Erratum in New York

Obliquely, With a Sidelong Glance

Things seen, or unseen, from askance. Driving the dark roads heading into Chappaqua, in a clearing where the pines part along the reservoir, an oblique moon like a glint in someone’s night eye breaks into pieces upon the water; everything is shades of black and pearl. In the rearview mirror he notices that his hairline is receding to reveal his father’s forehead.

A brief summer shower has done little to dissuade the sun’s heat. As he walks the hot macadam road that winds between the two fields, steam is rising and shimmering off the pavement like apparitions, and the rising dust stings as he breathes in the dampness. Out of the corner of his eye he catches the tail of a snake as it slips into the tall grass. What must the hot, wet macadam have felt like upon the cool length of the sinuous body as it contracted in undulatory progression, momentarily exposed, toward its habitual world unseen?

As I wait, while my wife is at the stand buying hostas, phlox, asters, and hydrangeas, I tilt back the passenger’s seat and look into the sky, a ubiquity too often ignored. Huge clouds have hidden the angular light source of the sun, although patches of blue are visible, like fathomless lakes at the base of billowy mountains. The movement of the clouds is almost imperceptible. Above me, however, a lower strata of wispy mammoths move rapidly toward some unknown destination. At first they seem to gently grasp together and commingle. Then I see that they actually move through each other, perhaps leaving some part of them in the form through which each passes.

In the past few weeks, quotidian obligations have usurped my usual diurnal staring into the abyss of American and, by implication, global politics. The ubiquitous calumny and palaver became background noise, without the time to scrutinize the prevaricating paragraphs and to read the intolerant screeds, never mind taking the time to confront the actual words. Out of the corner of an eye I glanced at bylines about the tragic events at Haditha. A cursory scan of sites like Truthout.org and rawstory.com revealed the graphic photos of the horrific scene; a surreal familiarity of man’s inhumanity to man that in a split second scars indelibly and irrevocably. Then, the details of life that seem obscenely insignificant suddenly, intrude, require immediate attention, and I am left with just the visceral effect and lingering anomie; a malaise that must permeate the citizenry who, like me, can not stop to scream back into the void.

At the time I became ensconced in the wonted duties assigned to me, the President had put forth the very person who had overseen the contentious, presumed illegal, and apparently unconstitutional NSA wiretap (without a FISA Warrant) program as his nominee to head the CIA. Despite my incredulity at such a blatant eff-u to all concerned Americans who would rather have our most secretive agencies follow the rule of law while pursuing threatening or criminal patterns of behavior in our midst, I (again) was naïve enough to believe that Democrats would stand together to block such an outrageous candidate as Michael Hayden for the CIA position. With a sidelong glance I witnessed at least one Democrat in the Senate ask Hayden( in reference to the domestic spying program),

"Whatever was done, you did it unilaterally, and as far as I'm aware, 'we' as a country weren't part of any effort to set the standards in these [espionage] programs, and most of the members of this committee were kept in the dark ... So, general, who is the 'we' that you have been citing?" (Senator Ron Wyden, Oregon)

But, I was also hearing the compliant Senators on the Intelligence Committee falling into their usual lemming-like line of complacency. And, before I realized the implications, a glimpse of Hayden being sworn in by President Bush crashed my foolish boat upon the rocks of reality; how cynical is cynical enough? Exactly what manner of freedom are we trying to spread in the name of democracy around the Middle East and the world? The kind Stalin employed, or something more dystopian and Orwellian…?

It has been the images of war, though, that despite the obliquity, have haunted me with the feeling of despair and guilt; the guilt of the safe, while others are slaughtered in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Darfur. How apropos the words of Thucydides’ reflections on the consequences of the Peloponnesian wars seem:

Practically the whole of the Hellenic world was convulsed, with rival parties in every state – democratic leaders trying to bring in the Athenians, and oligarchs trying to bring in the Spartans.... To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect.... As a result...there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The plain way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow.

In the Dentist’s office, a routine visit; next to me on a chair sits a Newsweek whose cover displays the wrapped, shrouded bodies of the Haditha victims two days after the November 19th, 2005 incident. I glance, but hesitate to pick it up. After I come out from my procedure, back into the waiting room, I see that my wife is reading the article. Her expression is one I have rarely seen, thankfully, and it conjures no words; only when our eyes meet do I glimpse something frightening and frightened. We don’t discuss it on the ride home, but its presence is felt like a passing brush of cold air or an astringent smell. Thirty thousand Iraqi civilians, a very conservative estimate, have died since the American Coalition forces began their tragic shock and awe campaign over three years ago. Haditha can barely gain hold on any front page of our largest newspapers.

In an interview with Bill Moyers in March of 2003, Chris Hedges, author of On War, talked of how he was seduced by the effects of war:

MOYERS: I read your book last night. One of the most chilling and haunting scenes in here is when, I think you were in El Salvador, and a young man was near you, calling out, "mama."

HEDGES: Yeah.

MOYERS: "Mama."

HEDGES: It's not uncommon when soldiers die that they call out for their mother. And that always seems to me to cut through the absurd posturing of soldiering.

MOYERS: Three times when you were in El Salvador you were threatened with death. You received death threats. The Embassy got you out.

HEDGES: That's right.

MOYERS: You went back.

HEDGES: Yes. Because I believe that it was better to live for one intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant my own death, rather than go back to the routine of life.

MOYERS: You're right, you know. War is an addiction, as you say. Let me read you this: "during a lull I dashed…" this is you.

HEDGES: Right.

MOYERS: Read this for me.

HEDGES: "During a lull I dashed across an empty square and found shelter behind a house. My heart was racing. Adrenaline coursed through my bloodstream. I was safe. I made it back to the capital. And like most war correspondents, I soon considered the experience a great cosmic joke. I drank away the fear and excitement in a seedy bar in downtown San Salvador. Most people, after such an experience, would learn to stay away. I was hooked. "

Hedges began an essay on truthout.org, while reviewing other authors writing about the Iraqi war, with these paragraphs:

The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. They know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with stories of courage and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, self-important memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war. The vanquished know the essence of war-death. They grasp that war is necrophilia. They see that war is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction. They know how war fosters alienation, leads inevitably to nihilism, and is a turning away from the sanctity and preservation of life. All other narratives about war too easily fall prey to the allure and seductiveness of violence, as well as the attraction of the godlike power that comes with the license to kill with impunity. But the words of the vanquished come later, sometimes long after the war, when grown men and women unpack the suffering they endured as children, what it was like to see their mother or father killed or taken away, or what it was like to lose their homes, their community, their security, and be discarded as human refuse. But by then few listen. The truth about war comes out, but usually too late. We are assured by the war-makers that these stories have no bearing on the glorious violent enterprise the nation is about to inaugurate. And, lapping up the myth of war and its sense of empowerment, we prefer not to look.

With the inconceivable consequences of our foreign policies toward Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran, and our practical ignorance of the entire continent of Africa, our failed policies toward North Korea and even Communist China, our own dead soldiers and the innumerable victims of this violence are usurped in today’s seat of our government, as the Senate holds hearings on and votes on a Constitutional Amendment to outlaw marriage between same-sex partners. Did I actually see that out of the corner of my eye? Is our own hypocrisy that great? What do we fear, if not the death of hundreds and hundreds of thousands, but rather the union of consenting adult individuals? Perhaps I should actually look at this closer.

As he continues to drive he notices that his hands and fingers on the steering wheel have become thick and rough as his father’s had been. He thinks of the night four years ago when, after visiting him in the hospital, the drive back to Providence from New Britain, Connecticut was nearly impossible in a torrential rainstorm that obliterated all vision, like a pounding world of water tearing through him. He thought that his father looked as though he were getting better. No sooner had he gotten in the house when the phone rang, however, and he was summoned back to Connecticut immediately. Now the slanting rain was a challenge, a force against which he must prevail. He was too late; upon his arrival in the basement ICU of the hospital he was met by the attending physician who told him that his father had died about a half an hour before. He was led to a room where his father lay, still with a length of breathing tube attached in his mouth. It struck him as odd. His father seemed to be snorkeling into oblivion.

The Beauty of the Rose Garden

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "The Over Soul"

Upon reading various histories of Persia, I am always struck by the fact that Persian poetry had a profound influence upon such writers as Emerson, Goethe, Kant, Nietzsche, et al. The dominant religion of ancient Persia, before its many upheavals throughout the centuries, was Zoroastrianism, which has strong similarities before its reformation to the Hinduism of Northern India and is claimed to be the first monotheistic religion, despite its inherent duality of "equally opposing powers" (see above Zoroastrianism link). Emerson's "personal revelation, the conviction of that truth that `God is within us,' is the irreducible source of democratic ideals." Although Emerson was born more than a quarter century after the birth of the American Republic, he was its first writer to express fully this idea, which is at the heart of the ideal of America. I highly recommend this lecture, by Dr. James R. Russell, Mesrob Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University, on Emerson and the Persians.

The chilling rhetoric being used by the Bush Administration and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, cloaked in apocalyptic threats, has caused me to try to understand this ancient and beautiful culture, these beautiful people whom America and Britain threaten to incinerate. As The Guardian puts it, there is no "Plan B" if the very poor extant version of diplomacy fails. Ahmadinejad, for his fascist part, is playing into the hands of the hegemonic Bush cabal, who have already shown that they can promote a war with very little evidence and zero Congressional oversight.

How apocalyptically evil are this Administration's designs on global hegemony? I guess the question by its implications answers itself. (Read Robert W. Merry's, Sands of Empire), The Physicians for Social Responsibility thought about this issue and offered this policy brief on 10/22/02, and excerpt of which reads,

The adoption of the dangerous venture of preemption as a pervasive security strategy is an unprecedented move by the United States, distancing the Bush administration's national security policy from all before it. President Bush cites the need for such a strategy due to the nature of the threats facing the United States in a strategic environment wrought with terrorism. This new strategy, however, is at least partly motivated by the administration's aim to maintain U.S. military dominance in the future, and both elements of this strategy carry more inherent dangers than do the threats cited by the Bush administration.

(Another parenthetical; when William Kristol refers to this global hegemony wet-dream, he calls it Benevolent Global Hegemony.)

Death and disfiguration of the body and spirit, however, are the only lasting effects of this "continuation of political intercourse", as politics become corrupted and change like fashion and empires rise and fall; death is final and eternal. Bush's invasion of and consequent war in Iraq, forged out of a policy of hegemony and propagated with prevarication, did not meet the definition of jus ad bellum and is thusly an illegal act. In the language of the Nuremberg prosecutors, aggressive leaders who launch unjust wars commit "crimes against peace." Bush's neo-con advisors have set a policy, justified by the still uninvestigated crimes of 9/11, that is intent on perpetuating a state of global war exemplified by Clausewitz's statement,

If war is part of policy, policy will determine its character. As policy becomes more ambitious and vigorous, so will war, and this may reach the point where war attains its absolute form. . . . Policy is the guiding intelligence and war only the instrument, not vice versa.

At the beginning of this war, the ultra-hyped "shock and awe" part, the American population was again, as in the Gulf War, whipped into a frenzy of blood lust, even though the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said portentously at the time,
"We need to condition people that this is war. People get the idea this is going to be antiseptic. Well, it's not going to be. People are going to die."

Not everyone saw the war as a jus ad bellum. War protesters staged events and rallies while intellectuals and writers spoke against the purported justifications for invading Iraq. The author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges said at the time,

I think the {Iraq} war is illegitimate not because civilians will die. Civilians die in every conflict. It's illegitimate because the administration has not, to my mind, provided any evidence of any credible threat. And we can't go to war just because we think somebody might do something eventually. There has to be hard intelligence. There has to be a real threat if we're going to ask our young men and women to die. Because once you unleash the "dogs of war" and I know this from every war I've ever covered, war has a force of its own. It's not surgical. We talk about taking out Saddam Hussein. Once you use the blunt instrument of war, it has all sorts of consequences when you use violence on that scale that you can't anticipate. I'm not opposed to the use of force. But force is always has to be a last resort because those who wield force become tainted or contaminated by it. And one of the things that most frightens me about the moment our nation is in now, is that we've lost touch with the notion of what war is.

Along these lines, the poet W.S. Merwin wrote:

It would not have been possible for me ever to trust someone who acquired office by the shameful means Mr. Bush and his abettors resorted to in the last presidential election. His nonentity was rapidly becoming more apparent than ever when the catastrophe of Sept. 11, 2001, provided him and his handlers with a role for him, that of "wartime leader", which they, and he in turn, were quick to exploit. This role was used at once to silence all criticism of the man and his words as unpatriotic, and to provide the auspices for a sustained assault upon civil liberties, environmental protections, and general welfare. The perpetuation of this role of "wartime leader" is the primary reason-- more important even than the greed for oil fields and the wish to blot out his father's failure-- for the present determination to visit war upon Iraq, kill and maim countless people, and antagonize much of the world of which Mr. Bush had not heard until recently. The real iniquities of Saddam Hussein should be recognized, in this context, as the pretexts they are. His earlier atrocities went unmentioned as long as he was an ally of former Republican administrations, which were happy, in their time, to supply him with weapons. I think that someone who was maneuvered into office against the will of the electorate, as Mr. Bush was, should be allowed to make no governmental decisions (including judicial appointments) that might outlast his questionable term, and if the reasons for war were many times greater than they have been said to be I would oppose any thing of the kind under such "leadership". To arrange a war in order to be re-elected outdoes even the means employed in the last presidential election. Mr. Bush and his plans are a greater danger to the United States than Saddam Hussein.

And yet, the Bush administration pounded the drums of war incessantly, before the country and before the world at the United Nations (as they are doing now toward Iran). Nevertheless, the case was made, as we now know (and knew), with flawed and manipulated intelligence that was "being fixed around the policy". There would be no stopping this initiative, and we were left with the result that, as Hedges put it,

Our whole civil society is being torn apart. Once again, as is true in every war, the media parrots back the clichés and jingoes of the state. Imbibes and promotes the myth. In wartime, the press is always part of the problem. And that we are about to engage in that ecstatic, exciting, narcotic that is war. And that if we don't get a grasp on the poison that war is, then that poison can ultimately kill us just as surely as the disease.

Politically, Iraq is so disjunctive that it is like a hyper-world full of sworn enemies that has been set into an inescapable dynamic of evil, and every individual has to look at those around him/her as that soul's potential murderer. To read the daily news reports of death and destruction is to immerse oneself in incomprehensible pathos. There is no sense, no hope, no logic; only war profiteering, whatever delusions of grandeur the Bush cabal suffer from, and the immutable loss of life. Whatever hatred fuels the insurgency in Iraq, it is matched by the hubris, greed, and imperial ambitions of our own corrupt leaders. They are cowards who send children off to die for their delusional designs. Bush and Rumsfeld, et al, have even failed to protect the troops who risk their lives daily in this dystopian hell. They have blundered into a war of which they have lost control, of which is already lost.

For a unique and trenchant perspective of what has gone on in Iraq, and where this may lead, I highly recommend, The Blood of My Brother, a film that reveals the pathos and tragedy of this (and all) war.

In War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges argues that war is both a deadly addiction--a drug that offers an unmatchable intoxication, the thrill of being released from the moral strictures of everyday life--and a unifying force that provides a sense of meaning, purpose, and self-sacrifice that can wash away life's trivial concerns. But the meaningfulness of combat, Hedges suggests, depends upon the myth of war. In reality, no matter what grand cause it is supposed to support, war is simply the basest form of aggression: "organized murder." Once war begins, the moral universe collapses and every manner of atrocity can be justified in the eyes of those who wage it, because the cause is just, the enemy is inhuman, and only war can restore balance to the world. Hedges reveals the hollowness of such thinking and makes an impassioned plea for humility, love, and compassion as the human race's only hope for survival. Only when a nation can accept its share of blame and see its enemy with compassion rather than hatred can war be averted and true peace prevail.

War is defined by death. It is a descent into madness, into the "heart of darkness". And as Neruda pleads in the last stanza of his poem "I'm Explaining a Few Things",

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!

Bush as Leviathan

"For the laws of nature (as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others as we woud be done to) of themselves, without the terror of some power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge and the like.
Another doctrine repugnant to civil society, is that whatsoever a man does against his conscience, is sin; and it dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of good and evil. For a man's conscience and his judgement are the same thing, and as the judgement, so also the conscience may be erroneous.”

-Thomas Hobbes

Wondering where Bush, and those who have formulated his compatibilist views, formed his notions of executive sovereignty and autonomy, I thought of Thomas Hobbes, whose birthday just passed (April 5,1588) We live in a world where all human beings are supposed to have rights, that is, moral claims that protect their basic interests. But what or who determines what those rights are? And who will enforce them? In other words, who will exercise the most important political powers, when the basic assumption is that we all share the same entitlements? Hobbes proposed the formation of a commonwealth (a network of associated contracts, which provides for the highest form of social organization), or a society that is subject to the justice and prudence of an absolute political authority.
In Hobbes's view, the formation of the commonwealth creates a new, artificial person (the Leviathan) to whom all responsibility for social order and public welfare is entrusted. (Leviathan II 17). Of course, someone must make decisions on behalf of this new whole, and that person will be the sovereign. Since the decisions of the sovereign are entirely arbitrary, it hardly matters where they come from, so long as they are understood and obeyed universally. (Separation of powers is distinctly rejected in Leviathan)

The NSA scandal, the Patriot Act, The prelude to and commitment to the Iraq War (and its concomitant hegemonic geopolitical designs), his disdain for the Constitution: all reveal Bush’s notion of limitless plenary powers. Unfortunately, he is about to plunge us into another Hobbesian nightmare: Bellum omnium contra omnes; "the war of all against all".

The most durable components of the Hobbesian philosophy have been his appraisal of the role that power and fear play in human relations. ("All mankind [is in] a perpetual and restless desire for power... that [stops] only in death." Consequently, giving power to the individual would create a dangerous situation that would start a "war of every man against every man" and make life "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." ) (It should be noted that Hobbes lived through the period of the ”English Civil Wars, Ironic in this context of juxtaposition, and very deterministic of Hobbes’s views.) Bush seems to operate very comfortably on this level of power and fear. Although also an empiricist, the English philosopher John Locke, challenged Thomas Hobbes on the nature of primitive society; for Locke it (society) was more rational, tolerant, and cooperative. His most important political work, Two Treatises of Government, appeared in 1690, wherein he argues that the function of the state is to protect the natural rights of its citizens, primarily to protect the right to property. Locke had one point of agreement with Hobbes: the origin of the social contract, an implicit agreement between everyone in a society to respect a legal authority designed to oversee a democratic coalition so as to enable the individual the inalienable right of the pursuit of happiness.

Listening to the current debate on Iran, I am struck by the strident Hobbesians who are willing to attack Iran now, and without mercy. They appear on the sites of both the left and the right and in their comment threads; reasonable sounding individuals who are caught up in fear, and who promote a sense of authority over the existence of others, ignoring the human toll of death and deprivation that would result; an obeisant bunch of American chauvinists, who may not agree with Bush on anything else (some soul searching would probably reveal otherwise), but simply operate on innate fear etched indelibly into the tabula rasa of their early lives.

It is difficult to discuss any aspect of the Bush presidency and his Administration without falling into a world of shifting paradigms, like the daedal and malevolently shape-shifting architecture in Mark Z. Danielewski’s, House of Leaves. We (you know who you are) need to focus on the individual issues – the NSA scandal, the Plame affair, the belligerent approach to Iran – (not to mention addressing the larger issues still under-examined regarding 9/11. the Patriot Act, etc.) – and not fall down the Hobbesian rabbit hole of history that Bush is digging.

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
-John Locke

Reality in Desuetude

"So let us regard this as settled: what is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious."
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)

"This is what violence does…This is what violence is. It is not enough that death reeks and stinks in the world, but now it takes on inimical human forms, prompting the self-defending survivors to strike and to hate, rightly or wrongly.” - William T. Vollmann, from Rising Up and Rising Down

For many of us, the first time we seriously contemplated whether it was possible to
“To see a world in a grain of sand,” was when we were introduced to Plato and Aristotle in school, or when we were asked to do so by parents or siblings who had thought about such things; others still, perhaps, were introduced to the notion by the leader of a congregation of like souls within a house of faith. The guileless and universal act of pondering the question of what constitutes reality, such as the different ways of perceiving an object through the senses as opposed to through the imagination or “heavenly light”, as Plato calls it, referring both to sunlight, to the imagination, and to the philosophical life, is as common as breathing.

Aristotle, Plato’s famous student (and eventual detractor, to a degree), relied upon the senses to interpret reality – and please forgive the oversimplification for the sake of this juxtaposition of theories – and, thus he was an empiricist, who relied upon a posteriori observations, that is, by experience or sensorial information rather than knowledge that is gained through intuition, pure reason, or other non-experiential sources ( also known as a priori). Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” (see below) illustrates the evolution of reality from a posteriori to a priori ; if you choose to concur. Anyone who has had a fever, or tried any number of illicit and/or licit drugs, or experienced a personal epiphinal moment in a forest, on a mountain, at the sea, or just prior to sleep has indubitably questioned what is real and what is not; are we part of one or part of multiple universes, and other ineluctable inquiry.

Over the last five years, America, and by extension of influence, the rest of the globe, has had to accommodate shifting, separate, mercurial, and adamantine realities that must, with great difficulty often, assimilate with the chronic routine of our ordinary lives; our own separate realities.
Consider these words published on August 28, 2001 in Salon, by Robert Scheer:

There is method to the president's madness, as he spelled out in his press conference Friday, proclaiming that the prospect of government red ink is "incredibly positive news" because it will produce "a fiscal straitjacket for Congress." … … The plan is to bankrupt the national government so we can be reduced to life as it's lived in Texas, where the rich make out like bandits playing with public funds, as George W. did on that stadium deal, while the rest of the folks scramble. Texas politicians, including three presidents in the past 40 years, always make sure their companies are fed well at the Washington trough, even if it means going to war. Whatever the state of the federal budget, Bush is not going to be tight with the dollar when it comes to a bloated military, because big oil still needs that stick of U.S. military intervention to protect its investments abroad. Why else do we need a military big enough to fight two wars at once except to protect U.S. investments that stretch from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf? Think of it as a Social Security program -- or more accurately, welfare -- for military contractors and energy companies, led by Halliburton, where Dick Cheney hustled his quick millions.

While the words are themselves prescient, as well as true to the facts at the time, the most salient aspect of reading this is that two weeks after its publication “reality” would undergo a radical and permanent paradigm shift; September 11th would shake up our glassball world, and nothing would ever settle as it was prior. Those in power would choose not to view the event as “criminal”, but rather as an “act of war” – another paradigm shift. 9/11 would be usurped for enormous geopolitical plans of hegemonic and reality-shifting proportions. (See this article for some perspective.) What has transpired since then, from the Orwellian named Patriot Act to the recently discovered (though long ago implemented) Bush-authorized, NSA warrantless domestic wiretapping and surveillance, and innumerable paradigm-shifting political, nay stygian, malevolent, greedy, and jaw-dropping examples of hubris (think Abu Ghraib), as well as diabolical, if incompetent, designs as yet unfathomable – try to wrap your perception of reality around a “tactical nuclear strike” against Iran.

In 1975, the Italian writer and literary critic Umberto Eco, went on a tour of America to get a firsthand look at the imitations and replicas that were on display in the nation's museums and tourist attractions. Eco had become theorizing upon the tendency of modern society to re-create reality – realistic fabrications – in a way superior or more idealized than actual reality; a priori better than real. His resulting and brilliant essay, Travels in Hyperreality , examined the encroachment of simulacra upon the American landscape, with its apotheosis in the glittering hyperreality of Las Vegas – where fake and idealized New York City, Venice, and Paris, are just the tip of the iceberg of simulacrum. Within the length of the essay is a section entitled, The Fortresses of Solitude, from which this is a sample:

Two very beautiful naked girls are crouched facing each other. They touch each other sensually, they kiss each other's breasts lightly, with the tip of the tongue. They are enclosed in a kind of cylinder of transparent plastic. Even someone who is not a professional voyeur is tempted to circle the cylinder in order to see the girls from behind, in profile, from the other side. The next temptation is to approach the cylinder, which stands on a little column and is only a few inches in diameter, in order to look down from above: But the girls are no longer there. This was one of the many works displayed in New York by the School of Holography.

(The entire essay is linked to below.) The point of this inclusion here, is to illustrate that our culture as a whole has been tinkering with reality with alacrity in recent decades. Of course, this has been the entire reason for the existence of fiction, art (painting and sculpture), music, etc. I can think of no character in literature who understood this better than the aesthete Des Esseintes of Huysmans’, À Rebours, who organizes an elaborate funeral for his late virility:

In the dining room, hung in black & opening on the transformed garden with its ash-powdered walks, its little pool now bordered with basalt & filled with ink, its clumps of cypresses & pines, the dinner had been served on a table draped in black, adorned with baskets of violets & scabiouses, lit by a candelabra from which green flames blazed, & by chandeliers from which wax tapers flared.
To the sound of funeral marches played by a concelaed orchestra, nude negresses, wearing slippers & stocking of silver cloth with patterns of tears, served the guests.
Out of black-edged plates they had drunk turtle soup & eaten Russion rye bread, ripe Turkish olives, caviar, smoked Frankfort black pudding, game with sauces that were the color of licorice & blacking, truffle gravy, chocolate cream, puddings, nectarines, grape preserves, mulberries & black-heart cherries; they had sipped, out of dark glasses, wines from Limagnes, Roussillon, Tenedos, Val de Penas & Porto, & after the coffee & walnut brandy had partaken of kvas & porter & stout.

Perhaps, with the diurnal onslaught of mind-cracking news, coming at us from our phones, our televisions, our computers, all of which are beyond ubiquitous, an indulgence of the senses that celebrates the essential quality of an object or experience would seem liberating; certainly indulgent. How sad and pathetic, however, that we should have to look to 19th century literature to imagine such divine escape.

The struggle to maintain focus, within a political context, in an America that has been vanishing for decades, but that is in danger, under the Bush regime, of becoming extinct – a catastrophic paradigm shift – or at best, nothing imagined by the authors of the U.S. Constitution (who would have found these tendencies to be anathema).

I offer these examples as a place to begin a conversation about epistemology in the age of shifting sands, each granular translucence offering its own complete and unique world.

Reality in Desuetude

•Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (begin here)

•Eco’s essay Travels in Hyperreality (then go here)

•Current news reporting and use of Orwellian language (just a couple of examples, here and here)

•Photoshop as the final corruptor of reality (examples here and here)

•Regarding Iran: John Bolton, US envoy to the United Nations, told visiting British MPs:
“We can hit different points along the line. You only have to take out one part of the nuclear operations to take the whole thing down." (Not to mention: The likes of a John Bolton being confirmed to a position for which he is clearly the antithesis of its purpose…)

•Nuclear experts estimate that Iran is at least two and up to ten years away from production of a useable nuclear weapon. At the same time, Iran lacks the kind of up-to-date, long-range missiles or jet aircraft needed to hit even regional targets.

•Iran, however, is surrounded by nuclear powers: Russia, Pakistan and India. US forces based in Iraq almost certainly have nuclear weapons. Israel, moreover, is estimated to have around 200 nuclear weapons, and also has a large fleet of sophisticated missiles and aircraft capable of hitting Iran. (For an interesting, if I may say so, perspective on the historical background the U.S./Iran relationship, go here.)

•WASHINGTON (AFP) - The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue. The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential Adolf Hitler. "That's the name they're using," the report quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying. A senior unnamed Pentagon adviser is quoted in the article as saying that "this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war”. The former intelligence official depicts planning as "enormous," "hectic" and "operational," Hersh writes. One former defense official said the military planning was premised on a belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government,"

•Europe is now home to an estimated 20 million Muslims; a statistic accomplished in a mere three decades. Islam now threatens the preeminence of Christianity as a religion on the Continent. There are strident intellectual discussions of this phenomenon, and huge issue of assimilation, from several perspectives, many of which are, to say the least, controversial, but nevertheless studied, necessary, and very worthwhile. Contemplative discussions of the subject can be found here and here and here and here. (The last is a simple reference to a term used by Bat Ye’or, and will certainly offer a perspective that is anathema to some. Nevertheless, these sources are among many that need to be brought into the discussion for the sake of instigating an intellectual dynamic; a dialectical alternative to an all-out global war of civilizations. All of the above should be read again and again – the discussion should be as imperative as the subject.)

“Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.”
Samuel Beckett

Example:

The stay-the-course-in-Iraq meme is part of a rhetorical network that itself is part of an intractable labyrinth devolving imperceptibly through advertising techniques into myth.

In order to grasp the power of motivation in myth, it is enough to reflect for a moment on an extreme case. I have here before me a collection of objects so lacking in order that I can find no meaning in it; it would seem that here, deprived of any previous meaning, the form could not root its analogy in anything, and that myth is impossible. But what the form can always give one to read is disorder itself: it can give a signification to the absurd; make the absurd itself a myth. (Roland Barthes, 1972)

To Be Continued…

In a Glassball World

The readiest and surest way to get rid of censure, is to correct ourselves.

- Demosthenes

As you are aware, Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) announced that he will introduce a resolution tomorrow to censure President Bush for authorizing an illegal warrantless domestic surveillance program. Feingold said President Bush’s actions were “right in the strike zone of the concept of high crimes and misdemeanors.” This Sisyphean task may provide the dynamic for a trenchant public discourse on the NSA issue, forcing scrutiny of the issues involved, and provide a counterbalance to DeWine’s proposed totalitarian legislation. Once the immense significance of this debate becomes apparent, and its implications are clearly defined, the outrage should spread beyond the glassball world of the blogosphere, where it will get shaken up by both sides until the “snow” of stridency further obfuscates the issue.

The ports deal controversy, what ever the political and economic dichotomy of that issue, illustrated that a vocal, energized citizenry in opposition - one that clamors to be heard - can have an immediate effect upon a political course. Senator Feingold needs the support of the American people for this action to succeed. To gain this, he will need high profile media coverage - the kind that Lou Dobbs provided on the ports issue - that is advocating of his (Feingold’s) position. Clearly, Bush broke the law; the censure is the least the Senate can do to begin a nation-wide and intense scrutiny of the issue. A fulminating electorate is impossible to ignore, although the fraudulent and fulsome Frist will use every divisive method of procedural obfuscation and obstruction that his staff can dredge up. The cowardly abdication of the Intelligence Committee’s investigatory obligations, succumbing to Cheney’s threats, has made Feingold’s course of action imperative. An email of support to Senator Feingold, phone calls, emails, and letters to our senators and congressional representatives, along with the same to the bastions of public media will be necessary to move this forward.

As Feingold said, “This President is breaking the law.”

Addendum: The difficulty ahead lies in this illustration: Blitzer, in reviewing the other Sunday talk show highlights, rather than showing Feingold's appearance on ABC This Week, played the clip of Frist implying that Feingold is treasonous:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You’re saying that censure resolution weakens America abroad?

FRIST: Yes. Well, I think it does because we are right now in a war, in an unprecedented war, where we do have people who really want to take us down and we think back to 9/11 and that war on terror is out there. So the signal that it sends that there is in any way a lack of support for our Commander in Chief, who is leading us with a bold vision in a way that we know is making our homeland safer is wrong. And it sends a perception around the world and, again, that’s why I’m saying as leader at least of the Republican side of this equation, that it’s wrong, because leadership around the world of our sworn enemies are going to say, well, now we have a little crack there. There is no crack. The American people are solidly behind this president in conducting this war on terror.

In order to express my contempt for the fulsome Frist
I’ll have to quote Seinfeld’s Newman (upon putting a piece of broccoli in his mouth):

“Vile weed!”

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."

--Harry S. Truman, message to Congress, August 8, 1950

Antithesis and Metabasis

"The committee is, to put it bluntly, basically under the control of the White House," said Rockefeller. . .” (Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.VA.), after leaving the Senate Intelligence Committee meeting yesterday)

As Glenn Greenwald commiserates with appropriate vitriol and razor precision, this outcome of the Senate Intelligence Committee, despite our commonsense-defying and desperate hopes, was inevitable. What manner of coercion, threats, entreaties, bribes, admonishments, and heaping mendacity must the Bush Administration employ to keep its jackboot on the face of Congress? After all, they have the NSA, the FBI, and whatever other manner of black-ops available within their purview to dig up or manufacture evidence that puts the metaphorical gun to the head of anyone who would resist absolute compliance – all within a prescribed daedal ruse – to the grand scheme.

Meanwhile, one does not need to be a semiotician to read the signs amidst the extant posturing and belligerence of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Bolton, Bush, and their concomitant neocon think-tanks and priapic military (and, our Middle Eastern pit bull, Israel) preparing for an imminent attack on Iran. The American citizenry is as ignorant of the facts and as susceptible to the Bush propaganda machine on Iran as it was with Iraq; more so it would appear. Despite the fact that we actually will be in a perpetual war after that – at least one that will last into the next century - and despite the blatant hypocrisy of arming to the hilt with nuclear technology and fissile material one strategically located nation that already has nuclear weapons (although not a signatory of the non-proliferation treaty), while threatening “dire consequences” if Iran, who does not possess nuclear weapons, continues to enrich uranium for what ever their purposes may be. If the media had an ounce of responsibility (or sovereignty or courage) and laid out the facts, including who has nukes and who doesn’t, who is likely to use them and who isn’t, and attempted to reveal the true nature of the Persian culture to Americans before we vaporize them, perhaps the inevitable march to war would run into some obstacles. Unfortunately, as Glenn Greenwald says,

“…we have a President who not only breaks the law but claims he has the right to do so, while the media barely finds any of it worthy of much attention… [and] the Congress has completely abdicated its responsibilities at the altar of cult-like
obedience to White House decrees. That's just one of the many rotted roots in our government.”

Reasonable outcomes are not expected, nor are they prudent.

The issues that reach the public media are those that the Bush Administration plant as a distraction; Wolf (now reporting from Dubai like someone whose family is being held hostage) plays the obsequious fool, while everyone in talkingheadville performs the sleight-of-hand without even knowing they are complicit. While citizen bloggers like Greenwald, Hamsher, and Georgia10 and those who link and comment on their sites, attempt to extrapolate upon the most important domestic issue, the NSA warrantless wiretaps (which as L.A. points out with perspicacity, is concomitant with the Patriot Act (non) debate), the public media is steered toward the hyperbolic and inconsequential ports deal controversy. Let’s examine the issue, as delineated by Mr. Greenwald:

But there is a far bigger and more important problem. Congress already enacted legislation regulating the Government's eavesdropping activities. They called that law FISA. The Administration has been violating that law because they believe they have the power to do so, because they think that Congress has no power to regulate or limit the President's eavesdropping activities. Since the White House still believes it has this power, isn't passing another law facially moronic, given that the Administration has already said that they are free to violate whatever Congressional laws they want which purport to regulate eavesdropping?

And, just by the way, there is also another law passed by Congress more than 50 years ago called the National Security Act of 1947, which already requires the Administration to brief the full House and Senate Intelligence Committee on all NSA activities, a law the Administration also plainly violated.

I am not one of those who comply to the notion that the President and his lawyers believe that they actually have these inherent powers; they simply know that they can manipulate, obfuscate, and coerce their way through any public scrutiny (unlikely considering the dysfunctionality of the public media), and a jackbooted Congress, until these imperial powers are taken for granted. The other possibility – that the citizenry goes into upheaval in the form of a general strike - would suit the Administration even better; suspension of Posse Comitatus and declaration of martial law, perhaps suspension of the 22nd Amendment.

While Bush & Co. keep the NSA scandal from proceeding to its ultimate legal denouement (an eventuality that is inevitable through myriad determined legal avenues), or at least off the front pages, they are filling the capillaries of tactical information with the blood of fear and hatred for Iran (Argumentum ad Baculum). The propaganda machine is already humming; only their message on Iran is getting out. By the time anyone figures out the ruse, Iran will be burning, and its ancient Persian culture will be reduced to trinkets for sale on e-bay.

Pick your battle and stick to it:

•The NSA scandal (the Constitution and a free republic are at stake);

•Iran: illuminate the hypocrisy, danger, and hegemonic agenda of the Bush Administration’s belligerence and propaganda – the consequences here are a world at war for the remainder of this century and a geopolitical realignment that would confound Orwell and Huxley;

•The attack on a woman’s right to choose – this issue affects the privacy of every citizen, and has at its heart a repugnant and vileness against life as it purports the opposite (Petitio Principii );

•Iraq: where are the ubiquitous demonstrations and marches that galvanized other anti-war movements? The tragedy of this illegal war is unfathomable in its cost of human lives, an historic civilization, and its Sisyphean financial burden on our economy. Morality and ethics should dictate the response alone. However, these diurnal reports should eventually wear down even the most complacent citizen of the world;

•Poverty: Katrina may have provided a brief glimpse into the enormity of our economic disparity, based on class warfare, corporate greed, and social stratification beyond anything Jonathon Kozol feared;

•Shedding Light: the onslaught of lies and propaganda from the Whitehouse and the neocon cabal needs, at a minimum, an equal force of resistance. We can no longer count on the free press as described in the First Amendment and by Madison (June 8, 1789) thusly:

''The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.''

ADDENDUM: Please take a moment to read this post by Riverbend at Baghdad Burning; through the tears are smiles.

Out to Lunch

Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total...because it may well involve the whole world.

– Jean-Paul Sartre

It has been a while since I posted anything here. Except for leaving copious and fulsome comments, like mouse droppings, within the threads of others, I have eschewed writing about the socioeconomic, domestic- and geopolitical, religiously orthodoxical, and cultural dynamics that, although outside my sphere of influence, are ubiquitously and relentlessly sucking me into their spheres of influence. Unless one is willing to shut off the television permanently, avoid newspapers, stay off the internet, and never leave the house so as not to have to converse with anyone who may inadvertently, or deliberately, bring up, just for example, Bush’s usurpation of the NSA to conduct domestic, warrantless electronic surveillance in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which may have the identical visceral effect upon one’s equilibrium as someone burping their as yet digested chili and beer in your face, one is manifestly bound to encounter the fact that the world has gone mad.

Any definition of what constitutes madness will undoubtedly be construed as subjective at least, and, propaganda, by those who would confer their own subjectivity upon it; a point illustrated inadvertently within this circumspect comment upon political discourse by David Foster Wallace (from the November 2003 issue of the Believer):

The reason why doing political writing is so hard right now is probably also the reason why more young (am I included in the range of this predicate anymore?) fiction writers ought to be doing it. As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O’Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left’s been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it’s totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken’s broadsides but further rage and return-venom?). Or see also e.g. Lapham’s latest Harper’s columns, or most of the stuff in the Nation, or even Rolling Stone. It’s all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds. There’s no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or “dialogue”); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying. Watching O’Reilly v. Franken is watching bloodsport. How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country’s macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy’s outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way—as is the belief that every last person you’re in conflict with is an asshole—but it’s childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community. My own belief, perhaps starry-eyed, is that since fictionists or literary-type writers are supposed to have some special interest in empathy, in trying to imagine what it’s like to be the other guy, they might have some useful part to play in a political conversation that’s having the problems ours is.

While I do not refute any aspect of the seeming futility of open jaws on either side of a line drawn in the sand screaming at each other, I do not necessarily think that shouting to be heard is a bad thing. It is not easy to be heard above the din of the ceaseless Sturm und Drang of hype and spin and the cacophony of those vying for pyretic position. Mr. Foster Wallace says, “Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying.” But the truth, if there is such a thing, is black-and-white - as in irrefutable, apodeictic, immutable – to the believer. Try telling a person on either side of the abortion or the death penalty debate that there are gray areas. Certainly you may believe there are. But ask Peter Pro-Life or Danny Anti-Death Penalty or Betty Bud-Light or Molly Miller-Lite to agree; wear a helmet.

Mr. Foster Wallace also concludes that literary types should aspire to empathy, i.e., seeing through the eyes of your adversary, in this case. My own preference is for a Socratic dialectic that methodically attempts to eliminate prejudices and detritus (non-facts) from an argument, until a conclusion, supposedly truthful, can be reached; not that these methods are mutually excusive. But I do not need to get inside Cheney’s head (nor would I if I could) to understand that his neo-conservative ideologies are anathema to my own. Nevertheless, I agree with Mr. Foster Wallace that digressions into hate speech, personal attacks that reference all manner of fulsome effluvia (apologies to Mr. Vonnegut), and digress into an abyss of rhetoric from which there is no return are part of the madness, not of any serious discourse.

If one reads my opening paragraph, it is obvious which way my political proclivities lean. However, beyond generalizations one would be foolish to attempt any precise categorization; I could be a libertarian conservative in the Republican Party, or I could be a concerned citizen who happens to be a registered Independent. Certainly I could be a Democrat or some part of their taxonomy. I would hope to avoid any strenuous attempt at such categorization in order to get at a consensus of the word mad and the examples I am about to give as representative of that definition.

It would be easy to begin with the headline: US Vice-President Cheney accidentally shoots hunting partner. While this is definitely unusual, a more salient aspect of the story is the fact that it took nearly 24 hours for the story to be publicly released. The madness is in the metaphor; this is how the presiding Administration operates. This obfuscation (one that, as we know through experience, will be permanent) is a metaphor for their domestic policy, and this is a metaphor for their foreign policy. Mad, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, means 1 mentally ill. 2 extremely foolish or ill-advised. 3 showing impulsiveness, confusion, or frenzy. I’d have to say that nos. 2 & 3 apply here.
The front page of today’s New York Times reports on this story denoting how Israel and the U.S are “discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats.” Hypocrisy in and of itself may not be mad, but it is definitely “ill-advised”. I can not speak conclusively for Israel, but the United States is, as defined by its constitution, for democracy.

Recently, Peter Daou ran this article that discussed, among other things, “scandal fatigue”, and listed these stories (with links) as examples (of which I shall use as examples of mad) of the cause of this disorder:

Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq
Paper: White House Knew About Levees Early
McClellan Confronted With Abramoff Emails
Waas's New Scoop: Cheney 'Authorized' Libby to Leak Classified Information
Chief FISA judge warned about misuse of NSA spy data
House majority leader's landlord is a lobbyist
Republican Who Oversees N.S.A. Calls for Wiretap Inquiry
Bush's Budget Tricks
John Dickerson Speaks...And Drops Some Plamegate Bombshells
Bush's Social Security Sleight of Hand
Tom DeLay to Oversee Justice Department

I reference both this fatigue and David Foster Wallace’s description of polarizing rhetoric as symptoms that I have displayed, and that made me reconsider my own rhetorical tack. However, like the 60 frames per second diurnal evolution of our technology, the geopolitical state of the planet seems to be careening headlong towards an irreversible precipice. And, simply standing gape-jawed, scratching my head, or screaming at the television are no longer intellectually satisfying, and, in fact, seem irresponsible within the context of the following:

'10,000 would die' in A-plant attack on Iran
US prepares military blitz against Iran's nuclear sites
Report: U.S. Is Abusing Captives
Use of force debated amid diplomacy on Iran
Outed CIA officer was working on Iran, intelligence sources say
Two die in Pakistan cartoon clash
Roadside Bomb Kills U.S. Marine (The death took the number of U.S. military personnel to have died in Iraq to at least 2,270 since the since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.)
Hunter Shot by Cheney Has Heart Attack
EU Seeks CIA Info on Secret Prisons

This list could go on and on, unfortunately, and not even begin to capture the scope of insanity. The proselytes of Judao/Christianity and Islam are amassing into their prospective mobs, some rhetorical, many real, like those who are protesting political cartoons of which they find existentially offensive, ready for a Holy War of apocalyptic proportions. Our own country is in such disarray, disrepute, and internal disruption and corruption, while disseminating dissembling and obfuscating red herrings through the free press, that absurd is becoming a term bound for extinction. Wars are piggybacking upon one another. Social stratification is trending toward the medieval. And, popular culture offers for our entertainment:
Wife Swap/Dancing with the Stars/Survivor, Panama; Exile Island/Dr. Phil/The Biggest Loser/Skating with Celebrities/Deal or No Deal/Trading Spouses…you get the idea. A cursory look at video games, probably the fastest growing industry right now, would kill the average grandmother. Scientists now (generally) agree that global warming is approaching a tipping point. The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, and The Boondocks are closer to reality than reality itself. The crazier and more strident actors such as Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly on one hand, and their ideological counterparts, Kim Jong Il, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Barbara Streisand on the other, have an exponentially larger audience than, for instance, Chris Hedges, Pamela Yates (“State of Fear”), Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, et al who advocate Mr. Foster Wallace’s empathetic view.

It is certain that, in Yeats’ words,

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

And we must find a way of talking to each other without hysterics, without blaspheming each others’ beliefs, without lying, and without the ulterior motives of wealth and power.

Soon we shall have hearings on the Able Danger program; we shall get Phase Two of The Senate Report on Iraqi WMD Intelligence; the Plame affair should reach some point of repose, the Abramoff scandal will unravel, and we’ll have more to hear on Cheney’s friendly fire, although we are more likely to ressurect the amazing Eric Dolphy before we actually get to the truth on any of the above.

Footnote:

Certain conclusions may be inferred from remarks implicit above relative to David Foster Wallace. In fact, I enthusiastically recommend all of DFW’s books, especially the last two,

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
and
Oblivion (Stories)

Bone Alone:An Appreciation of Great Trombone Soloists (Part 1 of five)

Let’s make no bones about it: what follows is subjective, fragmentary, transitory, illusory, extemporaneous, and onanistic. Solo bone is not for the timid. Even Tommy Dorsey, the Sentimental Gentleman, although one wouldn’t suspect it from his legato style and phrasings, his haute couture and impeccable coiffure, and his wire-rimmed eyeglasses, was known for punching guys out in night clubs. Belligerence or pugilistic tendencies may not be a prerequisite for the consummate trombonist, indeed most who are referenced here had a preternatural kindness and capacity for tolerance as well as hearts as big as their sound, but balls are requisite; for what’s a bone without balls? We’d say “a French Horn”, but we have too much respect, if not awe, for Gunther Schuller. David Amram and Julius Watkins also come to mind, and therefore, come to think of it, even at this premature juncture, we offer a retraction on the “horn” joke. (And, supplant it with this one: How do you get a trombone to sound like a French horn?
Stick your hand in the bell and mess up all the notes.) Before all of this gets as circuitous as the tubing of a Wagnerian Tuba and as arcane as Foucault after he took LSD at Zabriskie Point, let’s do some Paul Auster-type overlapping of coincidences, i.e. writing.

Hector Berlioz wrote:
In my opinion, the trombone is the true head of the family of wind instruments, which I have named the 'epic' one. It possesses nobility and grandeur to the highest degree; it has all the serious and powerful tones of sublime musical poetry, from religious, calm and imposing accents to savage, orgiastic outburst. Directed by the will of the master, the trombones can chant like a choir of priests, threaten, utter gloomy sighs, a mournful lament, or a bright hymn of glory; they can break forth into awe-inspiring cries and awaken the dead or doom the living with their fearful voices.

He forgot to mention break just like a little girl or to soar upwards and carry that which is heavy up to the place where dwells the race of gods, but one gets the point. The trombone is an instrument that, kissed by the right embouchure, is attuned to interior and exterior worlds of the otherwise ineffable. This is not to diminish the esoteric qualities of the other members of the brass family. Louis Armstrong, Clifford Brown, Miles, Dizzy, Kenny Dorham, Ted Curson, Freddy Hubbard, Blue Mitchell, Clark Terry, Lee Morgan, Woody Shaw, Snooky Young, Harry Edison, et al, all created sublime and indelible music on the trumpet. And, we do not need to go through the entire orchestra to offer evidence of the uniqueness and beauty of every single instrument, dependent, as always, upon the player, of course. However, the trombone, particularly in the idiom known both honorably and pejoratively as jazz (a point to which we shall further allude), seems to have a direct link to the soul, the spirit, the human life-force, the ineffable.

As a point of departure, one could do worse than listening to a Charles Mingus recording on Candid Records (CJM-8021/CJS-9021 - Mingus - Charles Mingus [1961] Recorded October 20 and November 11, 1960), beginning with the composition entitled MDM (which Mingus introduces and reveals that the initials stand for Monk, Duke, & Mingus) that is scored for a nonet with great trombone parts and features the great Britt Woodman and Jimmy Knepper alternating the first solos. Both of these trombonists offer a swinging bop attack, although Jimmy Knepper bops a little more, whereas Britt growls with a bit more vibrato. To hear the dialogue of ideas, the extemporaneous “composing” of ideas in the form of a passionate musical interlude, is to be uplifted, psychically eviscerated, recombined, and set down again forever changed. Mingus wrote:

Each jazz musician when he takes a horn in his hand- trumpet, bass, saxophone, drums-whatever instrument he plays-each soloist, that is, when he begins to ad lib on a given composition with a title and improvise a new creative melody, this man is taking the place of a composer. He is saying, "listen, I am going to give you a new complete idea with a new set of chord changes. I am going to give you a new melodic conception on a tune you are familiar with. I am a composer." That's what he is saying.

That paragraph begins a superb essay on music, “so-called jazz”, as Mingus refers to it, called, What is a Jazz Composer, which comprises the liner notes for Mingus’ album, Let My Children Hear Music. He references the playing of Jimmy Knepper in the piece.

And take Jimmy Knepper. One of his solos was taken off a record of mine and written out for classical trombone in my ballet. The trombone player could barely play it. He said it was one of the most technical exercises he had ever attempted to play. And he was just playing the notes-not the embellishments or the sound that Jimmy was getting.

On MDM, both Jimmy and Britt play extended solos that push the technical limits of the instrument, but Mr. Knepper delivers ferocious depth and range and a nectar-like, full tone that is unsurpassable. As an aside, Eric Dolphy’s playing on MDM is almost impossible to fathom in its brilliance; this is a superlative recording of nonpareil ensemble playing. (A complete discography and selected bibliography of references is offered at the end of this essay.) It was in 1959 that Knepper received accolades in Downbeat magazine as a “new star on the trombone” for his work with the Mingus bands. However, it was Jimmy Knepper who was the leader in his Debut recording (DL 101), which was only released in Denmark under its eponymous title, with Mingus as the sideman, the bassist. On this recording one can hear the hard bop and swinging intonation of Knepper’s incomparable technique and the brilliance of his ideas. Although it is Knepper and Mingus who keep this session aloft, with the fast paced help of one of music’s most underrated drummers, Danny Richmond, the pianist, Bill Triglia, and altoist, Joe Maini, a heavily Charles “Bird” Parker influenced player, more than adequately support and embellish the recording. Undoubtedly, however, it is the soloing of Knepper, Mingus’ huge bass playing, and the recording’s historical significance that give it heft.

The first Mingus album Knepper appears on is The Clown (Atlantic 1260) in 1957. His bone playing on this recording, both as an improviser and as an ensemble player, is transcendent. Further evidence of Jimmy Knepper’s genius is displayed in several recordings of 1957, from other Mingus led recordings (Tijuana Moods, Tonight at Noon, both on Atlantic), a Gunther Schuller recording under the title, Gunther Schuller, George Russell - Brandeis Jazz Festival (Columbia WL 127), that featured Mingus on vocals, and again with Charles Mingus on the Bethlehem recording (BCP 6019), East Coasting, with a young, aspiring pianist named Bill Evans. Not long after these recordings, Gil Evans orchestrated and recorded Out of the Cool (Impulse – IMPD 186) with the Gil Evans Orchestra, in which Jimmy Knepper creates one of the instruments most unforgettable and haunting performances on the composition, Where Flamingos Fly. His ethereal tone and augural incantation of thematic improvisation creates an evocative tone poem; a human voice enigmatically crying out in an imagined place of profound poignancy and ephemeral beauty.

In an interview for Jazz Professional, with Les Tomkins in 1981, Knepper said,

Music is an art, a science, a therapy, an emotion, a feeling, a swing; it’s rhythm, it’s harmony and it’s melody. You’re always able to learn; there’s always something there that you don’t know, that will be a very great revelation, and that might turn your whole playing around when you become aware of it.
He said his instrumental influences were not other trombone players but Charlie Parker, the great alto player, whom Knepper recorded in the early 40’s on a wire recorder and later transcribed the recordings. Knepper told Thad Jones, with whom he performed in the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band from 1968-1974, when asked who influenced him, that he was influenced by the saxophone; players like Lester Young, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, and Charlie Parker. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” was Jones reply.

Jimmy Knepper was not yet thirty when he joined the Mingus group of musicians who, between 1957 and 1962, would record some of the most miraculous, certainly extraordinary, music in jazz history. A careful, if not critical, listen to Tijuana Moods or Mingus Ah Um in this ever fading present, or in the ineluctable future, will surely and always fill the listener with awe and something approaching pure joy. Knepper and Mingus played together in various bands and orchestras, many of which Mingus was the leader, since 1947 (unissued titles on Columbia in 1947 with an un-named big band, and in 1949, Knepper was recorded on Charles Baron Mingus’ West Coast with the Mingus 22 Piece Bebop Band using Stan Kenton's Sidemen), and appeared on The Clown (recorded in NYC on March 12th and February 13th in 1957 - Atlantic #1260), Mingus’ first recording using Dannie Richmond on drums, that revealed the nascent sound of this musical relationship for the next several years.

As previously mentioned, Jimmy Knepper and Charles Mingus played together under the leadership, as conductor, of Gunther Schuller at the Brandeis Jazz Festival, recorded on June 18th, 1957 in New York City. Perhaps everyone has had someone in his or her life who has been both a benefit and a bane, the cliché blessing and a curse; perhaps you are that person in someone else’s existence. Mingus was that person for Jimmy Knepper. Knepper met Mingus in 1945 when he was 18 years old and Mingus was 23. Mingus sat in for an absent bass player in a be-bop band led by Dean Benedetti. It would be a few months later that Mingus would ask Knepper to join him in his band playing at a Los Angles club named Billy Berg’s. It would be more than ten year later, in 1957, when Willie Dennis left Mingus’ band, that Mingus called Jimmy Knepper to join the group. The history of these Mingus groups and recordings is delineated, all with great anecdotal quotes from the musicians, including Jimmy Knepper, in Brian Priestley’s excellent book, Mingus – A Critical Biography (Quartet Books Limited, 1982). In Priestley’s biography, the infamous story of how Mingus effectively and immutably changed Jimmy Knepper’s future with an irrevocable blow to the face is recalled by Knepper:

I was copying his arrangements, and the time got closer and closer. [This was in preparation for Mingus’ ill-famed Town Hall Concert.] Mingus was writing very slowly, and he kept adding horns to the band…Mingus called me up to go to his apartment, and he says ‘I want you to write some backgrounds for solos.’ And I said, Mingus, this is your music, you should write everything for it, and – I guess he was under a strain – he blew up and swung at me, and broke a tooth off. So we severed our relationship.

Ironically, Knepper would again join Mingus in 1971 (during a recording session of Let My Children Hear Music) and would appear on the last four albums before Mingus’ death in 1979. Further, Knepper would go on to play with a band devoted to the music of Charles Mingus (managed by Mingus’ widow, Sue Mingus) called Mingus Dynasty. In a Down Beat magazine interview in 1981 Knepper said, “It was very depressing to think that I'm linked with this guy for the rest of my life,” obviously referring back to earlier days. When Mingus hit Jimmy Knepper in 1962, Knepper’s embouchure would be ruined, adversely affecting his incredible range and tone. It would be many years before he would regain most of that ineffable sound. One can only imagine the range of emotions Knepper had to bear. Although he would perform in bands dedicated to the music of the great Charles Mingus, Jimmy Knepper eventually surmised that the true feeling of Mingus’ music came from Mingus’ interaction with his drummer Danny Richmond. In the 1981 interview with Knepper, to which we alluded earlier, Mr. Knepper summed up the Mingus Dynasty, and similar configurations this way:

The object of the group? For me, it’s to provide work. The object for Mrs. Mingus is probably to have something to do, to occupy her, and also to further his music. But you can’t get a Mingus sound without Mingus; you can’t really call it Mingus’ music—we play his tunes, but once the tune is over you’re playing the music of John Handy, Randy Brecker, Ted Curson, George Adams or whoever is taking a solo; then you come back and play the tune again. Mingus’s band was unique, in that he had a rapport with Dannie Richmond, the drummer, and the two of them acted almost as a unit.
They could do some very startling things, just by looking at each other—each one knew what the other was going to do. It was a very unique rhythm section.

In 1985 the unedited and not yet transcribed form of Mingus’ masterwork, Epitaph was discovered. Gunther Schuller would take on the task, with Sue Mingus and the help of the Ford Foundation, of scoring and transcribing the 4000+ bar orchestral work, and Mr. Schuller would conduct a 30 piece orchestra in its inaugural performance. It would have its premier performance at Alice Tully Hall in New York City on June 3rd, 1989, ten years after Mingus’ death. Jimmy Knepper, and Dannie Richmond, would not be among the performers. Jimmy Knepper died on June 14th, 2003 of complications from Parkinson’s Disease. A poignant and insightful remembrance of Knepper called, Jimmy Knepper - In Memoriam, A Personal Portrait of a Friend and Mentor, written by another great trombonist, Erling Kronor, can be found at http://kroner-music.dk/erling/knepper.html. The piece offers a rare, personal, and perspicacious look at one of the greatest bone players ever. When someone writes the necessary biography of Jimmy Knepper, references to Charles Mingus will be peppered inextricably throughout, as Mr. Knepper’s name is in any extant biography of Mingus’. Yet as interesting as their relationship may have been, their music still transcends the tether of corporeality.

To get back to the origins of jazz trombone, to the first couple of true bone soloists, we can still venture through the life of Mingus as an inverted roadmap. Mingus began his musical tutelage as a trombone player. His friend, and future band mate, Britt Woodman, one of jazz’s inimitable bone players, talked a very young Mingus into taking up the cello (closest in range to the trombone), and also exposed him to the music of Ellington. Eventually Mingus would take up the bass, and one of his first professional gigs was playing in a band that featured one of American music history’s first great trombone players: Edward “Kid” Ory. Along with Irving “Miff” Mole, Kid Ory, who reigned supreme in this regard, brought the music called “Dixieland” into the mainstream of contemporary culture of the time, and in so doing, introduced “jazz” to America.

"...that most fatal piece of stupidity..." *

Like most Americans, I tuned in this evening to listen to the President of the United States give an explanation for the OHS/FEMA malfunction following Hurricane Katrina. Immediately following President Bush’s speech in New Orleans, outlining his huge federal government promise of funding “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen”, I went to the AP headlines to see what else was going on in the world. One article caught my eye, and its implications shook me to the core. It concerns the pre-9/11 investigation of Mohammed Atta, et al, by the Pentagon’s Special Operatives Command (SOCOM), in a covert ops sanction called Operation Able Danger.The headline of the AP article is, Weldon: Atta Papers Destroyed on Orders. Weldon is Representative Curt Weldon, R-PA. The article begins: WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Pentagon employee was ordered to destroy documents that identified Mohamed Atta as a terrorist two years before the 2001 attacks, a congressman said Thursday. The employee is prepared to testify next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee and was expected to name the person who ordered him to destroy the large volume of documents, said Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa. Weldon declined to name the employee, citing confidentiality matters. Weldon described the documents as ''2.5 terabytes'' -- as much as one-fourth of all the printed materials in the Library of Congress, he added. The entire article should be read, as such, and follow-ups to this headline are certain to follow. A great deal about Able Danger and Rep. Weldon’s informant and ongoing investigation has been written at both Raw Story and Antiwar.com. As horrifying as this may get in the vetting, the truth of where we have been and where we are headed is all we have. * “We have no organ at all for knowledge, for truth: we know, or believe or imagine, precisely as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called usefulness is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

The Ebbing of 9/11

I’m beginning to get very worried about Bush’s plummeting poll numbers.  A 38% approval rating is less than optimal; and also less than inferior.  The problem is that back in early 2001, W’s numbers were heading rapidly in this direction, what with his long vacations and brush cutting photo opp’s, the downed U.S. spy plane in China, a poorly propagandized Social Security overhaul plan, and a few other things like:

·       Bush’s boycott on the UN Special Session on Children

·       Bush mandated governmental stem cell research restrictions

·       Withholding of the Reagan Papers

·       (under the tax cuts for the wealthy) the first to fall were the expanded benefits under the Children’s Insurance Benefit Program (CHIPS)

·       Cheney’s refusal to hand over energy documents to the GAO

·       The head of the Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives (John DiIulio, a Democrat, and a former Gore advisor from the campaign) resigns (as in, was pushed out)

·       Mr. Bush interrupted his vacation to do a little fundraising in Coloradofor Republicans Bill Owens and Wayne Allard.  The $1000 a plate dinner was held at the Adams Mark Hotel, a hotel chain that was boycotted by the NAACP.  The hotel settled a discrimination suit by the organization, but it was rejected in court, so the boycott was reinstated.  Bush probably couldn't care less; he has given up any semblance of concern for the nation's blacks

·       Rumsfeld was in Russiatelling Putin that the U.S.was not signing on to the ABM Treaty

·       Karl Rove met with officials or trade association representatives of at least six companies in which he said he had more than $100,000 worth of stock: Intel, Enron, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Cisco. Evidently he failed to disclose his ties to a political consulting firm, Karl Rove and Co., in his financial disclosure form, on which he was obligated to report all income sources for the past year.  He retained part ownership in the firm until September 2000.  The new owner stated that Rove was paid during 2000, and client's records also show payments to Rove

·       Bush criticized South Koreafor restricting access to U.S.tobacco products

·       Bush allocated $33 Billion in tax cuts and subsidies for the oil industry

      Of course, these are among many other of the quotidian Bushist diurnal details that were endearing the big W with the American electorate (who had not, in fact, elected this President), although most people were tuned into the missing Chandra Levy/Gary Condit mystery.  And, just when we all thought things could not get much worse in terms of anomie, ennui, and apathy, the neocons broke out the forewarned Pearl Harbor Scenario.

America a Prophesy

As you watch armed troops and a coterie of cops from all over the country patrol the debris and carrion strewn streets of New Orleans, keeping reporters at bay, controlling the flow of information, walking passed dead bodies inexplicably, and assuming the responsibility of evicting those residents who are intent upon remaining, contrast the image of this police state with the news that U.S. President George W. Bush has the power to detain Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who has been held in a South Carolina military brig for more than three years as a suspected enemy combatant without any charges, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday.
This article also states,

"The exceedingly important question before us is whether the president of the United States possesses the authority to detain militarily a citizen of this country who is closely associated with al Qaeda," wrote appeals court Judge J. Michael Luttig for the three-judge panel.
"We conclude that the president does possess such authority," wrote Luttig, a conservative whom the Bush administration has been considering for a possible Supreme Court nomination.

We are slipping into totalitarianism, being ruled by fear and fascism, and being propagandized by expert, self-delusional prevaricators. Better writers than me will keep you apprised of these facts, dangers, and imperative calls to action before we reach the tipping point. Among those who will provide truth to be told are:

• http://antiwar.com/justin/
• http://www.rawstory.com/
• http://www.juancole.com/
• http://www.fff.org/blog/jghindex.asp
• http://counterpunch.org/
• http://www.billmon.org/

among many others. If you value the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, please follow these threads; information is the only power you have.

After the Rain

Prior to this last week, New Orleans, and, in fact, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the South in general, were palpable for me only through the imagination. Thanks to rich literary, musical, and even culinary traditions, we can hear the lilt and cadence of the dialects, feel the four/four rhythms, understand the respite of a shade tree, feel the coolness and wetness of a mint julep upon our lips, and try to understand the unique social and familial relationships that are endemic to this geographical area. Writers such as Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Kate Chopin, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Erskine Caldwell, Truman Capote, Katherine Anne Porter, among many, many others, offered perspectives that that could be called aberrant to the non-southern culture. American Black Classical music, the genres that fall into the rubric known as jazz, had its genesis in New Orleans, soon moving its varied influences to Memphis, St. Louis, eventually Chicago and forever into the global consciousness. Louis Armstrong, a New Orleans native born into poverty, learned to play the coronet in the New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs. He elevated the trumpet to a solo instrument with his virtuosity and daring improvisations, and he exerted a virtually immeasurable influence on the history of jazz. Other seminal jazz musicians and singers from the south include King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, Clarence Williams, Sidney Bechet, all from New Orleans, and later giants such as Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane, from South Carolina and North Carolina respectively, transmogrified the genre further. In fact, as I watched the implausible misery unfold upon the forgotten and forlorn many who survived the initial destruction of the tempest and the floods, I turned off the sound on the television and listened to Coltrane’s evocative tone poem, After the Rain, as I tried to fathom the pain in the eyes of people who had already borne their inordinate amount. As the commentators referred, rather sardonically, to the toxic gumbo that was brewing in the stagnant flood waters, the irony of the unique cultural mix that is New Orleans possibly being drowned to history became apparent. The French- speaking, Roman Catholic Cajuns, the Creoles, who are the native-born descendents of the early French, Spanish, and Portuguese settlers of Latin America, the West Indies, and the southern United States, and, of course, the African Americans, who did not exactly settle there of their own accord, blended into the white culture until, indeed, a unique societal gumbo was created.

The history of New Orleans, Louisiana, and the South for that matter, is also forever stained with the era of slave trading in America. New Orleans was in fact one of the major ports, and last ports, of this ignominious mercantile endeavor. Although it is convenient to forget such horrors, the passage from Africa to America, which would last 6 to 8 weeks at sea, were of such inhumane conditions, with hundreds of Africans treated as cargo, crammed into the holds of the ships that no living person can ever imagine. A description written from the Congo Coast in 1859 says of the slavers:

“…they sail cautiously yet boldly in, anchor, and in two or three hours are filled with negroes, who are carried off to them in canoes. The refractory ones are clapped in irons, or made drunk with rum; and in this stupefied condition they are carried aboard, stowed in a sitting posture, with the knees drawn up so closely that they can scarcely breathe, much less move.
Now their sufferings become dreadful – horrible; indeed, human language is incapable of describing, or imagination of sketching even the faint outline of a dimly floating fancy of what their condition is – homesick, seasick, half starved, naked, crying for air, for water, the strong killing the weak or dying in order to make room, the hold becomes a perfect charnel house of death and misery – a misery and anguish only conceivable by those who have endured it.”

The Louisiana Superdome, this past week, took on the aura of those ships’ holds, with unspeakable misery, fear, pain, murder, rape, and struggling humanity. The thousands stranded outside of the New Orleans Convention Center without food and water for days will not leave the memory anytime soon. After more than a week of trenchant, heuristic, and empathetic news coverage of the devastation wreaked upon the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina, the American public has been thrust into a national tragedy that should and will affect all of us. The implications regarding our national strategies for natural disasters and potential attacks from those who would do us harm are redolent with failure. There will be untold economic effects nationally and regionally. The Gulf Coast will never be the same, although certainly it will slowly rebuild, most probably becoming bigger and richer. The lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals are in the incipient stages of recovery and starting over with nothing. How many will not be able to re-assimilate? And with all of the political battles of spin and inculpation, of self congratulatory statistics that will hide the truth, and endless scrutiny that is way too late to matter, the one salient issue that Americans have had to see first hand, with heartbreaking poignancy and national shame, is the other America that has been systematically gentrified out of sight in all of our major cities, and out of the national consciousness.

The issues of social stratification, class, and race in America have not been part of the national dialogue for decades, the literature on these subjects has become paltry, while the injustices and abject misunderstanding of the root causes of poverty and social apathy, and the consequential high rates of disease, premature deaths, anomie, urban crime, gang culture, amidst an indomitable strength of family and personal strength, is, by design of the power elite, forgotten; out of sight, out of mind. The shame we all must feel is that it takes a national disaster, be it a hurricane or a Pearl Harbor scenario before social issues are even casually discussed. The tepid, self-serving Democrats all fear the loathed bleeding heart liberal moniker, and thus remain silent on issues that should be their core values. C. Wright Mills had it part right in his assessment:

According to C. Wright Mills, among the best known power-elite theorists, the governing elite in the United States draws its members from three areas: (1) the highest political leaders including the president and a handful of key cabinet members and close advisers; (2) major corporate owners and directors; and (3) high-ranking military officers.

Where I’d disagree with Mills (and how could he envision a cadre of power hungry neocons who deliberately subjugate all those who fall outside of their elite), is this statement:

Even though these individuals constitute a close-knit group, they are not part of a conspiracy that secretly manipulates events in their own selfish interest. For the most part, the elite respects civil liberties, follows established constitutional principles, and operates openly and peacefully. It is not a dictatorship; it does not rely on terror, a secret police, or midnight arrests to get its way.

The current reality (a word, by the way, Nabokov said should always be in quotes) is exactly that; and with the erosion of both civil liberties and secularism, we have much to fear unless we unseat the current power base that is hell-bent on solidifying a permanent societal upper tier power base. Such radical change as is necessary that, historically, such change is usually only accomplished through civil disobedience. These are difficult and complex issues; ones that have been at the center of social theory from Adam Smith to Marx, from the social Darwinists to the utopians. However, the U.S., and the global community at large, will have to ultimately deal with these issues in this century. It remains to be seen if this society as a whole cares enough about its poor, or if it will continue to blame poverty on its victims.

The issue of race is inextricable from the tacit condition that is at the center of most of these social discussions, which is poverty. When politicians discuss the implications of illegal immigration, for example, it is from behind the rocks of national security and our domestic economy that they hide their rhetorical penury, ignoring the root of the problem, which is pernicious poverty. When politicians and the television evangelists discuss crime, violence, sex, and social depravity, they are pointing their hypocritical fingers at that inconvenient part of society that simply will not go away. There is no discussion of cause and effect, no discussion of the responsibility of the government to its citizens, except those individuals whose net worth exceeds that of the entire population of certain neighborhoods, boroughs, or even halves of cities exponentially, and never an acknowledgement that an unjust and immoral social stratification, whose entire social dynamic is fueled by poverty, exists.
Some statistics for 2004 (from the U.S. Census Bureau) are as follows:

• The official poverty rate in 2004 was 12.7 percent, up from 12.5 percent 2003. (it has gone up every year since 2000)
• In 2004, 37.0 million people were in poverty, up 1.1 million from 2003.
• Poverty rates remained unchanged for Blacks (24.7 percent) and Hispanics (21.9 percent), rose for non-Hispanic Whites (8.6 percent in 2004, up from 8.2 percent in 2003) and decreased for Asians (9.8 percent in 2004, down from 11.8 percent in 2003).
• For children under 18 years old, both the 2004 poverty rate (17.8 percent) and the number in poverty (13.0 million) remained unchanged from 2003. The poverty rate for children under 18 remained higher than that of 18-to-64-year olds (11.3 percent) and that of people aged 65 and over (9.8 percent).
• Both the poverty rate and number in poverty increased for people 18 to 64 years old (11.3 percent and 20.5 million in 2004, up from 10.8 percent and 19.4 million in 2003).

The disproportionality of people of color versus whites living in poverty, worldwide as well as domestically, makes any discussion or scrutiny of causal systems and absence of remedies one of race, and insists on an implicit racism on the part of the governing systems. Extreme upper tier tax cuts, which deplete from or obliterate any governmental safety nets (now anathema, like bleeding heart liberals), incompetent urban planning and development, and a t