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My God
2007-11-28 16:53:00
There has been much debate recently revolving around the utility, the morality, and the role of religion in our postmodern dystopia. Like all too many debates in America these days, the initiative is claimed and jealously guarded by those who aim to dismantle a fundamental foundation of our society and those who deny that any remedy is needed at all. Both views are wrong, of course, and both have much to fear from the middle ground, because the middle ground represents common sense, the ultimate threat to the faithful, regardless of where their faith lies.One side, led by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, excoriates literally everything about religion, since religion is based, by definition, on blind faith, which is wholly incompatible with a rational, globalized, and militarized world. For the atheists, religious faith, even in its more benevolent incarnations, is a relic of a bygone phase of history, which should have been cast aside along with human sacrifice, alchemy, wi...

Some Thoughts on Fundamentalism
2007-11-20 17:35:00
But then I sigh and, with a piece of scripture,Tell them that God bids us do good for evil;And thus I clothe my naked villainyWith odd old ends stol'n forth of Holy Writ,And seem a saint when most I play the devil.Shakespeare, Richard IIIIn an age in which economists take for granted that people equate well-being with consumption, increasing numbers of people seem willing to trade certain freedoms and material comforts for a sense of immutable order and the rapture of faith.Eugene Linden, The Future in Plain SightMere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand.The Second Coming! Hardly are those words outWhen a vast image out of Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desertA shape with lion body and the head of a man,A gaze blank and pitil...
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The Prince and The Dunce
2007-11-20 03:56:00
?For, in truth, there is no sure way of holding other than by destroying, and whoever becomes master of a City accustomed to live in freedom and does not destroy it, may reckon on being destroyed by it?Hence we may learn the lesson that on seizing a state, the usurper should make haste to inflict what injuries he must, at a stroke, that he may not have to renew them daily, but be able by their discontinuation to reassure men?s minds, and afterwards win them over by benefits? .While it can hardly be argued that Iraq or its capital of Baghdad, which reflects the divisions of Iraq, was accustomed to ?freedom? before the American invasion, it at least enjoyed freedom from foreign occupation. The above quote is relevant to the American experience in Iraq because, pursuant to the failure to destroy the enemy in the opening stages of the war, the American mission is in serious risk of being destroyed by that very enemy, years after taking nominal ?control? over Iraq. A failure to pacify re...
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The Crime of the Millenium (Part I)
2007-11-19 15:16:00
The crime of the millennium was so insidious and somehow anodyne that not a drop of blood was directly shed during its commission, owing in large part to the fact that it was perpetrated by the types of cowards who kill through surrogates so as not to sully their self-righteousness. The types of cowards who would lock up a man for stealing a car but would not think twice about stealing the votes and voices of 50 million of their fellow citizens or the very dignity of their nation and its highest offices. You know, "white-collar" criminals. Like Woody Guthrie said, "ramblin' through this world / I seen lots of crazy men / some would rob you with a six-gun / and some with a fountain pen."One of the mantras of the right-wing in America today is that the nation has fallen under that sway of "activist judges", who seek to impose their worldview via judicial rulings, rather than deferring to local and national legislatures as the only legitimate law-making bodies. There is some truth to ...
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Drop a Paradigm
2007-11-03 18:13:00
"The problems that face us cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them. What we need is a shift in consciousness." ---EinsteinVisiting our nation's capital this week was a study in contradictions for me, as shame mixed with pride, and as hope did the same with despair. These polar opposites were not poles apart, however; they tended instead to occupy the same physical and temporal spaces. The recurring theme for me was the unassailable truth of the quote above, and the undeniable necessity of embracing it with sober hearts and open minds.The photograph above is part of the World War II memorial in Washington. It's quite an impressive monument and it elicited a solemn and serious pride and respect from my own admittedly skeptical, though hopefully not cynical, heart and mind. More than anything, it illuminated the relevance of Einstein's quote.The American narrative of World War II is that of a selfless act of liberation. There is some truth to this, of c...
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The Safety
2007-10-29 03:55:00
Why are we cowards? Why do we not bat an eye at the implication that the president's most sacred duty is to ensure that no American ever dies or is ever afraid? If we were that soft, that desperate for affection and protection, what was the point of the Revolution? Let's get a grip, patriots. Freedom isn't free, but the cost is not a willingness to give up freedom; it's a willingness to defend it to the death.Free people and brave people aren't supposed to obsess about theoretical dangers. And if this is the land of the free and the home of the brave, how is it that Habeus Corpus is debatable? How is it that the medieval act of 9/11 will plunge us into that same moral universe, where torture is a subject for polite debate on mainstream cable channels?Freedom isn't free; that much is true, but that truism needs to be reclaimed from the proto-fascist element. We had one bad attack, which took about 12% of the American lives that were taken in that same year by other Ameri...
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Beware The Corporatists
2007-10-29 02:49:00
We were always on the left. In 1776, we were the very definition of the left. We were a mixture of Thomas Paine and Johnny Cash, embarrassing tyrants and sycophants with the immutable logic and dignity of our arguments. And now, we have spent so many decades protecting our left flank from a long-since vanquished demon called Bolshevism that we are blind to the demons gnawing at our right wing.Beware of Chavez, we are told. Only an enemy would smoke a Cuban, we are told. The French are pussies, we tell ourselves. The Saudis are our friends, we are told by the very same mouths. State ownership of vital resources is totalitarianism, they say. Corporate ownership of the very same thing is liberty, they say with no embarrassment.When a state that would confiscate private wealth to provide health care to poor women is judged to be more "anti-American" than a state that would confiscate private wealth to provide assurance that a woman will not be allowed to leave her house unless accompani...

The Word and The Deed
2007-10-25 17:08:00
"Dangers to a society may be mortal without being immediate. One such danger is the prevailing social vision of our time--and the dogmatism with which the ideas, assumptions, and attitudes behind that vision are held.It is not that these views are especially evil or especially erroneous. Human beings have been making mistakes and committing sins as long as there have been human beings. The great catastrophes of history have usually involved much more than that. Typically, there has been an additional and crucial ingredient--some method by which feedback from reality has been prevented, so that a dangerous course of action could be blindly continued to a fatal conclusion.Today, despite free speech and the mass media, the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality. Even when issues of public policy are discussed in the outward form of an argument, often the conclusions reached are predetermined by the assumptions and d...
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Why War Won't Work
2007-10-23 18:25:00
Amid all the loose talk of how Iraq is the new Vietnam, we need only look at recent history and a few hundred miles to the east of Baghdad to realize that Iraq is in fact the new Afghanistan. Afghanistan, of course, is still Afghanistan as well, which is bad enough. The truly intriguing parallel for the American war in Iraq is the Soviet war in Afghanistan.Like the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Americans in Iraq encountered little effective resistance during their initial invasion and their drive to the capital. They then declared their mission to be accomplished and set about initiating a political process that would safeguard the interests of the invading power. They left years later humiliated, bloodied, bankrupted, their acts of "liberation" having served only to spawn innumerable new enemies.Despite what militarists perennially claim, war empowers none; it merely grants the more temporally powerful actor a euphemistic and tendentiously temporary illusion of power. Modern mechaniz...
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Read This
2007-10-19 17:55:00
http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Article s/Al_Gore's_Inaugural_Address.html
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Control
2007-10-12 18:04:00
The ultimate tragedy of the Iraq War, at least for those who are still alive, is that the United States and could have been rid of Saddam Hussein in 1991 with no economic investment, no major military commitment, and without the undying enmity and hatred that it has engendered due to the 2003 invasion. The United States passed on this golden opportunity, however, because of one illusory and self-defeating obsession: control.In March of 1991, Saddam Hussein was on the ropes. The American-led coalition had mauled his armies, eviscerated his infrastructure, and made it clear to his subjects that his delusions of grandeur had set their country back by a half century. Emboldened by the exhortations of George H.W. Bush, they revolted against the Ba'athist regime.You don't hear much about it these days, but the twin insurgencies of 1991 (Kurdish and Shi'ite) gained control, albeit briefly, of all of Iraq except for Baghdad and the Sunni triangle. Saddam was finished, and he knew it. Unl...
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The Ashes
2007-10-03 16:30:00
American exceptionalism had to die somewhere, and how fitting it is that it should breathe its last breath where civilization breathed its first. The sands of Mesopotamia, and the fertile terrain between its twin rivers, saw the rise of law, writing, and the concept of citizenship. Millenia later, it is the witness to the terminal decline of the nation that was meant to most perfectly crystallize the fundamentals of civilization and of liberty.What a sad indictment of our nation that as soon as we had the material wealth to pursue the illusion of domination, we lept at it. This is not an indictment only of our morality and our sanity, but also of our intelligence, since no prior empire had as extensive a list of examples that should have dissuaded us from pursuing this ruinous course.How delusional we have proven to be. We reject the notion that we have anything in common with prior empires, and in so doing only quicken our own demise. Prior empires, we tell ourselves, sought aggran...
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Do As We Say, Not As We Do
2007-09-28 18:19:00
?You, quite simply, [are] ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated. . . . I doubt you will have the intellectual courage to answer [our] questions . . . I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mind-set that characterizes so much of what you say and do. . . . Your preposterous and belligerent statements . . . led to your party?s defeat in the [last] elections.?So said Columia president Lee Bollinger to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I'd be hard-pressed to choose which of these men's worldviews is more absurd, but in terms of being a spineless and self-absorbed prick, Bollinger wins it hands down.Bollinger is the man who invited Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia. He is also the man who keeps ROTC off of the Columbia campus on the grounds that the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is discriminatory towards gays. So the American military is discriminatory towards gays, but Mahmoud Ahmadinejad isn't? The American military is no...

How Do You Say "Idiot Savant" in Persian?
2007-09-25 17:12:00
It is amazing how comfortable Americans are comparing people to Hitler. It's such an attractive parallel, of course, because to utter the name Hitler is to end debate; it is to conjure up a spectre that can not be negotiated with, that can not be rationalized, that can not be met halfway, that can only be destroyed with unrestrained violence.The bad news is that Americans tend to paint themselves into corners by associating every two-bit thug with Hitler; the good news is that, thank god, we are always wrong when we do so.Some things to consider:1) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not the dictator of Iran. He was democratically elected to a largely ceremonial position. He is perhaps the fifth most powerful man in Iran.2) The Iranian nuclear program is entirely legal, as every nation has the right to enrich uranium for electricity and, despite all the hysteria, nobody has proven that Iran's program is for any use other than power.3) Since the Iranian Islamic Revolution, Iran has invaded zero...
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Who's to Bless and Who's to Blame
2007-09-24 18:39:00
Either George W. Bush is abnormally skilled at sleight-of-hand tricks, or the American public is abnormally skilled at falling for sleight-of-hand tricks. The ?deference? that the President is showing to General David Petraeus is cynical and dangerous; it not only shifts responsibility away from the President, but it casts an ominous shadow over the inevitably painful domestic reckoning that will follow the American defeat in Iraq.This faux-subservience to the generals comes approximately five years too late. I think any realist, and I take pride in fancying myself a realist, would agree that the officer corps of the American military was opposed to invading Iraq. And all honest people that disagree with me on that point would have to concede that, if the generals had truly been in charge, the invasion and occupation force would have been three times as large as it was.It was clear from the start that this was a civilian war; no generals were pushing for war in Iraq. This was a stri...
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The War That Was, And The One To Come (or, Scotch and Acid)
2007-09-12 15:29:00
It is misleading, in both a logical and a gramatical sense, to speak of the war in Iraq. There have been several wars in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, many of them occurring simultaneously. Since so many wars have been grafted onto and spawned from the original "cause" for the war, which in my mind was non-existent, we must assess the wisdom of the war now as being distinctly different from the wisdom of the war in 2003.To say that it is intellectually dishonest for one to feel differently about the war today than he or she felt about the original invasion is like saying it is inconsistent for one to feel differently about Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds than he or she felt about Eight Days a Week.The war started out rather straightforward. It was conventional, with conventional goals and a conventional and predicatable course. American tanks rolled into a largely defenseless country and blew shit up until the government disappeared. This was the war for which Americans trained and ...
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The Smoke and the Fire
2007-09-11 16:28:00
When we gain greater perspective on the events that have so molded our world in the last ten years, it will become increasingly clear that the ultimate actor in this drama, or rather this tragedy, was not George W. Bush or Osama bin Laden or Bill Clinton. It was Monica Lewinsky. This sordid truth indicts us for what we have been for the last decade: a petty and childish people, who invested our energies in embarrassing ourselves even as others plotted to strike at our vitals.The last two presidents stand out in our pantheon as almost uniquely divisive men; toward the end of their second terms, it was hard to find an American who was neutral about either man. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush solidified the animosity and paralysis of the 50 / 50 nation, a regretful phenomenon that has quickly established rather deep roots.While similar in their solicitation of blind love or blind hate from millions of Americans, Clinton and Bush are fundamentally different in many ways. Clinton was lov...
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For the Love of Mars (or, The Mistorian)
2007-08-29 20:39:00
IMr. Bush has become so adept at misinterpreting the present that it was only a matter of time before he would make a fun house mirror out of the past. For each championship game in professional sports, t-shirts and hats are printed naming each team as the champion so that the actual winners will have their attire immediately after the decisive game.The merchandise bearing the name of the loser is either shipped off to third world countries or destroyed. Well, it strikes me that Mr. Bush lives in that world, that nether-realm of alternate histories that can be swiftly disproven with the most rudimentary inquisitions. The world where Bill Buckner fielded that ground ball cleanly, where the Buffalo Bills won four consecutive Super Bowls, and where the United States did not fail in Vietnam, but rather quit when victory was in sight.Mr. Bush's recent speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars (are there any living veterans of domestic wars?), one of the few venues in which he is still ...
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I Fought the Law, and We Both Lost
2007-08-28 18:04:00
I recently attended the Christian Trial Lawyer Convention and, suffice it to say, it was long on trial lawyers and short on Christianity. I was genuinely curious as to how the members of this association would square their practice with Christianity and looked forward to a stimulating discussion of how their faith informed their professional conduct.The conference began with a prayer of the inocuous and self-centered variety which dominates American "faith" today. But after imploring Jesus to bless the cars and planes carrying the yet-to-arrive attendees, there were precisely zero references to religion of any sort for the rest of the conference.It seemed to me that these lawyers were using Christianity as a justification for their actions rather than as an influence on their decision making. In other words, they live in Bush World, where Christ is a militaristic and, apparently, frivilously litigious figure who can legitmize any crime, any venality, any measure of greed, as long as...
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Just a Closer Walk with Thee
2007-08-20 15:56:00
At the latest debate among the Democratic presidential candidates, an average citizen was afforded the chance to ask the candidates a question, in what was an increasingly common example of the infantilization of politics masquerading as the "democratization" of the same. What could be more democratic, after all, than allowing everyday Americans to demand answers to the toughest questions from their would-be representatives on live TV?Well, the question profered by this man who, it pains me to say, is a very average American, illustrated the depth of the lobotimization of leadership that this country is subjecting itself to. This earnest citizen wished to know from each candidate whether "the power of prayer could have lessened the impact of Hurrican Katrina."And each one of the candidates, these would-be statesmen, these sometime-scholars, stood there and answered that question as if it they had been asked how they planned to balance the budget or end the war in Iraq. What does ...
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Us and Them (And the Ever-Thining Line)
2007-08-02 18:53:00
What makes us "us"? It is human nature to focus on differences, however overwhelmingly trivial those differences may be in the broader scheme of things. This is how the human mind orders the universe, and it is born of practicality rather than ingorance or bigotry. For example, how do I distinguish my father from any other man I may meet? Well, I know what my father looks like, and every other man looks....different. If my mind was not preconditioned to focus on differences, my universe would consist of a monochromatic mass without depth, color, or contrast.This is the purely physical and pracitcal manifestation of "difference". We practice another variation of this tendency as well. This second manifestation allows us to use broad strokes to classify whole cultures and civilization as being "different" from us. Again, this is a necessary impulse, but it can quickly lead to delusion.I have no time for moral relativism. I have no time for those who compare George W. Bush to ...
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IX / XI
2007-07-31 16:19:00
IX / XI, Part III: Rudy Redux9/11, or IX / XI as our imperial Roman forebears would have it, is the most fertile ground for conspiracy theory in American history. 9/11 is the four dimensional chess to the JFK assassination's tic-tac-toe.The phrase "conspiracy theory" has assumed a largely negative connotation in our discourse, but it is the most fitting verbiage imaginable for 9/11, even if one is predisposed to believe every element of the government's version of events.Why? Because even if the official story is true, it is the story of a massive conspiracy orchestrated by men in caves, men in European universities, men in American flights schools, and men in our government who were apparently too stupid to realize they were facilitating the evildoers' desgins. Men like Rudy Giuliani. America's mayor. Thank God he isn't litterally America's mayor, because if he was, America would be fucked.Those who feel that the massive, transnational conspiracy that was 9/11 was carried out...

Why We Lost
2007-07-30 16:42:00
?The War Tapes? was culled from footage shot by a New Hampshire National Guard detachment sent to Iraq in 2004. 2004. Remember 2004? The war was so much better then, but it was already lost, as is made clear by this documentary, in which the soldiers? voices are the only ones that are heard; no sanctimonious Michael Moore commentary to be found here. This is simply a video journal of a tour in Iraq. These men, however amiable they may seem, however innocent they are of the forces that put this abattoir into motion, are completely incapable of winning, or even defining, the war they were sent to ?fight?. None of them are trained in the culture or language of Iraq. They are trained to kill, yes, but if you don?t know who to kill, you end up increasing the number of people willing to kill you.Since Baghdad ?fell? this has been a war of peace, a political war. The problem is that our government never seemed to realize that. Instead of treating the Iraqis as a liberated people, w...
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Bush and the Book
2007-07-18 17:24:00
"It's more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you that is a principle that no one can convince me that doesn't exist"Despite the mangled syntax or, rather, because of it, the above quote by our President at his most recent news conference affords us an illuminating look into the hamster-on-a-wheel that is his mind.I need to distinguish myself from the Bush -hating types who reject all allusions to faith as the naive and inane delusion harbored by flat-earth racists and Bible-thumping simpletons. In fact, if I was forced to choose between those who acknowledge the existence of a higher power and those who castigate faith as a mental disorder, I would choose the former without hesitation.The president's "theology", however, has nothing to do with the transcedant mysteries of the universe that any open-minded person struggles with throughout his or her life. Bush does not use faith ...
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The Hands-Off Approach
2007-07-16 15:01:00
I?ve spent a lot of time in the last 6 years trying to keep American military actions in perspective, especially when conversing with my friends and family, most of whom are far quicker to blame America for the world?s ills than I am. In fact, I still firmly believe that the American model, if not the American practice, is a benefit to mankind in the temporal and secular sense.When we fight wars, however, the standards tighten. I have been totally opposed to the Iraq War since it began. In the proper historical sense, this war began in 1990, but that?s another blog. The 2003 invasion was illegal in every sense of the word, and the manner in which it was executed totally disregarded the needs of the Iraqi people.The fatal flaw of the American enterprise in Iraq, since day one, is that the military?s primary mission has been to protect itself at all costs. This priority manifests itself in high-altitude bombing, assumption of hostility from all civilians, and indiscriminate arres...
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IX / XI
2007-07-13 15:23:00
IX / XI, Part II: Rudy and George (or, How to Polish a Turd)Imagine this happening in any other country: the country suffers the worst foreign attack in its history, a surprise attack that kills thousands of civilians. The leadership, at every level, fails to a) forsee, preempt, guard against, or even warn of the attack which, for the citizenry, literally comes out of the blue, and b)mitigate the attack while in progress in any meaningful way.In any other country, especially if said country claims to be a "democratic" country in which the leadership is "held to account" by the citizenry, this would seem a scandal of epic proportion. What is more unimaginable, though, and unforgivable, is not just that the leadership failed to forsee the attack or to lessen its impact after it began, but that the very same leadership has used the attack as evidence of its competence.Think about this: President Bush was in charge on the bloodiest day in American history since Gettysburg, and sinc...

Know the Enemy (1.3 billion Allah fans can't be wrong)
2007-07-12 14:37:00
Nothing gets my blood up in the morning like right-wing talk radio. I actually think, unlike most educated east coast denizens, that talk radio is the most responsive and democratic media in this country; in general it is a good thing, and there is nothing so unappealing as those who castigate democratic media when they disagree with the content.For example, whatever one thought of the recent immigration bill, talk radio mobilized millions to demand that their elected representatives vote against the bill. Without this absolutely unprecedented outcry from their constituents, Congress would have passed that bill in 10 minutes. Instead, it failed.Again, regardless of how you feel about immigration, this was democracy in action, an example of an informed citizenry directly swaying their representatives towards their will. This was true republicanism and proactive citizenship of the likes that this country has not witnessed in decades.The flip-side of talk radio, which self-styled liber...
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IX / XI
2007-07-11 15:45:00
photo courtesy of www.natashamaria.blogspot.comIX / XI, Part I: Bush's ConductMichael Moore has never been accused of being objective (not by any remotely objective person, at least). Anyone who would tell you that Moore is not just as ideological as the president has a severe deficiency in the faculty that differentiates documentary from propaganda. Mr. Moore did us a service, however, in stressing the president's conduct on that horrible day in that Florida school in the otherwise boorish and insipid Fahrenheit 9/11.It matters that Bush sat and continued reading to those children. It matters alot. It matters not strictly in the public relations sense, but in regards to the much more substantive issues of competence and leadership. There was more than the unnerving skunk-in-the-headlights look on the president's face; there was what it implied.The people who take pains to defend the president's immediate non-response use a very effective (if allowed to pass unnoticed) sleight o...

The Abyss
2007-07-03 16:29:00
Evil must be recognized as that which makes us think we are innocent of it.As I age, I am inevitably drawn to envisioning the world my unborn children will live in. I come to understand how my parents must have felt, bringing me into a world where men regarded as displaying "leadership" could talk of nuclear war as others might talk of baseball or television shows. To talk of nuclear war is impossible, because nuclear war would destroy all that is, including words and the men foolish enough to utter them so nonchalantly regarding the end of existence.Nuclear war is not war. It is extinction. It is the very definition of evil, and all that can be said for it is that, along with everything else, perhaps it would destroy evil as well. As hard as it has been for me to realize this, I have grown, like my parents before me, in a culture that has lost its mind, as it casually weilds the capability to destroy all that exists and even more casually calls this "security".Such unfathomable thi...
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To Feed the Beast
2007-06-25 16:53:00
I have a brother. My brother is a conservative. Contrary to the dominant paradigm, however, my brother is a conservative that actually believes in conservative principles. My brother, in other words, is a great believer in liberty.Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who are still the two greatest personal influences on the nature of the federal government, did not believe in liberty so much as they did ?justice?, which is in quotes for a reason.?Justice? doesn?t exist. It is, rather, something humans are predisposed to strive for, even if it proves perpetually unattainable. Liberty, on the other hand, is easy for the government to provide; it simply does nothing. When the government does nothing, every citizen enjoys perfect liberty, and all of the opportunities and perils inherent in the same.Even the most libertarian of us, however, understand that we need some measure of government, up to and including the federal level. My brother, the nearly bulletproof conservative intellec...
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