideration this excerpt from a recent article in the Toronto Sun:

“Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China.The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly "cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.

The extremely dry conditions and alkaline soil acted as preservatives, allowing a team of scientists to carefully analyze the stash, which still looked green though it had lost its distinctive odour.

"To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent," says the newly published paper, whose lead author was American neurologist Dr. Ethan B. Russo.

Remnants of cannabis have been found in ancient Egypt and other sites, and the substance has been referred to by authors such as the Greek historian Herodotus. But the tomb stash is the oldest so far that could be thoroughly tested for its properties.”

I wonder what they mean by "thoroughly tested."

Tangled roots

2008-11-30T11:00:00.000-08:00

There were a couple of op-eds in today’s Charleston Gazette that discussed the proposed consolidation of the city of Charleston WV with the surrounding county, Kanawha. This “metro consolidation,” as it’s known, is peripherally related to what we’ve been trying to do here in Hampshire County, in that it’s an effort by local citizens to change the form of their local government. But they’re using a different legal mechanism than we are.

The first op-ed I read was a straightforward look at the process of consolidation itself by a local state senator. The second piece was written by a Baptist minister, and primarily discussed a specific issue that metro consolidation should address—substance abuse—because, according to the author, it’s an issue that’s at the root of virtually all of the Charleston metro region’s social problems, from crime to domestic violence.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that alcohol or drug abuse is a major component in many of American society’s problems. But as I read the column, with its typically punitive tone, I was increasingly bothered by the fact that it was only talking about treating a symptom of America’s social disease, without acknowledging that symptom’s underlying causes.

There was no questioning of why, after thirty-plus years of a “war on drugs” and ubiquitous anti-alcohol government propaganda, America continues to lead the world in substance abuse problems. There was no mention of underlying economic or cultural phenomena that may explain why Americans would want to take the national flight from reality a distinctly individual step further. On the unending question of which came first, chicken or egg, the preacher/author (no doubt a creationist) had, with fundamentalist certitude, chosen the chicken. Another drug warrior raises the flag.

What is so disturbing about this well-conditioned knee-jerk response to the problem of substance abuse, apart from its intellectual laziness, is that, in the end, it only contributes to extending the life of the problem.

A few days ago, the Los Angeles Times published an article about a recent Brookings Institution report, which says unequivocally, “The US war on drugs has failed.” From the article:

“The report, which is the work of Brookings' Partnership for the Americas Commission, offers especially pointed criticism of the way the drug war has been waged.Contrary to government claims, the use of heroin and cocaine in the U.S. has not declined significantly, the report says, and the use of methamphetamine is spreading. Falling street prices suggest that the supply of narcotics has not declined noticeably, and U.S. prevention and treatment programs are woefully underfunded, the study says."Current U.S. counter- narcotics policies are failing by most objective standards," the report says. "The only long-run solution to the problem of illegal narcotics is to reduce the demand for drugs in the major consuming countries, including the United States."

Following the establishment practice of continuing to keep the drug problem in the criminal justice domain, however, the Brookings Institution’s recommendations step only gingerly in the direction of decriminalization. The LAT article continues, “The report urges the U.S. to take responsibility for stemming the transport of an estimated 2,000 guns a day across the border; to expand drug prevention programs in schools and redirect anti-drug messages to younger people by emphasizing cosmetic damage as well as health risks; and to greatly enhance drug courts, a system that incorporates treatment into prosecution.”

I love that last phrase, “a system that incorporates treatment into prosecution.” Obviously, there won’t be any mainstream discussion of treatment outside the context of prosecution. And this is the very discussion that is so lacking in our public dialogue about drugs. It is precisely this missing element that holds the key to what our current policy is all about.

For as long as the American drug war has been waged, drug policy reformers have been offering alternative approaches that emphasize treating the problem of substance abuse as primarily a public health issue. There are all kinds of reasons why this approach makes infinitely more sense than the current policy, which I won’t go into at this time.

The only point I want to make now is that we cannot analyze the failures of the war on drugs without looking at who benefits from the current policy. And we cannot see who benefits if we willfully close our eyes to the same intelligence/underworld connections that lie under every rock we overturn once we start searching for the truth of what happened in virtually every one of the last half-century’s most disturbing events, from the JFK assassination to 9/11.

Oh, it’s a tangled, drug-soaked web.

Strategy of tension

2008-11-28T09:04:00.000-08:00

There’s been a steady uptick in media reports about terrorism over the past week—not only about the horrific events in Mumbai, India (which naturally got the most attention), but about serious bombings in Iraq, and the announcement of an Al Qaeda plot to attack the New York subway system.

It makes me nervous.

The head of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, has been asked to meet with the Indian Prime Minister. Pakistan’s government has hastened to reassure India that it didn’t have anything to do with the Mumbai attacks, which India has, at this point, identified as the work of Kashmiri separatists. Presumably, a few choice questions to the ISI chief from India’s own intelligence agencies (who, in 2001, were the ones to let the FBI know that $100,000 in funding for the 9/11 attacks came from the ISI—a fact the 9/11 Commission thought too unimportant to include in their report) should clear up whether Pakistan was officially involved or not.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of living in the 21st century Wonderland the world has become is the fact that we may never know who did anything in the clandestine underworld of terrorism. The eternal question of “Cui bono?” (“Who benefits?”), from a particular terrorist act, can yield a whole variety of beneficiaries—governments, gangsters, gun smugglers, drug dealers, private armies, or multinational corporations—who may be interrelated in any variety of ways. And most of the people involved may not even have any idea of what’s really going on.

It’s a looking glass world.

I’m far from the only one to wonder if there’s a New World Order dimension to what, as of this writing, is still going on in Mumbai. It could turn out to be very “convenient” for certain interests.

There’s been much concern recently among the power elite about the stability and even viability of the Pakistani government, the only Islamic state with nuclear weapons (but whose chief nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan, has had a mysterious long term relationship with the CIA). But the circumstances of a potential nuclear war between India and Pakistan, instigated by the murkiness of ISI’s historic involvement with “terrorists,” could certainly be used to justify greater NWO involvement in Pakistan’s domestic affairs—already under Predator drone assault in the northwestern tribal areas of the country.

One of our more prophetic commentators, Chris Floyd (www.chris-floyd.com), published a column on Monday, “Security Blanket: Western Democracy and the Strategy of Tension,” about the postwar history of the use of “false flag” terrorism by the US government to advance American foreign policy—by staging terrorist attacks that are then blamed on enemies of the US, thereby justifying American counter-reaction.

The most famous example of this tactic was Operation Gladio, which terrorized Europe for decades, and which we know about because it was exposed by high-level operatives. The philosophy behind this operation (whose most infamous act was the 1980 bombing of the Bologna, Italy, train station, which killed 85 people) was described in 1991 by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti: “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force…the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.” This policy, fascist to its core, was known as “the strategy of tension.”

If, like me, you’ve been feeling a little tense lately, it may be deliberate.

Same old

2008-11-26T08:07:00.000-08:00

To continue a theme for this week…

Those who expected Barack Obama to be the anti-war candidate he (kind of) ran as, have to be disappointed with the news leak that Bush’s Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, will continue in that position for at least a year. When you add that info to the news that his National Security Adviser will be a Marine general, and his National Intelligence Director will be another Navy admiral, it’s difficult to conclude anything other than that the military industrial complex remains in charge.

The permanent government doesn’t change.

Of course, it’s always possible that, as some progressive observers have postulated, Obama is just smarter than the rest of us, and that what he’s pulling here is some kind of political aikido, using his opponents’ strength against them and working for change from the inside (he is, after all, the first African American to get himself elected president—possibly an impossible task for an unabashed progressive). But I doubt it. It’s the system that rules. Politics is the art of the possible, and what is possible in this system of corporate democracy is very narrow indeed.

Maybe a shift of a few yards across the fifty-yard line is the only “change” we can really believe in—nothing else is possible.

Along these lines, my recommendation for today’s reading is Frida Berrigan’s article at www.tomdispatch.com, “Who rules the Pentagon?” Unfortunately, I think the headline is misleading, because she doesn’t really answer the question directly. But she does provide a sickening overview of how much control the military industrial complex actually exercises over our nominal “democracy,” not to mention our national budget priorities (an important element, under the present economic circumstances).

She also confirms that, under an Obama presidency, it’s very unlikely that there will be any kind of a “peace dividend.”

Meet the new boss.

Inconceivable

2008-11-25T07:45:00.000-08:00

One of the running jokes in the cult film classic, “The Princess Bride,” is the repetition of the word “inconceivable” by one of the villains of the piece, as he is constantly surprised by the hero’s resourcefulness.

The word came to me as I read a short piece at the website Information Clearinghouse this morning, discussing the $7.4 trillion that Bloomberg News reports the Bush administration has committed in the past 15 months to clean up the financial mess it’s created. The author notes that if you piled up 7.4 trillion pennies, the stack would be high enough to equal the distance of ten round trips between Earth and the moon.

Is it any wonder that no one really grasps what’s going on here, or that our financial problems seem insurmountable?

***

Another interesting website I stumbled on today, via 911blogger, is www.sheilacasey.com. I met Sheila earlier this year at a DC 9/11 Truth meeting. Her website has a lot of information about the global financial elites who finance virtually every national political system, keeping their own interests at the forefront.

This is the kind of information that gets you labeled a “conspiracy theorist,” but it’s information critical to any real understanding of how the world really works.

Particularly interesting to me was her article about Carroll Quigley, who was Bill Clinton’s mentor at Georgetown University. She has a number of quotes from Quigley’s book about the genuine conspiracy among elites to dominate the world’s financial system, based on his access to documents of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Under the present circumstances of global economic collapse and Hillary Clinton’s reported ascension to the position of Obama’s Secretary of State, it’s worth taking a look.

***

Speaking of stumbling, I’d like to thank the website Stumblers (www.stumblers.net) for reprinting my article “Paranoid Shift” on Sunday, to mark the anniversary of the JFK assassination. I’m honored.

Off the farm

2008-11-24T08:09:00.000-08:00

The big news today is the economy, because Obama will be announcing the appointment of his economic team, and yesterday, the Bush administration announced that taxpaying Americans are rescuing yet another financial giant “too big to fail,” Citibank.

In his fireside Internet video chat on Saturday, Obama noted that the economic situation is getting worse, so he put a little more flesh on his campaign promise to bolster the economy with 2.5 million infrastructure jobs. Prominent economists are saying that we may be reaching just “the end of the beginning” of a downturn that could be worse than the Great Depression.

There’s a huge difference, however, between the situation in America today and America in the 1930s. When FDR became president, one in three Americans lived on a farm, and so they were at least able to feed themselves. Today, barely more than one in a hundred Americans lives on a farm. If the system breaks down to the degree it did during the Depression, what are all those people going to eat?

***

Speaking of being off the farm, there’s a rather intense debate going on in cyberspace among progressives, about the choices Obama is making on his foreign policy team, which has a decidedly hawkish stance.

The STFU crowd of Obama supporters is saying give him a chance, he’s not even in office yet. The radicals are echoing Ralph Nader’s “I told you so.”

Cindy Sheehan weighs in on the radical side in the comments at Common Dreams, which supported Obama strongly during the campaign. Their top headline today, from the conservative British paper, the Sunday Telegraph, is “Barack Obama accused of selling out on Iraq.” Sheehan closes her comment with the slogan, “Don’t blame me, I voted for Cynthia McKinney.”

I wonder if anybody’s selling bumper stickers yet.

***

Finally, as regular readers of this blog know, I supported Obama (with strong reservations, but simply bowing to political reality) during the campaign, in articles that included what is still my most widely reprinted post, “Barack Obunny and Elmer McFudd.”

The latest Rolling Stone magazine has an article, “How Obama won.” I haven’t read it yet, but the illustration is a cartoon of Obama as Bugs Bunny, with both McCain and Palin dressed like Elmer Fudd.

Naturally, I’d like to think the cartoonist read my piece. But even if not, and it’s just one of those “hundredth monkey” moments, it’s personally satisfying to see my observations confirmed in illustrated form. It’s going in my scrapbook.

Horse sense

2008-11-22T05:01:00.001-08:00

This will be a short post today. We’re marking the 45th anniversary of the JFK assassination with a visit from the farrier, who’s coming this morning to trim the horses’ hooves.

If you want to get a real sense of the awesome power of nature, stand next to a two-thousand pound animal while she rears up on her hind legs, as I did once when Daisy had a bad reaction to an earlier farrier. I had hold of the rope on her halter, but all I could do was stand there and look up at her. I’ll never forget that moment, which happened not long after we first got the horses, because I was so filled with awe at the sight of her that I felt not the slightest hint of fear, even though one of her flailing front hooves could have easily caved my skull in. I was a little giddy afterwards.

I was fourteen when JFK was killed, and it’s another moment that, like everyone else in my generation, I’ll never forget. I can’t forget the priest who interrupted our math class to lead us in prayer at the news he’d been shot, or how all the people on the DC city bus I took when we got off early were talking about it, or my mother turning to me from the television, tears in her eyes, when I walked in, and her voice quaking with grief, saying simply, “They killed him.”

Last year I read David Talbot’s “Brothers,” his book about the relationship between Jack and Bobby Kennedy. It’s a book that got remarkably little attention in the media, but jaded as I am now, I’m not surprised. Much of the book dealt with Bobby’s efforts to find out who really killed his brother. Both he and the widowed Jackie suspected it was the CIA.

I suspect they’re right.

Two months

2008-11-21T10:06:00.000-08:00

It was two months ago today that I started writing this blog. Like most things in life, I suppose, it’s been an education.

For one thing, I’m surprised at some of the unexpected turns it’s taken. My original intention had been to write at least six posts a week, of at least five hundred words each. I wanted this blog to be a writing discipline in itself, as well as a way to express my opinions about subjects that I don’t think get enough attention.

Of course, real life intruded immediately, in the form of some unexpected new responsibilities that made that kind of schedule impossible. Also, I’ve come to realize that once I’ve gotten five hundred words into a topic, it usually takes at least five hundred more words to get out of it. So soon after I started, I figured I could produce the same output as I originally intended by writing every other day.

But it’s even been hard to keep that schedule. And I don’t think it works for a blog, in terms of retaining readership. It’s working for me as a writer, in that I’m writing essays in a free form mode that I never allowed myself before. But I think I’ll need to do more “marketing,” both with emails (which I haven’t done yet) and posting at other sites besides my old haunt, Online Journal, to get the audience I would like, to make it all seem worthwhile, or at least more than a personal diary.

I’ve been very appreciative of the readers who have come by, and especially of the comments, which have been invariably thoughtful. So just for you and I, for now, I’ll keep the blog going. But I think I’ll make some changes.

I still haven’t got the newer computer I was hoping for weeks ago, and I’m still having memory problems, so no pictures and videos yet. But I’m going to resolve to post something every day, even just a few comments like this, so you’ll have a reason to check in more often. And I’ll just do the major essays a few times a week, like I’ve been doing.

If the post is less than five hundred words, I’ll try to keep them pithy.

First snow

2008-11-19T07:23:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we woke to winter’s first snow. It was a nice one, deep enough to cover everything, and fluffy enough to brush off the car easily, and most of it was gone by day’s end. There’s still some left today, because it turned cold.

It’s beautiful to look out over the hills in any season, but with the leaves down, you see views you don’t see in other seasons, and sometimes that makes the vista more grand.

I can see about thirty miles down the valley from my office window. The Shenandoah Mountains (the Allegany subrange that runs along the Virginia/West Virginia border) are long ridges stretching miles to the northeast. Our weather tends to come either directly from the west/northwest, or up from the south along the Appalachians, when we can watch it come up the valley—a majestic sight.

It’s amazing to me how living in the country has gradually broadened my connection to the Earth. I notice things, and know things, that never entered my consciousness as a city dweller. It’s awakened me to just how much modern humans are out of touch with the very ground we stand on.

I think any true grassroots revolution has to re-make that connection.

Equal human rights

2008-11-17T07:58:00.000-08:00

One of the few areas where conservatives could take any comfort on election night 2008 was in the passage, in three states, of ballot initiatives opposing same-sex marriage—most notably, in California, where thousands of gay and lesbian couples had already made their relationships legally binding, in the months between the California Supreme Court decision upholding the right of homosexuals to marry and November 4th.

Over this past weekend, there were large demonstrations all over the country against the passage of California’s Proposition 8, demanding equal rights for homosexuals. By coincidence, I spent the weekend celebrating the birthday of an old friend of mine, who is in a long-term lesbian relationship. She is a college friend of my partner’s, and we stayed at her home in Pennsylvania, along with her visiting children and grandchildren, and of course her partner, who organized the party. It was a wonderful time.

It has been one of the great blessings of my life that I’ve had close, longtime gay and lesbian friends. Since I come from a very large family, it’s unsurprising to me that I also have homosexual relatives. It’s estimated that about five percent of the human population is attracted to the same sex, and that seems about right, in my experience.

Surveys have found, logically enough, that people who have gay and lesbian friends and relatives are more apt to support equal rights for homosexuals, including the right to marry. To me, the idea that these rights are even in question is a tragic absurdity. What right do so-called “Christians” have, to deny people I love one of our most fundamental human rights as specifically stated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to “the pursuit of happiness.” How can people who claim to find their own happiness in “the sanctity of marriage,” presume to deny anyone else their right to that same happiness? It doesn’t make any sense. It is, at best, hypocrisy.

At worst, it is bigotry and hatred—the very opposite of the God of love and tolerance that fundamentalist Christians claim to worship. In their own scriptures, Jesus tells them that they can find him in the “outcast.” But they continually refuse to believe him. Like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, they obsess about the letter of their scripture, but are blind to its spirit—the spirit of love, compassion, justice and tolerance that Jesus preached.

Every so often, I listen to Christian radio broadcast out of Winchester, to hear what talking points are being circulated and assimilated among the Republican base. The spin on gay marriage is that this represents “special rights,” rather than equal rights, because gay marriage has never been part of our Judeo-Christian tradition. The Christian right sees same-sex marriage as an attack on “the family,” which is based on “the union of one man and one woman;” and the family being society’s own basic building block, gay marriage is therefore an attack on American society itself, and ipso facto, anti-American.

Fundamentalist Christians like to think of themselves as being persecuted. Gay marriage is also seen as an attack on the Bible and religious faith, and on the right of “Christians” to practice their faith freely. In their eyes, “secular humanists” control the media, the judiciary, and the federal bureaucracy, and are trying to destroy America and Christianity by advancing the causes of both “Gnosticism” (cultural relativism) and “pagan nature worship,” which includes both environmentalism and the animal coupling of men with men and women with women. The Christian right sees the official sanction of gay marriage as the government requiring them to reject their own faith, because their tax dollars would then support a system that celebrates, at the county courthouse, a sacrament—same-sex marriage—of a false religion. Hence, the Christian right is being persecuted (in a country where a substantial majority of citizens identify themselves as “Christian”) for taking a stand in support of “biblical principles.”

The Hebrew scriptures were written partly as political documents. They were meant to encourage the separation of the Hebrew tribe from other Canaanites, and to create a sense of tribal nationalism through religious difference, by rejecting both Canaanite polytheism and its feminine aspects—female goddesses, greater equality between the sexes, and tolerance for homosexuality. The scriptures are just as effective today in conveying religious sanction to a system of male domination and other power imbalances, nourished by our “Judeo-Christian tradition.”

The Christian right’s opinion of same-sex marriage is, as would probably be expected, rich with irony.

In the first place, every premise on which they base their argument is wrong. As always, the scriptures are full of ambiguities, rather than the certainties they preach, and the same Old Testament book that is supposed to outlaw homosexuality also outlaws cheeseburgers—it’s meant to be read in context. The Bible outlaws adultery, too, but Jesus himself is descended from one of scripture’s most infamous adulteresses. In addition, the Irish Times, several years ago, published a well-documented account of ancient Christian ritual used in the matrimonial ceremonies of same-sex couples. Early Christianity endorsed gay marriage.

Perhaps the biggest irony in this debate is that the people who are most worried about attacks on the institution of marriage are the ones with the highest divorce rate. Most of the ten states with the highest divorce rates vote Republican; the majority of states with the lowest divorce rates are blue states. Evangelical Christians get more divorces than other demographic groups; evangelical teens have higher pregnancy rates. This is why Bristol Palin’s pregnancy was no big deal to the Republican base. They all know kids like that.

The small comfort that conservatives took from the initiatives banning gay marriage this past election day will be seen, in the end, as just whistling in the dark. The culture has already shifted, and not just among the young, who are our future. If the front line of the culture war today is gay marriage, when just short years ago, it was civil unions, cultural conservatives have lost tremendous ground.

Ultimately, it’s because they are defending a groundless position. People are homosexual because God created them that way; homosexuality is found throughout nature. If we truly believe in the principle that we are all created equal—with equal rights—and we want to govern ourselves by that principle, then we will not be bound by the tyranny of a temporary majority, but only by our national responsibility to uphold the most fundamental human rights—including the right to marry the person of your own choosing.

If it’s a new era, let’s begin with those.

Spare change?

2008-11-13T09:42:00.000-08:00

Can Barack Obama be a black Clinton and an American Mandela simultaneously? Can he be an agent of change and a corporate tool at the same time?

Physicists have discovered that we all live in many alternative universes simultaneously. A universe in eternal fluctuation between wave and particle contains infinite possibilities. We are all kaleidoscopes of the many personalities living within us—or, as the Greek philosopher put it in a more general context, you never step in the same river twice. So, like the rest of us, Obama too can have many interpretations.

There can be no doubt, even this early, that Obama will govern like Clinton, with the same foreign policy and economic team that enforce the ruling elite consensus from the “left” side of America’s permanent binary government—the “humanitarian” interventionists, the “velvet glove” wing (alternating with the “iron fist” Republican wing). Anyone who expected “change we can believe in” to extend beyond the elite consensus of what is “politically possible” in the Age of Terror was letting their hope run away with them. It’s nice to live in a dream world, but this isn’t it.

Obama’s Clintonesque nature has been apparent from the beginning, from his contributions from Wall Street, to his “centrist” betrayals of core progressive principles—for example, his FISA vote, where he lost many progressives who might have supported him otherwise. It is very likely that Obama, at some probably early point in his effort to “govern from the center,” will face opposition from a united progressive left. For the reality-based community, corporations still rule. Let there be no doubt about that.

It is, in fact, disturbing how little change we are seeing from the prospective Obama administration. His first appointments were Clinton veterans: Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff, and Clinton chief of staff John Podesta to lead the Obama transition team. This brings the Israel lobby and establishment liberals on board. Clinton’s first secretary of state, Warren Christopher, will oversee the Obama transition at the State Department; Clinton’s second secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, is an Obama adviser. The military industrial complex will continue to guide the nation’s foreign policy. We won’t be leaving Afghanistan anytime soon.

It is also increasingly likely that, like the Clinton administration, an Obama Justice Department will quietly retire investigations of illegal activity by yet another criminal Bush administration. There may be congressional hearings, like there were into Iran-Contra, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, and the sale of WMDs to Saddam Hussein—all of which would have implicated George Bush Sr., had they been followed to their logical end—but just like those hearings, there will be no real accountability for the wrongdoers. There’s a reason Bill Clinton and Bush 41 are the best of friends.

The psyops activity setting up the exoneration of George W. Bush and company has already started. There are articles this week in both the Washington Post and the New York Times, talking about the need to move on and not waste time prosecuting political decisions, in the Post article; and exploring the history of executive privilege as claimed by former presidents in the past, and how “unclear” the precedents are for requiring testimony from an ex-president, in the Times. The power elite takes care of its own.

But can Obama also be an “American Mandela,” as I have suggested before is his potential?

Among the many universes in which we live is the archetypal, or mythic universe. In that universe, real human beings come to represent ideals that have universal meaning. In the archetypal universe, Obama is a “hero” figure, representing “hope” and “change.” The major significance of Obama’s election is at this symbolic level. Obama is the “hero” who broke through the American color barrier, a central component in the national character, enshrined in our Constitution. Having slain both the vast rightwing and Clinton dragons, he is a genuine hero. All the babies being named Barack are a testament to Obama as a heroic symbol. Obama’s election resonates most strongly at our subconscious levels, where archetypes live.

But even in the “real” world, Obama’s election has special qualities, that signal the potential for an enormous shift at conscious levels, too.

For one thing, his description as “The One,” the term in the Matrix trilogy for the messianic hero, comes at least partly from Obama’s own otherworldly nature. One of his foreign policy advisers described his impressions of Obama to a reporter from the New Yorker, of his “degree of self-reflection, self-awareness, and psychological wholeness…Having worked for two Presidents and with many Presidential candidates during the last thirty years, I have not seen one as psychologically well balanced, and as good about not injecting his ego into a problem.” The biggest change will be not having a president who’s a psychopath, but Obama is a unique political figure.

A second possibility for shifting the national dynamic is the unprecedented “army of volunteers” waiting for instructions from a President Obama. The choices he asks that army to support by pressuring Congress to act, can move the nation in directions even out of control of the power elite. Although that is, however, unlikely to happen, it is possible that large progressive steps can be taken in health care and education, among other traditional Democratic interests. America is ready for a new New Deal.

Historian Michael Lind published an article at Salon recently, “Obama and the Fourth Republic.” Lind is among those historians who divide American history into three 72-year “republics,” which share common characteristics. Obama would be the first president of the Fourth Republic.

These republican ages begin with a strong president, and a three decade period of federalizing the government under the principles of Alexander Hamilton: a strong central government, central banking, infrastructure spending, and enlarging the bureaucracy. In the latter half of these republican ages, Jeffersonian principles of states rights and individualism, and a weak central government return to prominence. The ages all come to a close with a failed presidency.

It’s remarkable how closely the actual history tracks to this model. The first presidents of the republics were Washington, Lincoln, and FDR—three of our greatest presidents, whose administrations all consolidated power in an activist federal government. The final, failed presidents were Buchanan, Hoover and our own George W. Bush, considered by many historians already to be the worst president in American history. Obama has nowhere to go but up.

But perhaps the most important reason Obama could become an American Mandela is that, whatever happens, enormous change is already upon us, and he is going to be forced to react. The world economy is collapsing; it could be worse than the Great Depression, serious people say. Climate change is happening faster than anyone expected. Ecosystems are altering dramatically. An overabundant humanity is running out of food, water and oil—the foundation stone of the postindustrial economy.

If Obama can keep his cool through all that, and prevent the nation from either sliding deeper into fascism or crumbling into violent anarchy along the way, he’ll deserve some credit, at least.

Let’s just hope it’s not really the end of history.

The problem of mass

2008-11-10T11:56:00.000-08:00

The late great media critic Marshall McLuhan described the planetary media system as the extension of humanity’s collective nervous system into space, creating a “one world” consciousness.

It is indisputable that 21st-century humans have a more global consciousness than our predecessors. The extension of media all over the world, with satellites providing instantaneous information through a variety of receiving devices, from televisions to cellphones, has united human consciousness in an unprecedented way. Mass culture has become a global phenomenon; billions of people “know” Angelina Jolie.

The worldwide unanimity of opinion about Barack Obama’s election to the presidency is the latest example of the positive benefit that planetary culture brings. Already, all over the world, American travelers are reporting a much more positive reception to their national identity from the native people they encounter in foreign lands. The Obama election really did bring about a paradigm shift in world opinion about America. We confounded the racist stereotype, to everyone’s surprise, including our own.

But mass culture also brings many problems, from celebrity worship to corporate domination of national politics, that inhibit the healthy functioning of democracy. Many of these problems can be addressed by returning our national cultural emphasis to local participation in politics and the economy.

Of course, it is against the interests of the ruling power structure to decentralize either political or economic power. So naturally, this subject doesn’t get much discussion in the national media. Nor does it even get much discussion in the academic world of political science. I saw an analysis of an annual conference of political science professors a few years ago, which showed that not a single paper submitted to the conference discussed corporate influence on American political life.

As McLuhan would have explained, they don’t see corporate involvement in democracy because it’s like the water in which fish swim: it’s everywhere. It hasn’t been possible to separate business from government since the very beginning of the American republic.

When the republic began, however, business was much more decentralized than it is today, and there was a healthy distrust of corporations. Thomas Jefferson wanted an anti-corporate 11th amendment in the Bill of Rights. Corporations were far more restricted in their lifespans, and in what activities they could engage. Some historians think that the American Revolution was principally waged against the monopoly power of the British East India Company.

It’s a different story today, when multinational corporations provide just about everything we buy, from food to entertainment. We’ve lost the economic independence that comes from local self-sufficiency, and as a result, we’ve lost our real political independence. When every jurisdiction is begging for jobs, because there’s no more real work, and most people spend their lives sitting in boxes, looking at changing light forms emitted from ever smaller boxes, a county commissioner is as likely to favor a global giant in his decisions as anyone else up the political food chain. We are all prisoners of a corporate economy.

With the corporate economy comes the corporate mass media, from which most Americans still get most of their information. (This is what I generally refer to as “the Matrix,” from the film trilogy, which, whatever its flaws, presented a devastatingly accurate picture of how the virtual world in which most Americans live operates.)

The corporate media is as multinational as the other corporations which dominate the global economy, and because of its unique function, integral to the continuation of the current global economic structure, which primarily benefits the elites who control it. So mass culture, in the present context, will always reflect the long-term needs of the global power elite, whose corporations fund the advertising, which produces the media under this system. No advertising, no media. And anyone who doesn’t think advertisers affect media content is living in a fantasy.

The biggest problem with corporate mass culture is that it frames the political context. An Obama aide speaking to McClatchy reporter Margaret Talev compared the media to a group of kindergartners playing soccer, and all the campaign had to do was to nudge the ball to get reporters to follow it. But the herd mentality also spills over into the blogosphere, and too often the internet conversation centers around what the corporate media wants us to talk about. Unfortunately, it’s the subjects omitted from the conversation which often speak most directly to stark reality. (I’d like to see more discussion, for example, of what evidence Bolivian President Morales will present to Obama, about US Drug Enforcement Administration involvement in drug trafficking in his country.)

The most harmful effect that corporate mass culture has on our political brains is to close off possibilities, and to separate us from our own local geography. Whenever single-payer health care is discussed, for instance, it’s routinely dismissed as politically impossible. Why it’s politically impossible—namely, the political power of insurance companies to override the public interest—is rarely discussed, if ever. In another important omission, the unhealthy emphasis on presidential politics in our political culture (what populist David Sirota calls “presidentialism”) leaves out necessary discussion of local offices and issues.

Late one night, many years ago, I stood at the base of the Citibank skyscraper in Manhattan. I couldn’t help but marvel at the engineering that produced it, as well as the amount of work involved, having spent much of my life building things. But I was struck, at the same time, by the fact that the building’s dimensions were so far beyond human scale, and that that physical fact also expressed the underlying reality of the corporate/human relationship. The mass scale of global institutions has grown beyond human control. It’s a major reason we all feel so helpless.

If we really want to return control of our economy and government to the American people, we’re going to have to find a way to bring our institutions, especially our media, back to human scale.

The mandate

2008-11-08T10:03:00.000-08:00

The day after the election, I had to unexpectedly leave my computer to go help my sister for a few days. I’m glad I’ve had the time to process the Obama victory.

Like the vast majority of the world’s population, I had a strongly emotional response to the election night results, and to Obama’s unprecedented speech before his largest crowd ever. In historical fact, now, he is the rightful heir to the legacy of Lincoln (whom he quoted twice in his speech) and a culmination of the abolitionist movement (with a long way to go). The significance of this event in the national soul, and the step toward healing our relations with the rest of the planet, were even greater than I thought they would be. It was one of those times I regretted not living in a big city, with dancing in the streets.

I marked the victory by announcing the results, when the west coast polls closed and Obama went over 270, to the handful of volunteers who had braved the rain to come down to the local Democratic headquarters. I just happened to be the one sitting in front of the laptop at that moment. There probably would have been more people there, if the vote-counting machine in the courthouse just down the block hadn’t broken down (we didn’t get the county results until the next morning). But we celebrated in our own quiet way; it was nice to be with like-minded friends.

In our county, Obama got 36 percent of the vote, about midway between the best and worst-case scenarios. (Mine was one of 28 votes for Cynthia McKinney. This will come as a disappointment to some of my friends. But as I predicted, Obama didn’t need my vote in this state, where he only got 43 percent—still seven points better than in Hampshire County.) I think he did as well as a white Democrat would have done in this increasingly Republican county. The black candidate for sheriff got 41 percent against a popular incumbent white Republican. This would seem to indicate that Obama was voted against more because of abortion than race—relatively, a step forward.

My sister has satellite television. Since I only get one station at home with my rabbit ears, the visit with my sister turned out to be a rare opportunity for me to survey the vast wasteland, at a time of momentous change.

I didn’t watch Fox News, but spent most of my available time watching MSNBC and CNN. I was amazed at how many times I saw Barney biting that White House reporter, and how much airtime the prospective First Puppy got. But what I found most surprising (since I wasn’t watching Fox) was the unanimity of opinion about what a smart choice the American people had finally made in their election of Obama. (You could see why Republicans accuse the media of being in the Obama tank, but that’s actually one of the concerns I have about him. If corporate media is supporting him, that raises red flags.)

In my last post before the election, I talked about the sense of unity that Americans would feel with the knowledge that it would have been a united effort of black, white and Hispanic votes that put Obama in office. I think, post-election, there was a general feeling of being awestruck by the enormity of a historically racist country like the United States choosing a man the color of a slave as president. I think this sense of awe surprised everyone, including those who talked about it on the cable networks. I heard several people say that they never really expected to see an African American president in their lifetime. I’ve thought the same thing myself. It’s an amazing moment in our history.

But the unique combination of elements in Obama’s character—from his preternatural coolness under pressure to his mixed race heritage to a rare synthesis of thinking and rhetorical skills perhaps not seen since Lincoln—combined with the familiarity that has grown between the races in two generations of civil rights legislation and blacks holding office, have perhaps made this day happen sooner than might have been expected.

In an excellent analysis of the Obama victory by McClatchy reporter Margaret Talev (“Obama saw an opportunity—and positioned himself to take it”), Obama adviser David Axelrod says that a presidential candidate can’t really influence when it is the right time to run. “The times pick you,” he says. “He [Obama] seemed to match the times.”

Obama, in his own personal history, symbolizes the globalized multiracial world in which we presently live. Among the many advantages he brought to the presidential race is his ability to adapt to virtually any situation, having grown up as a second-generation African in both white and mixed-race communities, in middle American Kansas and in exotic Hawaii and Indonesia. It’s been my experience that the native Africans I’ve met have seemed to have more self-assurance than African Americans, not having internalized the centuries of oppression that black Americans grow up with. Obama also escaped that internalized oppression, which is why he comes across so confidently.

Obama will be the first American president who came of age in the era of civil rights. The remarkable strength of his victory, in itself, marks a shift in our national paradigm. If we are lucky, this shift will inaugurate a new era of human rights—all human rights. That’s the mandate I think we should take from this election.

Report from the front

2008-11-03T08:20:00.000-08:00

The reception to the waving Obama signs at the stoplight in Romney WV yesterday afternoon was better than I expected.

There were a significant number of honks for Obama, and many people were enthusiastic, flashing big smiles and both thumbs up. They were still a distinct minority. Most people drove by with stern looks on their faces, and the negative reactions were more numerous and expressive than we’ve usually had at our anti-war demonstrations at that corner, out in front of the courthouse.

I didn’t personally hear any racial epithets, and neither did anyone else I talked to (there were about thirty people in attendance, enough to put signs at all four corners). That sort of surprised me. The worst I heard was “communist.” But there were a number of thumbs down, and a few middle fingers, as well as a few shouts of “McCain!”

Based on the percentage of positive responses we got, I think it’s possible for Obama to get close to forty percent of the vote in this county, which I would count as a victory. That’s about what Gore and Kerry got, and if Obama does that well, it means he’ll have overcome the votes that he lost to racism, which will be a significant factor in this county. We also have a black Democratic candidate for sheriff, whose vote can provide a reality check, or at least add a variable in the calculation of what effect race will have on the election here.

There is a sense of hopeful anticipation palpable in the Obama supporters. Some of the people at the demo were surprised to see me there, having read my blog and knowing the reservations I have about him. But I want Obama to win as much as anyone, in the hope that, at the very least, he’ll bring incremental improvement to people’s lives. Even incremental improvement is movement in the right direction. My most outlandish hope is that he really is the secret radical the Republicans fear—the “most liberal” Democrat in the Senate. But I doubt it. He’s too cautious—which may be exactly what the world needs (or is only capable of handling) right now.

At any rate, the feeling here, on election eve, is that we are on the verge of a historic moment. That’s certainly the way I feel, and what I felt from my fellow sign-wavers yesterday.

The spirit of the Obama people reminded me of the first post-apartheid election in South Africa. Because, at the time, I was a board member of the DC chapter of the United Nations Association, I was asked to be an election observer at the South African embassy, off Connecticut Avenue. I’ll never forget the happiness I saw in the faces of the people coming to vote, both black and white, but especially in the black faces. There was also genuine pride in the faces of the white embassy employees, as they supervised the vote. It was a portrait of a people coming together, for the sake of the future.

I think the most dramatic immediate effect of an Obama victory will be the sense of unity that will come from blacks and whites having voted together to put the first African American in the White House. It will not mark the end of systemic racism, which will remain with us for years—although it may be easier to correct, with the scale tipped by the symbolic weight of historic injustice that should become more apparent with a man the color of a slave serving as president. The question should naturally arise: why are other people of color so economically, and systemically, disadvantaged?

But Obama, with his grace of thought and character, has the potential to be an American Mandela, incorporating in his persona a national desire to truly move beyond race in our politics. Our problems will inevitably remain, but with an Obama presidency, America will have taken a giant step forward toward embodying our most precious founding principle: that we are indeed all created equal.

If Obama is elected (I say with fingers crossed, and profound contempt for electronic voting), it will truly be a righteous cause for celebration around the world.

We’ll get back to reality soon enough.

The change we need

2008-11-01T10:11:00.000-07:00

Whichever way this presidential election goes, it will be momentous.

If Obama wins, America will have its first black president, a highly symbolic step toward a truly multicultural nation, and potentially a progressive renaissance (if Obama can escape his handlers). If McCain wins, who knows what chaos will unfold? Even after the riots die down, we’ll have to worry about Alzheimer’s, flashbacks, and the final McCain/Strangelove incarnation. And then there’s always the potential of Ms. End Times inheriting the office and rewarding her apocalyptic cronies with important posts in the Defense Department.

Either way, there won’t be much real change from the existing power arrangements, with corporations calling the shots. “In the Almighty Dollar we trust” will continue to be our national motto, even in an Obama administration. His economic and foreign policy brain trusts are a who’s who of establishment regulars, determined to keep the spirit of Bretton Woods and an imperial America astride the globe alive. Obama will be a step in the right direction, but I don’t think we should have any illusions that he’s really the change we need.

The change we need is to completely revolutionize the way we organize ourselves politically. America’s problem is that we have, over two-plus centuries, created a system that, like its ruling corporations, has become too big to fail. But fail it must, if we are to have any hope of a peaceful transformation of the planet.

The biggest change we have to make is to localize power. We are prisoners of mass culture and the illusions of nationalism. Today, local economies are dependent on multinational corporations (as well as federal and state government spending) to provide jobs. Municipalities offer tremendous tax breaks purely to keep from dying in a globalized world, localities no longer able to provide work. Globalization has created an unnatural dependence.

To the Founders, the political freedom established in the US Constitution was dependent on the economic freedom of the white male enfranchised voters, 90 percent of whom were economically independent farmers, artisans and merchants. We will not regain our political freedom in this country until we restore our economic freedom, and return the center of our economy to local government.

To do that effectively, we need to re-establish the sense of community within local government—make it small enough that people will want to participate, because they have a sense of their own power. This is not possible when you are dependent on a global food distribution system, which can always be tightened in the event of an outbreak of democracy, and render localities powerless to prevent starvation. The centralization of food production into less than 2 percent of the population ensures that government and corporate power (the same in our neofascist system) will also be centralized.

We also need to establish a “new federalism,” where there is a more direct connection between federal and local government entities, and states are left to govern common regional concerns, like watersheds. Local governments will also need intermediate judiciary oversight, human nature being what it is. Local officials can easily be the most corrupt, as we’ve discovered recently in our own county. Local communities have a tendency to let people cut some slack for their friends, which has both a positive and negative effect. Sometimes, people will try to take advantage of others’ good nature. So you need whistleblower protection, and auditing of local decisions (some should be done by federal government and some by the state).

Under a new federalism, the federal bureaucracy would be moved to the local, even the neighborhood, level. So every neighborhood would have a health clinic, where providers would be familiar with their patients’ medical histories, and which would essentially serve as a triage unit, filtering out emergencies from the general community health needs, and as a primary care unit, referring patients to specialists organized at a higher-poulation level. And every neighborhood would have a magistrate, and a sheriff, to sort out local judicial affairs, and keep kids out of serious trouble with the law. Appeals courts and law enforcement coordination could be established at the county level.

Under a new federalism, county governments would have much more voice in how local affairs are administered (including the production of food, to make the necessary change from a global distribution system to food independence; this doesn’t mean the end of trade, which will inevitably continue, but hopefully at a more humane level). Localizing government power can enhance the local economy, by allowing local governments more control over corporate practices in the community. Protecting local businesses from multinationals will allow a community-based economy to flourish. We need to decentralize government power.

In Hampshire County, where I live, we’ve been trying for five years to make our county more democratic, by increasing the size of the county’s ruling body, and giving people representation at the district/neighborhood level. We have been fought at every step by the ruling status quo. It will not be easy to devolve power from the federal and state governments back to local hands.

I believe that the way to effect this change that we so desperately need, if we are going to rescue Earth from the ravages of corporate destruction and undemocratic capitalism, and return true democratic power to the hands of individual American citizens, is through the state legislatures. State legislatures are granted enormous power in the US Constitution, including the power, under Article V, to call a Constitutional Convention, and rewrite the contract under which we are governed. My local delegate has a constituency of about 20,000. That’s a level where progressives can organize at a truly grassroots level.

We can have a new federalism sooner than we might think, with real control over our own lives, along with our many connections to the very land on which we live, restored to the community level, if we resurrect the community organizing skills that Barack Obama seems to have so deftly mastered in this election.

Restoring democracy to the community—and thus resurrecting our true sense of community, inseparably attached to the land—is the change that we really need.

Curb enthusiasm

2008-10-30T09:30:00.001-07:00

This Sunday afternoon, from 2 to 5, Hampshire County supporters of Barack Obama will be standing on the curb in front of the county courthouse in Romney to wave Obama signs and pass out bumper stickers and literature to passing motorists.

I’ll be out there with the rest of the gang, waving a sign. This will be my first partisan event at what locals call “the stoplight” (there are actually two traffic lights in town, but the other one is for pedestrians from the West Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind to cross the street over to McDonald’s, so it generally stays green). We’ve had a number of demonstrations against the Iraq war there, where we usually get far more positive reactions than negative. It will be interesting to see what kind of reaction Obama gets.

There seem to be a lot more political signs around the county than usual this year, but I’ve only seen one Obama sign, and it was gone the next time I passed. Hampshire was the most Confederate county in the state during the Civil War, and the first county in the country to erect a memorial to Confederate soldiers afterwards, and the attitudes about race from that era still prevail pretty strongly.

When we moved out here from DC fourteen years ago, I hadn’t heard a white person use the “n-word” in years, so it came as a shock the first time. Since then, I’ve heard it a number of times, usually from older people who say it so naturally that it still makes me feel uncomfortable, but it seems as much as an anachronism as the dying small farm culture that they grew up with, an anachronism that I can no more affect than I can change their way of life. So it just makes me sad.

I wish I could say that the use of the “n-word” will die off in a generation, but I think hate will always be with us. And we do have a small hate group in the county, identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a chapter of the American Nazi Party, to encourage the word’s use into the future. But I’m not sure the “n-word” has the same resonance it used to.

For example, I was talking with this old guy recently, and he was going on about how “that n…” seemed to make so much more sense than McCain. And then he ended up saying, “I’m probably going to vote for “that n…” This prompted a little cognitive dissonance on my part, but I was thinking that I didn’t want to mess up his vote by trying to correct his language, so I just told him I thought that was a good idea. I thought that he represented an unusual “post-racial” anomaly until a few days ago, when the Charleston Gazette quoted a voter in the southern part of the state saying, “I’m voting for that n…” Maybe it’s a trend.

The Obama campaign seems to think so. I remain skeptical. But if you happen to be in Romney WV on Sunday afternoon, you’re welcome to join us. We’ll have signs.

Palin: 9/11 truther?

2008-10-28T09:16:00.000-07:00

One of the websites I try to check on a regular basis is 911blogger.com, which keeps current with developments in the 9/11 truth movement.

Many of the posts at 911blogger are videos put up to illustrate various activities of the movement, including conferences, films, and confrontations with political and media figures who are asked sometimes uncomfortable questions about the events of September 11th, 2001.

Today there’s a video posted by WeAreChange Ohio (there are WeAreChange groups all over the country, trying to raise public awareness of the questions surrounding 9/11). One of their members attended a Sarah Palin rally in Ohio, and had a chance to ask her a question as she walked along a rope line after her speech. Since most of the video was filmed at waist level (probably by a cell phone), it’s unlikely she knew she was being recorded. But here’s how the exchange went (exact quotes):

WeAreChange: Will you support the victims’ family members and first responders of 9/11 that are calling for a new investigation?

Palin: I do. I do, ‘cause I think that helps us get to the point of never again, and if anything that we can do could still complete that reminder out there. Were you affected?

WeAreChange: Yeah, I have friends that were affected. I know people and a lot of them are still sick and dying from the EPA because they lied about the air quality like that.

Palin: Thank you for your concern.

Obviously, setting aside the grammatical confusion, Palin is not a 9/11 truther. And you can sense her discomfort when the interviewer mentions the “lies” of the Bush administration Environmental Protection Agency, who falsely assured New Yorkers a few days after the attacks that the air around Ground Zero was safe to breathe—contrary to their own reports.

But with this surreptitious interview, Palin becomes the only major party candidate to join Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney and independent candidate Ralph Nader to call for a new investigation of 9/11. I don’t, however, expect this to make news in the corporate media (see my post, “Coordinated media,” for why I’m skeptical).

* * * *

While we’re on campaign news…

Republicans have been howling for years about comparisons being made between George W. Bush and Adolph Hitler (guilty as charged). Of course, it was their regular stock-in-trade during the Clinton years to compare Clinton to Hitler (we all remember the black helicopters, don’t we?), but “hypocrisy” is not a word found in the GOP dictionary.

Predictably enough, we’re already seeing the inevitable Obama/Hitler comparisons, but they’re not just coming from the radical fascist wing. They’re coming from the GOP itself.

Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the Republican Committee of Pennsylvania is sending out emails to Jewish voters reading, “Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision…many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake. Let’s not make a similar one this year!”

McCain campaign officials are trying to deny responsibility for the mailing, but Bryan Rudnick, a political consultant hired by the GOP for outreach to Jewish voters, told the AP that “I had authorization from party officials” to send the email.

* * * *

Finally, for your amusement, a youtube video from Jumpin’ Joe Sixpack, “McCocain on the Membrane” (someday I’ll learn how to embed these things):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDk4LH0uo9I

Enjoy.

Woe, scribes and Pharisees!

2008-10-26T11:20:00.000-07:00

Today’s sermon is taken from the 23rd chapter of the book of Matthew, which begins, “Then spake Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples, saying, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat: all therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.”

The book of Matthew was known in early Christianity as the favorite gospel of the “Ebionites.” The Ebionites (from the Hebrew word for “poor men”), according to some scholars, were the faction of 1st-century Christianity made up of the family and early disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, who were led after his crucifixion by his brother, James, the bishop of Jerusalem and leader of the Jerusalem Christian sect in the Acts of the Apostles. The Jewish/Roman historian Josephus documents their struggle against the Temple hierarchy, which culminated with James’ assassination in 66 CE.

The 23rd chapter states their case, from the mouth of Jesus himself.

After his initial accusation of hypocrisy against the Temple establishment, who essentially served as Rome’s provincial bureaucracy, Jesus continues, “For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.”

Hmmm…sounds like Jesus is preaching class warfare. How unRepublican.

“But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries [little prayer boxes with scripture inside], and enlarge the borders of their garments, and love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, and greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.”

More class warfare, and a direct challenge to the chief priests. But who would he be talking about today? Televangelists, for sure, who hardly do their praying in the privacy of their rooms, as Jesus recommended. But given that we’re a culture ruled by Mammon, you have to go to Mammon’s temples to get a precise corollary: luxury boxes at sports stadiums, or skyscraper penthouse conference rooms. CEOs, the high-level managers of our global empire, live a life different from ours, as the Temple poobahs did then.

But here’s where Jesus gets really subversive, and essentially guarantees his removal by the authorities:

“But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your father, which is in heaven. Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ. But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.”

This was the central principle of Jesus’ ministry, revolutionary in its rejection of imperial social structure, and responsible for Christianity’s viral spread among the imperial lower classes. It is also the same egalitarian principle central to the Enlightenment of the West, rediscovered (after Gutenberg printed his Bible for the masses) in the Judeo-Christian social gospel of “the poor,” those Jesus called “blessed,” and turned into concepts of democracy and freedom by philosophers like John Locke and John Stuart Mill. It was the basis for the abolitionist movement, and for the civil rights movement, and continues to inspire peace and social justice activists today. We are all created equal—what a concept.

I have to note an important point in these last verses, related to that. When Jesus talks about one “Master, even Christ,” he’s only talking about himself in the most general terms. Jesus was raised in a clan related to both the king “messiah” (a Hebrew word translated into the Greek “Christ”), David, and to the priest “messiah,” Aaron, through the tribe of Levi. “Messiah” is the essential noble spirit of humanity, as expressed through heroes and other “messiahs” like Moses and Joshua, or virtually anyone at a given moment in time. Heath Ledger is a modern “messiah,” having sacrificed himself to his art. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King were “messiahs.” It’s an archetype of human hope.

The “Ebionite heresy,” declared as such by the imperial church after the pagans Paul converted became a majority of Christians, is explained by the Oxford Dictionary of World Religions: “The sect emphasized the ordinary humanity of Jesus as the human son of Mary and Joseph, who was then given the Holy Spirit at his baptism; it also adhered to the Jewish Torah.” But who knew Jesus better than his family? On the other hand, how could such a modest character keep an empire under control?

Jesus spends the next twenty verses, the bulk of the 23rd chapter, laying out a bill of particulars against the scribes and Pharisees, famous for its repeating opening line, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” It’s an indictment of the Sadducees who ran the Temple, and shut off the central sanctuary from the masses, and cheated the people and polluted the Temple with their own inner filth. It’s also an amazingly accurate portrait of today’s “Christian” right: their sanctimonious worship of “prosperity,” caring nothing for the victims of a massively unjust social structure; the demographic most loyal to corporate profit, shiny and clean in their persona, but “within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.”

Iraq, anyone?

After his tirade at the scribes and Pharisees—concluding with, “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?”—Jesus then explains very clearly how the concept of “messiah” works: to redeem the nation from the corruption of the scribes and Pharisees, “Behold,” he says, “I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city: that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily I say unto you, all these things shall come upon this generation.”

(The last sentence can only be true if he’s talking about every generation--or if an early editor knew about the destruction of Jerusalem shortly after James' death--but it was to the early apostles’ advantage for prospective converts to believe, as they themselves did, that Jesus was talking about the generation he was directly speaking to—which he was. They were an apocalyptic sect; and the Kingdom of God was already within, even (or especially) after Jesus’ own crucifixion. Adjustments in interpretation only had to be made when the first generation of Christians finally died off. And the gospel writers knew it was good propaganda.)

More important than the possible inaccuracy of Jesus' prediction is the apocalyptic message that he is conveying here: you may kill me, and others, but justice will ultimately be done.

This is exactly the nonviolence philosophy taught by Gandhi and King, that "the arc of the universe bends toward justice," and is the essential messianic message: it is the nature of humanity that people will always stand up for the truth, and for each other, just as they are doing today. And in the end, the truth will finally set us free to live in the Kingdom of God, where we are all “brethren” and have no masters.

Jesus’ jeremiad against the scribes and Pharisees concludes on a tenderly sad note, and with an apocalyptic riddle:

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.

“For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.”

"Coordinated media"

2008-10-25T09:22:00.000-07:00

The primary goal of Joseph Goebbels in his Nazi propaganda management was to create what he called “coordinated media”—a diversity of viewpoints, but all expressed within the narrow parameters of party ideology. Adolph Hitler himself would complain if he thought news coverage was too monochromatic; he didn’t want to be bored by his own press operation. He considered himself a news consumer, along with the rest of the German population. With his precise sense of what people wanted to hear, Hitler knew that propaganda couldn’t be too blatant.

21st-century Americans can certainly relate to the concept of “coordinated media.” Often observed is the phenomenon of every major television network’s evening news shows featuring exactly the same stories in exactly the same order, the stories’ importance allocated in exactly the same proportions. How does this happen? How is it that every network editor exercises the same judgments about what is “news?”

Part of the answer is the growing concentration of media power in the hands of fewer and fewer corporations. Six corporations now control ninety percent of American media output. Naturally, the ideological range of this output extends only as far as what will benefit the corporate agenda.

But another explanation for “coordinated” media messaging is what is known as “the mighty Wurlitzer”—an expression that originated with the late Frank Wisner, a legendary CIA propaganda specialist, in reference to the international media. He was comparing his ability to manipulate public consciousness through the media, to playing a giant pipe organ. Wisner ended his life mentally disturbed, shooting himself in the head. Too much power can twist the mind, and there are few institutions in this culture more powerful than the corporate media.

The role the Central Intelligence Agency plays in American media is rarely discussed (even by progressive media watchdogs), considering the long history of the agency’s relationship with Wall Street and media titans, and this relationship’s importance in molding the public consensus.

In his 2007 history of the dark side of the CIA, “Legacy of Ashes,” Tim Weiner writes, “From his first days in power, Allen Dulles [CIA Director, 195???-61]… kept in close touch with the men who ran the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the nation’s leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time’s Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek’s man in Tokyo. It was second nature for Dulles to plant stories in the press. American newsrooms were dominated by veterans of the government’s wartime propaganda branch, the Office of War Information, once part of Wild Bill Donovan’s domain.

“The men who responded to the CIA’s call included Henry Luce and his editors at Time, Life and Fortune; popular magazines such as Parade, the Saturday Review, and Reader’s Digest; and the most powerful executives at CBS News. Dulles built a public relations and propaganda machine that came to include more than fifty news organizations, a dozen publishing houses, and personal pledges of support from men such as Axel Springer, West Germany’s most powerful press baron.”

It is naïve to think that the close and informal relations with the media that Dulles cultivated to further CIA objectives have not been continued by his successors.

The Church Committee hearings into abuses by the CIA, conducted while George H.W. Bush was director of the agency in the mid-‘70s, revealed that hundreds of journalists and their bosses were either paid or volunteer CIA “assets.” I’ve often suspected that the primary reason the Bush family has received such a relatively free ride in the media over the years is that Bush refused to give the Senate committee the names of these assets. The committee accepted his counter-offer of vague descriptions of the agency/journalist relationship, instead of names (the power elite is a cozy little club).

What has changed over the decades (especially in the Bush Jr. administration) is that the intelligence community has been privatized, and many of the more questionable propaganda efforts have been shifted to private sector “consultants” who don’t have to answer to Congress. Another trend has been the growth of Pentagon influence in the media. When the New York Times reported last year that the Pentagon was coordinating its public “message” with the stable of retired military officers that all the major television networks depend on for “independent expert” analysis of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (virtually all of whom are also profiting from these wars as defense industry consultants), the story was quickly buried.

Where the evidence of a “coordinated” American media operation is most profound today is in the area of 9/11 truth. When “Jersey Girl” Patty Cassazza, who, along with her fellow New Jersey 9/11 widows, became a media darling when they were trying to get an independent 9/11 commission started, told a conference last year that she had been told by FBI insiders that the government knew the exact date, targets and plan of the 9/11 attacks beforehand, the revelation was universally ignored by corporate media.

Stephen Jones, the former BYU physicist who possesses physical evidence of controlled demolition of the World Trade Center towers, has not been welcome back at cable TV talk shows since he first appeared on the scene, with a persona too normal to be dismissed as a conspiracy nutcase. Jones’ revelation at that same conference that he’d been offered a bribe by a Homeland Security consultant not to publish his paper raising serious questions about the official conclusion of why the towers collapsed, also received zero corporate news coverage (the consultant offered an either/or deal, and indeed, one month later, the directors of Brigham Young were pressured by the government to force Jones’ resignation).

The importance of the internet and alternative media is that, like the samizdat in the old Soviet Union, they offer the opportunity to get out a message that would never pass through the official corporate media/CIA filter—the Matrix.

The challenge is to construct a message that can both penetrate the Matrix (whose agents pay close attention to potential threats in the information “battlefield,” and respond accordingly), and simultaneously be heard over the white noise of an oversaturated global media environment.

It will probably require a little “coordinating” of its own.

While we were out...

2008-10-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

Back in my early post-psychedelic period, when I became a spiritual seeker, I discovered the work of Edgar Cayce, known as “the sleeping prophet.” Cayce, who died in 1945, had a gift, while in a trance state, for what he called “readings” of people’s souls and bodies. So many of the naturopathic cures he recommended for people who came to him with ailments turned out to have real healing ability that the American Medical Association once called him “the father of alternative medicine.”

In the course of these readings, Cayce also talked about spiritual forces at work, both in his clients and in the world at large. Many of the “predictions” for the future he made—for example, the rediscovery of Atlantis—have not come to pass. Given his record of accuracy on the physical readings, I’m not particularly troubled by these seeming failures, for two reasons. One, he qualified these predictions by saying that humanity always possesses the power to alter its own future. And two, I think he always spoke on purely spiritual issues in symbolic language, like the language of the Bible around which his own spiritual life revolved (he analyzed the Book of Revelation, for example, as a map of an internal spiritual journey, rather than a prediction of apocalypse).

Because, over the course of decades, my personal spiritual “language” has moved beyond the Christianity that Cayce centered his beliefs on, his teachings no longer have the importance for me that they once did (though I still practice meditation, which was at the core of his practical spiritual recommendations). But, even though it may not be unfolding in the exact way he predicted, I think he was right about the enormous changes the world and humanity would experience at the turn of the millennium.

What brings this up for me today is one of the characteristics Cayce gave to the period in which we’re now living. He called it “the quickening.” It’s a phrase that I’m reminded of practically every day. This is a momentous, unprecedented era in which we live. Now we know firsthand why the ancient Chinese wish, “May you live in interesting times,” was considered a curse.

There is, of course, unprecedented and understandable interest in the American presidential election worldwide. I think that even most Americans, who have pretty much let their democracy operate on cruise control since World War II, are aware of the historic nature of the shift in global power that is occurring now, thanks to George W. Bush’s wholesale destruction of the American (and perhaps global) economy, as well as its military and government.

But there any number of issues that have been put on the back burner during this campaign, the discussion of which has been reduced to sloganeering, at best, by both campaigns (see Reid b’s comment at my post, “Hope and the left” for a good observation about this). And these issues will inevitably face whichever candidate “wins” the election. (With the recent spate of articles in the Charleston Gazette about touch screen voting machines already switching votes from Democrat to Republican, I think we can safely say an Obama victory is not a sure thing, no matter how many points he’s ahead in the polls, or even, more importantly, how many votes he gets.)

It was telling, for example, that at the last debate, when moderator Bob Schieffer asked a question about climate change, the answers from both candidates immediately veered into national energy policy, and the very real effects of climate change—agricultural destruction, water shortages, disease, rising oceans, and mass extinctions of plant and animal life, among them—went completely unremarked upon. Schieffer, corporate propagandist that he is, let it slide and did not, as he had promised before the debate, follow up.

Similarly, there’s no real discussion in the campaign about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither candidate wants to address the conclusions of a National Intelligence Estimate that was leaked a few weeks ago, that essentially says that the present “truce” between Sunni and Shia factions in Iraq is tenuous at best, and full civil war can break out at any time. This renders both McCain’s promise of “victory” and Obama’s promise to remove combat troops as too simplistic to address the real-world situation there. Nor will either candidate address the fact that the American military is facing the same ignominious defeat in Afghanistan that every would-be conqueror from Alexander to Andropov has been forced to swallow.

To Obama’s credit, he does address, with his tax policy, the inequality between the rich and everyone else that has grown so noticeable in the last eight years—but only to a degree. But it’s only to be expected that neither establishment candidate, supported as they are by a corporate-dominant political system, will discuss the fundamental question of whether the consumer culture on which the entire global economy is built has itself reached its natural endpoint, and is in collapse. Is Gaia, the Earth-spirit, in the process of self-correction?

Once the election is over, these questions will remain. Meanwhile, keep your seatbelts strapped tight. “The quickening” is a wild ride, and no matter what happens, it’s guaranteed that the world will change dramatically.

Comments

2008-10-21T09:16:00.000-07:00

Recently, a computer-savvy friend of mine suggested that I might get more comments if I changed the blogspot default setting to allow people to comment anonymously. This seemed like a good idea until I gave it some more thought.

It had been my original intention (one month ago today!) to leave the comments section to the readers, and reply to interesting ideas in the posts, and that policy will continue. But I had worried, since I knew I’d be introducing some controversial ideas, that these comment debates had the potential to get ugly, as they do at so many websites. I didn’t realize that readers couldn’t make anonymous comments, under the blogspot settings.

Based on the comments that have come in so far, I think it’s wise to leave the settings where they are. Aside from the fact that some of the comments have been complimentary (which I naturally enjoy), all the comments have come from people I know personally, and have all been thoughtful and heartfelt. I think this may be the natural consequence of the fact that people have to identify themselves, which encourages the spirit of Ghandian “truth force” that I hope to cultivate here. Besides, I’m not anonymous (as many bloggers are). This keeps us on an equal footing.

I prefer having a few well-considered comments to hundreds of comments from people going back and forth, calling each other names. And frankly, I barely have time to write this blog, much less police a comments section. So you guys are on your own.

Having said that, let me move on to the most recent comments, at the end of “The whole story 5.”

Jim d, a local friend of mine, has left several comments about the political realities of life in Hampshire County that are dead-on in their analysis. It’s like reading an alternative history of the county (rather than the Chamber of Commerce-approved version you read in the Hampshire Review), reflected through the eyes of someone who has always had the courage to speak the truth, and put himself out there, in an environment that can often be hostile to the ideas of outsiders. I’m very grateful for his interest in this blog.

What inspired today’s post, though, is the second comment, from “winnacunnet jag,” someone who is obviously very close to me, and who deals every day, in her work, with the young casualties of recreational drug use, and who, from that perspective, quite legitimately challenges my opinion that an honest discussion of drug use in the media should include a “pro-drug” message.

Actually, there is very little in her comment that I would disagree with—for example, she’s absolutely right that “context” is important to any drug message, pro or anti (and the absence of context has been the persistent problem with the media dialogue about drugs). But let me add some nuance to my earlier conclusions, by answering some of her objections.

First, I very deliberately used the word “simple” to describe my former editors at the Hampshire Review, not only in the positive sense of rural people whose idea of America is virtually unchanged from the postwar optimism that characterized the ‘50s, despite the darkness of heart that has been revealed in the decades since (assassinations, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.), but also in the negative sense of “simplistic.” Unlike Winnacunnet, who clearly sees the damage that the drug war has wrought, Charlie and Sallie See are unrepentant drug warriors who, from my experience, are incapable of processing information that contradicts their views (and certainly don’t allow it in their newspaper), and use their powerful position in the community to perpetuate a policy that damages more lives than drugs ever do.

By coincidence, there’s a column today at Salon.com by Joe Conason that makes my point, by suggesting to both presidential candidates that, if they’re looking for places to save the taxpayers money, they start with the drug war, which costs local, state and federal governments about 50 billion dollars a year (he doesn’t say where he got this figure, but I suspect that indirect costs would make the total much higher).

Conason discusses past drug use admitted by both Barack Obama and Cindy McCain, and concludes, “The only reason to talk about past drug abuse by Barack Obama or Cindy McCain is to point out the waste and injustice of the ongoing drug war. Both of them broke the law, repeatedly, by their own admission, but neither deserved to go to prison and no useful purpose would have been served by punishing them.”

You don’t need much imagination to realize that Obama’s name would not be on the ballot today, had he not been one of the lucky young black men to escape the drug war dragnet (or that his avoidance of arrest was more than likely due to the fact that he was living in a white community, rather than a ghetto, when he did his early experimentation). “Waste” would be exactly the right word, had his fate been different.

One thing that won’t change, whether drugs are legal (like Oxycontin) or illegal, is that people will continue to destroy themselves, like they do with alcohol. When alcohol prohibition ended, there was an upsurge in alcohol-related social problems. Yet the American people had discovered that, as grievous as these social costs were, they were much more manageable and less dangerous to society than the costs of prohibition. In today’s world, the costs of prohibition include the tragedies of meth labs and prescription drug abuse, which flourish in the subterranean underworld that prohibition creates.

This is the message that drug policy reformers have been trying to convey since the drug war ramped up in the Reagan era. But it’s a message that can’t get past the media gatekeepers who, for a variety of reasons that I’ll continue to explore in this blog, won’t allow it to be heard by the American people.

And it’s a message that most definitely requires “context.”

Hope and the left

2008-10-19T12:49:00.001-07:00

The other night, I watched a DVD of a PBS documentary, “Sisters of Selma,” about Roman Catholic nuns who joined the civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, after the first attempt at a march from Selma to Montgomery was infamously met by violence from local and state law enforcement. In the wake of that outrage, religious people traveled to Selma from other parts of the country, to stand up for their fellow citizens’ voting rights.

It was an inspiring film, to which I responded at points with a reaction that I’ve learned over years to expect, but which still surprises me with its uncontrollable nature: I get choked up and tearful at expressions of hope and courage against the odds. A friend of mine who noticed this reaction one time when we sat together in a movie theater watching “Born on the Fourth of July” (with Tom Cruise, of all people, playing a disabled Vietnam veteran protesting the war), said afterwards that she had read that people get emotional when their most deeply-held values are touched.

This only makes sense, of course, as any rightwinger who chokes up at the national anthem can tell you. But what’s funny to me is that this reaction usually hits me when I’m watching or reading accounts about dissidents (whose uncompromising and idealistic radicalism certainly reflects my most deeply-held values), protesting a simplistic, conservative nationalism that leaves most leftists cold. Sometimes, though, the reaction happens when I’m listening to corporate politicians like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. I’m an idealist by nature. I want to hope.

By coincidence, earlier in the day that I watched the “Sisters” DVD, I had read a commentary at Common Dreams by a regular contributor, Ira Chernus, a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado. Titled, “Obama and the left 2,” it was a return to a topic he had discussed earlier which had received many critical comments from supporters of third-party candidates, who objected to being asked once again to vote for the Democratic lesser of two evils.

Chernus’ second commentary also received a lot of comments from readers (almost 400 as of this morning). It was interesting to read because it so accurately reflected the argument in my own mind between two sides with approximately equal weight: the side that says that incremental progress (or even backing up slowly) is better than the rapid decline—social, political, cultural and environmental—the nation inevitably experiences under modern Republican rule; and the side that says American democracy is already dead, and it hardly serves our long-term interest to pretend the rotting carcass is still breathing.

Every day, I go back and forth between these sides of myself, the idealist and the cynic. But which is which, when both sides are true? Is it idealistic or cynical to think that things will always be the way they are, with two corporate parties essentially serving the same military-industrial interests and playing good cop/bad cop with partisans who invariably see the other side as the bad cop, whose agenda must be prevented at all costs? Is it idealistic or cynical to think that all citizens should take a political Hippocratic oath to first, do no harm? Is it idealistic or cynical to hold fast to your principles, and refuse to compromise with a system that will never truly challenge the prevailing corporate order, whose steady march to fascism has been enabled by the actions of both major parties?

Do I give in to my hope that a Democratic administration, at this crisis point in American history, will crack the door open just wide enough that a flood of progressive legislation will be unstoppable; and that electing the first African American president will cause a subtle shock to the political culture, that will forever alter the system of white supremacy on which America has been built?

Or do I give in to my hope that enough people casting “protest” votes will open more people’s eyes to the fact that the American experiment in democracy has become a meaningless sham, with no real effect by either party on an ultimately militaristic empire, unresponsive to the public whim? Do I keep hoping that keeping my eyes on the prize of necessary and radical change, however hopeless that change may seem today, is the price that must be paid to see it happen (as it was for the early Abolitionists)?

At this moment, I have an answer. But it’s an answer that can change in fifteen minutes, so I won’t bother you with it. I suspect there may be millions of Americans on the horns of the same dilemma. And we’re going to have to figure it out for ourselves.

Tomorrow?

2008-10-18T04:26:00.000-07:00

As if to confirm the point that this blog isn’t real life, reality again intruded on my intention to write a regular blog post yesterday, and continues to do so today. I have to make an unanticipated trip to DC, on family business. So the regular post will have to wait until tomorrow, that receding horizon that, as Annie reminds us, is only a day away. I guess it all depends on what reality, that great jokester, may bring.

The whole story 5

2008-10-16T15:30:00.000-07:00

Writing this blog, even after less than a month, has been an education. It had been my intention at the beginning to write at least five posts a week. But I’ve experienced in actuality what I originally suspected: this blog isn’t real life. Real life is the family medical crisis, or the friend who needed my help, or the faraway weekday benefit/gig, or even the day-to-day responsibilities that have all intervened since my last post (which, to the ear of an old altar boy like myself, makes this blog sound like the sacrament of confession—which I suppose, for me, it really is).

Something I didn’t expect—but should have—was to be sidetracked into a lengthy explanation of a personal insult that was itself the culmination of a tragicomedy of errors. The secret of life is the mathematical symbol Pi, a number that divides itself into infinity and is necessary to find any measurement of a circle. Life is a series of interlocking circles. It was foolish of me to think that this particular story wouldn’t circle around again, in some mysterious and unexpected way. But today, I’m coming round the bend to the finish line.

While I’ve been slogging through the swamp of my psychological confusion, the world’s been dropping deeper into economic Wonderland. And then we had the last presidential debate last night. As the media and polling have recognized, there’s not much change in the dynamic. Once again, Obama looked presidential, and McCain looked like an eccentric old man, wound up waaay too tight to trust with his finger on either the economic or the nuclear trigger. Not much more to say about that.

I’ll be back tomorrow with regular posts. But now, onto the conclusion of our story…

When I called Sallie See, editor of the Hampshire Review, a couple of weeks ago to apologize for screwing up the email address when I sent her the op-ed, “Reflections an a lawsuit” (posted here last month), I mentioned that I had intended my post, “Spiritual conundrum,” to be an answer to the previous week’s column on the Review’s “Religion” page.

The column is written every week by Don Kesner, an evangelical minister as well as a full-time reporter for the Review. Don and I have been friends since I first started at the Review twelve years ago, and have often discussed religion and the Bible, which we of course approach quite differently. Some of these discussions have been in the paper, both while I wrote my column, and afterwards, on the letters page.

I had sent Don a notice when I first started publishing this blog, and had been struck by the fact that Don’s next column, titled “Identity theft,” touched on some of the very topics I had discussed in my first post, “Radical Pantheism”—drug use, identity crisis, the creation of humans in God’s “image and likeness,” and the identity of Jesus as the “only begotten son of God,” among them. Don talked about the “darkness” into which those who use drugs or deny the divinity of Jesus descend. It was natural for me to think, given our history and my now-public conversion from “Gnostic” Christianity to pantheism, that Don was sending me a message. And even if not, I thought his column needed an answer. I emailed him when I posted “Spiritual conundrum,” to let him know it was online.

After I mentioned him in our conversation, Sallie told me that, at that very moment, Don was undergoing spinal surgery. He had recently had some hardware internally attached to his spine, to correct a worsening spinal degeneration, and a titanium rod they’d put in had failed. I asked Sallie to pass along my best wishes.

Two days later, Sallie emailed that she had changed her mind about publishing my op-ed, and I sent my (now infamous, locally) reply, “Fuck you,” and posted the exchange here on the blog (“Intercepted email”).

Two days after that, Don emailed me about “Spiritual conundrum.” He was uncharacteristically angry, and his email seemed rather confused. Twice, he misspelled the word “sacrilegious” (differently each time), which was his general reaction to my post. I figured he’d seen my reply to Sally, and was angry about that, and was probably on some pretty heavy pain meds—which would be extremely ironic, under the circumstances.

What Don found most “sacrilegious” in the post was the hypothesis advanced by Dead Sea scrolls scholar John Allegro in his book, “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross,” that Jesus and the apostles developed their spiritual ideas in a psychedelic state of ecstasy. For some reason, Don thought that this was my idea, and it only confirmed the “darkness” (that word again) in my soul, the foul residue of my own drug experiences. I had insulted the only son of God, the sacred object of Don’s worship (I may as well have been drawing cartoons of Mohammed, so similar was the emotional response). I was a hypocrite for singing gospel songs that I didn’t believe in, in his church. Don never wanted to hear from me again, and said he’d block my email.

I emailed him back anyway, pointing out where he had misinterpreted my thinking, and that he and I just had different conceptions of Jesus, as Christians have throughout the centuries. I assured him of my continued friendship, despite the email, and wished him well in his convalescence from surgery. I cc’d it to the Review, to make sure he got it.

It was sad to get that email from Don, but I’m glad he sent it anyway. Because it opened my eyes to the possibility that the Review’s rejection of my op-ed was neither political nor personal, as I initially thought. Instead, it opened my eyes to the fear with which Charlie and Sallie and Don see the world, and if this were indeed the case, it makes their actions more understandable, for being so completely human.

What all three of them have in common is an irrational fear of the unknown—drugs, in this case. And I am challenging their fear with my writing. They do not allow any kind of a positive message about drugs, either in their newspaper or in Don’s church, and they are afraid of the repercussions if such a discussion were to take place. They fear that even by simply drawing attention to a positive drug message, they will themselves be tainted with the stain.

There is naturally a certain amount of provincialism in this fear, in that the conjunction of government, church and media is more intense in America’s small towns. But even in the rural areas, it is not uncommon for young people to experiment with drugs (though it was probably less common when Charlie and Sallie grew up around here).

However, it is also a major problem in our national political and media culture that an honest discussion of the full spectrum of drug use is disallowed. It is rare in the mainstream media, even from advocates of drug legalization or decriminalization (which, after a brief period of interest in the early ‘90s, is itself rarely discussed anymore), to hear about positive benefits of drug use—spiritual, social, artistic, or physical—other than medical benefits. And even those are underreported. How many people know that the US government has funded at least four peer-reviewed studies that indicate that marijuana is a cancer preventative? Let me repeat that: a cancer preventative. Do you think people might have a different attitude about it if they knew?

As I wrote two decades ago, the war on drugs is a war on the American people. The majority of American adults have experimented with illegal drugs. In most cases, when presented with the facts, citizens will vote with their common sense—for example, in the eleven states where medical marijuana initiatives have passed, even in the face of opposition from politicians, police and the prison-industrial complex. But anti-drug propaganda nevertheless keeps most people frightened, and incapable of proper judgment.

The war on drugs is a multi-billion dollar industry that destroys lives. We imprison more people per capita than any other nation on Earth. It’s sick. The worst of it is, it’s also the key to understanding how the world really works. A 30-year counterintelligence veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration once told Congress that, throughout his career, he had never investigated a major international drug operation in which the CIA was not involved. American drug policy is the way it is because that’s the way the “black” operations, intelligence and military, that keep wealth funneling into the pockets of the global power elite, are funded.

The relentless decimation of the Bill of Rights that began with the drug war has brought us to our present fascist state, where schoolchildren are taught to sit with their hands on their desks, and are forbidden to use the restroom, while sheriff’s deputies search their classroom with drug-sniffing dogs—a bit of totalitarian conditioning that is regularly applauded in the pages of the Review. Small town newspapers all over America are the New World Order’s most effective propaganda. And usually it’s because the editors are simple people like Charlie and Sallie, who still believe that America is the fantasyland they read about in their civics books. All the evidence to the contrary exploding every day all around them, from the lies about Iraq’s WMDs to the collapsing economy, just intensifies their cognitive dissonance.

Closer to home, the Sees are afraid of something else—offending their mostly conservative Christian readership, or even worse, their advertisers. A friend of mine told me, several years after I quit, that he knew of a concerted effort that was made by enemies of my column to pressure Charlie to fire me. Looking back, and knowing Charlie better now, I’m surprised that he was able to withstand it long enough to let me go first. I’m sure it accounts for some of the tension I was feeling in those last months.

Charlie and Sallie not only have a position in the community and a successful business to protect. They also have a payroll to meet, and a certain responsibility for the welfare of their employees. So giving them the benefit of the doubt, I can see why, alarmed as they must have been by ideas so radical that they would cause even an even-tempered man of the cloth like Don Kesner to go ballistic, they would choose to think about their employees first. They are generous people, however fearful.

As a pantheist (by way of Gnosticism—not to throw the baby Jesus out with the bathwater), I have a forgiving nature. How can it be otherwise, surrounded as I am by God in every human form. So there’s nothing preventing me from extending a hand of forgiveness to Charlie and Sallie See, however much I may think they have wronged me over the years. I may no longer trust them, but I can forgive them. And I’m sure they have their own side of the story. It can’t have been too easy for a couple of solid burghers like them to have an unpredictable radical like me in their employ.

You never know where life is going to take you. I certainly didn’t expect to be spending all this time, right after starting my blog, on this tortuous personal history. But I’m glad I’ve gotten it out of my system, and I hope that you’ll forgive me, if you’ve been offended in any way, for my own all-too-human weaknesses (like surrendering to my temper, for an obvious immediate example).

I’m also glad to be able now to finally move on in this blog, away from my personal history and back to the rest of the world, with all its mysterious and confounding ways.

I hope we can travel together, and see what tomorrow may bring.

The whole story 4

2008-10-12T18:56:00.000-07:00

It took me a long time to recover my emotional equilibrium after Charlie See refused to print my first post-column letter to the editor of the Hampshire Review. Like most humans, I suppose, I had been treated with disloyalty a few times in my life, by friends. But this was my worst experience. To let people think that I shared equal responsibility for the ugly tone into which “Thinking Locally” had descended in recent years, when I had been trying for years to get Charlie to use his position as editor to stop it, was just too unfair.

Finally, after a year of not writing, and watching the war in Iraq turn sour, with the 2004 election coming up, and seeing all the elements of fascism creeping further into American culture and government, I decided to start writing again. In January 2004, I sent a letter to the editor discussing the parallels between Bush and Hitler, including the torture charges that had just come to light (a small excerpt from my first article for Online Journal, “Paranoid Shift,” which appeared online a few days later). The Review printed it.

As might have been expected, the letter ignited a burst of gleeful outrage from the local trolls who had been regular respondents to my late column (and obviously missed it), and an exchange ensued for several weeks. I continued submitting letters and op-eds to the Review for the next four years, until the one almost two weeks ago about our lawsuit against the legislature.

Until that most recent submission, only two pieces I sent them were not printed—a letter and an op-ed. They both had one thing in common with the first letter they didn’t print: they discussed the reasons I quit writing the column in the Review. They were the only ones I ever submitted that did so. I never received a phone call asking for changes, or explaining why they were rejected. Nor was the subject ever mentioned during the occasional times I would visit Charlie in his office.

At the beginning of 2005, the Committee to Reform Hampshire County Government was gearing up to re-introduce the legislation setting up a county referendum that had passed the West Virginia Senate, but not the House, in the 2004 session (see my post, “Reflections on a lawsuit,” for details). The chief opponent of the bill in the House had been Hampshire County’s delegate, Jerry Mezzatesta. But Jerry had been defeated in the 2004 general election, tarnished by a scandal involving shifting state money from the county’s special services workshop to local firehouses, as a way of currying political favor with the volunteer firefighter community. (He was also in the dubious position of having been recently hired by the county board of education to write grants, while simultaneously serving as the chair of the House Education Committee, which dispenses education money.)

He was defeated by a Republican woman, Ruth Rowan, whose son-in-law was a member of our committee and had written the first draft of the petition. So we knew that she was sympathetic to the fact that our petition was the first one in state history where the legislature had failed to do its constitutional duty. The problem was, the committee’s leaders (in a group that was very informally organized), for various personal reasons, were not able to put in the energy needed to jumpstart the legislation, and keep the initiative going. So one snowy January night, when only a handful of us made it to a meeting, my friend Frank Whitacre, the county assessor, asked me if I would take the ball.

It was not something I was particularly interested in doing, not only for the work involved, but also because I’m something of a political lightning rod in this county, and it might be bad PR to have me seen as the campaign’s leader (although the “save the hospital” referendum I had championed just two years before had passed by a 3-1 margin, so I knew I wasn’t total political poison). But it was a cause I thought was important, and since there was nobody else who was willing to do it, I took it on.

After talking to Ruth, confirming her support and getting her pledge to re-introduce the legislation, I wrote a draft bill (mostly a rewrite of the original bill, with the bad parts edited out) and put her in touch with my friend in the Attorney General’s office to answer her legal questions. I’ve had primary responsibility for trying to get the bill passed every year since, writing all the press releases and dealing with the media, coordinating the committee’s lobbying efforts, recruiting our pro bono attorney when we decided to sue the legislature for their inaction, and traveling to Charleston for every judicial hearing. So as you can see, I have a lot of personal investment in this issue.

We didn’t get much cooperation from the Hampshire Review. I think Charlie, who had totally supported my efforts in the hospital campaign, had initially been intrigued by the changes in county government we proposed. But electoral changes had brought his political allies into county office, and had gotten rid of the good ol’ boy network that he openly admitted to me he had hired me to go after (he often told me that he admired my “courage,” by which I thought he meant that I was a big enough fool to rush in where angels like him fear to tread). So he no longer seemed to favor the proposals in our petition. Too radical, I suspect, for a centrist conservative like Charlie.

The articles he ran about the issue were either studiously neutral or negative, from our perspective. So I regularly submitted press releases reporting events and changes in status in the legislature and in the court. They would appear, instead of an article from a Review reporter, somewhere inside the front section, often below the fold, and at least on one occasion, with important info edited out. But at least we were getting our spin into print (a common practice with community groups and small town newspapers, not some special treatment we were getting). The op-eds were similarly downplayed. One time, my commentary ran in the middle of a large box, with the title as a subhead under an old piece from a long-deceased county citizen.

The only reason the issue got any coverage at all in the Review (we got much more prominent coverage in the Charleston Gazette and Cumberland Times-News) is its historic nature, which even Charlie had to admit to. Our lawsuit goes to the heart of what American democracy and republican government are all about—the right of the people to choose the form of government under which their democracy will function. If the West Virginia Supreme Court overturns the clear language of their 1981 opinion, affirming that right in the strongest terms, it will be a terrible loss for the people of this state.

I wish I could say that I’m sorry I emailed “Fuck you” to Charlie’s wife, Sallie, the Review’s current editor (Charlie’s the publisher now), when she took back her promise from two days before, that she would publish my op-ed on the Supreme Court hearing (see “Intercepted email”). But unfortunately, I’m not sorry. It turned out to be just the catharsis I needed to purge the demons of anger and betrayal and supreme injustice that have haunted me ever since Charlie refused to print that first letter. It was both an emotional and physical release, which I knew deep in my soul I needed. The next day, I gave one of my best vocal performances in my life onstage at the Burlington Apple Harvest Festival. My body and my voice never felt so free.

Yet that still leaves the mystery of why exactly Sallie (and probably Charlie) changed her mind, and sent me that email. Was it something political? Did I make the argument too well for a position that they oppose, so that’s why they wanted a straight news story instead? Was I too disrespectful in my language about venerable state institutions, the legislature and the Supreme Court? Or was it something else?

When I called her two days before that, to apologize for getting the address wrong when I first sent the op-ed and to discuss publication, I told her about my new blog. Did she or Charlie then look at my first post, “Radical Pantheism,” and see that I had once again given an account about quitting the Review, and decide that they didn’t want to bring any attention to the blog—which an op-ed from me might, but a press release with the byline, “Committee to Reform Hampshire County Government,” wouldn’t?

That’s what I first thought. And that’s what so consumed me with anger, the night I got the email from Sallie, that I couldn’t sleep, and had to get out of bed in the middle of the night and go to the computer and pound out a reply, and post it on the internet. It was the last link in a chain of personal betrayals that was finally strangling me, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to break free, to get it out of my system. I’ll never forget the sense of complete relief I felt when I hit the “send” button.

But a couple of days later, I got an email from the Review’s religion columnist, Don Kesner, that made me think that Sallie’s broken promise may not have had anything at all to do with either the politics of the lawsuit or the personal politics of our dysfunctional, disgruntled employee/employer relationship.

Next time, I’ll conclude this seemingly endless saga with what I was initially hoping to get to this time: why I think Sallie, in her heart of hearts, really thought she was doing the right thing in turning down my op-ed.

The whole story 3

2008-10-09T06:44:00.000-07:00

Every once in awhile, even today, one of my friends will bring up the time my column was absent from the Hampshire Review. The column that didn’t appear was “Amerika,” my account of the incident at the drug checkpoint, the weekend of the Buffalo Gap bluegrass festival.

When I took the column into the Review office on Monday morning, Charlie was out in the reception area. He looked upset, and took me back to his office, and demanded to know what had happened Saturday night, because he’d already had a call from the state police lieutenant saying that they were sorry that they hadn’t arrested me for interfering with a police action.

I scoffed. They were going to arrest me? They were the ones who were breaking the law, and wiping their muddy jackboots all over the Constitution (about six months after this event, the US Supreme Court ruled in a similar case, also involving drug-sniffing dogs at a police checkpoint, that the police had violated citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights).

We debated the issue for awhile, with Charlie making the point that he had to be very delicate in his dealings with the state police, because if they didn’t like what he put in the paper, they were perfectly free to withhold information from Review reporters, which would put the Review at a severe disadvantage in reporting crime stories. Since I didn’t have a background in mainstream media, this revelation came as kind of a shock. I had never fully realized before how much the government controls what information goes out to the public, even in a local situation like this.

Finally, Charlie read the column. When he finished, he said, “I’m not printing this.”

I was flabbergasted. I hadn’t written anything objectionable in the column, just a straightforward account of the incident at the checkpoint, closing with the observation that if this had happened thirty years before, the cops may have picked up young potheads Al Gore and George Bush, who at that moment were running for president.

I didn’t bother to try to find out what exactly he thought was wrong with the column, because I was on my high, principled horse. So I just told him that I wasn’t going to write another column, and he’d have to run that one, or nothing, and left.

Two days later, my counterpart’s column appeared on the editorial page, but there was nothing from me. I had thought maybe Charlie would run an old column, one of my thought pieces or something. The absence caused a little hubbub in the community, because at that time, the column was about at the height of its popularity. The hospital issue was still hot, and we were right in the middle of the 2000 presidential campaign, so people expected me to be out there defending the Democratic position, not only nationally but locally. Friends called to see what happened.

As I talked to people, I realized that I’d made a mistake, and my principles were no substitute for the rare position I held of being able to argue a progressive point of view in a mainstream media outlet. So I swallowed my pride and went back in to talk to Charlie, who was also in an accommodating mood, and he welcomed me back—with one condition.

As it turned out, the reason he turned down the column didn’t have anything to do with my encounter with the police. What he had objected to was the fact that I had mentioned that Ralph Nader—whom I had endorsed in May—was advocating the legalization of marijuana. Charlie thought that if he published that column, people would think that he himself was promoting drug legalization.

Of course, this struck me as irrational nonsense, and I told him so. But Charlie was adamant. I was never to write about drugs again—at least, if I was saying anything positive about them. I could say all the negative stuff I wanted.

In the course of this conversation, Charlie revealed something that I found astonishing: he and Sallie, who are just about my age, had never experimented with illegal drugs. Maybe it’s the people I tend to hang out with—musicians, artists and assorted radicals—but I couldn’t recall ever meeting anyone from my generation, who came of age in the ‘60s, who hadn’t at least toked on a joint once. And if the Sees are a rarity among baby boomers for their pharmaceutical innocence, polls show they’re also in the minority of the total American adult population, most of whom have at least tried marijuana (which, simply put, is why our drug laws are so absurd). So I couldn’t help thinking as we talked, who’s the real weirdo here?

Nevertheless, we both, for our own reasons, wanted to work things out, and the next week, I wrote a sheepish column explaining how discretion is often the better part of valor, and we all have to compromise sometimes, and too bad for all the wingnuts celebrating my demise that I’m back.

But I carried the frustration about not being able to write about drugs through the rest of my years at the column. You see, I was kind of an expert on the subject, not only because of my own personal experience, but because I’d actually been writing about it for years before I moved to West Virginia. Back in DC, I had co-founded a local group, DC Citizens for HEALTH, with Eric Sterling of the National Drug Strategy Network, Sam Smith, editor and publisher of the Progressive Review, and Al Jardine, a community activist from Anacostia, advocating a public health approach to the drug problem, instead of the criminal justice approach that was ruining so many lives. We had sponsored mayoral debates in which all the candidates essentially agreed with our position.

For the rest of the time that I wrote the Review column, I would bring Charlie studies and data showing the benefits (medicinal and otherwise) of drug use, and the downside of the punitive approach to drugs--including a couple of studies that indicated that the DARE program in the schools, for which he was a great champion in the paper, actually encouraged children to experiment with drugs. But Charlie wasn’t interested. And I never wrote about drugs (directly, at least) again.

But in recalling this history the other day, it suddenly occurred to me why Sallie had rejected my op-ed about Tuesday’s Supreme Court hearing. And it was because she was trying to do the right thing.

I’ll explain, next time.

The whole story 2

2008-10-08T13:12:00.000-07:00

Before I resume the tale I began on Monday, let me comment on a couple of developments from yesterday.

I ‘d never been in the West Virginia Supreme Court’s “temple” before Tuesday morning, so like any new visitor, I was awed by the grandeur—the beautifully sculpted and painted plaster ceiling, featuring a design of 16-pointed golden stars in a 4-square pattern, and the massive marble columns, four on each of three sides of the room, in front of deep maroon drapes. The justices sat at a long, dark, impeccably crafted bench, looking down at us.

My friend from the Attorney General’s office told me afterward that it was unusual for litigants to sit at the attorneys’ table, but I didn’t know that, so I just walked up there with Bob Bastress, our attorney, when the case was called, and took furious notes the whole time.

The legislature’s argument was primarily a confirmation of the observation that Shepherd University history professor John Stealey had made in his 2006 article, “Quiet Revolution in Hampshire County: Who Says County Government Has to Be a Three-Member Throwback to Virginia’s Old County Court System?” The attorneys said that, in the state’s 1872 constitutional convention, southern Democrats wanted to throw out the “township” model (which is similar to what we want to do in Hampshire County) that the Yankees set up in 1863, when the state “seceded” (it’s a complicated story) from Virginia. But they kept the provision giving county citizens the right to form their own government in the amended Constitution, as a concession to win support. But, the lawyers argued, the 1872 framers always intended for the legislature to oversee the county reform process, so the WV Supreme Court erred in its unanimous 1981 decision, Taylor County Commission v. Spencer, which requires the legislature to act on a county petition.

Our entire argument hinges on the Taylor decision, the centerpiece of Bastress’ presentation to the Court. He read from the decision:

“The use of the word ‘shall’ connotes a mandatory duty on the part of the Legislature. Its role in the reformation process is to expedite, within constitutional parameters, the will of the citizens of the county by producing enabling legislation which reflects the stated preference of the petitioning voters and provides the other voters of the county an opportunity to approve or to reject that alternative to the existing form of government. In effect, the Legislature is obliged by the constitution to vindicate the desires and designs of the voters of the county. This it is constitutionally required to do and beyond this it cannot act.”

In order for the legislature to win its appeal, the Court will have to overturn its own clear language.

Only two of the five justices asked many questions, so it was hard to tell where they would come down. I talked with a friend of mine on the Court staff later, and he said it would depend on whether the justices decide on principle or politics: if on principle, it favors us; if on politics, it overwhelmingly favors the legislature. He was glad to hear I didn’t have my hopes up.

I stopped off at the Charleston Gazette afterward, and they want an op-ed on the issue ASAP. The editor is under the correct impression that there’s a relationship between what we want to do, and Kanawha County’s attempt to consolidate the city and county government there, so I’ll talk about that. I’ll post it on the blog later. The Gazette’s got an AP story about yesterday’s Supreme Court hearing online today.

The other thing I wanted to briefly mention was the second presidential debate last night. It’s no surprise that virtually all the immediate post-debate polls gave the clear edge to Obama. McCain may think he does okay in town meeting formats, but maybe that’s when he’s the sole center of attention. The stunning contrast between Obama’s mature and leonine grace and McCain’s spiteful, doddering old stumblebum is no joke.

People have whispered about McCain’s mental deterioration. I’ve been watching him for years, the most frequent guest on Meet the Press, and this doesn’t look anything like the McCain of ten years ago to me. The erratic behavioral tics and Snidely Tonguelash routine he’s developed over this campaign are worrisome, especially with the Pentecostal fanatic (and her Zealot followers) he’s got slavering to take over from him. God help us all, if all the voting machines are rigged.

Now, back to our story.

It’s impossible to convey how devastated I was by the sense of hurt and betrayal I felt when Charlie refused to print my letter to the editor. All I was saying was something he’d heard me say a dozen times, at least: that I was as sick (probably sicker) of the vicious and ugly partisanship that was going back and forth between me and my counterpart in the column as the readers were.

But it was a trap that I hadn’t been able to escape. Sometimes I felt like I was in Thunderdome, tied at the wrist with a guy who I couldn’t get rid of until either I killed him or he killed me, with a crazed crowd cheering us on, lusting for blood. One local official once proposed to me that Scott and I stage a public boxing match, as a fundraiser for some charity. It was unnerving sometimes to see the sadistic glee in my friends’ eyes as they recited some of my more piercingly cruel comments.

I hated it. But what was I going to be—Alan Colmes? I had understood early on that in the Scots-Irish culture that prevails in this region, I couldn’t let insults go unanswered. And as a “liberal,” I was long tired of being bullied by ignorant fascists—which is essentially what my counterpart was. (I had heard rumors that he was connected with local Nazis—we have a chapter in this county—but never got any confirmation of that.) But the plain fact was: American mainstream media at every level (except on the Internet) is severely proscribed to a narrow range of political opinions that can be published (I call it the tyranny of the center), and I felt like I owed it to fellow progressives to hang on.

The most emotionally painful part of Charlie’s refusal to print the letter was the personal betrayal of our friendship. I couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t let me defend myself from this attack by simply and openly explaining my feelings. We had sat in his office once a week for seven years, sharing confidences and laughs about everything, and now he was letting me share equal blame for an ugly situation he could have stopped at any time, by editing Scott’s falsehoods. But he didn’t. And now I would be tied at the wrist with Scott in people’s minds for the rest of my life. It was too terrible to bear.

But really, I shouldn’t have been caught so off-guard emotionally, because Charlie had betrayed me once before. It was during the 2000 election, and the only time I was ever allowed to take photographs for the Hampshire Review.

My reporter friend who covered county arts events at that time was going on vacation, and he knew that I was planning to go to this “alternative” bluegrass festival in the county, featuring David Grisham and other big names. So he asked me if I would use his company camera to take some pictures.

A few months before, the county commission had tried to stop the permit for the festival, to be held at this funky and beautiful resort/campsite called Buffalo Gap, because they’d heard that a large number of “undesirables” tended to show up at this particular production company’s events. I had written a satirical column about this affair, describing a meeting of the “Hamster County Commission” in an alternative universe. This allowed me to read the thoughts of the commissioners as they conducted their ridiculous deliberations. Most people thought it was funny. But as it turned out, the county poobahs weren’t going to let their negative feelings about the festival go unexpressed.

It was a beautiful weekend. But on the road out of Capon Bridge going up to Buffalo Gap, a task force of the sheriff’s department and state police had set up a roadblock, and pulled over along the side of the road were about a half-dozen cars and vans, with all their contents—sleeping bags, backpacks, clothes, food, tents—spilled out on the gravel next to their vehicles. The occupants were being questioned by officers.

I couldn’t believe they were doing this. It was so patently unconstitutional (as the US Supreme Court itself ruled, several months later). I was furious, and embarrassed for the county, and incredulous that they would pull a move this stupid, this death blow to the tourist industry—because this story was going to get around (a few years ago, Buffalo Gap, unable to prosper, was turned into another subdivision). But they didn’t bother to stop me, alone in my pickup with West Virginia tags, so I continued on to the festival.

I had a great time that day, my fury quickly subsiding in the festival’s omnipresent good vibes. I ran into some old friends, and really enjoyed my first real experience with a camera, trying to incorporate all the ideas about balance and composition I remembered from art school days. This gave me an opening to talk with a lot of people, too, some of whom had been stopped and searched. Despite the good vibes, there was an undercurrent of anger about how the festival had been “welcomed” into the county.

I had such a good time, and the world-class music was so good, that it wasn’t until almost midnight that I left. So I was amazed, at that hour, as I was driving back down the road, to see that the police still had the roadblock up, and had several vehicles pulled over. Obviously, this was a job for Super-photojournalist, who, having quaffed a couple of beers, was feeling pretty brave.

I pulled over on my side of the road about fifty yards in front of the roadblock. As I walked toward it, I wondered if the digital camera would focus itself in the sharply contrasting shadows of the roadblock’s lights. As soon as I got close enough, I started snapping pictures, and would snap one every few yards until I came up to the deputy interrogating three kids looking down at their feet, and took a picture of the interrogation.

“Hey, you can’t do that,” he says. “Who are you?”

“I’m Michael Hasty,” I answer. “I’m taking pictures for the Hampshire Review.”

“Oh, yeah,” he says, in a tone that makes me think he’s probably a Republican, “I know who you are. You can’t take pictures here.”

It’s funny. I only thought for just a second before I replied, “What—you figure since you’ve already trashed the fourth amendment, you might as well trash the first one, too? Who’s in charge here? I want to talk to him.”

The deputy regarded me silently, with a kind of confused look on his face, for a minute, before he pointed at my feet and said, “Wait right here. No pictures.” Then he turned around and went over to caucus with the other deputies and state police.

The kids were all looking at me, wide-eyed. I apologized to them, on behalf of Hampshire County, for the way they’d been treated by some of our more overzealous ideologues, and hoped that they wouldn’t go away thinking everybody here is an asshole, because there are a lot of good people in this county. I asked them about what had happened. They were starting to tell me when the deputy came over and handed them their summons to the magistrate’s office, and told them to leave. Within a few minutes, the whole roadblock had closed down, and the only ones left were me and a couple of deputies.

I don’t remember how it started, but we had a rather earnest and vigorous conversation about the meaning of the Constitution for about twenty minutes, and then we left, too. The next day, I wrote a column about my outrage about this event (just titled “Amerika,” as I recall) and talking about how ironic it was that, if this had happened thirty years before, the roadblock could have snagged two of the three major presidential candidates, the exception being Ralph Nader, who despite his own teetotalling ways, nevertheless called for the legalization of marijuana—the Green Party platform.

When I took the column into the office on Monday morning, anxious to tell Charlie about the incident, the proverbial feces had already hit the proverbial fan.

You know, when I started telling this story, I didn’t really expect it to take this long. And now I seem to find myself caught in a diversionary thicket. But since this is supposed to be the “whole” story, I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s gone on like this. I know how it ends, but I’m as interested as I hope you are to find out how I’m going to get there. So here’s my commitment: I’ll keep going until we arrive back in the present, and then we’ll all find out together if it was worth the trip.

Seeya tomorrow.

The whole story

2008-10-06T10:50:00.000-07:00

Well.

I guess I got that off my chest (see the previous post, “Intercepted email”).

In retrospect, the “Fuck you” seems a little gratuitous. But it was exactly the way I was feeling at the time. And frankly, I just thought it was a direct re-statement of Sallie’s email, only with the euphemism stripped away. You see, she had told me just two days earlier that she was going to run the op-ed in this week’s Hampshire Review, along with an update at the end that I would call in from Charleston after the WV Supreme Court hearing on Tuesday. So you can understand why I felt betrayed.

You may not understand why I was so very, very angry. Every writer gets rejection slips. Isn’t this kind of an overreaction?

For many years now, I have kept silent about the story of how I came to quit writing the column in the Hampshire Review, a job I dearly loved. Some of it came out in my first “epic” post, “Radical Pantheism.” But just what happened in Charlie See’s office that day is a story that’s only been shared with a few friends, for a variety of reasons: to protect the reputations of important local people who have their flaws, like every human being (the “cross” we have to bear), but whose lives, on the whole, are an overwhelmingly positive contribution to their community—people I always considered friends, despite their many personal betrayals; to keep a civil discourse that would help us function together in projects we worked on (for example, me buying ads for civic events in their paper); and because, if you’re organizing in local politics, you don’t want to make an enemy of the county newspaper.

Now, obviously, the time has come to tell the whole story. And ultimately, it is a story of my personal skirmish in the national culture war, as well as a friendship gone bad.

When Charlie first approached me about writing the “transplant” (the nickname by which county natives refer to the immigrants moving into the third fastest-growing county in the state) side of a transplant/native column format, my friend Michael O’Brien, a reporter for the paper, told me that Charlie had asked him if I was a conservative. I had sent the Review a 1,200-word op-ed responding to the negative comments in the man-in-the-street column they’d run the week of George Washington’s birthday. The interviewees were unanimously pessimistic about what Washington would think of the current state of the country—the unspoken subtext being the presidency of Bill Clinton.

I wrote an upbeat piece about how Washington would tell these people to buck up, how he was a get-up-and-go, can-do kind of guy, the model American, and how, if we just follow his example and roll up our sleeves, we can do the same thing today—he would expect it of us. I was experimenting with using patriotic language to express the same beliefs I always had, but to an audience of rural conservatives instead of the progressive urban sophisticates who read the left-wing newsletters I’d always written for before this. It fooled Charlie, the editor (at that time) of the Review.

When the column started in May 1996, my counterpart, the chair of the county Republican party, and I agreed that we wanted to conduct a civil dialogue. But it was an election year, and it wasn’t long before the culture war reared its massive ugly head. In an indirect response to my third column, something about the modern ramifications of the American Civil War, my counterpart’s fourth column was headlined, “Liberals lie.” He didn’t mention me by name.

We got pretty brutal—as you may have realized by now, I’m not exactly a milquetoast liberal—but we never got off speaking terms when we’d see each other around the county. He’s basically a good-humored good ol’ boy; and we were in fundamental agreement about our politics, despite the left/right thing, because he’s out of the party’s libertarian wing, and he’s just as afraid of the Council on Foreign Relations as I am.

Things changed when he ran for the state senate after two years on the column, and his little brother took over. We started with the same civil agreement, but it got real ugly, real fast. And he’s meaner than his brother.

The worst of it came when his political patron, the president of the county commission, tried to sell the county hospital to a friend who then leased it, and I became privy to information that led me to mount a “save the hospital” campaign in the column. After my former counterpart was elected to the county commission in 2000 and provided the majority vote to sell the building, I found out from a friend of mine in the Attorney General’s office about a provision in the WV Constitution that allows citizens to petition to sell county property. We opponents of the sale formed a committee and gathered enough signatures within days—which voided the commission vote. In the 2002 GOP primary, the county commission president was defeated (despite being voted “Republican of the year” in 2001), and the citizens voted 3-1 not to sell the hospital.

All this time, my counterpart was attacking me for “sour grapes,” by constantly bringing up my partner Nancy, who had worked as a nurse practitioner for the company that leased the hospital, at a separate clinic. When the clinic closed, her secretary, who was suing one of the company doctors for sexual harassment, was hired by the hospital, but Nancy wasn’t (most people think it was to get at me, for my columns). Every time, I reminded readers that I had started writing against the hospital sale while the clinic was still open, and there was no talk of closing it; and I knew for a fact that the company was lying about the clinic’s patient numbers, at the county commission hearing on the closure.

This would shut him up for awhile, but a few weeks later, he’d bring it up again, because he knew that it bothered me. I would sit in Charlie’s office in agony, because of course it embarrassed Nancy, but Charlie would say, “If I censor Scott, I’ll have to censor you, too.” And naturally, I didn’t want to lose what little freedom I had in my first real gig in mainstream media, so I suffered along. I begged him to separate the columns, so I wouldn’t be forced to answer some of the more outrageous vomit coming from the right. He would tell me about going to statewide editor/publisher conferences, and all these guys coming up to him in wonderment that he was printing my stuff, and saying they would never do it. “Michael,” he said, “I could never publish a guy like you without somebody to balance you.”

Freedom of the press? In America?

Please.

I told him I was going to quit in the spring of 2002, I was so sick of the back-and-forth. But he convinced me to hold out until after the general election, when he was going to get rid of Scott, because he’d found out that Scott’s brother had filed papers (partnering with a guy who recently pled guilty to embezzling the county) with the Secretary of State’s office, to start another newspaper in Hampshire County, and Charlie was pissed about this. I figured I could hold out that much longer.

After the election, I kept waiting for the change to happen, and occasionally dropping hints, but it never did. I came up with several candidates to replace Scott, Republican friends of mine, but for one reason or another, Charlie would dismiss the idea.

I wrote in “Radical Pantheism” about how nervous Charlie was at that time that I was against the coming war with Iraq, and how I kept talking about how Bush was lying about everything. It was our traditional practice since I began writing the column for me to come in on Monday mornings and hand-deliver it, to make sure it was acceptable (I only had two rejected in seven years), and because Charlie and I genuinely enjoy sitting around and talking about stuff. (At least, we used to. He confessed to me recently that my column had caused him “many sleepless nights.” I didn’t tell him the experience was mutual.)

One Monday morning in January 2003, I came in with a column that was mostly about Bush’s lies about Iraqi WMD, but had a short coda responding to Scott’s previous column. I don’t have a fulltime job, since I spend most of my time working around the farm, and he had alluded to me being lazy. I had answered with a list of some of the things I do around here, and closed with something like, “Anybody who confesses to being too fat to walk in the woods [as he had in his Thanksgiving column] should be careful about mentioning work.”

It was humorous, but Nancy had been embarrassed about being publicly linked to a shiftless husband type, so it was the last straw for me. I confronted Charlie and told him that, if he didn’t fire Scott or at least separate the columns, I was quitting. He got mad and said I didn’t have any right to put him on the spot like that. I reminded him of his promise a year before to fire Scott, and he says, “I said, I was thinking about firing Scott,” and I say, “That’s not the way I heard it” (remembering how mad he was at the time), and then say, “If you’re not going to fire Scott or separate the columns, I quit,” and he says, “Fine!” and I say, “Well give me back that column. I don’t want you to publish that one, either,” and he says, “Fine.”

Throughout this time, of course, our voices are getting louder and louder, and we kept on arguing. Now here’s something that might jog Charlie’s “memory” about what really happened that day (the last time I talked with him—this spring, as I recall—he kept hinting for me to agree with him that our separation was a mutual decision, but I let it pass): right in the middle of this heated argument, I suddenly stopped and said, “Wait a minute. Are you getting rid of Scott, too? Because I’m not quitting, if you’re not getting rid of Scott.” It was a suicide bomber’s logic. And Charlie said, “Scott’s going too,” and then we resumed our argument.

We argued until we exhausted ourselves, and then we stood up and shook hands, in the interest of the comity I mentioned above, and I left. Two days later, the column was replaced by a vague, sentimental editorial from Charlie about how things change, and sometimes you just have to move on.

In the next issue, somebody wrote in to say how glad he was that “Thinking Locally” had ended, because he was tired of the personal and ideological garbage. Naively thinking that I could still join the conversation, I wrote a letter to the editor in reply, saying how much I agreed with the reader, and that was exactly the reason I quit. Charlie didn’t print it. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe he was letting me take the rap for all this shit, when he knew better than anyone else in the county, except Nancy, that I had been begging him to make it stop for at least three years, for him to properly exercise his editorial discretion and cease the false and unfairly personal attacks.

But he was going to be above it all.

Well, this story has already gone on much longer than I intended, and there’s still a lot to tell, about further betrayals, and how drugs and religion and crooked state politics all fit into the picture. But I have to get ready for my drive to Charleston this afternoon, for tomorrow’s West Virginia Supreme Court hearing on the case, Committee to Reform Hampshire County Government v. West Virginia Speaker of the House of Delegates and President of the Senate, in which I’m a plaintiff (the legislature’s appealing).

I’ll be back on Wednesday to resume the story, and to give you an update on what happened in court.

Intercepted email

2008-10-03T22:54:00.000-07:00

10/3/2008 9:12am
Subject: Re: Mistake
From: Sallie [See, editor of the Hampshire Review]
To: Michael Hasty

Michael,

Why don’t you send me a press release on the Supreme Court hearing the Legislature’s appeal in the case. [sic] I’m not really interested in a first-person op-ed at this point.

Thanks,
Sallie

10/4/2008 1:30am
Subject: Re: Re: Mistake
From: Michael
To: Sallie

Sallie,

In the past couple of years, you have published at least three personal reflections on the “tribunal” issue, that I can recall, by people who I know for a fact have not attended a meeting of the Committee to Reform Hampshire County Government in more than three years, if ever.

Yet now, in the week when the West Virginia Supreme Court meets to hear arguments in a case that has been historically unprecedented from the beginning—presented by the state’s pre-eminent constitutional law scholar, Bob Bastress, one of the losing candidates in this year’s Supreme Court Democratic primary, to Chief Justice Spike Maynard, the other losing candidate—you don’t want a first-person observation from the guy who wrote the first draft of the bill that resurrected the issue in 2005, after the House failed to pass it the first time; did all the back-door negotiations with the Attorney General’s office to get their cooperation on the bill; recruited Bastress as pro bono attorney in the case; personally talked House Political Subdivisions Chair Tim Manchin into leading the way to finally get it passed by the House in 2007 (though not the Senate); has written three major op-eds on this issue prominently featured in the Charleston Gazette; was the only—repeat, only—citizen of Hampshire County to attend all three circuit court hearings, in which we, the plaintiffs, won on every single count; and knows all the Legislature’s lawyers on a first-name basis.

You are not being honest, Sallie. It is extremely disappointing to me, your former friend, that you are as big a liar as your husband Charlie, who has never, in five years, had the courage to admit to anyone that I quit, and he didn’t fire me, because I injured his precious little male pride.

Please do not publish my op-ed. Pay a reporter to write your own story.

Fuck you,
Michael

Palin drone

2008-10-03T06:44:00.000-07:00

Although I’ve seen Youtube clips, I didn’t watch Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican convention, so I’d never experienced the full Saracuda Hustle before last night’s debate.

I was as astonished as Joe Biden, in that happy-to-be-in-the-presence-of-such-a-wild-and-attractive-woman kind of leering male way, at Palin’s antics. She’s always struck me as a weird amalgam of Shirley Temple, the Church Lady, and Raquel Welch in designer eyeglasses. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her suddenly strip down to a cavegirl bikini and sing “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” holding a cross.

Let’s face it, she was flirting with me the whole time. I mean, Bill Clinton was a flirt, but I don’t recall him ever crinkling up his nose straight into the camera. She winked at me at least twice. I kept thinking, what if this was Biden doing this? I can’t recall a single presidential or vice-presidential candidate in my lifetime, including Geraldine Ferraro, ever spending an entire television appearance doing a cutesy-poo routine.

I genuinely liked Joe Biden last night, who, especially in comparison with Palin, the talking Caribou Barbie doll, came off as a fully-rounded and compassionate human being, warts and all.

I’ve never really been a fan of Biden’s, who’s let too many oleaginous rightwing judges slip through his hands as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And one thing Palin got right was Biden’s interventionist history. But he seems a kind man; and the sad fact is, everybody in his political class, including Obama, the Lion of Afghanistan, is trapped in the military-industrial Matrix. By those standards, I thought Obama’s choice of Biden was yet another example of his brilliant mind at work.

Gwen Ifill, the moderator from PBS, did a good job keeping the conversation lively, but she left a lot of important questions unasked. She had a perfect opportunity—the specter of Dick Cheney having been summoned in the back-and-forth about the role of VP, and with the release of the Department of Justice report this week suggesting possible criminal politicization of the DOJ by Rove & Company—to ask about abuse of power, and asking political appointees to do questionable things. It’s curious that the media shows so little interest in stonewalled subpoenas as a general matter, from Troopergate to the fired US attorneys.

Lively as the discussion was, however, I had a hard time staying awake sometimes, which really irritated me because it was interfering with my fantasies about me and Sarah off alone in the woods. I’d been up late the night before, and sometimes the train of thought was gosh-darn difficult to follow, as Fantasy Girl might say.

I mean, Ifill would ask a question, or Biden would make a point, and then the focus would shift to Palin, who would take a beat while she shuffled through her note cards (in her mind or on the podium, I don’t really know, though they both were looking down a lot). Then she would start droning on with some floral and ludicrous right wing talking point or campaign slogan that I’d heard what, a million and a half times before, and Sarah and I would disappear somewhere off in dreamland.

In an unprecedented way, Palin’s presence in this campaign represents the final degrading step in the celebritization of presidential politics. Because I won’t give up hope, I’ll continue to hope that the Obama era will bring some return to the politics of reason favored by James Madison and his Founding Father associates (“Gee, willikers, Senator Omadison—can I call you Jimmy?—up in small town Alaska, we don’t go for that East Coast elitist church-state separation thingy, know what I mean?”).

Meanwhile, I choose Sarah Palin as the candidate I’d most like to go off in the woods and gut a moose with—though I’d keep a close eye on the knife the whole time.

Spiritual conundrum

2008-10-01T09:14:00.000-07:00

One of the most convenient aspects of being a pantheist is that there are no churches or ministers.

I mean, really, what would be the point, when everything and everyone is God? You don’t need a holy place, because the entire universe is holy. And you don’t need a middleman, because everyone you meet is God. It has all the conveniences of atheism, but without the emptiness.

I’m not particularly anti-clerical—certainly not to the degree of Tom Paine, or even Thomas Jefferson. I was never raped as an altar boy, and I’ve had priest and minister friends all my life. I’ve always enjoyed the company of men and women of the cloth (though I have to admit, I’ve never met a TV evangelist; and I don’t like the feeling of biting my tongue in the occasional encounter when I have to, just to keep things on a pious plane). But I much prefer preachers who are more pastor than politician.

I’m sure that, now that I’ve publicly confessed to being a pantheist, I have minister friends who are concerned that I’m in danger of losing my immortal soul, that when the angels come calling to carry me home, I won’t be there, because I had to catch an early train to hell. They probably worry that I’ve lost my way, confused by all those drugs I took in my early years.

But they don’t have to worry. It’s been decades since I took psychedelics, and for me, aside from the occasional moment of terror when my soul was stripped bare, it was a far more positive experience than negative one.

This summer, when my band played at a party in Berkeley Springs WV, I met a couple of guys who were overseeing research at Johns Hopkins University on the spiritual effects of the psilocybin mushroom. Their research (which has since been published) showed distinct positive spiritual benefits from the mushroom. This result matches studies done at Harvard and other academic settings.

Other research includes the suggestion of an Israeli archeologist (also recently published) that Moses was high on a native psychedelic plant when he received the Ten Commandments, and saw the “burning bush.” The late Dead Sea scrolls scholar and philologist, John Allegro, wrote a book, “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross,” uncovering multiple hidden drug references in the Gospels, and suggesting that Jesus and his followers experienced their spiritual communion in a drug-induced ecstasy.

There is abundant archeological evidence that the ancient Hebrews smoked cannabis both as medicine and for recreation—a tradition that continues throughout the Middle East today (like the American government-sanctioned practice of using peyote in Native American rituals). There are multiple positive references to marijuana in the Bible. In the Book of Kings, David’s son Jonathan and his troops get hungry walking through a field of seed-bearing herb, and when they ate it, “their eyes opened,” and they have a great victory. Then, of course, there’s the Song of Solomon (nudge, nudge; wink, wink).

Another reason my minister friends may worry about the state of my soul is that I no longer “believe in” Jesus, either because he isn’t God, or because everyone else is, too.

But this is exactly what Jesus himself was talking about, when the Pharisees questioned what they perceived as his pretensions to divinity, referring to himself as a son of God, and he replied, “Is it not written, ye are gods?” He may as well have added, “What’s the big deal? We’re all made in his image and likeness!” When you go to those areas around Israel where the ancient Aramaic language Jesus spoke is still used today, you can see how wildly everyday expressions like “son of man” and “in my name” have been misinterpreted by contemporary Christianity.

Of course Jesus was a “messiah” (or “Christ,” in the Greek). Messiahs are a dime a dozen—at least, as they were understood by Jesus and his clan. Moses was a messiah. Joshua was a messiah. David was a messiah—which is why the messiah of their age had to be a “son of David.” “Messiah” is a concept hardwired into the human character, Isaiah’s “Suffering Servant,” represented in archetypal form in “gods” from Osiris to Elvis, the highest spirit of humanity crucified on a cross of flesh, leading the way to understanding.

When I’m standing onstage and singing my heart out in those old gospel tunes like “Wondrous Love” that “Christ laid aside his crown for my soul,” I mean every single word of it.

Just because I’m a pantheist doesn’t mean I don’t love Jesus.

*******

Correction: I made a huge mistake when I sent "Reflections on a lawsuit" to the Hampshire Review on Monday, and mis-typed the email address. I was gone yesterday, and didn’t find out until this morning that they didn’t get it. So it won’t be in today’s Review. Sorry to everybody about the confusion.

Empire falls

2008-09-30T08:28:00.000-07:00

Who knows? Maybe we will go out with a bang.

I always thought it would be more likely that global capitalism would expire in a long, extended whimper, as the foundation slowly crumbled to the point where the whole thing would collapse of its own weight. But when the Dow Jones average falls more points than any other single day in its history, as it did yesterday, we enter a new neighborhood in Wonderland.

Capitalism has always been something of a Ponzi scheme, depending as it does on continuing “growth.” Kevin Philips, one of America’s most astute political prophets, has an excellent analysis of the crapshoot capitalism has always been historically in his 2002 book, “Wealth and Democracy,” which traces imperial economic bubbles through the ages (his most recent book takes a bead on our current crisis). Uncontrolled (or unregulated) systemic growth has more in common with negative phenomena like cancer or disease epidemics than with the organic, rhythmic seasonal process you see in the growth of a tree, for example.

Like many environmentalists, I prefer the idea of the “steady state” economy laid out by E.F. Schumacher in his influential book, “Small is Beautiful,” where systemic waste is used as a fertilizer, rather than collected in a cesspool. Under the current system, pollution is seen as a positive good, either as an asset to the corporate bottom line (because costs are “externalized” when somebody else has to clean up the mess), or as a boost to GDP when somebody is paid to do the cleanup. This is a system that deserves to fail.

As a revolutionary, I enjoy watching the adolescent discomfort of our dysfunctional and now-despised king, Alfred E. Bushman, as he tries to reassure his fellow first-class passengers on the economic Titanic (his “base,” as he once joked to a roomful of tuxedo-clad swells) and the corrupt Congressful of headless Chicken Littles, feathers flying, anxiously running around in partisan circles, frantic to rescue their biggest campaign contributors.

But where do you run, when the sky is falling?

*******

Perhaps someone can unlock a mystery for me.

As I confessed recently, I’m kind of a Luddite when it comes to computers. The other day, I tried to load some site-tracking software, to monitor how my marketing campaign is going. As usually happens when I try something new on the computer, I got a prompt asking something like “Wxq bthuzg hrofm? Click yes or no.” So I flipped a coin and clicked something, and got the response, “Nice try, asshole, but your cookies are soggy and your javascript is melting. Go back to the end of the line.”

In my usual panic about these things, I abandoned the project until I could get some help. But I’m wondering if I caused some sort of disturbance in the Force, because none of the three search engines I’ve tried (Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com) will bring up this blog, even though the Obunny post has been reprinted at several other websites, where it’s received hundreds of hits, at least. It’s of course interesting to see what all my alter egos are doing (I’m proud to say that most Michael Hastys are productive community members, including a lot of doctors, dentists and police officers—though we do also have a bank robber and kidnapper in our midst), but even googling “Michael Hasty Radical Pantheist” won’t produce this blog in the search.

How come? Computer gurus are welcome to reply.

Reflections on a lawsuit

2008-09-29T10:54:00.000-07:00

Today's post is an op-ed I sent this afternoon to the Hampshire Review, where I used to write a column. It's about a lawsuit, in which I'm a plaintiff, against the West Virginia legislature. The WV Supreme Court hears their appeal next week.

Thanks to Online Journal and Smirking Chimp for picking up the "Obunny" post.

Next week, on Tuesday, October 7th, the West Virginia Supreme Court will hear the Legislature’s appeal in the case, Committee to Reform Hampshire County Government v. Richard Thompson, Speaker of the West Virginia House of Delegates, and Earl Ray Tomblin, President of the West Virginia Senate. The legislature has lost three times at the circuit court level.

The suit was filed in August 2005, in response to the legislature’s failure to pass an enabling bill, which would allow the citizens of Hampshire County to vote in a referendum on the changes to county government proposed in a petition signed by ten percent of the county’s voters, and submitted to the legislature in 2003—the first time in West Virginia history that a legislature has failed to perform this required constitutional function.

The petition proposes that a county “tribunal” (an unfortunate term that we’d change to “council” if we had to do it over again, but we got it straight from the Constitution), consisting of representatives from each electoral district (eight in our case, replacing the present three at-large county commissioners), and paid $250 per meeting each (instead of the fulltime salary and benefits commissioners get now), hire a fulltime county administrator to execute the day-to-day functions of the county government.

The change would be that the county’s ruling body would function more as a part-time citizen legislature, with a representative elected from each district, and with more efficiency than the current part-time, legislative/executive hybrid. The present county commission system is left over from colonial Virginia’s aristocracy, and designed to keep the peasants in their place—as Shepherd University history professor John Stealey observed in his study of our historically altered process, “Quiet Revolution in Hampshire County.”

The change was designed to be revenue-neutral—counter to its opponents’ claims. The savings that would come from paying eight council members, per meeting, instead of paying three county commissioners full salary and benefits, is almost, in itself, enough to pay a fulltime county administrator. The rest would come from the efficiencies that would result from having a fulltime executive coordinating the activities of the existing county offices, which would retain their single-purpose autonomy. The council/administrator model is one of the most common forms of county government in America.

As a plaintiff in the lawsuit, and the only Hampshire County citizen who’s attended all three circuit court hearings, I thought Review readers might be interested in a few of my observations.

First, I will attend next week’s Supreme Court hearing with some sense of dread. We have won every question about the legislature’s responsibility presented to the circuit judge, but the Supreme Court declined to accept our petition for confirmation of the judge’s rulings. The legislature’s appeal was a how-much-spaghetti-sticks-to-the-wall laugh riot, raising issues that had never been litigated at the circuit level. The fact that the Supremes took their case is a bad sign, because our entire case is based on an earlier Supreme Court decision, Spencer v. Taylor County Commission, which gives the final word on the form of county government to the citizens of the county—not the state legislature.

The recent anti-democratic trend throughout the American system of justice (and not just in now-notorious West Virginia), like the US Supreme Court ruling about using eminent domain for private profit, for example, is also worrisome. And our biggest opponent in the legislature has been the Association of Counties, representing all those local officials who are worried that if we cut salaries in Hampshire County, their citizens can cut theirs—and judges in West Virginia are elected by local machines.

We carry the additional legal burden that our pro bono attorney, WVU constitutional law professor Bob Bastress, ran against the chief justice, who’ll be sitting on the bench Tuesday, in last May’s Democratic primary (they both lost).

Second, from the very beginning, I have been impressed by the nonpartisan cooperation that has characterized our local campaign. The plaintiffs list includes Democrats, Republicans and independents. I think it’s important to mention two in particular.

Republican Bob Shilling is no longer on the list, because he passed away last year. Bob had a gentle good humor about him, and we kidded each other about our political opinions mercilessly. As everyone who knew him (and most did) recognized, he was a tireless contributor to the community, from the teen center to the library, and he always put his “country first.” We were both veterans, so we spoke with the understanding that brings. The last time we talked was on his front porch, and he was hoping he’d live long enough to vote in the referendum. We carry on in his honor.

Democrat Frank Whitacre is still on the plaintiffs list, but come January, he’ll no longer occupy the office of county assessor, having lost the primary. Frank is the innocent victim of a crazy real estate market and his own scrupulous honesty, but the last time I saw him, he was looking forward to retirement. Frank was alone among his fellow elected officials, in having the courage and integrity to support a change in county government that he believes will make the county better, and supporting it for all the right and honest and patriotic reasons.

This brings me to my final observation. Where Frank and I agree is that this is an important case—certainly more important than the attention it’s received so far.

At the heart of this case is the most basic principle of republican government—that citizens have the right to choose the form of government under which they govern themselves in a democracy, with a level of representation in the governing body that they themselves design. Article IX, Section 13 of the West Virginia Constitution is one of the most radically democratic provisions in any state constitution in America, in putting true power in the hands of local citizens.

If the West Virginia Supreme Court reverses its own precedent in this case, another door to real democracy in America will have closed.

I’ll be writing about the Supreme Court hearing in future posts. Legal documents from the case can be viewed at the Historic Hampshire website (www.historichampshire.org).

Sun Day

2008-09-28T08:25:00.000-07:00

It’s raining again today, the third day in a row. We needed the rain, but things are getting soggy—too soggy to load up the back of my friend’s pickup with horse manure for her garden, which was the scheduled plan.

Sunday’s still a day I like to kick back, especially in the morning, which retains the aura of sanctity hardwired into me from my days as an altar boy. It may be a 24/7 world out here in cyberspace, but back on the farm we breathe in the eternal holiness that surrounds us, from the mountains and meadows to the ever-expanding edges of the universe, a holiness especially rich on Sunday morning, for me. Out here, we’re still living in the Big Bang. And if you pay attention, you can feel the reverberations in your breath.

Around six, I take the dogs for a walk down the little country lane up above the house. That’s when they like to get up, and on the weekends, I want to give Nancy the opportunity to sleep in. After they eat, the dogs join her in bed until it’s time to go visit the horses, their usual routine. I head for my desk, where I sit slackjawed for a couple of hours staring at a glowing box, trying to make sense of what happened yesterday in the Matrix.

The routine creates its own rhythm, which the dogs themselves are attuned to, even though it’s a human invention. They are exquisitely aware of any activity involving food, and since they get an egg on Sunday morning (for their coats, Nancy says), I can already see the Sunday light in their eyes, even as they’re bustling around waiting for me to open the door to our walk.

The rhythm of creation, human and divine, is of course incorporated in scripture in the concept of the Sabbath, the seventh day, when God rested. In the early years of imperial Christianity, they moved the sabbath to Sunday, ostensibly to celebrate the mythic resurrection of Jesus, but also to remove any taint of Judaism attached to its traditional celebration on Saturday.

I like the fact that we still recognize the sanctity of time (in a culture marked by what ecologist Jerry Mander calls “the absence of the sacred”) by keeping every day named after a god, from those old perennials the Sun and Moon, to the Roman god Saturn—the god who himself rules time and the sign Capricorn. The old man; Jupiter’s father. He’s such a stern old cuss, that it’s like a big joke that his name has been attached from the beginning to having a great old Dionysian time, from “Saturnalia” to “Saturday Night Fever.” The secret is in the hedonist’s mantra—“Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die!” Saturn, the Grim Reaper.

So that’s another reason to enjoy a quiet Sunday morning—to recover from the hangover from the night before.

The basic concept of the Sabbath is a principle we need to revive, if we are going to rescue the Earth from its 24/7 assault. In the Old Testament, the land is supposed to lie fallow every seventh year, so that it may rest from the work of providing human sustenance with regular cultivation. Any “volunteer” production from last year’s garden is to be given to the poor. This principle is also behind the biblical idea of the “Jubilee Year” every 49 years (7X7), when slaves are freed and all debts are forgiven. People are trying to revive the idea of the Jubilee today, to relieve the crushing bank debt of the Third World.

As much as I’d like to encourage the idea of resting on the Sabbath, however, I have to go clean house. See you on Moon Day.

Barack Obunny and Elmer McFudd

2008-09-27T07:54:00.000-07:00

The thought had occurred to me before, perhaps from something that I’d read, but the image was so striking as soon as they walked out on stage to shake hands with the moderator that I wasn’t able to shake it through the whole debate: Barack Obama, long, lean and debonair, looked just like Bugs Bunny, and John McCain, the hunched-over and stumpy old man, made a perfect Elmer Fudd.

I’d also never noticed before how much McCain sounded like Elmer Fudd (without the speech impediment). His voice has the same kind of high-pitched, sing-songy raspiness as Elmer’s; and he telegraphs his plans to trap Barack with the same kind of evil glints in his eye that Elmer displayed when he was cooking up a plan for the Wascally Wabbit.

McCain is more Nixonesque than Fudd, however, something else I’d never really noticed before. I hadn’t watched the Republican primary debates at any length, but in those, McCain’s essential creepiness just made him one of the crowd. You didn’t have the focus you did in last night’s debate. I also appreciated the split screen broadcast that let us watch the reactions of the candidates when the other one was speaking.

Obama usually looked like he was standing on the outside of the garden fence, holding a bunch of carrots. McCain was either deviously calculating when he was going to spring his next pre-planned talking point, nervously chuckling at his own jokes, or frantically fuming as his plans blew up in his face, and he’s watching Bugs Obunny escape again—just like Elmer.

It wasn’t all a cartoon, though. At times I felt like I was watching one of the best presidential debates since Kennedy and Nixon (it’s heartbreaking to listen to those debates today, and hear them trying to outdo each other in how they are going to help the poor). Obama was his usual cool and highly-prepared self, unflappably handsome and intelligent. You could really see the impressive young man who made so many early admirers think of him as a future president. Obama, for all his faults, has the real potential to be one of those transformative American presidents whose name is left on an historical era.

To give McCain his due, he was also better prepared than I expected, and he showed up to fight. Earlier in the day, I had written to my niece—who was confused why McCain pulled the lamebrain stunt of trying to cancel the debate—that I thought McCain really, in his heart of hearts, wants to lose the election and retire to his houses and cars in sunny, dry Arizona. He’s an old man.

But after watching last night, I no longer think that. This was an old man who was putting up a fight, a cantankerous old codger with an inbred sense of supreme privilege—he’s owed for all those years he spent tortured in prison, the son of an admiral, no less—and on transparent display throughout the debate was the boy his schoolmates, in their childish frankness, nicknamed “McNasty.” The reason McCain pulled the debate stunt is because he’s still the same person he always was, the guy investigator Cliff Schecter calls “the Real McCain:” the Naval Academy fuckup who couldn’t keep a plane in the air, even before he was shot down.

Senator, I knew Elmer Fudd. You’re no Elmer Fudd.

About this blog

2008-09-26T17:29:00.000-07:00

It’s raining this morning, and since I don’t like to work outside in the rain, it’s a perfect day to start regular blogging—which I hope to keep up daily. Before I get into today’s subject, though, let me do a little “housekeeping.”

First, thanks for the comments on my opening opus, “Radical Pantheism” (please don’t think that length will be repeated anytime soon; it’s actually the longest article I’ve ever written). Aside from the unsurprising fact that all the comments (so far) came from personal friends of mine, the commenters have other things in common (and the synchronicity here naturally delights a pantheist like myself): they’re all women of spiritual leanings, and each is an artist in her own genre. It felt like a blessing by the Muses—an equally delightful omen. (The book Jan recommends looks interesting, in a subject I was introduced to years ago in “The Tao of Physics,” by Fritjof Capra.)

The second thing I wanted to take care of was to note the fact—obvious to anyone under the age of thirty—that I don’t know much more about computers than John McCain. I’m hoping to remedy that in coming weeks (plus I’m getting a new computer, which will help speed things along). I’ll also get a digital camera, to illustrate (when I can) what I’m talking about—whether it’s a court hearing or the way the wind plays upon the grass—without worrying about whether I’m stepping on somebody’s photographic rights (alternative suggestions are welcome). The upshot is, I hope to add all the bells and whistles soon, including photos, videos and hyperlinks.

It was thinking about the links I’d like to refer people to that gave me the idea for today’s post.

The most attractive aspect of writing a blog, for me, is that it’s a very open medium, which allows me to write whatever I want, at any length, on any subject. All my writing in the past has been circumscribed by the editorial needs of the newspaper or website I was writing for. But as I thought about how to organize the links for this blog, it became apparent to me that my blog posts would fall into the same five general categories: Matrix, Deep State, New World, Spirit and Family.

Matrix

This term is obviously borrowed from the Matrix film trilogy, whose hero discovers that the world he thinks he is living in is not the real world, but a computer-generated fantasy. I use the term to refer to the “real” world, where America is still a constitutional democracy—the world of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, the New York Times and the Washington Post and the rest of the corporate media, the world where American democracy has been replaced by a Permanent Presidential Puppet Show.

This is the world we all live in, a world of illusion which nonetheless has tragic and real-world consequences. It is a world where all communications are monitored by whatever-named agency has taken over the functions of Total Information Awareness, mining the near-infinite ocean of data for patterns that might affect the wealth and well-being of what sociologist C. Wright Mills once called “the Power Elite.” It is a world defined at its outer edges by journalists like Ron Suskind and Seymour Hersch, a world whose ways have taken a taxi to the dark side.

It is also the world of what I think of as “institutional progressives,” who generally follow the analysis of American foreign policy laid out most famously by Noam Chomsky, and still believe in the economic policies of the New Deal. These are goodhearted people who think the Constitution can be restored, but whose own goodness of heart prevents them from psychologically accepting the dark truths at the epic center of modern American history. Matrix is where I’ll link sites like Common Dreams, Buzzflash and Firedoglake, favorite sites of mine whose take on the Matrix I consider essential reading. I don’t have any real hope that Cynthia McKinney will be elected president, and in the “real” world, it is essential that Obama is. And if hope is anywhere to be found, you can certainly find it among his supporters, and on these sites.

Deep State

At the very outposts of the Matrix are journalists like Glenn Greenwald, at Salon, and Naomi Klein, author of the important book, “The Shock Doctrine.” They are reporting on the outlines of fascism that are becoming so apparent in the American (and global) system, from the collusion of the two major parties in illegal activities to the unprecedented staging of the American military on native soil. But they don’t go as far as “the other Naomi,” Naomi Wolf, author of “Letter to a Young Patriot,” in questioning the truth of the official account of what really happened on 9/11—which, if revealed, would indeed “change everything.”

I first encountered the term “deep state” in the writings of Peter Dale Scott, a Canadian diplomat turned Berkeley English professor, and to my mind the foremost authority on the assassination of JFK and its links to the American Deep State: the underworld nexus of criminal organizations and the CIA, the banking and energy industries, and the military industrial complex (including its psychological operations arm, the corporate media). Scott traces the first use of the term as a reference to the corrupt underworld behind the government of Turkey. FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds says that the secrets of 9/11 can be found in the Turkish-American Council.

Deep State topics will include 9/11 and the fascist takeover of America, false flag terrorism, CIA drug-running, the Bush crime family, fishy associations and assassinations, and related subjects. A partial list of websites tracking these subterranean activities would have to include Online Journal, 9/11 Blogger, 9/11 Truth, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Journal of 9/11 Studies, Want to Know, Madcow Morning News, Propaganda Matrix, Information Clearing House, and websites of people like Dr. Scott, retired Special Forces sergeant Stan Goff, Chris Floyd and Carolyn Kay, among others.

New World

I am not just a radical; I’m a revolutionary.

However, though I would commit violence in the immediate defense of myself or my family, the idea of plotting a violent revolution, under the all-seeing eye of the most intrusive surveillance state in history, is both laughable and sad. And as a pantheist who believes in the eternal cycles of history and the essential divinity of all beings, I also believe that violence is ultimately futile, and in the power of nonviolence—the best and only strategic alternative, under the circumstances.

I think America, as a political experiment, is dead. We entered a post-constitutional era when the Supreme Court handed the presidency to the dauphin at the turn of the millennium. And in the wake of illegal wars, torture, the abandonment of habeus corpus, signing statements, and an “opposition party” Congress that refuses to perform its constitutional imperative to impeach the most flagrant criminal in presidential history, America only lives on in the ideals of its citizens.

But let’s face it. We’d already outgrown a structure that was created for a population only 1/100th of America’s present size, anyway. Just look in Article I, where a representative has to have a minimum constituency of 30,000 residents. In their deliberations, the Framers rejected 40,000 as “too high.” Today, the average representative has about 680,000 constituents—more than twenty-two times what the Framers intended. We each have a little more than four percent of the democracy the Constitution was built to give us.

So I think we need a new government. The source of many of our problems is mass culture and the problem of scale, and that’s at the heart of what’s wrong with our Constitution, which was designed before industrialization changed human nature. For example, it’s absurd to think of ourselves as “independent” citizens, when we depend on a corporate food distribution system to keep ourselves alive. We’re very dependent, and we have to come to terms with these kinds of fundamental issues in any coherent redesign of American government—which is coming, no matter what we do. The Empire is crumbling, but how it ends up depends on us.

These are the kinds of things I’ll be writing about in New World, and of the efforts of people like Joel Hirschorn, who’s calling for an Article V Constitutional Convention. I also admire the work of David Sirota and the Progressive States Network. I’ve thought for a long time that state legislatures are where we should be focusing our electoral efforts, where the link between corporations and government can be most effectively broken. I’ll also be writing about my own efforts to change the local government here in Hampshire County, West Virginia (the case goes to the WV Supreme Court on October 7th; you can find the case files at HistoricHampshire.org) and other ideas about decentralizing government and building local communities.

Spirit

This category will include not only reflections on divinity, and further explorations of scriptural history and ideas, like I featured in my first post, but also any discussion about art (which I know little about, although I have a lot of artist friends) and music, including the music I make with the Time Travelers, the folk/gospel group I sing with. By the way, we’re playing the Burlington (WV) Apple Harvest Festival on Saturday October 4th at noon. You’re all invited.

Practical pantheism will also be discussed under this category, as I experience it in my various interactions with the world, not only with people, but in my relationships with the fellow members of my personal multi-species tribe—with whom I spend more time than I do with other humans, including my partner Nancy. The tribe’s members include Matewan, a yellow lab who’s seventy in human years, my approximate contemporary, and getting stiff; Simone, the neurotic foundling, also a yellow lab mix; Ace, the crotchety gray tabby elder of the feline crew; Abe, his lookalike younger hunting partner; Elizabeth, the princess, Abe’s sister, a creamy orange tabby and the house huntress; Belly Button, a black cat with a big white belly, who prefers the company of the dogs; and Digger and Daisy, the draft horses (the chickens, being non-mammal, are a tribe unto themselves).

Sometimes I feel like I live in Meercat Manor. Sometimes the animals talk to me in my dreams.

Family

This will not be one of those blogs where I’ll be discussing the intimate details of my personal family life—not only to protect the privacy of my loved ones, but to maintain a zone of privacy for Michael Hasty, the private person whose authorship of this blog is only one aspect of an otherwise full and complicated human life. It’s inevitable that the lives of Michael Hasty and Radical Pantheist, a series of mental snapshots on a webpage, will intersect on occasion, but one should never be confused with the other.

As I did with the column I used to write in the Hampshire Review, however, sometimes I’ll write about our family activities (like our annual weeklong family reunion at the beach) in a general way that illustrates my thoughts about family and the turn of the Great Wheel. I’ll also link readers to family websites, once I check with the relatives to see if they want to be publicly associated with me. For example, I have a nephew and godson, Trent Haaga, who’s a screenwriter and B-movie action hero (the protagonist in “Terror Firma,” a Troma production—doesn’t get much more B-movie than that). And my brothers are characters on “Monster Madhouse,” a cable TV show that features old Japanese monster movies. I’ll give you a full weblist once I put it together.

Well, that’s it. Certainly enough writing for today. I hope you’ll join me on this particular ride, and tell your friends. I’ll try to keep things interesting.

If you’d like to be notified when I publish a more substantive article (besides the usual daily stuff), put “email list” in the subject line of an email to “radicalpantheist [at] gmail [dot] com”—spelled like it sounds, not like it looks.

Radical Pantheism

2008-09-21T06:58:00.000-07:00

This is a long post, over six thousand words. But since it's the first post in my first blog, I wanted to try to explain exactly why I'm here. I have some work around the farm to catch up on, so I'll leave this here a while, to give you time to read, but I'll be back to regular blogging soon. Hope you enjoy it.

For most of my life, I was generally what you might call a “Christian.” I was born in 1949 and raised Catholic, went to parochial school, and was taught to look at Jesus as an older brother. This was a comfort to me, the oldest, myself, in a family of five boys and seven girls. There was always a mediator between me and what you might call “God,” someone who would understand me because he was half-human, himself. Jesus was my hero.

My only bout with atheism came at about the age of seventeen. At the time, I was regularly leaving Mass early to go outside and smoke cigarettes in front of the church. I don’t remember exactly how this change in my faith came to pass—but I went to a Jesuit high school, if that’s any clue.

At any rate, my faith in “God” returned several years later, under the influence of copious amounts of psychedelic drugs (a number of studies, most recently at Johns Hopkins University, confirm this effect on users). Of course, my faith was altered by the drug experience, and by my readings in Eastern religion and philosophy and paranormal phenomena. But although I could generally be categorized as a “New Ager,” Jesus returned to the center of my belief (although I was only an occasional churchgoer), and remained there until fairly recently. Christian fundamentalists would have probably called me a “Gnostic” (Gnosticism is the diverse and mystical branch of early Christianity, condemned as heresy by the orthodox church, with which fundamentalists associate New Age types today).

The return to “Christian” faith, combined with the ‘60s spirit of political revolution with which I was infected, led me back to the social gospel bred in me by the Jesuits and by my mother, who was raised Catholic herself (my dad converted from Methodism to marry her—the requirement for Catholics at the time—but never talked about religion much, that I can recall). My beliefs in turn led me into political activity, of various shades of both nonviolent radicalism and electoral politics, in my twenties, and I’ve remained politically active (mostly as a volunteer) ever since.

The turn of the millennium brought about transformative changes in both my politics and my faith.

At the time, I was writing a column in the oldest newspaper in West Virginia, the Hampshire Review, a “large circulation” (about 7K) weekly. The column was in a left-right format, with me on the left, and the chairman of the county Republican Party on the right. (Originally, the idea was to juxtapose me as the “transplant,” and him as the native, but it devolved into politics very quickly.) When the guy on the right ran for state senate in 1998, he was replaced by his brother—more of a wingnut. It got ugly.

It got real ugly in late 2000. I had betrayed the county Democratic Club, of which I was a member (and sometimes officer), by endorsing Ralph Nader in May—though I spent the fall attacking Bush’s lies and Orwellian campaign, and defending Gore. (Having spent a few years working for the CIA in my youth, I had studied its activities ever since, so was familiar with disinformation campaigns.) My Nader endorsement allowed me to, at first, play “neutral” observer in the Florida brawl (suggesting, for example, a Thunderdome-style match to the death, on global media, between the two naked, unarmed candidates). But it quickly became apparent that Florida was an obvious Republican theft. And when I called foul, the banshees descended in the letters to the editor, and my counterpart ratcheted up the name-calling.

For me, though, that was the moment I fell through the rabbit hole, and my point of view veered even further from the corporate media meta-narrative than when I began the column four years earlier. (Readers routinely suggested I’d be more appropriate on the Internet.)

This transparent and absolute trashing of the Constitution, abetted by Gore himself, unremarked upon except by “conspiracy theorists,” and covered up by the white noise of a corporate propaganda system so pervasive and hypnotic that the puppet-masters can allow us to say whatever we want…knocked me tumbling into Wonderland—or is it the Matrix? Either way, it’s an alternative dimension.

The events of 9/11 finally cut my ties to conventional “wisdom” completely, and turned every talking head into a Mad Hatter.

Like most people, I was shocked by the immensity and scale of the 9/11 tragedy. Like many, I spent the day calling friends and family, checking on anyone who may have been in the area of the crashes or traveling. Like most on the left, I took the Chomskyesque view that the event was the entirely predictable result of American foreign policy—though I was very careful in how I said it in the column. (It’s a Bible Belt community.) Within days, however, my now-obsessive research on the web (following links that began at Democrats.com) had immediately led me to some amazing questions that were going unexamined and unanswered.

Why did George Bush sit in a classroom, reading with children, when he had just been told the nation was “under attack?” And what exactly is his relationship with the bin Laden family?

Where exactly was Dick Cheney, when...?

Why did Donald Rumsfeld continue his routine meeting, after the towers were struck? And why did he choose to act like an EMT instead of a Defense Secretary after the Pentagon was hit? Why didn’t the new chair of the Joint Chiefs want to be disturbed from his meeting? Where was the goddamn military?!!

Soon there were other questions. Who were the mysterious people making a fortune in the stock market by betting on the 9/11 attacks? Why were so many stark warnings from so many nations’ and our own intelligence services ignored? How had the buildings collapsed so completely, and at free-fall speed?

As obliquely as possible, I started raising these questions in my column, and would return to them when something in the mainstream news would justify the comment—former congressional representative Cynthia McKinney, for example. But in the house of horrors that is the Bush era, there was never time to stay on one issue alone (except for the attempted sale of the county hospital to a crony of the president of the county commission, which needed the column’s focus).

With Bush, it’s been one anti-constitutional outrage after another, and eternal war. Hard to take, for an old peace activist like myself.

Just before the Iraq War, I was writing about the fact that Bush was lying about the WMDs. There was plenty of information—even in the corporate media—that the whole thing smelled: UN inspectors talking about the “garbage” they were getting from CIA; CIA analysts leaking about how they were being “pressured” by the White House to produce; news just before the invasion that Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, who had overseen Iraq’s WMD program, and who was being regularly quoted by Bush, had also told CIA that Saddam had trashed all his WMDs after the Gulf War—something Bush never quoted; former UN weapons inspector and Marine captain, Scott Ritter.

Things were getting tense with my editor. He was nervous about my anti-war stance, and we finally had a big fight, and I quit, just before the invasion.

I stewed for a while, and stayed active in local political activities, including helping to organize small peace demonstrations at the county courthouse. In January 2004, I started writing a fairly regular column at the website Online Journal, beginning with “Paranoid Shift,” a hallucinogenic compendium of my thoughts, at that time, on 9/11 and the secret US government behind the puppet one. It was a big success, getting over a quarter million hits, and was republished or linked at over a hundred other websites (including Tikkun, which I’m particularly proud of).

The column at Online Journal lasted about a year and a half. It gradually dawned on me that everything that needed to be said, to “change the world,” was being said, somewhere in cyberspace. I felt I was just adding to the white noise. What was missing was the action component, something more than signing an e-petition, voting and marching.

So I quit writing, other than an occasional op-ed or letter to the editor, to concentrate on local organizing.

The West Virginia Constitution has an unusually democratic provision in it—Article IX, Section 13—which allows the citizens of a county to petition to change the form of county government. As an outgrowth of the “save the hospital” campaign, some of the same organizers (including me) got a petition together. We submitted it, signed by ten percent of the voters, to the county commission in May 2003, which then passed it to the state legislature, as required, for a bill to establish a county referendum on the proposed change, at the next election. Totally pro forma.

For the first time in state history, the legislature balked at passing the bill. We re-grouped, our corrupt local delegate was replaced at the next election, and the following year we talked his replacement into re-submitting the bill (I drafted this version, mostly just editing out the bad parts of the earlier bill). Again, the legislature killed the bill—in both houses, this time.

I had been kibbutzing from the beginning with a friend of mine in the state attorney general’s office, and she suggested that I contact a constitutional law professor at West Virginia University who might have an interest in working for us pro bono, since it had become obvious that the only way we were going to get a bill was to sue the legislature.

He did have an interest, and we filed suit in August 2005. Three years later, we’ve won three times at the circuit court level, the legislature still hasn’t passed a bill, and next month, the West Virginia Supreme Court hears the legislature’s appeal. Given the Court’s reputation for counter-integrity, I’m skeptical of our prospects. Plus, last year, the legislature easily passed a bill that now makes our proposed new form of government illegal—food for future litigation, no doubt…just in case.

Perhaps it was this stonewalling and unconstitutional action by the West Virginia legislature and their allies, combined with the abject failure of any institution (government or media) to hold George Bush and his cronies accountable for their many ruthless and transparent crimes, that drove me into utter despair about the usefulness of any political activity—in an Empire that is crumbling of its own accord, but hardly fast enough to meet the urgency of what is needed if we are to in any way ameliorate the ongoing planetary “Sixth Extinction.”

The despair that I felt about my political life, however, was small compared to the “dark night of the soul” I was experiencing in my spiritual life.

When I began writing the Review column in 1996, it quickly became apparent to me how little I actually knew about religion and politics. Despite a lifetime of interest and reading in both subjects, my knowledge level felt too superficial for my new responsibility. So I dove into a journey of exploration, searching for the fundamental roots of both American government and the Christian religion—intertwined in any red state debate.

My readings in government quickly took me to economics—the true foundation of every government. The primary role of state power is protecting wealth. My readings in Christianity took me to the study of the historical Jesus, who mixed his own saliva with dirt, and placing it on my eyes, healed my blindness.

I had been interested in feminist biblical scholarship for some years before starting the column. (Did you know that the Hebrew word for “God” used in the first verse of Genesis, “Elohim,” is both masculine and feminine, singular and plural, and was originally used by the pagan tribes of Canaan to refer to their pantheon, among whom Yahweh was but a minor storm deity?) This interest eventually led me to the Jesus Seminar, a group of mostly liberal New Testament scholars, who, based on textual analysis of Scripture, see Jesus as a fun-loving, iconoclastic Cynic—a hybrid of the Judaic prophetic tradition and the Greek culture adopted by Judea’s Roman occupiers.

One of the more prominent members of the Jesus Seminar is John Dominic Crossan, a former Catholic priest and still a “believer,” but very realistic in his exploration of the historical Jesus. He speculates, with some justification, that, like most victims of Roman crucifixion, the body of Jesus was probably fed to the dogs; and that the idea of Resurrection began in the mourning songs of his women followers—which would explain the poems and hymns at the heart of both the epistles and gospels, as well as the vast diversity of beliefs in the early Christian communities. It was a bottom-up movement.

Crossan sees Jesus as a revolutionary, standing against the ruthless Romans, a champion of the poor and oppressed and enemy of the Temple establishment, puppets of the empire. He is joined in this view by many scholars, including Richard Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman, authors of “The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul ignited a revolution and transformed the ancient world” (another book that influenced my thinking).

Until the last few years, my view of Jesus tracked fairly closely with Crossan’s—including his belief in Jesus’ divine nature, which I interpreted as a symbolic, though still unique, expression of eternal archetypes. So, for example, on those rare occasions when I accompanied a relative to church, I could say the words of the Apostles’ Creed and mean what I said (leaving out the words I couldn’t), because I was giving those words a more Gnostic interpretation.

After 9/11, like for most Americans, I suspect, faith meant more to me, and I dove more deeply into trying to understand my faith by expanding my research into the roots of Christianity.

Not long after it was released in 1996, the year I started writing the Review column, I read Robert Eisenman’s “James, the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Eisenman, who is Jewish, is considered a radical among Scrolls scholars, because he thinks the ancient documents—discovered sixty years ago in desert caves near the Qumran monastery on the shore of the Dead Sea—were produced by first-century “Christians” in the community surrounding James and the other members of Jesus’ family, rather than by another Jewish sect in multi-sectarian Jerusalem a century earlier.

What gives Eisenman’s argument such credence is how establishment Christianity has minimized the critical role of James for two millennia. Not only does The Acts of the Apostles document James’ importance in the community around Jesus—both Peter and Paul have to answer to him—but he also occupied an important office in the Temple hierarchy, as the leader of “The Poor” (also known as the Ebionites), a large faction of Essene-like monks. In that position, he had the rare privilege of entering the Holy of Holies to pray for the nation on the Day of Atonement, and he oversaw the Temple trial of Paul, who’d been accused of teaching against the Jewish law.

James’ importance was also noted by the contemporary Jewish/Roman historian, Josephus, who suggested that it was the assassination of James on the Temple steps, in 66 CE, which set off the chain of events that culminated in the final Roman destruction of Jerusalem less than a decade later. Yet establishment Christianity has largely ignored “the brother of Jesus.” I don’t remember him ever being discussed in my religion classes or in Sunday sermons.

Ironically enough, however, there is some support for Eisenman’s theory in Catholic literature. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (1990 edition) describes how “the similarity between Qumran life and that of the Jerusalem church described in Acts has been noted by several scholars,” and explains that, “We have presented the Qumran organization in such detail because it offers extremely important parallels for the organization of the primitive Christian church.” These parallels include the Jerusalem “General Assembly” with the Qumran “Session of the Many;” the fact that Qumran “had a special body of the Twelve” (cf. the twelve apostles); and the fact that “the Christian bishop is an excellent parallel to the Qumran supervisor…and the functions attributed to the bishop are much the same as those of the Qumran supervisor, e.g. shepherd of the flock, steward and manager of community property, and inspector of the doctrine of the faithful.”

A more important parallel between the early Christians and Qumran monks is that both groups thought they were living in the “last days,” and both were preoccupied with the Jewish ideal of “messiah”—a Hebrew word which means “anointed,” or “the anointed one,” and which New Testament writers translated into the Greek term, “Christos.”

There are two main reasons I find Eisenman’s theory that the early Christians were indistinguishable from the Qumran community so compelling.

First, Josephus—an impeccably detailed historian (though certainly one given to mythmaking of his own)—identified three main groups in Jerusalem society: Sadducees, the conservative allies of the High Priest and his family; Pharisees, lawyers and scribes (like Paul, a Pharisee), constantly debating “the letter of the law;” and Essenes, monks who dressed in white linen, took vows of poverty, and pooled their wealth together just like the Christians in Acts (“from each according to their ability; to each according to their need”). It is inconceivable that Josephus would have failed to discuss such a major movement, centered in the Temple at this critical moment in Jewish history, sending out preachers across the empire to convert Jews and pagans alike, and with an important figure like James as its bishop.

But in fact, he did discuss it—only not in terms that Christianity’s later apologists would accept. To Josephus, the Christians were identical to an important sect of Essenes present in both Jerusalem and Qumran, and instrumental in the events of the day. But at the time he wrote, he lacked the historical perspective necessary to see that a major imperial religion would grow from the seed planted in Jerusalem, nurtured by the fervent and creative passion of messianism. So he didn’t give it the emphasis the apologists would have expected.

Second, there is no doubt among New Testament scholars that there was indeed a major schism in Christianity around the time of James’ death, between the “works”-based beliefs of James and the early followers of Jesus, and the creed of “faith”-based followers of Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles. In the long run, Paul, with his hybrid combination of Jewish Messiah and Greek and Roman mystery gods, won. The community around James and his family—Jesus’family—fled to points north when the Romans attacked Jerusalem, eventually to Syria. Their belief that Jesus was only a mensch—a messiah, to be sure, but a wholly human one, not divine—was later named by the Roman Catholic church, the “Ebionite Heresy.”

The fact that Jesus’ own family did not think that he was “God” was a huge embarrassment to the orthodox church, and a mighty challenge to their propaganda. So of course they would do whatever they could to cover it up. And for me, it is this very obvious, centuries-long coverup, still continuing today, that lends such weight to Eisenman’s arguments.

And it was the force of his logic, eventually combined with the personal psychological trauma of world events and the proto-fascist breakdown of the American system, that finally shattered my cognitive dissonance, and I was forced to confront a terrifying question:

If Jesus isn’t God, who is?

At this point, I have to tell you something about myself that I don’t talk about very much.

Since childhood, I’ve had what you might call “mystical” experiences. The truly powerful ones have only happened a handful of times, but they all take various forms (visions, dreams, synchronous events, eternal music) and have arrived by various routes (yoga and other spiritual practices, drugs, music, dozing off in grade-school catechism class, or even just walking in the woods). I don’t think of this as anything special or unnatural, and I’m certainly no less flawed than the average human (the awareness of which flaws I unfortunately experience with the same weird intensity I experience everything else). It’s just something that happens to some people—one of infinite possibilities among our species that have made humanity such a fascinating story.

I mention this “unusual” characteristic to illustrate why it was so difficult for me to let go of the divinity of Jesus.

One late night in 1990, as my father slept in his intensive-care hospital bed, in the middle of a weeklong coma from which he would never awaken, I sat alone next to him, holding his hand. I will never forget the warmth of his hand—not feverish, but as full of life as it could be, from the intravenous feeding—and how his hand, once calloused from work, had been softened in recent years by the inactivity that came with ill health. It was about 3 am. I had been there for hours, sometimes crying, sometimes praying, and I was in the middle of silently reciting the 23rd Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd…”), my eyes closed.

Suddenly I found myself in a grove of trees, darkly illuminated by late twilight. And while I held my father’s hand in my right hand and watched him reciting the Psalm with me, I was instantly aware that there was another man on my left, holding both of our hands and reciting with us. Somehow I knew that if I removed my glance from my father, or stopped reciting, the trance would end, and I didn’t want this to happen because I was afraid I would never see my father “alive” again. But I was able to “intuit” the man’s description. He was a few inches shorter than I am (6’3”) and seemed to have a swarthy complexion. He had short dark hair and a full beard, also cut short. He seemed very kind.

When I finished reciting the Psalm, the vision dissipated, and I opened my eyes. I was glowing with warmth. My first thought was that the man must have been Jesus, but how unusual his appearance was. (It wasn’t until years later that a friend of mine, knowing my interest in the historical Jesus, passed along an article with a picture titled, “How Jesus really looked,” based on archeologists’ assessment of the customs of the times. His hair and beard were exactly like the man in my vision.)

But at that point, like I say, I was a Gnostic, and “knew” that Jesus, the archetype, could take many forms. So I just prayed my thanks for the blessing of this vision, this perhaps last opportunity to be with my “conscious” father, and after awhile, went into the family waiting room to see if I could catch a couple of hours sleep on the couch.

Over a decade later, as I struggled with the revelations of Eisenman and the other historians and archaeologists I consulted to confirm the portrait of Jesus that he presents—a Jewish nationalist revolutionary with the bloodline to be a “messiah” (an entirely human concept), with no intention to start a new religion, and perhaps only a fictional creation—the Jesus of my vision was the hardest to surrender.

But no spiritual system that rejects “reality” can ever claim to represent “truth.” And an honest examination of the historical evidence confirms: Christanity is as much an imperial political invention as Judaism itself was centuries earlier, when the Hebrews sought to differentiate themselves from the other polytheistic tribes of Canaan. It is an entirely human invention.

And that’s “reality.”

You may wonder why I put “reality” in quotation marks. My explanation will (hopefully) take us to the end of this already long essay. I beg your patience.

As “reality” sank in (Eisenman’s 2006 book, “The New Testament Code: The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Covenant, and the Blood of Christ,” only iced the cake for me—though I think the available evidence doesn’t necessarily justify all his conclusions), and the true reality of the magnitude of George Bush’s crimes and maddening lack of accountability became ever more apparent, I gradually found myself abandoned by the personal Jesus (and with him, the personal God) who had blessed me with spiritual strength and comfort and provided a refuge from the trials of this world for as long as I could remember. I ended up in what felt to me like a dry-as-dust form of Buddhism, where everything just is what it is, abstract and inscrutable as a sand garden. I believed things in my mind (in a still-transcendent divinity and the truth of archetypes, for example), but could no longer feel them in my heart.

Combining this spiritual desert with what increasingly felt like the futility of any political action whatever, and despair about the natural world, and a growing and lengthening writer’s block, I was getting angrier and more depressed every day. I thought about suicide often (though more as an imaginary exercise, whose unpleasant horrors served as a preventative, than a serious thought—I would never do that to my family and loved ones, no matter how utterly I had failed in my life’s purpose, which is what I was feeling).

Let me explain how stupid this suicidal impulse was. I live on a beautiful farm in West Virginia with my longtime partner, Nancy, and a bunch of dogs and cats, two draft horses and a small flock of chickens. As the cliché about rural life affirms, it can sometimes be lonely. But I also live an active social life, have lots of friends, participate in community affairs, and play music in a couple of bands. Plus, I have a large and loving family not far away. Why would I ever want to kill myself? Wouldn’t it be better to just, say, turn off the computer?

It’s hard to say exactly when my spiritual rehabilitation began. But an important moment was about a year ago, when a Palestinian Israeli peace activist visited our county seat.

As you can imagine, the community of progressives in this remote and conservative county is relatively small, so a chance to hear a community organizer from a foreign country give a public talk about local peacemaking in the Middle East is a rare event. The event had been organized by a friend of mine, who has occasionally lived in Israel. The little hippie restaurant where the talk was held was full.

The activist, Elias Jabbour, who bases his work in the nonviolence philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, related his grassroots experiences getting individual Palestinians and Israelis together to talk, and urged us to pressure our government to get more involved in peacemaking in Israel. In the question-and-answer session that followed, I expressed my doubts about his description of the US as a “democracy,” because the last two presidential elections had been stolen, and we don’t have the informed public that democracy requires, since our media essentially serve as the propaganda arm of the military industrial complex. I asked him what we could really do under these circumstances that would be effective?

He admitted that the basis of my question was accurate, but looked at the bright side of the fact that, however bad it was, we still had the freedom on an individual level to speak our minds. And generally speaking, our lawmakers share the same concerns as the rest of humanity, so they can be persuaded to act rightly.

I had a chance to speak with him alone after the formal presentation. In this conversation, he added more nuance to his answer, and revealed that he was as much in despair about the global situation as I was. “But what can I do?” he said. “I can’t give up hope.”

He said this with such earnest, soul-deep meaning that I could feel my heart melt. I could only agree.

This was a turning point for me, I think. After that, in my daily internal apocalyptic struggles between light and darkness, the light began winning more often. There were good days and bad days, of course. And there were the inevitable life changes and experiences that would tilt the scales in one direction or other. But I gradually became more accepting of the fact that the universe would unfold in its own way, no matter what I did. So I might as well just act in the way that seems right to me—the only thing I can really control—and, no matter what happened, trust in the eternal harmony of an infinite mystery I have no human way of understanding.

This psychological and emotional thaw opened me up to a more mystical perception of my daily life. And I began to reflect, especially when I was outside, surrounded by Nature, on a catechism question that had always perplexed me when I was a kid: if God is everywhere, why isn’t everything God?

This question had been framed in my parochial catechism classes as the difference between “transcendence,” where God is in, but not of the world, and “immanence,” which in its most extreme form is pantheism, where “the created order is understood to be the mode of God’s self-manifestation, and thus to be the body of God,” according to the Oxford Dictionary of World Religions. The same question was most recently (and perhaps inadvertently) expressed in the words of the scientists conducting the research at the new atomic particle collider in Switzerland, who thought the answer was important enough to risk turning Earth into a black hole, and who framed it thusly:

“Why is there matter?”

As it turns out, as spiritual-minded physicists who don’t separate science from religion have been pointing out for decades, life in its most fundamental form is both wave and particle. This fundamental duality, expressed in religious symbols from yin-yang to the cross, is at the core of the infinite dualities found in physical existence: male and female, in and out, I and Thou, left and right, good and evil, spirit and matter…ad infinitum. Duality is the engine that keeps the universe running.

Pantheism, the belief that God is all, and all is God, has made its appearance in human religious thought from humanity’s very beginnings, and all over the world. By its very nature, it’s a radical idea: who, after all, wants to believe that Dick Cheney is God? But it does answer my childhood question about God being everywhere. And no matter what challenges and struggles life presents you, or what evil may be committed, in the name of God or otherwise, it does encourage a more forgiving and loving nature. And for me, it finally provides the same sense of spiritual comfort I had when I believed a semi-divine older brother was looking after me.

So what is reality? Simple answer—God. God is everything: you, me, Dick Cheney, my horses, trees, the bug you just stepped on, black holes, the eternal present—everything. Even Jesus is God. Just like it says in the Bible, we’re all made in God’s image and likeness. What else could that mean?

And that’s why, today, I consider myself a pantheist—which is radical enough in itself. But since I’m also a political radical, I’ll call myself a radical pantheist.

In the ancient Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-gita, the human warrior Arjuna experiences an existential and paralyzing moment of crisis, just as he is about to enter a battle against an enemy that includes some of his own relatives. Fortunately for him, the driver of his chariot turns out to be the god Krishna, who spends the bulk of the text explaining to him that, although Arjuna (like Job in the Old Testament) may never understand the mysterious ways and purposes of divinity, the only true path open to him (or to any other human) is to live out his dharma—the duty he undertook when he incarnated.

It seems that my Palestinian friend has played Krishna to my Arjuna.

Not long after we talked, I (along with some other friends) started organizing a “9/11 Truth” event at our county library. We invited some people from the DC 9/11 Truth group to give a presentation on the question, “Was the World Trade Center Destroyed by Controlled Demolition?” I wrote some letters to the editor and did a local radio interview, and we placed some ads in the paper, and when the event took place in March, we had about fifty people show up—a very respectable turnout in a small community like ours, especially on such a controversial topic.

On reflection, I think the fact that I doubt the official story of what happened on 9/11 contributed greatly to the feelings of hopelessness I had about the efficacy of political action. What is now generally referred to as “9/11 Truth” (and its adherents as “truthers”) is a position that is ridiculed not only in the corporate media, but across the political spectrum—even though my doubts about 9/11 are shared by a significant number of very serious people.

A short list could include former CIA operative and author Robert Baer; former CIA analyst Ray McGovern; progressive historian Howard Zinn; peace activist Cindy Sheehan; former Deputy Treasury Secretary (under Reagan) Paul Craig Roberts; former Minnesota governor (and demolition expert) Jesse Ventura; Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney (who I’ll be voting for in November); FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds; Lt. Col. (retired) Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the notorious Office of Special Plans and was in the Pentagon on 9/11; retired USAF colonel and decorated combat pilot Robert Bowman; and hundreds of architects, scientists and engineers. Even the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission have said that the CIA and the military outright lied to them about the events of that day.

Yet, as we all know by now, anyone who strays too far from the official reservation is automatically derided as a “conspiracy theorist.” The irony is that, beyond theory, what we’re talking about here is physical evidence: evidence of thermite, a steel-cutting compound, in the WTC dust, as reported by the US Geological Survey; of “intergranular melting” of the WTC girders (despite fire temperatures that never even came close to steel’s melting point), as reported by FEMA; of molten metal in the rubble, as reported by first responders and WTC engineers; and of explosions in the towers, as reported by numerous eyewitnesses.

So you can yell “conspiracy theory” all you want, but if you can’t give me a plausible explanation for the thermite, the molten metal, the free-fall speed of the collapses, and the mysterious explosions—and if you’re depending on the hodge-podge of disinformation, evasions and omissions in the official government reports, you can’t—then I only have two words to say…and the second word is “you.” I don’t care if you are God.

The title of my first column for Online Journal, “Paranoid Shift,” was of course a pun on the term, “paradigm shift,” a concept introduced to public discussion in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn in his book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” The term refers to the process by which, historically, “crises” in scientific understanding which arise when the theoretical framework underlying an idea is contradicted by new evidence, are resolved by a relatively sudden intellectual shift into a new “paradigm,” or framework. Since the book’s publication, the concept of paradigm shift has been broadened to include other, non-scientific changes in public consciousness.

Recently, I decided to start writing a blog. I continue to think that, despite the seeming hopelessness of our global situation and the impossible urgency of the task required to correct it, all the information we need to change the world and our nation for the better is already circulating out there in cyberspace, and I’ll just be spitting into a teeming ocean of information.

But call it an act of faith—another voice crying in the wilderness. Who really knows what straw will break the fascist camel’s back, or what new idea will suddenly cause the paradigm to shift? The answer, as Barack Obama replied recently when he was questioned about when human life begins, is “above my pay grade.”

All I can do is write. And hope.

And be still, and know that I am God.