9/25/04: The day that the progressive blog alliance was founded. Leave a comment with your blogs URL to join. Otherwise send me an e-mail.

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Alas, a Blog put the "where are the female bloggers?" question to rest forever. Check out the blogroll of progressive women at What She Said! Frankly, its overwhelming.

Speaking of female progressive bloggers, the great Bohemian Mama gives us an important reminder today:

The 40th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act is something we should all be considering and pondering - yet I doubt that many will even know this anniversary is here. In this horserace of an election where all that matters is whether Bush can scare people enough or Kerry can reassure people enough, there will likely be no debate on the conditions of civil rights or poverty or the conditions people of color in this country still face. Why? Because despite the passing of 40 years, it's still too easy to pretend that everything is just fine.

The "shrill" Digby of Hullabaloo is a dealer of illusions, man. I only stumbled on to his site a week ago; but he is already one of my favorite bloggers.

Jesus' General came to the disturbing realization that one of Bush's oathsmen... likes men... Read all about it.

I'm now going to face the aftermath of last night's keg party at my house. Just let me find my waders... some advil would be nice too.
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"Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery." - William Shakespeare

Whenever an American politician acknowledges economic inequity, he will either be accused of engaging in "class warfare" ;or he will be labeled a "radical leftists" (whatever that means). Both Bush I in '88, and Bush II in 2000 accused their opponents of instigating class antagonism for political gains. Not surprisingly, both Gore and Dukakis responded by toning down the rhetoric. In American politics , talking about class inequities is considered rude and off-limits.

This shouldn't be surprising; our national history is one of division by class, race, and national origin. Our history books are full of fierce domestic conflicts; and yes - dare I say it - they were class conflicts. However, we are taught a conception of history that pushes those conflicts into the margins. We are an "indivisible" nation - out of many comes one. Better for Americans to be unaware that the preamble of our constitution, "we the people", was written by wealthy slave-owners in secret.

In Federalist Paper No. 10, Madison wrote that the new constitution had to be ratified in order to prevent the masses from rebelling against "various and unequal distribution of property." Or, as he put it more bluntly, "A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal distribution of property, or for any other improper or wicked project." Had Madison lived today, he would have simply said, "We must protect our free-markets."

However, I remain unconvinced that a mystical "free market" exists. I do not see much evidence of this legendery being who is alleged to reward people for hard work and perseverance. In contrast, for all the teary-eyed rhetoric regarding free-market principles, I see quite a bit of hypocrisy. Our government is always willing to intervene when it favors those who already controls wealth.

After congress passed the fugitive slave act, a conservative slave who was a rugged-individualist might ask:

Why make the slave-owner dependent on the government? If he wants his me back, he should do it himself. Doesn't the "initiative" that I showed by escaping show a great deal "self-reliance" and "pursuit of my own best interests"?

However, the government of the time would have answered was "no"; the law is a matter of property and money, not morality or basic respect for fellow man.

Our government is generally Laissez-fair when it comes to helping those who are sick, hungry, or homeless. This is undoubtedly related to the myth of "rugged Individualism." I recall historian Charles Beard, who wryly noted that industrial and financial leaders were not rugged enough to make their own way in the world. Indeed, its quite legitimate for big business to be subsidized, nursed, and protected by government intervention.

Furthermore, we have been quite liberal about using our military to intervene with the affairs of sovereign and democratic nations when they threaten the well-being of our corporations. In 1954, the CIA master-minded the overthrow of the elected president of Guatemala, simply to insure the security of the United Fruit Company's property. In 1973 the U.S. government worked with the IT&T Corporation to overthrow the elected socialist leader of Chile, Salvador Allende. Indeed, Allende did give the foreign corporations -- who had long exploited Chile's people and wealth -- a tepid welcome. So we intervened. However, someone looses a job because of economic fluctuations, and they are told to be a "rugged invididualist".

Free market rhetoric, strikes me (perhaps wrongly) as nothing more than rationalizations for injustice. People don't endure the inner-city because they are lazy and immoral; rather, they are caught in a perpetual cycle of destruction. If someone is born into poverty, than they will go to impoverished schools that don't prepare them for college. The cycle goes round and round, while those who are protecting their wealth recommend that they show a bit of "rugged individualism".

Yes, I favor redistributing wealth through progressive taxations. Wealth is both the means to gain additional wealth, and a token which allows people to survive. It's not a "token of worth". If it was, it would mean that Darryl Strawberry was "worth" more than Van Gogh, Mozart, Einstein, and Nelson Mandela combined. I do not think that wealth should be redistributed because I'm selfish and want money that isn't mine. My reasons are parrall to what Einstein once explained:

If one were to take that goal out of out of its religious form and look merely at its purely human side, one might state it perhaps thus: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind. I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves - such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine. The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

It is a lofty goal, but at least it strikes me as something worth striving for. That is why I'm a progressive: it might be idealistic, but at least its an attempt to attain something better than what we have now.
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It would seem that videos of beheading have become passe. Though I've seen a few obligatory links to the recent videos; they've caused none of the euphoric excitement of four months ago. These days, a video of some poor man getting his head chopped off is received with a yawn. And why shouldn't it be? We all know their script by now: There will be about four guys in cheap black ninja costumes standing in front of a flag. One of them will spend about 6 min angrily yelling about something in another language. Often, his speech will be long winded enough to require him to read it from typed pages. Then, he'll yell something loudly in another language, and cut off kidnapped victim's head.

Beheadings no longer have a spark in the blogosphere. Now, some readers might accuse me of being tasteless for saying such things. I ask those readers to consider the fact that the truth has neither tastes, nor 'values:' it simply is, regardless of how we feel about it. That consideration brings me to my main point: To the average American, Iraq is now just another re-run.

Our minds cannot help the fact that they filter out familiar information. News of bombs, deaths, and chaos in Iraq is now filtered out like street sounds to someone sleeping in New York. This might explain why Kerry's attack against Bush's war is causing so little of an effect on the polls. Frankly, Bush's "its gonna turn out alright" is more soothing than Kerry's "We're screwed". And lets me straight: people like to ignore unpleasant facts. So why are we expecting voters to flock to someone who will constantly remind them that the sky is falling? It doesn't really make sense when you talk it through.

My guess is that Kerry's only choice is to scare the hell out of voters. He needs to talk about the future, the voters aren't going to pay attention WMD reruns. His message might be more effective if its along the lines of, "I hope to be a peace president; I will take no pride in being a war president." But, then again, I may be the only one who feels a breeze of fresh air upon hearing the term, "peace president".

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That line, from the uncomfortably prophetic film The Siege, in some ways may say everything that needs to be said about the situation in Iraq as it is evolving, just as it would have summed up Viet Nam forty years earlier. Car bombs, suicide attacks, poorly armed militias holding off the might of the biggest, best, and most powerful military force in the world--it's time to say it out loud: Holbrooke is right. Iraq is Viet Nam all over again, only worse.

Ever since Bush announced his intention to follow the PNAC 'plan' from 1989 and invade Iraq on the strength of innuendo, misinformation, and bald-faced lies, critics like me have been saying it would be Nam all over again, and from the start of the invasion the parallels have been downright spooky. Yes, the physical terrain is different--desert instead of jungle; yes, the people are different, Arabs instead of Asians; yes, there is more at stake in the Gulf than there ever was in Nam--real oil instead of imaginary dominoes; and yes, Nam was not a response to a direct attack on US soil. But the mistakes are the same: arrogance fueled by fear, lies fueled by ideology, disastrous military decisions being made by civilians for political reasons against the advice of military leaders, a steady stream of HappyTalk from the Administration and its loyalists about how much better everything is than it looks, and, most importantly, a native insurgency arising from a desire to expel a foreign occupier being defined by a blind Admin as the rumpus made by a few 'outside agitators'.

The neocon naifs in the Bush Admin are patently still in thrall to Laurie Mylroie's paranoid fantasies and Ahmad Chalabi's self-serving lies. Wolfowitz and Perle are still insisting no more troops are needed and that everything is just ducky even as we have reached and passed the 1000-death mark in a war that was supposed to be over--shades of McNamara grousing about 'negativity'; Bush is running around the country campaigning on his 'Don't listen to them' platform, pleading with people to pay no attention to the reports of chaos and confusion, incompetence and outright theft, a massively botched reconstruction, and instead trust his glowing, optimistic assessment based on--what? He doesn't say. His optimism, one imagines.

It didn't have to be this way. As Jay Bookman points out in a brilliant essay, Tikrit is as quiet as Fallujah is an uproar.

The Army's 1st Infantry Division is headquartered in Tikrit, and its footprint has been heavy and it has been felt. U.S. troops patrol the streets in relative safety, because here, if nowhere else in Iraq, they have been given the numbers to squelch opposition. "I can sit on that corner, on 'RPG Alley,' and eat an ice cream cone now," Lt. Col. Jeffrey Sinclair recently told the Associated Press, pointing on a map to the infamous city's most infamous street.

Before the invasion, the haughty amateurs who planned this brave adventure were warned that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to pacify Iraq. Rather than listen and learn, they scoffed at the four-star generals who spouted such nonsense. These men knew better, for in the Washington think tanks that had nurtured them like fragile hothouse orchids, eager Iraqi exiles had assured them that if we invaded, we would be greeted as liberators, that our path would be strewn with roses, that our leaders would be honored with statues on Baghdad squares.

Tikrit, by its silence, condemns those men for their arrogance. Here, at the very core of Saddam's strength, the difficult has been achieved. The calm may be a sullen calm, an enforced calm, but it is a calm nonetheless. This is what might have been elsewhere in Iraq if competence had been valued over blind allegiance, if we had been led into this war by serious people who understood that when you bet high stakes, you play to win and you assume nothing.

But we weren't. We were led into this war by corporate-style leaders watching the bottom line, ex-corporate executives who believe that the truth is what they say it is and that how it looks is more important than what it is, and corporate consultants who specialize in marketing attractive ideas in order to sell shoddy, defective, and useless products to people who don't need or want them. Corporate executives are valued largely on their ability to convince themselves and others that the impossible is doable, that illusions are what matter, and that products can be forced on unwilling consumers if you tell them the right lies in the right way.

Well, we elected a pile of corporate-trained, corporate-educated, corporate-indulged executives who, like all their class, were so completely cut off from reality, so thoroughly enmeshed in their own private fantasy world of success, so convinced that the lofty heights of business to which they had climbed--largely through political contacts and the Old Boy network--were the direct result of their own genius, that they virtually live in an alternate universe, a universe where their stubbornness is heroism, their incompetence is superior vision, and their blindness is loyalty. So what did we expect them to do? Suddenly become realists after spending their lives investing their energy and resources committing to an illusion? It don't work that way, people.

If we ever get out of this I hope the one lesson we take away with us, indelibly printed in the core of our brainpans, is to never never NEVER again allow corporate managers to grab the reins of government. Because while it matter who is the most committed, it matters just as much what they're committed to.

(Cross-posted at Arran's Alley.)
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This four-month-year-old blog is experiencing a major growth spurt. First off, I'm honored that Dr. Menlo has given us "The Progressive Blog of the Week" award. In addition, I'm suprised to see that our daily audience has tripled in during the past week. Without a doubt, the credit for our sudden burst into the blogosphere goes to Net Politik's new band of left-wing ruffians: Don Fox, Cul Heath, Mick Arran, Jeffrey Barbose, and Inspector Lohmann. By the way, I'm not giving y'all credit to appear humble; Although I'm arrogant, I'm not arrogant enough to pretend to be humble.

Moving on, I realized we are missing one thing: a statement of purpose. So I've begun to fill in the hole by answering, "who are we?".

We are a fellowship of progressive bloggers; there are no leaders, and there are no followers. We are not some petty "citizen's media"; we are writers, thinkers, and activists.

We are not a part of the "new media". We are part of a tradition that is old as Thomas Paine's essay Common Sense. We recognize that ideas have more power than a hydrogen bomb -- and we hope to
take advantage of that.

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By Stephen R. Sestanovich
The New York Times, July 21, 2004

Most anyone who's worked in government has a story -- probably re-told often these days, given the Iraq debate -- about facing a big decision on the basis of information that then turned out to be wrong. My favorite is from August 1998 when, with Bill Clinton just three days away from a trip to Moscow, the Central Intelligence Agency reported that President Boris Yeltsin of Russia was dead.

In 1998 the news that Mr. Yeltsin had died was, of course, no more surprising than the news, in 2003, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It matched what we knew of his health and habits, and the secretive handling of his earlier illnesses. Nor was anyone puzzled by the lack of an announcement. Russia's financial crash 10 days earlier had set off a political crisis, and we assumed a fierce Kremlin succession struggle was raging behind the scenes.

In the agonizing conference calls that ensued, all government agencies played their usual parts. The C.I.A. stood by its sources but was uncomfortable making any recommendation. National Security Council officials, knowing Mr. Clinton wasn't eager for the trip, wanted to pull the plug immediately. The State Department (in this case, me) insisted we'd look pretty ridiculous canceling the meeting because Mr. Yeltsin was dead -- only to discover that he wasn't.

Eventually we decided that the Russians had to let the deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, who was in Moscow for pre-summit meetings, see Mr. Yeltsin within 24 hours or the trip was off. Nothing else would convince us: no phone call, no television appearance, no doctor's testimony. The next day Mr. Yeltsin, hale and hearty, greeted Mr. Talbott in his office, and two days later Bill Clinton got on the plane to Moscow.

When the trip was over, I phoned the C.I.A. analyst who had relayed the false report. He was apologetic -- sort of. ''You have to understand,'' he said. ''We missed the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests last spring. We're under a lot of pressure not to miss anything else.''

Some of the lessons of this episode are the same as those emerging from the Iraq debate: sensitive intelligence is often too weak to guide important decisions; if the information fits what we already believe, or what we want to do, it gets too little scrutiny.

Yet Mr. Yeltsin's ''near-death experience'' of 1998 carries another lesson that unfortunately hasn't been part of the current controversy. When policymakers have imperfect information about a serious problem (which is almost always), what should they do? The answer, then as now, is to shift the burden of proof to the other guy. If we had been denied that meeting with Mr. Yeltsin, it would hardly have proved that he was dead. But we would have canceled the trip all the same. Russian uncooperativeness -- not our poor intelligence -- would have left us no choice.

Going to war and canceling a trip are vastly different matters, but what the Bush administration did with Saddam Hussein in the run-up to war followed the same rule: it challenged him to prove that American intelligence was wrong, so that the responsibility for war was his, not ours.

Clearly, President Bush and his advisers did not expect Saddam Hussein to cooperate in this test, and might still have wanted war if he had. But even if the administration had handled other aspects of the issue differently, it would still have been necessary to subject Iraq to a test. In our debate about the war, we need to acknowledge that the administration set the right test for Saddam Hussein -- and that he did not pass it.

When America demanded that Iraq follow the example of countries like Ukraine and South Africa, which sought international help in dismantling their weapons of mass destruction, it set the bar extremely high, but not unreasonably so. The right test had to reflect Saddam Hussein's long record of acquiring, using and concealing such weapons. Just as important, it had to yield a clear enough result to satisfy doubters on both sides, either breaking the momentum for war or showing that it was justified.

Some may object that this approach treated Saddam Hussein as guilty until proved innocent. They're right. But the Bush administration did not invent this logic. When Saddam Hussein forced out United Nations inspectors in 1998, President Clinton responded with days of bombings -- not because he knew what weapons Iraq had, but because Iraq's actions kept us from finding out.

A decision on war is almost never based simply on what we know, or think we know. Intelligence is always disputed. Instead, we respond to what the other guy does. This is how we went to war in Iraq. The next time we face such a choice, whether our intelligence has improved or not, we'll almost surely decide in the very same way.
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Last week, I speculated as to what Karl Rove would gain from releasing fake documents. But today, it has become clear that he had nothing to do with it -- otherwise, why would he have denied it? You know? Mr. Rove denied allegations of being involved with the memos(twice), "Obviously, you know the answer is no. Do you feel good about asking that question?" he said before repeating, "The answer is no, obviously." I wouldn't have said I felt "good", but rather "high". Now that I think about it though, I'd probably feel oily while talking to Rove. Admittedly, I pick on Karl Rove. I mean dude... he looks like porky pig. However, he does deserve respect -- because of what he does. As Rove said, "I'm the senior adviser ... the senior adviser," So? I'm Rick James, bitch.

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The Spoken Words of George W. Bush:
-Exhibit sponsered by the Net Politik Institute for Advanced Punditry

	I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy. Sometimes when I sleep at night I think of (Dr. Seuss's) 'Hop on Pop.' I'm the commander - see, I don't need to explain - I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president. We need to counter the shockwave of the evildoer by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates.
I couldn't imagine somebody like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah. The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur. The most important job is not to be governor, or first lady in my case. This is what I'm good at. I like meeting people, my fellow citizens, I like interfacing with them.

She's just trying to make sure Anthony gets a good meal - Antonio. -George W. Bush, on Laura Bush inviting Justice Antonin Scalia to dinner at the White House, Jan. 14, 2001

God loves you, and I love you. And you can count on both of us as a powerful message that people who wonder about their future can hears.

Mars Is Essentially In The Same Orbit. Mars Is Somewhat The Same Distance From The Sun, Which is Very Important. We Have Seen Pictures Where There Are Canals, We Believe, And Water. If There Is Water, That Means There Is Oxygen. If Oxygen That Means We Can Breathe.

For NASA, Space Is Still A High Priority.

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From Reuters:

"There are individuals and officials who are actively trying to stop people from voting who they think will vote against their party and that nearly always means stopping black people from voting Democratic," said Mary Frances Berry, head of the U.S. Commission on Human Rights.

Vicky Beasley, a field officer for People for the American Way, listed some of the ways voters have been "discouraged" from voting.

"In elections in Baltimore in 2002 and in Georgia last year, black voters were sent fliers saying anyone who hadn't paid utility bills or had outstanding parking tickets or were behind on their rent would be arrested at polling stations. It happens in every election cycle," she said.

In a mayoral election in Philadelphia last year, people pretending to be plainclothes police officers stood outside some polling stations asking people to identify themselves. There have also been reports of mysterious people videotaping people waiting in line to vote in black neighborhoods.

Minority voters may be deterred from voting simply by election officials demanding to see drivers' licenses before handing them a ballot, according to Spencer Overton, who teaches law at George Washington University. The federal government does not require people to produce a photo identification unless they are first-time voters who registered by mail.

"African Americans are four to five times less likely than whites to have a photo ID," Overton said at a recent briefing on minority disenfranchisement.

The commission, in a report earlier this year, said that in Florida, where President Bush won a bitterly disputed election in 2000 by 537 votes, black voters had been 10 times more likely than non-black voters to have their ballots rejected and were often prevented from voting because their names were erroneously purged from registration lists.

Beasley said that many voters who had registered recently in swing states were likely to find their names would not be on the rolls when they showed up on Election Day.

"There is very widespread delay in the swing states because there have been massive registration drives among minorities and those applications are not being processed quickly enough," she said.

Found Via Dr. Menlo


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If blogging provides the means by which such a community for social change can form -- how does it move to the next level? -Via Inspector Lohmann

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"Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same. It is the bridge between the future and the past. No real revolutionary has ever been an internationalist."

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are "only doing their duty", as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.

One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it.

Also, one must admit that the divisions between nation and nation are founded on real differences of outlook. Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country. Things that could happen in one country could not happen in another.

National characteristics are not easy to pin down, and when pinned down they often turn out to be trivialities or seem to have no connexion with one another.

The English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic "world-view". Nor is this because they are "practical", as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town planning and water supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But they have a certain power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed hypocrisy - their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for instance - is bound up with this. Also, in moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost everyone, though never formulated.

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in the law as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.

It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like "They can't run me in; I haven't done anything wrong", or "They can't do that; it's against the law", are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else.

Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.

It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense "left". Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T. E. Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone describable as an "intellectual" has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order. Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for him. In an Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be "clever" was to be suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T. S. Eliot or the theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any important job. The intellectuals could find a function for themselves only in the literary reviews and the left-wing political parties.

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were most "anti-Fascist" during the Spanish Civil War are most defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia -- their severance from the common culture of the country.

An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is "just the same as" or "just as bad as" totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. But in reality, whatever may be true about democracy and totalitarianism, it is not true that they are the same. It would not be true, even if British democracy were incapable of evolving beyond its present stage. The whole conception of the militarized continental state, with its secret police, its censored literature and its conscript labour, is utterly different from that of the loose maritime democracy, with its slums and unemployment, its strikes and party politics. It is the difference between land power and sea power, between cruelty and inefficiency, between lying and self-deception, between the S.S. man and the rent-collector. And in choosing between them one chooses not so much on the strength of what they now are as of what they are capable of becoming. But in a sense it is irrelevant whether democracy, at its highest or at its lowest, is "better" than totalitarianism. To decide that one would have to have access to absolute standards. The only question that matters is where one's real sympathies will lie when the pinch comes. The intellectuals who are so fond of balancing democracy against totalitarianism and "proving" that one is as bad as the other are simply frivolous people who have never been shoved up against realities.
***
The difference between Socialism and capitalism is not primarily a difference of technique. One cannot simply change from one system to the other as one might install a new piece of machinery in a factory, and then carry on as before, with the same people in positions of control. Obviously there is also needed a complete shift of power. New blood, new men, new ideas -- in the true sense of the word, a revolution.

I have spoken earlier of the soundness and homogeneity of England, the patriotism that runs like a connecting thread through almost all classes. After Dunkirk anyone who had eyes in his head could see this. But it is absurd to pretend that the promise of that moment has been fulfilled. Almost certainly the mass of the people are now ready for the vast changes that are necessary; but those changes have not even begun to happen.

Compared with the task of bringing the real England to the surface, even the winning of the war, necessary though it is, is secondary. By revolution we become more ourselves, not less. There is no question of stopping short, striking a compromise, salvaging democracy, or standing still. Nothing ever stands still. We must add to our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater or grow less, we must go forward or backward.
*Excerpts from the short book by George Orwell
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Today, Kerry finally said the truth: "Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell," he added. "But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure." Bush, of course, said Kerry was flip-flopping. Predictably, the president retorted, "Incredibly, he now believes our national security would be stronger with Saddam Hussein in power, not in prison. He's saying he prefers the stability of the dictatorship to the hope and security of democracy. I couldn't disagree more, and not so long ago, neither did my opponent." A weak response, if I might say..

As Kerry pointed out during his speech at NYU:

By one count, the President offered 23 different rationales for this war. If his purpose was to confuse and mislead the American people, he succeeded.

His two main rationales -- weapons of mass destruction and the Al
Qaeda/September 11 connection -- have been proved false... by the President's own weapons inspectors... and by the 9/11 Commission. Just last week, Secretary of State Powell acknowledged the facts. Only Vice President Cheney still insists that the earth is flat.

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) conceded that "The fact is, we're in deep trouble
in Iraq," . "We made serious mistakes," said Sen. John McCain
(R-Ariz.)Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, blamed the chaos in Iraq on "the incompetence in the administration."

Kerry put it a little stronger than his Republican counterparts:

The President now admits to "miscalculations" in Iraq.That is one of the greatest understatements in recent American history. His were not the equivalent of accounting errors. They were colossal failures of judgment -- and judgment is what we look for in a president.

This is all the more stunning because we're not talking about 20/20
hindsight. Before the war, before he chose to go to war, bi-partisan
Congressional hearings... major outside studies... and even some in the administration itself... predicted virtually every problem we now face in Iraq.

This President was in denial. He hitched his wagon to the ideologues who surround him, filtering out those who disagreed, including leaders of his own party and the uniformed military. The result is a long litany of misjudgments with terrible consequences.

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There is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word "nationalism", but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation -- that is, a single race or a geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty. By "nationalism" I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled "good" or "bad". But secondly -- and this is much more important -- I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved.

By "patriotism" I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseperable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

It would be an oversimplification to say that all forms of nationalism are the same, even in their mental atmosphere, but there are certain rules that hold good in all cases. The following are the principal characteristics of nationalist thought:

OBSESSION. As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur uponhis own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can relieve only by making some sharp retort. If the chosen unit is an actual country, such as Ireland or India, he will generally claim superiority for it not only in military power and political virtue, but in art, literature, sport, structure of the language, the physical beauty of the inhabitants, and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking. He will show great sensitiveness about such things as the correct display of flags, relative size of headlines and the order in which different countries are named. Nomenclature plays a very important part in nationalist thought. Countries which have won their independence or gone through a nationalist revolution usually change their names, and any country or other unit round which strong feelings revolve is likely to have several names, each of them carrying a different implication. The two sides of the Spanish Civil War had between them nine or ten names expressing different degrees of love and hatred. Some of these names (e.g. "Patriots" for Franco-supporters, or "Loyalists" for Government-supporters) were frankly question-begging, and there was no single one of the which the two rival factions could have agreed to use.

INDIFFERENCE TO REALITY. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage -- torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians -- which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by "our" side. The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians. It is the same with historical events.

Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported -- battles, massacres, famines, revolutions -- tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.

In the classification I have attempted above, it will seem that I have often exaggerated, oversimplified, made unwarranted assumptions and have left out of account the existence of ordinarily decent motives. This was inevitable, because in this essay I am trying to isolate and identify tendencies which exist in all our minds and pervert our thinking, without necessarily occurring in a pure state or operating continuously. It is important at this point to correct the over-simplified picture which I have been obliged to make. To begin with, one has no right to assume that everyone, or even every intellectual, is infected by nationalism. Secondly, nationalism can be intermittent and limited. An intelligent man may half-succumb to a belief which he knows to be absurd, and he may keep it out of his mind for long periods, only reverting to it in moments of anger or sentimentality, or when he is certain that no important issues are involved. Thirdly, a nationalistic creed may be adopted in good faith from non-nationalistic motives. Fourthly, several kinds of nationalism, even kinds that cancel out, can co-exist in the same person.

All the way through I have said, "the nationalist does this" or "the nationalist does that", using for purposes of illustration the extreme, barely sane type of nationalist who has no neutral areas in his mind and no interest in anything except the struggle for power. Actually such people are fairly common, but they are not worth the powder and shot.

The reason for the rise and spread of nationalism is far too big a question to be raised here. It is enough to say that, in the forms in which it appears among English intellectuals, it is a distorted reflection of the frightful battles actually happening in the external world, and that its worst follies have been made possible by the breakdown of patriotism and religious belief. If one follows up this train of thought, one is in danger of being led into a species of Conservatism, or into political quietism. It can be plausibly argued, for instance -- it is even possibly true -- that patriotism is an inocculation against nationalism, that monarchy is a guard against dictatorship, and that organized religion is a guard against superstition. Or again, it can be argued that no unbiased outlook is possible, that all creeds and causes involve the same lies, follies, and barbarities; and this is often advanced as a reason for keeping out of politics altogether. I do not accept this argument, if only because in the modern world no one describable as an intellectual can keep out of politics in the sense of not caring about them. I think one must engage in politics -- using the word in a wide sense -- and that one must have preferences: that is, one must recognize that some causes are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one's own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of inferiority towards the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of those feelings simply by taking thought. But you can at least recognize that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes. The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality.

Excerpts from Notes on Nationalism By George Orwell (May 1945)

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CNN asks the rest of the world who they want for President.I'm a guy who has been known for his anti-dogma options. Being wary of anything with a dogma would include 'nationalism'. It's a childish, outmoded form of territorial pissing. My politics generally fall in what almost anyone would consider 'liberal' in this country; my politics general shake out from two tenets: a) Corporations are not people. b) I prefer to think in terms of "better for human beings" rather than "better for Americans".

That said, it was interesting to find out who the rest of the world would vote for, if they could vote. And think about it (your nationalistic leaning aside): if America claims to have the right to involve herself in everyone else's affairs, shouldn't those others have a say-so in who leads America?

Purely rhetorical, of course.

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From Reuters:
U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee, a Republican moderate from Rhode Island, said on Monday he might not vote for President Bush in the Nov. 2 election. Chafee stressed, however, that he has no plans to bolt his party, and that if he does not back Bush he will write in the name of another Republican.

His spokesman Stephen Hourahan said afterward that if Chafee does write in a name it would be that of Bush's father, former President Bush.

"He is a good fiscal conservative," Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said with a chuckle. "What I like about him is that he can be a Republican senator and at the same time say he is unsure about a Republican president," Graham said. "He is a breath of fresh air in politics."
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I'm now 120 pages into Zbgniew Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard" and one thing quickly becomes apparent to the perceptive reader: just how irrelevant democracy is in America. "The Grand Chessboard" is Brzezinski's 1998 gameplan for how America can achieve global hegemony. It's a cogent and perceptive analysis of world geopolitics that forthrightly discusses the goals and strategies of the world's nations. It's like reading the brilliantly devised strategy of a master Risk or Diplomacy boardgame player as they figure out where to move their pieces and how best to form aggrandizing alliances. The book begins, as do most, with certain unstated assumptions, the primary one here being that America has a right and necessity to pursue global hegemony. It's a grand historical narrative in which people don't exist, only countries do. It is a tale of boardroom diplomats moving pieces around a board, completely removed from the flesh-and-blood men, women, and children who happen to inhabit these countries, and for whom whatever dreams of self-determination they may entertain don't even enter the picture.

And the more you read the more you begin to realize that this is how the world is run. When the world's "great" leaders have their G8 and Davos conferences they are devising policies and their strategic implementations from the highest levels, with no consideration for what the people themselves may want and think. It is the world run from above, not from below. (And, as such, necessarily requires the tools of enforcement to do so. "The further and further away geographically decisions are taken, the more scope you have for incredible injustice." -Arundhati Roy)

Bill Moyers has discussed the Shadow Government of America at length. And here we have Brzezinski's book presenting an insider's view of how they see the world. (It is, in all honesty, a fascinating read.)

And then you think about the people who have been running American since WWII and you take a quick look at the list of names in key administrative positions going back to Truman, and you notice that the same names appear over and over again, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background. Criminals like Poindexter, hardcore authoritarians like Abrams and Negroponte, crooks like Cheney, genocidalists like Kissinger, running dogs like Powell. It quickly becomes apparent that policy in America is determined by a handful of powerful men answerable to nobody. There's a chain of key policy players that runs from John Foster Dulles and Prescott Bush through Kissinger and Brzezinski to Cheney and Perle. (And, let's not forget the shadowy Bush family dynasty itself.) The same figures are always in the background, setting the direction for America's ship of state. Any danger that could potentially alter this course is resolved through various agencies, whether by selective assassinations of influential people (JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, Salvadore Allendre, Rafael Trujillo, Olof Palme, Orlando Letelier, etc.), overturning or disrupting democracies that refused to be client states (Panama, Indonesia, Greece, Guatemela, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, etc.), or pre-emptive foreclosure of challenges to the status quo (eg, using dirty politics to eliminate challengers to elective office, using effective propaganda techniques to frame the terms of debate, etc.).

America is nothing but a Multinational Corporation with a tenured Board of Directors, who every so often have to allow the plebs to pick between two hand-chosen senior administrators that pass muster. ("Passing muster", in this case, means that the actor can fit into the red shirt without flubbing their lines too much.) The only practical difference when new actors are chosen to fill their roles is how much they'll turn the rudder on the ship of state. The destination is always the same (ie, corporate global hegemony), but the tack may be different.

The nominees who are ordained to run for the slots are chosen with this in mind. Just think about it — how else do you account for a fucking loser like Kerry getting chosen over Kucinich, or even Dean? How else do you account for a loser like GW Bush getting picked over McCain? How else do you account for Nader being so viciously vituperated whenever he enters the fray (regardless of whatever you may think of him — in a healthy and functioning democracy he would be allowed to be heard); or the complete media-blackout of worthy candidates like Kucinich? And yet some billionnaire "populist" inbred like Ross Perrot gets to participate in the debate? And clinically insane candidates, like Pat Robertson, are not only taken seriously, but actually have a serious chance to be the republican's candidate for president?

For one thing, the Board only allows promotion from within the company; outsiders, like Nader and Kucinich, aren't even invited for an interview with HR — because they would turn the ship around. Basically, since the Board has two competing factions jockeying for control of the Company it is they who get to determine who their candidates will be. That's why pre-ordained, insider candidates like Kerry and Bush will always ultimately prevail against ostensible "grassroots" nominees like Dean and McCain. And because the Company's bylaws states that new administrators must be chosen by the stockholders every four years the two factions of the Board doll up their chosen nominees and put on a dog-and-pony show to lure the voters to allow their faction a chance to implement their strategy for the Company for the next four years.

(What's the goal of the Company? Simply to increase the size of the bank accounts of the Board of Directors and their nepotistic supporters.)

BushCo, (un)surprisingly enough, is a threat to the power elite because they're turning the rudder too much as they try to slake their insatiable greed. They are currently involved in a hostile takeover of the Board, and this is making the Board nervous:

The Bush administration has proved itself to be an insular group of inept, dishonest and dangerous CEO's of the corporation known as America. They have become very bad for business and the Board of Directors is now taking action. Make no mistake, the CIA works for "The Board" - Wall Street and big money. The long-term (very corrupt and unethical) agenda of the Board, in the face of multiple worsening global crises, was intended to proceed far beyond the initially destructive war in Iraq, toward an effective reconstruction and a strategic response to Peak Oil. But the neocons have stalled at the ugly stage: killing hundreds of thousands of people; destroying Iraq's industrial and cultural infrastructure as their own bombs and other people's RPGs blow everything up; getting caught running torture camps; and making the whole world intensely dislike America.

These jerks are doing real damage to their masters' interests.

Brzensink's next book directly addresses this issue to try to tack the ship back to course; meanwhile Gabriel Kolko does the same, but from the other side of the aisle in his cogent analysis that concludes with the assertion that BushCo may actually prove better for the world than Kerry.

Brzenski represents one strategy the Board wanted to pursue. BushCo represented the other. And as you read Brzenski's book, and then refer to BushCo's own blueprint for the New American Century, you realize the extent to which the entire Iraqi adventure was merely a matter of implementing a policy drawn up by one faction of the Board prior to their election. 9/11, WMD, the whole UN approval bullshit — all smoke and mirrors used to provide cover for BushCo's big play on the Risk gameboard. Do you think democracy means anything to them? Or to the Board of Directors running MurkaCo?

America's modern (entire?) history is primarily one of politics in the Boardroom between two factions, each trying to get their turn at the helm of ship of state. The factions may bitterly contest the route to get there, but both agree what kind of ship it is and where it's heading. Currently, there's a dust up in the boardroom as BushCo makes its power grab.

Be that as it may, the farcically painful "elections" America endures are, ultimately, a dog-and-pony show where each faction's candidates will say anything they wish to get them elected — it just doesn't matter in the end, because the Board will always get what it wants.

I'm the one who will not raise taxes. My opponent says he'll raise them as a last resort, or a third resort. But when a politician talks like that, you know that's one resort he'll be checking into. My opponet won't rule out raising taxes. But I will. And the Congress will push me to raise taxes and I'll say, 'No.' And they'll push, and I'll say, 'No.' And they'll push again, and I'll say to them: 'Read my lips: No new taxes!'
—US President George Bush, campaign promise before raising taxes

He kept us out of war!
—US President Woodrow Wilson, re-election campaign promise before plunging America into WWI

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.
—US President Theodore Roosevelt [1906]

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military/industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist...We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
—US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address

If voting really changed anything it would be illegal.
—Jello Biafra

[cross posted at Inspector Lohmann and excerpted at American Samizdat]

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California Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger laid to rest all those claims about how 'moderate' he is with two strokes of the pen. One vetoed a hike in CA's minimum wage--which hasn't been adjusted in 4 years and remains the lowest on the west coast--and the other vetoed a bill that would have forced corporations like Wal-Mart to pay for studies on the effects of their proposed projects on nearby neighborhoods and traffic patterns. Like the good little radcon he is, Ahnud would rather see workers slave away for pay that is below the poverty line than see corporations forced to pay a living wage.

Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, the author of the minimum-wage bill, said Schwarzenegger's veto was disappointing. "The state minimum wage is under the federal poverty line," said Lieber (D-Mountain View). "This veto is evidence that you can't serve two masters. You either side with the corporate interests or the people. Schwarzenegger sided with the corporate interests."

More than 1.4 million Californians earn the minimum wage, according to the California Budget Project, a Sacramento-based nonprofit group. A report it released earlier this month rebutted the presumption that most minimum-wage earners are teens and part-time employees. The report said that 83.1% are adults and 60.7% work full time to support themselves and their families.

Five states have higher minimum wages than California: Alaska ($7.15), Connecticut ($7.10), Oregon ($7.05), Vermont ($7 starting in January) and Washington state ($7.16), according to the U.S. Department of Labor. California's rate is the same as Massachusetts' and Rhode Island's.

I live in Mass and you can't pay even the lowest rent in the cheapest town on minimum wage. That Schwarzenegger is deliberately allowing corporations to take advantage of their workers by paying a non-living wage is bad enough, but that he does so because he believes businesses won't come to CA if it means paying their workers enough to live on says a lot about the core radcon ideology. Where, one wonders, will it end?

Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit organization, said that the minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation over the last 25 years. Adjusted for inflation, California's minimum wage is 22% below what it was in 1969, he said.

Levy disputed the notion that raising the wage would drive businesses out of California. "If you're talking about the sectors where most of the minimum-wage workers work — restaurants, dry cleaners — those are not in industries that compete internationally," he said Saturday. "The impact is going to be on prices. Your burger is going to cost another nickel. All the restaurants aren't going to go to Nevada, because their customers are here."

Levy said that under Schwarzenegger's logic, the minimum wage should be scrapped altogether. "We have a lot of governmental policies that meet objective values but also raise costs," he said. "Somebody should ask the governor if he's going to roll back environmental standards because they raise costs, or roll back plant-safety standards because they raise costs, or take away smog controls."

Ahnud is using standard radcon race-to-the-bottom ideological reasoning, the kind that won't be happy until American workers are making as little as street vendors in Ecuador or Indonesia, the kind that sees every penny paid over starvation level as a waste of money and an insurmountable obstacle to corporate survival. But Levy is right: the radcon reasoning doesn't stop at the door of workers' wages; that's only the beginning. The same corporate forces rail regularly against the 'cost of government interference and excessive regulation' when it comes to other areas that affect profit, like pollution controls, product safety, and consumer fraud.

Hidden within both veto statements is the over-arching radical conservative hard-core dogma that worker and consumer concerns are valueless--meaningless sour-grapes whining from people jealous of the success of thrifty corporations who want to do nothing more than bring them down from their high perch for spite. There is a familiar echo here, isn't there? A logic we've heard applied to a totally different area?

That's right--the war in Iraq.

Bush and his other ex-corporate-honcho advisors didn't stop thinking in the blocked tunnel of corporate self-interest just because they joined the government. They brought those narrow-minded, short-sighted attitudes with them, and they were what led Junior to claim that the insurgency in Iraq didn't arise from the Iraqis' intense reaction to their occupation by a foreign force but because 'the terrorists hate our freedom and everything we stand for'. It's simply the corporate radcon anti-poor mythology fleshed out in different words.

At its root, BushCo's strangely insistent belief that its enemies hate it for its success, its moral perfection even, is the twin brother of the just as strangely insistent belief of corporations and the rich that any claim of unfairness or foul play on their part is the belly-aching of the losers they stomped on their way to the top who are trying to use the govt and the courts to get back at them. They've simply switched their prejudices from corporate mythology to governing myth and applied the same faulty logic on a wider scale.

If you needed another reason to refuse to vote for any ex-corporate-exec who uses his (probably) ill-gotten wealth to buy his way into the government on the strength of a childish belief that govt and corporations have the same goals, this should do it. Wars should NEVER be fought for private corporate gain, and we're seeing why in Iraq right now. The myth of corporate government is just that--a myth. Bush and Ahnud betyween them are proving that every day.

(Cross-posted at Dispatch from the Trenches)

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What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, "I am going to produce a work of art." I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen -- in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all -- and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money .
   
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
   
3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
   
4. Political purpose -- using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
   It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed.

Source: "Why I write" By George Orwell (1947)

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Most honest observers would rate the Progressive movement's impact on public affairs as "insignificant". Such judgments shouldn't come as a shock. After all, what is a "progressive"? I'd imagine the dozens of answers to that question would be as diverse as the multitude of factions that call themselves "progressive." In fact, I'd say that Progressivism is not a movement at all. Rather, it is a plurality of special interests and radical politics that needed a word to replace "liberal". Adele Stevenson once remarked that a Liberal was "one who had both feet firmly planted in the air." The various sects of Progressivism -- which include New Deal Liberalism, Socialism, environmentalism, pacifism and anarchism -- tend to keep their goals self-centered, static, and uncompromising. This is a shame; if these sects could cooperate and support each other, they might be able to revolutionize our government.

Most of the ideas forged by the progressive mind are forever exiled to highbrow books, academia, and the local coffee shop debating society. Meanwhile, Conservatives find total unity in their never ending quest for the dollar.

Conservative philosopher Russell Kirk once wrote that Conservatism is "the negation of ideology". Indeed, what appears as conservative ideology to a progressive is actually the conservative's "populist" bait for the voters. The conservative is not concerned with abortion or gay marriage, rather the conservative is interested in using those issues to gain votes. Indeed, as a general rule, stupid people are the easiest to control and reward. Thus, the backward message of pro-Life, anti-gay, "pro-bombing the browns" gets Republicans elected. Like moths to a porchlight, it draws the troves of racist weak-minded dolts to vote polls. Meanwhile, the progressives are still debating the finer points of enviromental reform at Joe's Java.

Once the conservatives are elected, than they usually proceed with their planned orgy-like festivals of tax breaks and corporate handouts. Since they are good businessmen, they are also sure to throw some table scraps to their base in the form of a judicial nominations or proposed amendments. It keeps the dogs coming back.

It's a bleak reality for progressives. Our entire movement depends upon people being intelligent and good hearted -- and look where its gotten us: A Democratic canidate who is tanking, the prospect of the supreme court being controlled by rightwing ideologies, a Republican congress, and a "war president". So, I've dropped the dream of "waking people up". I've decided to cross over to the dark side.

Unless we Progressives can learn the "dark arts of Rove", we don't stand a chance. Its time that we learn to pluck the strings of greed, vanity, and stupidity in the electorate. But don't fret, we just have to change our message, not our ideals -- and god forbid one of us gets elected, we could exercise our power in the way we always knew we would have: to advance that which is true, just, and beautiful.

"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia."-George Orwell

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Okay, its true: Nadar does speak out against issues that most Democrats won't touch. His campaign speeches criticize NAFTA, WTO, deregulation of the airwaves, and corporate welfare. And yes -- he thinks we should have more than two parties. So, to recap: Nadar talks and has opinions. He is also a shameless egoist who exploits the idealism of young leftists, and old idiots. Nader claims that its "the Democrat's fault" if they cannot gain support from the left-wing's most naive and stupid voters. Nadar says that Kerry should "end the war in Iraq"," create a system of universal health care", and enforce a "living wage" (which he left undefined). Indeed we would all like to see Nader's dreams bloom into a world without war, pollution, or poverty. Unfortunatly, those dreams are divorced from reality.

If Kerry presents a pacificist, socialist, anti-corporate agenda, he will lose. When he says "universal health care", and independents hear, "inefficent big government program that will cost me lots of taxes." Kerry might call it a "living wage", but most people will hear "layoffs and companies moving oversees". Reality sucks, doesn't it? Ralph, I have news for you: a lot of voters are more concerned about their wallets than your expensive adventures in enviromentally friendly socialism.

Nader claims that, "The two parties have rigged the political system to guarantee that, from ballot access barriers to exclusion from debates. The two parties are dominating the political scene." However, I for one am relieved that I don't have to watch Nader drone on about his idealistic and wistful fantasy of a third party. America has been a two party More than 300 years. If your smart, you take over the interests of one of those parties; you don't create your own party. That is -- unless you want to get power the hard and unlikely way.

Nader says, "If the Democrats cannot landslide the worst Republican administration in the 20th century they better look at themselves," Really?

Here is a truth that niether Nader, nor the Democrats will admit. Both Republicans, and Democrats have supporters that are idiots. Just as Perot and Buchannon spoiled Bush Sr.'s re-election by taking rightwing idiot vote, Nadar is stealing Kerry's leftwing idiot vote. For Christ sakes, Nader needs to realize how much we need our idiots at the polls! Otherwise, we might have a one party system, like Mexico's PRI. Unless Nader wakes up, all I can conclude is that he is an idiot himself.

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Why its:

Same-sex marriage ban approved in Louisiana

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- Louisiana voters overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional amendment Saturday banning same-sex marriages and civil unions, one of up to 12 such measures on the ballot around the country this year.

I can't help but find this sort of thing humorous these days because they're already too late. What I mean by that is best stated in a post I did back in JUly of 2003 on an article in the NY Times about groups threatening a state by state fight on the subject:

Beware the Evil of Social Consciousness

...and how it perverts the natural order of things...

The New York Times has an article called "Adversaries on Gay Rights Vow State-by-State Fight" which describes the probablility that since the recent decision by the Supreme Court in the Lawrence vs Texas case which overturned a Texas anti-sodomy law there will be a galvanizing of resistance by the right wing to the idea of gay marriage not seen since Roe vs Wade.

Probably true...after all, nothing cuts quite so close to the bone, (as it were), of what really is core to the bullshit of American religiosity and cultural identity than the collective "sneer at the queer". Nearly all Americans are trained in this precept from the get go...boys learn to tell queer jokes before they even know what a queer is...and many queer kids tell queer jokes even after they realize they are one...the practical alternative being of course a fast or slow, social or literal suicide. Isn't the peer pressure thing just the greatest tool ever for indoctrination? I don't know how we would be able to fuck kids up quite so badly without it.

Trouble is though, that like all comfortable and seemingly self-evident hatreds, it eventually becomes less and less possible to reconcile day to day reality with the cliches and icons that serve as insulation against having to be rational about such things. Nothing is quite so frustrating as knowing full well that you despise something and yet cannot come up with a good reason to despise it. The best thing to do in that case is to do what Americans are expert at; ignore the facts and wave a flag or a bible in the air and continue with the reliable old fantasy that "consensus makes right".. Like it or lump it...love it or leave it...you've heard the tune.

That sort of works...for a while.

But all too soon we find ourselves having to reach for the remote more frequently because for some reason those we despise seem to be getting way too much air time. Worse we start finding ourselves having to pretend to be tolerant in public toward those we despise because locals no longer own the company we work for and the production line or office has queers we can't avoid working next to. And, like all repetitive behavior, we become inured to it so that we don't notice that we are less vigilant and tense about being in the same room with "those kind". We will ask, "Now, how did that happen?", should we become aware of it.

It doesn't matter, but a few cases of beer and/or card games later we've just about got the whole plot figured out...if its not the Jewish controlled media then its government mind control experiments gone haywire....or even the Commies...pick a demon, any demon, the sophistication level is irrelevant.

A cartoonish simplification, I know, but there's truth to it. The weapon used is empathy and the perpetrator is called social consciousness. The M.O. is to keep whispering the same idea over and over and to move so slowly that no one notices until its too late. By the time you are shouting past the police lines that you will never allow the changes being demanded, its over. The change has already taken place. That's where we are today with the gay marriage issue. The very fact that it is an issue being entertained in the media and in the highest courts in the land and argued about by plain folk in their day to day is what makes legalization of gay marriage inevitable...its just semantics now.

Social consciousness has a relentless evolution that sometimes seems almost independent of the species that harbors it. And it operates at the largest scale, across centuries and diverse cultures, always plodding seemingly forward toward some teleological goal of perfect social harmony. It cannot be resisted: The success of US civil rights movement of blacks taken against the backdrop of the deep committment and historical momentum of the South to preserve its biases at all costs, were no match for the impetus of social change required or demanded by this "thing" I am calling social consciousness.

With that perspective I see the end result of this impending state by state battle being the same as the tulmult over Roe and Wade; great gnashing of teeth, snarled threats, police line crashing, queer bashing and media cashing in. The hand in the bucket will be vigorously roiling the water around and everyone will be drawn to the spectacle of the great splashes...and then the hand will be withdrawn and the water will return to its usual state. A decade or two later young people (and some older) wondering what the huge fuss was about and how could people be so ignorant "back then". Gays will have been married and divorced in every state and some other group of social outcasts will be painting up signs for their protest parade on the weekend while their adversaries are handing out leaflets declaring the natural order of things is at stake.

Never was, never is.

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