Genuinely Stoopid Stuff
Waxman Markey.
Simple Cap and Trade.
Glenn Beck says it's either ignorant or treason.
Broun calls it a "Hoax".
Gingrey says its just the same as North Korea and Iran.
Boehner says it will cost millions of jobs, Bishop says passage will be "tragic" as the death of Michael Jackson.
Really? Do any of these idiots know what they're talking about? Or perhaps more to the point, how stupid do they think we are? Yes, I understand they're counting on the disinterest and ignorance of the American electorate, but at what point will they actually get called on their lies and demagoguery?
Underneath the economic complexity of it's implementation, this is what we're arguing about: Industries that burn a great deal of fossil fuels have, up until this point, had access to a critical public resource for zero cost. The atmosphere. Although the environment belongs equally to all human beings, and it's degradation carries the same costs for all in terms of health and quality of life, it has for centuries been used as a dumping ground by industries around the globe. And yet the costs of this resource, upon which these industries depend for their profits, has never been valued, and the costs to human society have never been assessed. For global business to assume this resource has no value and to utilize it at no cost is ridiculous, and outside of the most basic understanding of how business works.
A so-called "Cap and Trade" bill, at it's root, is nothing more than a methodology for factoring the costs of the "negative externalities" of burning fossil fuels, while at the same time seeking a way to implement these costs without either excessively hurting the profitability of these industries and protecting consumers from the cost increases.
Of COURSE there are costs associated with recognizing the costs of greenhouse gas pollution, and while a Cap and Trade program does a pretty good job of mitigating the costs to both business and the poorest segment of the population, this isn't a sudden decision to "tax" greenhouse gas polluters. It merely brings the cost of burning fossil fuels into a more realistic realm, where it is not artificially subsidized with the lives and livelihoods of the human population of the planet.
And suddenly, when you have a realistic cost structure around burning fossil fuels and dumping the waste into the atmosphere where it has global consequences, other forms of energy, from renewables like wind and solar to alternatives like nuclear are not anywhere near as comparatively expensive and a more realistic mix of power generation can be implemented that is substantially less destructive to the future of mankind.
Waxman Markey isn't a solution. It doesn't begin to address the problem in the US, let alone globally. But it's a start. And the fact that American business is so greedy and so shortsighted that they are frantically opposing, along with their republican lackeys, the implementation of even a watered - down and limited beginning is appalling. They are essentially demanding the right to destroy the ability of the planet to sustain human life on it's current scale in order to ensure their own short - term profits.
I cannot even conceive of a deeper evil...
A Beautiful Life
Neda.
Tragedy wears the face of a beautiful young woman.
Ideology breaks hearts even as it bleeds out the innocent.
Horror is the eyes going slack, at the end of a young life destroyed.
Revolution is costly, and none of the lives lost will be forgotten either by those who love them, nor those who took them.
Agony carries the misery of the loss, never balanced by honesty nor truth nor fairness nor love.
Hope dwells in the tears of the masses, tears of loss, and tears from the gas.
Anger sits heavy in the breast, railing NO! against the pointless lies and self-serving violence of the leadership.
Power is found in guns and terror, but also in righteous beliefs and solidarity.
Strength can only be rooted in the love of family, the support of neighbors, and the caring of a world unwilling to let this crime stand.
Faith can sustain believers, but it is the children that create the space where a new world can grow.
Courage can be recognized, in the videos and the texts, but cannot be impelled and should never be expected nor demanded.
There is a purity in combat, not a glory, certainly not a promise for a bright future, but in the smoky chaotic violence of a moment forever frozen in time, our hearts are savaged and our souls are thrown to the cracked asphalt in the wild confusion of the shouts and gunfire, but in the very same way that everyone is tainted by the horror of the confrontation, in the high keening madness of a fight that leaves your life behind you, hopefully to be retrieved later when you have recaptured your sanity, you make decisions that, should you survive the revolution, you will describe to your grandchildren fifty years on, eyes glistening with the names of the fallen.
Later, when the roaring in your ears is quieted, and a somber silence lies across the field, the lonely broken dead lie crumpled, bled out, the ultimate cost for the ultimate conflict.
Neda.
Lost forever to her family and her friends, even as she is embraced by a world horrified and angered by her loss. And the awful, bloody irony that they took her life in order to undermine their OWN system.
Do not misunderstand. You can't define who is and who is not a combatant in a war zone. Who will live, who will die, who will win the day. The price paid is not measured by contribution, but merely by participation. And at the end, the dead offer the only real truth...
Day of Reckoning
Like the cylinder of a revolver smoothly rotating to place a live round under a cocked hammer, the last piece of the seemingly inevitable collision between an authoritarian leadership that has finally crossed a red line they never even knew was there and a seething young population who only want what other young populations want, not even anything so profound a true democracy but only to sing and dance and love in the springtime of their lives has fallen neatly into place. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini offered to his people a sermon today, in which he told them they must not only accept the blatant fraud imposed upon them even while they had faith that their system, limited and claustrophobic though it already was, was fair and did not fear a leader they could elect but who would never have real power, but to continue to merely stand on the street in silence was to invite beatings, arrests and even death.
It is entirely unclear how this will pan out. Perhaps, under the threat alone, the demonstrations will lose steam and fade away over the next couple weeks without further bloodshed. Perhaps the demonstrations will continue, and in the power of their numbers and their compelling silence the security forces will refuse to murder them, and something historic will happen. Perhaps in a brief, terrifying paroxysm of violence and horror the institutions of a state that finally chose to take off the mask and reveal itself to be the dictatorship it has denied being for so long will crush the "Tehran Spring" moment, ending for a generation the hopes of the population to make decisions about their own lives without intimidation from their government.
What does appear clear is that, after a week of posturing, maneuvering and shadow-boxing, the tipping point has been reached. Tens of thousands of Iranians will take to the streets on Saturday, seeking to be heard, asking only for the rights they have grown up believing they already had. And they have been warned - they will do so at their peril. In the recent history of authoritarian governments, it has frequently been the case that they only fall when they fall victim to their own lethal combination of hubris and paranoia. When they react to popular discontent with overwhelming violence and abuse of their power. When they force the people into an understanding that there is no longer anything to lose, and popular outrage turns into a bottomless anger more powerful than fear. Sometimes massive killing works, but it's always the last desperate gamble of a regime bereft of all credibility, seeking merely to cling to power for the sake of power, offering no reasonable explanation of their actions, only fighting and killing the only existential threat that ever ultimately matters - their own people.
The Americans who wave pompoms and shout from the sidelines when peoples are finally pushed past the point of acceptance, be it Georgians or Iranians, are wrong. We have no dog in this fight. These people aren't necessarily standing up for some kind of nebulous political philosophy such as the American political right has so toxically fetishized. They have been forced to acknowledge that their leadership has so degraded their personal liberty that they have no real future, no hope of living the life they desire, and their concrete demands are not for a political system, but for a chance to make a living, raise a family and live the way they wish. Understand, for this is important. They don't WANT to be Americans. They WANT to be Iranians. When even that became impossible, they went to the barricades.
Tomorrow we may find out what destiny has in store for them...
The Soft Bigotry of...Expectations
Measured objectively, it is fair to say that so far, Barack Obama has been a pretty good president. Not great, certainly, but orders of magnitude better than his foul, venal predecessor. Unfortunately, for both him and for us, it is not possible to view his presidency objectively. Indeed, everything he does or doesn't do must be viewed through the prism of the expectations set during his very long campaign.
We could not help but see him as a forceful agent of change, major if not radical change to the system and the way it works, so every day we see the status quo is a day we wonder what happened to the Barack Obama we THOUGHT we were electing?
We expected powerful leadership, and we are disappointed to see an odd, kind of weak passiveness in the face of a weakened and discredited political opposition.
We expected the promised transparency and we have seen the Obama administration double down on state secrets, reverse itself on the release of photos and documents and just this week refuse to release the White House visitor logs a la Dick Cheney.
We expected a strong voice on freedom and equality and instead got an administration out of step with the people it claims to represent, strongly supporting DOMA and refusing to even begin to engage on Don't Ask Don't Tell.
We expected a reasonable voice to end America's horrendously counterproductive wars and we get hedging and doublespeak on Iraq, a major escalation in Afghanistan even as we edge closer to open warfare with Pakistan and North Korea.
We expected a leader that would protect the middle class from economic predation, and instead we got an administration that seems to cower before the financial lobby, that didn't even show up on Cramdown and allowed a few political grandstanders to water down his stimulus bill.
We came to expect a powerful political force, willing to stand against the worst instincts and excesses of both parties with demands for common sense and real-world solutions. We got a president who won't even fight for his own cabinet nominees, who seems to lack the political vision to make use of overwhelming majorities in both houses.
Given the choice between Obama and McCain, it's impossible to actually regret the actions and events that brought us here. But I think disappointment and discontent is brewing, as the people are tired of a political leadership that refuses to serve their interests while talking openly of serving the interests of corporations and industries. The people are beginning to sense that something has gone horribly wrong when a young, brilliant, charismatic leader is elected and cannot seem to move the nation off its unsustainable path. When a trillion dollar military is not even worth discussing, but a trillion dollars over ten years on health care for American citizens is just "too expensive". When a few of the Bush administration's worst crimes are rolled back and the vast majority of their maniacal grab for power and wealth is embraced by what we had come to believe was the "anti-bush".
President Obama, now is the time. It is not yet too late, but make no mistake, one can see "too late" from where we stand today. You must begin to stand up for what you claimed to believe in, you must begin to demonstrate a willingness to fight, even to make a few (more) enemies in the process. You have an unusual opportunity to change the course of history, and if, in the interest of some kind of political legacy you allow the self-interested rabble of congress and the media to cow you into passivity, silence and "compromise" that is not compromise, but surrender, it will all slip away. The people are becoming restless, and if you continue to demonstrate political expediency rather than political courage, you will lose everything. Popularity, power, opportunity. You are well on the way to proving yourself a fraud, another political hack who told a good story to acquire power. If that is how the Obama story plays out, we will all have lost.
Iran into a Little Trouble Over the Weekend
I suppose I should say something about the Iranian elections. Although there really isn't a great deal to say, as most bloggers and pundits seem to waver between sky-is-falling speculation and suggestions for somehow putting things right.
In order to even have the conversation, you need at the very outset to define who it is you are speaking for, and about. If you want to discuss the implications of the election and it's dubious outcome for American policy and in light of American interests, that's going to be a very different conversation than a discussion of the impact of the election on the Iranian people and regional geopolitics. Neither of which is as fascinating as a completely speculative discussion of not just
what actually happened, but
why.
But first, we need to try to decide what, at this point, we believe actually occurred. There are three possible narratives.
First, and least likely, the possibility must be considered that something unexpected happened and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad actually did win this election fair and square. There are no reliable polls in Iran, and Ahmedinejad's base of support is rural, so one must consider the possibility that the outcome was exactly as it should have been. However, enough experts have debunked this possibility, not to even mention what simple common sense tells us about the differential and how it was announced. If he had "won" by a much more scant margin, or even had to wait and "win" the runoff, there would have been fewer questions asked. But it appears that in their arrogance, the powerful people ruling Iran did not consider the popular reaction.
If we do not accept that possibility, the next likeliest scenario is that Ahmedinejad had become part of the powerful elites in government and the Revolutionary Guards and they set out to manipulate the election results on their own, outside of the purview and capacity of the clerical leadership. This is somewhat unlikely because of the absolute power the Ayatollahs wield, but if it happened it would be the scariest outcome, because then power would be vested in the hands of a dictatorial few who's agenda we cannot know.
The most likely explanation for what we saw in Iran over the last few days is that the clerical leadership had some deep reservations about Moussavi's ascent to power, and at the last minute decided to make certain that Ahmedinejad kept the Presidency. This seems to be the scenario that most people favor, and based on what we've been able to observe it is the description of events that most neatly fits observed reality, but it has one gaping flaw. Why? The Ayatollahs have the power, and they have kept that power when reformist politicians held presidential office before, in much more challenging times when Saddam was a real threat on their border. What could have caused them to decide it was necessary to risk the social turmoil, or even the possibility of a real change in government that this blatant action might lead to?
Until we can understand what it was about a Moussavi Presidency that was categorically unacceptable to the Mullahs we cannot really understand what transpired there. So we move on to the next question, the one that Americans always ask because EVERY global event is ultimately about us, is it not? What should we do? And of course, wisdom would cause the American leadership to recognize the limitations on any American reaction. Almost ANYTHING we can do would be counterproductive in light of America's unfortunate history meddling in Iranian internal politics for the last sixty years.
The US can register it's concern over the election, and can certainly support any internal Iranian calls for internal or international investigations. Beyond that, America cannot do anything helpful to the Iranian people or their nascent democracy movement. And there has been so much debate about diplomatic engagement with Iran over the last few years, certainly there will be calls for an end to the American diplomatic outreach to the Iranians that has only barely started. But for what? What can possibly be gained by further isolating the Iranian leadership.
The reason a nation engages diplomatically with other nations is to pursue HER interests, not the interests of the other nations. American interests haven't changed, and the only way America can pursue those interests is to engage with the leadership, no matter who they are, or how they came to power. If America is willing to share diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia or China, we cannot honestly claim to be squeamish about dealing with a non-democratically elected leader in Iran, can we?
Kerry Good!
In an interview with Financial Times, Sen. John Kerry did something unprecedented among Washington politicians and pundits. He told the truth about Iran's nuclear program. After years of wondering whether ANYBODY in the American leadership had ever even READ the NPT, it is stunning to discover that finally someone has the cojones to actually say that under the treaty and international law Iran has every right to enrich Uranium to produce reactor fuel, which is what they have been doing. The IAEA inspection regime has repeatedly assured the world that there is absolutely NO evidence that the Iranians have diverted any fissile materials to weaponization.
When you think of all the time, effort and international political collateral that has been wasted in order to try to end a program that is entirely legal and that exists unchallenged in dozens of other nations you realize how outrageous, unproductive and unnecessary it is. When you think about how many people have called for starting a WAR over the perfectly legal actions of the Iranian researchers, you wonder how it is that the US is not an utter laughingstock.
Israel has an advanced nuclear deterrent. There is no possibility that any reasonable, thinking person in Israel actually believes that an Iran with nuclear weapons, let alone an Iran with a nuclear research program under IAEA monitoring is truly an "existential threat". It's pretty clear that if the people in power in Israel want to avoid making any concessions to the Palestinians they need a credible external threat to keep people from concentrating on the brutal occupation of the West Bank and the horrible conditions being forced on the people of Gaza, and Iran fills that requirement nicely. It has, however, been appalling to watch the American government blindly and unquestioningly go along with nothing more than a political ruse in order to support a single political party in Israel.
And now, finally, someone stood up and told the truth. Someone powerful, as Kerry is the chairman of the foreign relations committee. Someone has actually pointed out the pasty white ugliness of the naked emperor. I'm very proud of John Kerry today. Maybe even slightly hopeful that this whole weird honesty thing might become a trend.
Pundits like to refer to a particular school of thought around International Relations as "realist", and oddly, much of the foreign policy under Bush/Cheney did not fall into that category. They never had much truck with realism, of that there can be no doubt. But one should be careful not to confuse a "realist" stance on foreign policy with being realistic. It is clearly time to start viewing the world without the obfuscation of ideology and fantasy, and learn to put the maximum effort into the most genuine challenges. To spend so much capital trying to artificially define challenges to serve nothing but a political agenda is nothing short of stupid. There are real challenges, from climate change and energy policy to human rights to economics to resource depletion. All the time spent addressing imaginary challenges only takes away from doing something about unquestionably REAL challenges. If there are solutions, they will come from powerful people being honest about what they are.
Unplug the Coffee Pot, Turn off the Lights and Lock the Door
That's got it. All caught up. At dawn I leave for the high country. Yosemite. Grubbing in the dirt, rassling bears, living on nuts and berries. I'm messing around getting my backpack squared away now, and I can't wait to leave this valley behind for the tranquility and beauty of that one.
Peace be on all of you, I'll be back Friday if I don't get eaten by a bear.
Private Holocaust Post-Embrace Denial?
Imprisoned in the Hague for war crimes, Charles Taylor has converted to Judaism. He was a Christian, but apparently had trouble believing the whole Christ Son of God thing, so in his metaphysical and theological explorations he has decided to become a Jew.
Now, there's about six layers of irony in all this, but mainly I'm struck by the common embrace of religion by those who have inflicted death and suffering on an industrial scale, people who's very life stories embody the hellish dishonesty of scriptural gospel.
Of course, there's also that whole "genocidal maniac identifies as Jewish" thing that's frankly a little hard to wrap my mind around.
There's that whole "finding religion once you're pretty certain never to have your freedom again" deal that somehow always seems a little tawdry to me.
For years I have grappled with and railed against the fundamental hypocrisy of the worlds motley collection of organized religions, but this is something beyond their baseline mendacity. If some very powerful Rabbi somewhere doesn't stand up and say, "hey Charles, know what? I checked with god and he says fuck you - find some other path to spiritual realization", it will reinforce everything I've ever thought about religious institutions...
Words and Deeds
"No single speech can eradicate years of mistrust..."President Obama said that early in his speech in Cairo. And, of course, therein lies the real problem. Just as it's a ridiculous falsehood that "they hate us for our freedoms", it's equally false to assume that they "hate us for the things we say". It is America's actions in the Middle East and around the world that have gotten us to this point. Sure, terrorism is bad and people who use terror as a political tactic are criminals, etc. etc., but we understand WHY there are people, many of them muslims, who want to attack the United States.
So whether America's leader uses the arrogant, bellicose words of the cowboy in a saloon or the eloquent, poetic words of peace and moderation, it is unrealistic to expect any real change in the world without actual changes in behavior. And that, of course, is a great deal harder than saying the words.
The people of the "muslim world", the population of the middle east and south asia, have a lot of reasons to hate the United States government. The US has not been an honest broker in their legitimate disputes, and they can clearly and without argument identify a series of actions the United States has taken in their region that negatively and measurably impacted their life and well-being. It is a wonderful first step to announce that we have common goals, and that we should pursue them in peace. But you cannot blame them for being skeptical, after all these years, and waiting hopefully for some indication that America as the entity that has destroyed so many lives and families is willing to act with their interests at heart.
America can select what it is she wishes to talk about, but it's imperative that, whatever the topics chosen, she speak with honesty and balance. If the American leadership wants to talk about nuclear proliferation, they must do so honestly, unflinchingly indicting enemy and ally alike, not just Iran and North Korea, but India, Pakistan and Israel also.
If the American leadership chooses to talk about authoritarian government, they must be prepared to address not just nations with whom they have differences, but also nations like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and even Israeli governance of the occupied territories.
If the American leadership chooses to talk about human rights, they must move forward under already ratified international law and prosecute the torturers in America.
American international credibility is at it's nadir, and the primary reason for that is a combination of American Exceptionalism and American Hypocrisy. When we continue to make demands of some nations we do not make of others, when we speak to how nations of the world should behave and then abandon those behaviors ourselves when they are inconvenient, when we ask governments to respect the rule of law when we neither do so ourselves nor require it of our friends, we hold ourselves up as nothing but a blowhard bully, a toxic combination of empty rhetoric and massive weaponry.
If it is to be an argument about ideals, then American leadership must recognize that it is not an argument to be won with bombs and bombast, but rather by living those ideals at home and abroad, and demonstrating their utility in modern society. If you seek peace, you begin by not engaging in war. If you wish to demand an end to aggression, you first must stop invading. If your goal is to spread human dignity and the rule of law, you must have the courage to release people from custody if you cannot charge them with a crime.
There is much America can do to lead the world into a peaceful and prosperous century, each more simple and obvious than the next, but all requiring a level of political courage not present for many decades. Obama says nice things, but will he have the courage to risk his personal political future and become one of those rare, transcendent global figures, a statesman who changes the status quo, or will soaring rhetoric be followed up with safe, incremental changes in American policy that essentially preserve the current order? I know what I see, and I am not optimistic...
It's Like if you Went Through the Looking Glass, Only to Find Another Looking Glass
Sure, Michal Steele is willfully tone-deaf on any kind of social justice issue, and sure, irony crawled under George Bush's personal oval office carpet, curled up and died nearly a decade ago, but some things are just so amazingly, blatantly idiotic that even after you go back and read it a second time, you still think you must have mis-read it.
Stuff like this, from Think Progress this morning. Yes, THAT Michael Steele. The black one. The one who seems to think that the key civil rights issue facing Americans in 2009 in the oppression and unfair treatment of white men. A man who, in his own lifetime, has seen black men murdered, wrongly incarcerated, prosecuted and executed at a rate that far outstrips their representative population. One can only shake one's head when you realize that, yes, the Republican party IS actually going to base it's platform on resistance to the oppression of white men. The sense of entitlement, and it's coinciding sense of victimhood as their grip on total power slips away, is breathtaking.
And now there's this. Bay Buchanan, a terrifying aggregation of her husband's hate and bigotry and her own massive dishonesty had an assistant who was convicted of a hate crime. She knew about it, but it wasn't widely distributed knowledge, and ultimately he only more honestly expressed the actual beliefs of the organizations that employed him, so she quite happily kept him on staff. Of course, in Washington, everything eventually comes out, and so this ugly, sordid story exploded on the Internet this week. And while this guy was rightfully pilloried for his bizarre and ugly felony, his employer saw fit not just to defend him, but to describe his treatment as a "lynching". That's right. Lynching. As if there was some equivalence between pointing out that an organization actively involved in attempting to preserve the traditional privilege of white males employed a man convicted of a race-based hate crime and the torture and murder of people for no other reason than their skin was a different color.
The grip the extreme right has come to exert over Republican party politics cannot last. Virtually everything they do, every position they take, and every time they cling to ideology to the detriment of the vast majority of the American people they lose more ground. They really only represent the deep South, where their constituency lives in fear of freedom, human rights and diversity, and will only elect leaders who they believe will shield them from the future. Whether there is a path back to sanity and electoral success for the Republicans, or another party will arise to provide modern, realistic opposition to the center-right Democrats in power remains to be seen. But is does seem clear that while they are in the wilderness, struggling for relevance in a world that has passed them by, they are prepared to unleash an obscene, violent attack against the basic values that America stands for, and the more unhinged among them will serve as their shock troops. Of course, as with the previous administration, only those foot soldiers will be held accountable for the bloodshed...
Money Talks and Bullshit Walks
Timothy Geithner's "Legacy Loans" program that caused so much angst a few months ago is now officially off the table. This may or may not be good news, as the very idea of taxpayers guaranteeing loans that private firms could then use to overpay for some of the banks assets without any risk of financial loss appalled most people as they came to understand it. And that's not to mention the various ways for banks to game the system and further enrich themselves at the expense of the American taxpayer. But the most interesting thing is WHY the policy failed.
If you recall, the idea was for Treasury and FDIC to help the banks they deemed "too big to fail" to improve their balance sheets by being able to sell off a substantial part of what have come to be called "toxic assets". The banks haven't been willing to sell them, because in order to do so, the market would have to determine what they were actually worth, not what the bank values them at as an asset on the books. If a bank says it has 100 million dollars in CDOs, it can show 100 million dollars in assets. If those CDOs are sold for 18 million dollars, the bank no longer has assets worth 100 million dollars, it has 18 million dollars in cash. In essence, it finds itself insolvent.
But the Geithner plan was for the US government to offer "no recourse" loans to anyone willing to purchase these assets at auction. The assumption was, if there was little or no risk in buying them, the funds that did so would be willing to essentially overpay for them, as any losses they would take down the road would be passed off to the taxpayers.
Apparently, that's not what happened. Nobody was going to come close to paying what the banks claim these assets are worth, and as such, with implicit guarantees from the government in place even without the auctions, the banks simply refused to offer them for sale. They would keep them to maturity, insisting all along that they would make a profit on these investments, without being required to expose them to the market for a valuation.
The ride these giant banks have taken the American people on is just horrendous, by any measure. Their ruthlesness and overarching self-interest makes the mob look like a caring and compassionate organization. To borrow a phrase from the presidential campaign, how can we expxect our government to stand up to the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Il when they are utterly cowed by their own financial industry. The banks take billions from the US treasury and refuse to offer up even the slightest concession, knowing that there will be no sanction, and should they require even more billions, they'll get them without question. They continue to sit at the table in a game that is fixed in their favor, one that they cannot lose no matter what decisions they choose to make. In this game, they not only flaunt the rules, they do it blatantly with sneer of disrespect, for they know there will be no consequences.
This is a glimpse into the interconnected, globalized world of twenty first century capitalism. Increasingly, nations serve only as platforms for business operations, and the real power is in the hands of the bankers and the CEOs. Increasingly, people and resources will be brutally exploited in the name of quarterly profits simply because there will be no entities who have an interest in protecting them. Increasingly, the gap between the rich and the poor will become a chasm, and there will be nothing in between. It has become desperately clear that this is not a place we want to go, and yet already we find we are powerless to affect the outcome...
A Death in Kansas
It really was only a matter of time. The American political right had already adopted the intolerance and bigotry of al Quaeda, demanding allegiance to one true religion and branding non-christians as apostates and infidels. They had already adopted the tribal fealty and superstitious fears of the Taliban, seeking to dictate a set of repressive measures to control what people do, what words they can use, how they are to dress, what social and sexual behaviors will be permitted and those that will be suppressed by punishing anyone who deviates from their vision. They had already defined their desired society, ruled by iron fisted men, with rights carefully limited and wealth in a few, powerful hands.
So one cannot be at all surprised that once again, when they find their power at it's nadir and their ability to influence people outside of their own community to have slipped from their grasp, that they would turn from the philosophy of al Quaeda to the tactics of al Quaeda. Terror. The use of violence to create fear and close off options, so people, however unwilling, might be forced to live under their repressive, medieval laws. The use of intimidation to squelch political debate and silence opposition. If there are ideas out there you cannot suppress, you can still try to kill them, by killing those with whom you disagree, and inciting the less stable and more fanatical among your followers to kill and destroy in the name of an ideology you espouse and a fear you create. All, ultimately, to achieve power.
Power over the population. Power over the purse strings. Power over the military, the police, the legislature. Power over women, power over thought, power to neutralize ideas and defeat progress. Power to take lives and destroy families. Power.
The Obama administration has been in power four months. Four months out of at least four years. The republican opposition has yet to find a single position that resonates with the majority, that hasn't been widely discredited, that hasn't simply failed epically. The frustration deepens, the futility gives rise to a desperate kind of anger, the rhetoric becomes uglier, more polarizing and certain unsavory and deeply amoral partisans see an opportunity for personal aggrandizement. In a heavily armed nation where all the brightest traditions have the population reaching for their guns in the face of any sort of problem. Americans kill their way out of trouble, and solve any kind of challenge with violence, and they certainly face a daunting challenge this time.
The American people rejected their fear, their hatred, their bigotry and intolerance. Americans have embraced diversity, and our culture has left the old divides in a tragic past. They have lost the argument, so now it remains only for them to take out their guns - from Davey Crockett to Audie Murphy, from John Wayne to Mel Gibson, the answer is there for the righteous man wronged.
Keep in mind that the media will talk around the elephant in the room. Keep in mind that it still quacks like a duck. Keep in mind that today and tomorrow and into the future, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and all their hate - spewing colleagues will continue to ratchet up the rhetoric, offering only incitement, not as a solution, but in place of one. They are the ones who will look at Dr. Tiller's murder and see progress, hope for their cause. They will see the pain and fear in an opposition that had already won the field, and they will be encouraged.
I don't know how it will all play out, but I think we can safely assume that we will bear witness to something horrible over the next few years, something ugly that America has not seen before, and Americans are very much unprepared for. A kind of low-level insurgency, not-quite-civil-war and not-quite-peace. America has had a lot of experience on that kind of battlefield, and it seems unavoidable that she faces the same kind of cowardice and butchery in her cities that we witnessed in Iraq. If we have learned nothing else, it is that the expression of fear and hatred is seldom without consequences...
Waxman Markey.
