alias Bruce.

You Didn't Read This.

Good evening. The subject of this blog non-entry is the former governor of the northernmost American state, who shall here remain nameless, since Google hits and soundbites from outraged liberals are precisely what she seeks in order to inflame her extremist fringe base. Not that the prospect of her shattering the Republican Party does not carry certain benefits. But for that she does not require our help.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to follow this link to an insightful piece at The Nation (and formerly at Tom Dispatch) in which Max Blumenthal makes the case that the former governor's appeal to her audience rests more on reptile-brain nihilism than on any structured affirmation, which makes her adherents immune to counter-argument or evidence, let alone reason.

If for any reason, after reading the essay, you or others become caught in the trap of overly energetic attention toward said former governor, I will disavow all knowledge of this post.

This message will self-destruct in five seconds.

We need a word

for a person who is the equivalent of a husband or wife but in an unmarried relationship by choice. I had an aunt who was with the same man for something like 40 years, until death, without their marrying. I have a friend whose live-in life love recently died unexpectedly --  again, they could have legally married but chose not to -- and in conveying my sympathy I realized I was missing a noun that would do justice to this person's role in my friend's life.

I have since been groping for that word in my hamstrung language, English, and I haven't found it. "Partner," to me, falls way short emotionally and sounds too transactional, although I know that some couples comfortably use it. "Companion" also seems to come up short; that could be your dog. "Girlfriend" and "boyfriend" seem OK to me up to a point, but once you have reached a certain seriousness of loving commitment, especially later in life, calling someone your "girlfriend" or "boyfriend" just sounds silly. I guess we could go with modifiers and try "life companion" or "loving partner" or similar pairings, but they feel to me more like fodder for obits or greeting cards than for actual life. Plus, who wants to lug around a two-word phrase as the generic handle for the person you love?

"Domestic partner" also feels chilly to me. I know the term is useful as a legal runner-up to "husband" or "wife" for gay couples who want to marry but are forbidden to by discriminatory laws, and it also has legal uses for potential recognition of straight couples who cohabit. But as a phrase it leaves me cold. Listen to it: "Domestic partnership." It sounds like a household business. All that's missing is the "Inc." afterward. Of course, gay couples who would like to marry can choose to call themselves "husbands" and "wives" no matter what the laws say (although there are plenty of reasons why they might not like those terms). But what about people who don't want to marry but who have built a life together?

So I've come up wordless for this. Maybe there's one I'm missing. Or it's time to create one. Surely we can do better than the lame assortment from which we've learned to choose.

Who's Really Scared of a 9/11 Trial?

For God's sake. With all of this chittering by small weasel-like creatures about the allegedly catastrophic "propaganda opportunity" provided to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 defendants by the federal court trial planned in New York by Attorney General Eric Holder, you'd think the United States was some sorry illegitimate state whose global stature cannot hold up under the challenge of a criminal defendant's statements in open court.

Which I guess, come to think of it, is actually the problem.

Holder has said, rightly, that he isn't scared. But I do think the spastic critters squeaking their fears on Fox are onto something, although a very different something than what they think they're onto. In truth, their behavior begs a basic question: What kind of country is so unsure of the persuasiveness of its ideals that it is afraid to apply its own rules of due process for fear that the transparency of a trial will allow an anti-American defendant's voice to be heard?

Answer: A country that has trouble believing in itself. For good reason, actually.

So here's the deal: When part of calling yourself a democracy involves using a publicly accountable and visible court process to put accused criminals on trial, you don't get to conveniently renege on the "public" and "accountable" and "visible" parts when you have a defendant whose beliefs you consider tangibly threatening. Dictatorships do that. Alleged democracies don't. An alleged democracy believes in its supposedly convincing principles of jurisprudence enough to put them into practice even when -- or especially when -- this shines a public spotlight on a defendant's violent defiance.

A right to a public trial is a right to a public trial. When you chicken out on granting that right because you fear the message of the accused, it says more about you than it says about the defendant.

Who's Afraid of...?

A couple of nights ago I watched Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the movie version of Edward Albee's eyebrow-frying play, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton scorching their way through the Marriage From Hell and Sandy Dennis adding heat as an innocent bystander who gets raked into the coals. It's a pleasant little film if you don't mind clinging to the earth's crust for two hours to avoid sliding down into the magma. The film won five Oscars, including Best Actress for Taylor. I think it deserved at least one more, for Burton, who underplayed the steamrollered but knowing husband like a force of nature. Somehow I had managed to miss seeing this film, as I've missed a long list of classics. If you haven't seen it, I suggest you correct that quickly. I'm no movie maven, but it's certainly the best film about the lies of love that I've ever seen. You can find details here, but beware the painfully-complete plot summary if you plan on watching the film.

Anyway, I mentioned the movie to some friends, one of whom emailed me an excerpt about playwright Albee, who has managed to be ruthlessly honest AND to win every dramatic award in the universe at least once. He's the kind of informed bigmouth we need more of in the age of Small Change. The excerpt, from a 2008 interview in the Gay and Lesbian Review, dates from the last of the Bush years, but you'll want to read it anyway:

AMERICA’S leading playwright provocateur, now an octogenarian, Edward Albee—whose plays include the scalding Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance, Three Tall Woman, and the taboo-smashing The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?—is hardly resting on his accumulated laurels (three Pulitzer prizes and three Tony awards). In fact, the playwright is now directing new stagings of two of his one-acts, “The American Dream” and “The Sandbox,” with the assistance of a hearing aid, and is proving as durable as his work. When his The Play About the Baby ran at New York’s Century Center in 2000, he underwent an operation to have two stents inserted to bypass a 95-percent blocked artery to his heart, and stayed conscious to observe the entire procedure. He gamely recommends that “life should be lived at the precipice, so that we don’t come to the end of our life with regret for what we have not done.”

An ardent Democrat, he laments the Bush regime and its current “destruction of democracy in this country,” and observes: “I don’t know a single artist today who doesn’t believe this administration is terrible...that it was not elected, but was put in power by a coup d’état. It worries me to see that it believes the only way to save democracy is to repress it at home, by silencing journalists and writers.” There is still evidence of the angry young man who penned “The American Dream,” willing to call things as he sees them. A recipient of Kennedy Center honors when Bill Clinton was in office, Albee has refused to attend any Kennedy Center ceremonies under George W. Bush. “One doesn’t like some presidents,” he remarked, but “this is the first president I’ve despised. What’s worse is the fucking passive American people. Remember what Adlai Stevenson said? In this country we can still have anything we want—but we’re going to end up with what we deserve.”

Thanks to Laurie.

Baltimore Mayor's Card Trick.

Here's one for you:

Let's say there is a mayor. Of a major city. And the mayor is single and is dating a wealthy developer. (The mayor's administration is also granting said developer some big-ticket city contracts, by the way. But more about that later.) And at some point it comes to light that this mayor went on a shopping spree with 60 -- count 'em, 60 -- gift cards from Best Buy, Old Navy, and the area Giant supermarket chain worth about $1,500, most of which were paid for by the mayor's developer lover. Except there's a small twist: these 60 cards were allegedly intended for use by poor families during the holidays. The developer, by now the mayor's ex-boyfriend, tells a grand jury that the mayor's office telephoned him asking for a slew of $25 and $50 gift cards; the $25 cards, he says, were for single mothers and the $50 cards were for bigger families.

But, as it turned out, all 60 of them were personally used by the mayor, for the mayor.

All hell breaks loose. The mayor is indicted for felony theft and other charges. Initially, the mayor claims to have used the cards by mistake. (Yep, used up 60 cards, all by mistake. Shopping can be so confusing.) But no, wait. At the trial, the mayor's legal team makes a hairpin turn and argues that the mayor, in fact, truly believed that all these cards were intended for the mayor's personal use. So the mayor, the attorney declares to the jury, was spending recklessly in good faith. Sure, maybe it appeared a little odd for the rich boyfriend to send, as a personal token of affection, 60 small-value gift cards to the mayor's office instead of, say, sending a few big cards or a gift certificate for $1,500 to the mayor's home. But, hey, anybody can misunderstand a gift, right? So off went the mayor on an extended and thoroughly honorable mission to spend down 60 gift cards.

Welcome to Baltimore, the town where I live, where the mayor of the moment, Sheila Dixon, in a local tradition of political hacks, numbskulls, and petty thieves, is trying to set a new record for the most outrageous straight-faced claim of innocence ever. As well as a new standard for astoundingly reprehensible behavior toward the poor.

I care more about this sorry Baltimore episode than you do, of course, because I live here. Mayor Dixon is a perennial lightweight and sad sack whose un-mayorly leadership has been a local embarrassment since her election. But then, this is the town where (former mayor) William Donald Shaefer made it onto CNN by ordering a young staffer, on camera, to repeat her walk away from him while he ogled her derriere. Mayor Dixon might rightly figure that shame is extinct around these parts.

Anyway, at a time when former card-carrying Deficit Spenders For Bush Wars And Plutocratic Gluttony are now threatening to riot over federal spending to repair the damage they helped create, I thought I'd share with you Baltimore's latest little tale of political audacity.

By the way, Mayor Dixon's trial for theft, embezzlement, and misconduct is now in progress. Her perjury trial for allegedly not reporting gifts from city contractor and former boyfriend Ronald Lipscomb is scheduled for March.

Faces.

 

 

 

I took these photos in various places.

You Name It.

I saw a bumper sticker like this one on a truck the other day.

What a tribute to the awe-inspiringly seductive powers of delusion. For the sake of a sought-after feeling of potency, or a fearful swipe at the specter of a black president, or a sense of heroic devotion to a single cause (e.g., guns), gaggles of scared and struggling folks are able to convince themselves that by nodding at the power of citizen-stomping corporations in a near-depression economy they are "keeping their freedom and their money." This while the New York Times reports that national unemployment has hit 17.5 percent when you factor in those who are seeking jobs, those who have given up looking, and those who are working part-time because they can't find full-time jobs.

We could detour here into a rant about far-right gullibility and brain failure, but why? It is hardly news that the back-slapping refrain of, "You've got yours, just like us, and don't let those people take any of it away from you" has been the ruling class's most effective sop for white wage slaves ever since the days of black non-wage slavery.

I heard a Republican say on the radio a few days ago that the rise of so-called social conservatism has been the worst thing that ever happened to the G.O.P. Its passing off a mob-mentality moralism as "conservatism," he said, has splintered the party's planks of true conservatism: those being belief in small government, maximum market competition, staying out of people's private lives, etc. This isn't news, either, since we know very well that today's farthest right is not "conservative" at all but a loose posse of reactionaries who like big government and violation of individual rights just fine when it does what they want: punishing women for abortions, using military and police surveillance and violence with abandon, detaining assorted feared "others" without due process, passing laws forbidding gay people to marry, and so on.

So all of this gets me to thinking: We need to make it a public point to delete the word "conservative" from the terms we use to describe such people, and substitute another.

How about "coercive?" As in, "Social coercives have shown support for a measure that would make public the names and medical records of women who have abortions." (This is true, by the way.) Or as in, "In an intra-party conflict among Republicans, coercives are calling for harsh government policies toward illegal immigrants, while business-oriented conservatives are not."

I'm still mulling over other possible terms. Maybe you'll want to as well. It's definitely time to change the lexicon. Calling people "conservatives" when they embrace government-as-God's-goon just won't cut it.

The Fort Hood Shootings.

My first reaction upon reading this morning that the alleged shooter in yesterday's nightmarish Fort Hood massacre is a Muslim named Nidal Malik Hasan was to groan, "Oh, no."

Not because of anything this means about him. But because of what it may mean for how the nation deals with its own attitudes. It's like when many of we black males hear news of an unthinkably brutal attack on a white stranger, one of our immediate thoughts, alongside our empathy with the victim, is, "God, I hope this perp isn't black." Something in us starts to brace, from experience, to watch the venerable Fear of Black Men rear its snarling head another foot higher among the hordes of our white brethren. Sometimes this presumptive dread by people of color of whites' reaction proves irrelevant or just wrong, either because the perp is white or because the white reaction to his race rebuts our conditioned (and sometimes paranoid) response.

The glass-half-full take on how the country reacts to Hasan is that this horrible tragedy may reveal a teachable moment, when (Foxoid crazies aside) citizens sidestep the post-9-11 "get those Islamist bastards" tar pit and instead view the alleged mass-murderer according to the still-unfolding facts of who he is: an Army psychiatrist, apparently taunted for being a Muslim, who treated enough PTSD patients to develop a contempt for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a panic about his upcoming deployment, which he allegedly tried to avert by attempting unsuccessfully to get out of the Army. So the dominant public narrative about Hasan, after these years of baseless detentions of Muslims and the emergence of white terrorism suspects, becomes one of an angry doctor going antiwar and losing his marbles in a murderous rampage.

The glass-half-empty version, of course, is that the dominant narrative about Hasan devolves to anti-Islamist boilerplate, or that the pockets of  birthers/anti-immigrant vigilantes/Christian supremacists/terrorphobes simply drown out the more reasoned public mood in their shrieking blame of an uppity black president for the assured nuking of the republic.

Today's New York Times reported that terrorist intent had not been ruled out, but that it appeared unlikely. Even if that changes, the glass-half-full mindset could still hold. And even if it doesn't change, the glass-half-full juggernaut could surge onward anyway, the facts of this case be damned.

We'll see where this horrendous story goes.

"Dithering."

So Dick Cheney, that sneering ghost of failures past, has recently been hissing into the ear of the national punditry corps that Obama is "dithering" on Afghanistan.

It's an interesting accusation coming from Cheney, a man whose quick trigger finger and lack of perceptual acuity under pressure have made him a danger both to the world and to his hunting partners.

Not that prospects look good for a productively wise Obama response to the horrors in that tortured nation, which every day looks more and more like a mountainous quagmire for American hubris. It's looking clear that wrong-headed American military escalation is on the way. And it's also looking clear that furrow-browed Washington rhetoric about pairing a successful military surge with a hearts-and-minds political victory betrays a floundering cluelessness about how to actually pull this off. The honest folks in the room, I believe, already know that it cannot be achieved militarily and that it cannot be forced politically in a nation where the U.S. has cornered itself, with its drones and its dirty alliances, into the role of a hopelessly bloody-handed interloper. The growing comparisons to Vietnam are no coincidence, and Obama's nearly 300-day presidential record of spinal plasticity is no reason for confidence. Behind closed doors, the "realistic" options on the White House table may be various scenarios of good-old-college-try escalation followed, after a respectable interval, by the most face-saving winding down of U.S. intervention deemed politically possible. The Soviets tried to warn us.

But if Obama is, at worst, a weakling in the pull of a bad war, Cheney is a madman. There are reasons aplenty for deep deliberation on Afghanistan, not the least of which are the possible upcoming electoral defeat (or victory) of a corrupt and largely discredited Afghan government; the horrible prospects for the American war effort; and the hemorrhaging economy and spirit of an America caught in two bad wars and the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression.

Add to that the fact that America's most catastrophic troubles of the past decade have resulted directly from dishonest and misinformed rushes to rash action (deregulation, Iraq), and you can make a pretty good case for dithering.

The Arizona Sweat Lodge.

The three deaths and many injuries from the October 8 sweat lodge at a $9,000-per-head Arizona spiritual retreat are tragic evidence (as if we needed more) that misusing a tradition this powerful is a terrible and dangerous game.

I'll leave it to people who know more to say more. There are many who feel that the sweat lodge ceremony, which goes back thousands of years on this continent and others, should never be in the hands of cultural middlemen in the first place. On the other hand, if we forbade an  American Indian from becoming a Catholic priest and taking confession from Native American parishioners, what would that say? It is, of course, not a level playing field: on the cultural theft scoreboard, the numbers are something like American Settlers 200, Native Americans 2. All I'll say is that I have been in many a sweat lodge, all led with sufficient respect and grounding in the tradition to be carried out reverently and safely. This ceremony, and what happens to body and spirit in the searing steam and pitch blackness of the lodge ritual, is nothing to mess with.

If a survivor's account of the fateful Arizona lodge is true, and self-help icon and lodge leader James Arthur Ray put more than 50 modern consumers through eight 15-to-20-minute sweat rounds covering a total of two hours -- all after five days of fasting and sleep deprivation -- Ray needs to be held accountable for negligent homicide. That kind of package-tour contempt for the tradition and for his paying customers is so reckless as to take the breath away.

In the wake of the tragedy, CNN posted an excellent background piece about the history, meaning, and methods of sweat lodge ceremonies -- and they didn't just quote white people. Read it if you'd like more of a sense of what this ancient ritual is for, how it is intended to function, and the huge burden of responsibility on the ceremony leader to care for those who enter the lodge.

Clearly, Ray didn't get the part about respect and care. It's looking as if he had no business even being in a position to.