alias Bruce.

Bad.

Say whatever you want about Michael Jackson. He was one bad MF, and his dying at 50 after having apparently drifted out of the solar system long before then is one of the greatest losses pop music will ever know. Since there are, at the moment, approximately 17,448,293 reverent online tributes to the late King of Pop, I will keep this short.

Like so many, I remember when I Want You Back hit the street and was blaring from every loudspeaker in existence in 1969. We were all jabbering to one another about this superhuman 11-year-old boy who sang as if he had already lived a hundred lives of heartbreak. Maybe he had. And of course there was the song's body-melting orchestration with strings and every other instrument known to man, and that gorgeous Phil-Spector-on-steroids intro that practically had you weeping before the singing even started. And the so-called B side? Who's Lovin' You, one of the great shattered-heart songs of all time. I challenge you to make it through the extended vocal coda, with Michael finally breaking upward a full octave at the end, and keep your composure.

But we know all of this, and all that came after. And we all have our perplexity about What-The-Hell-Happened-To-Michael, with the nose and the skin and the whispery perpetually pre-pubescent voice and the chimp and the Lisa Marie marriage and the baby on the balcony and the allegations about little boys at Neverland and the rest of the awful circus. A beautiful genius of a black man literally sliced into a creature we couldn't recognize. It's a story partly about race, partly about family, partly about Hollywood, partly about outer space. That's the story, mind you, the narrative we thread together. The truth, though, is something we will never know. Even the most definitive autopsy and toxicology report will never give us, really, the cause of Michael Jackson's death. If you know what I mean.

So, as with every death, we are left with what he left us.

In the documentary film Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger delivers the best summation of the meaning of Hendrix's death -- and, almost presciently, of Michael Jackson's death -- I have ever heard. Jagger basically says, and I'm paraphrasing from memory here: I don't know anything about Jimi's private business or whether he was a casualty or any of that. All I know is he was the best rock act, the most original, and I miss him, and I wish he was still here. And that's it.

Yeah. That's it.

Discipline.

One thing you can say about President Barack Obama: he has discipline.

Any given move of his may be right or wrong, principled or expedient, upright or shameless or anywhere in between. But this president goes about his business according to his own calibration of what is required, and a thundering freight train at his flank will not throw him off message.

We have seen this in Obama's handling of the situation in Iran, which I'd say has been just about perfect. Unlike John McCain and other memory-challenged or morally-malleable loudmouths who called for an immediate and righteous presidential tongue-lashing of the Iranian regime, Obama understood from the beginning America's hypocritical history in that nation: we backed Iraq's Saddam Hussein and his chemical gassing against Iran when it suited us, and to avoid nationalization of Iranian oil we forcibly overthrew the democratically-elected Mossadegh government of Iran and helped install the Shah, ultimately leading to the backlash that brought in Iran's repressive current theocracy. Obama realized that American moral stock has limited value on the Iranian street, and that American military options in this situation are worth even less, and that leaping early into a fierce American sermon on democracy and human rights would 1.) be marginally inspiring at best to protesting Iranians who remember America's historic role there, and 2.) give the Iranian regime fuel to blame American instigation for some of the unrest and to brutally crack down on dissent.

This sober realization of Obama's matters. A lot. His restraint has now exposed the Iranian regime's brutal response as being unequivocally an atrocity of its own making, and has also allowed the world to see that the resistance is a wholly Iranian creation. Obama's control of his tongue has allowed the Iranian resistance to generate, in the eyes of the world, its own unquestionable legitimacy. And so now that the Iranian theocrats have blamed America for fanning the flames while the world sees clearly that no such thing occurred, the regime is left to globally account for itself, and Obama is now free to more credibly unleash outrage. Had the thoughtless and camera-hungry McCains of American politics had their way at the outset, neither Obama nor the Iranian revolt would have the clear international moral authority they now possess. Bear in mind, too, that with two wars going on at the moment -- Iraq and Afghanistan -- the United States has approximately zero military options in Iran. Moreover, whether we like it or not, Obama has calculated, quite clinically, that his only leverage in influencing the Ahmadinejad regime's nuclear actions lies in making no explicit threats to the legitimacy of the regime. This may yet prove to be a bargain with the devil from which Obama will need to extract himself. But to date, Obama's restrained tactics have succeeded in isolating and indicting the Iranian regime.

For a succinct and passionate explanation of how Obama is being smart about this while McCain and other detractors of Obama are not, see Joe Klein's June 22 remarks on CNN.

Discipline. Like it or not, Obama's got it.

What the Health is This?

If you're keeping score on how our elected representatives, laden with private sector campaign contributions and quid pro quo expectations, are playing out the contest for health care reform, here is this week's outlook on whether any visible change might happen in your lifetime:

The Senate finance committee has entirely dropped the public health coverage option -- the heart of any meaningful change for premium-trampled citizens -- from that body's ever-shrinking health care reform initiative, and senators are balking and barking at the price of what remains: $1.6 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, for a mixture of private insurance requirements, expanded Medicaid, and insurance "co-ops" where government bows out of the underwriting of affordable coverage. The CBO fiscal estimate represents an overrun of more than a half-trillion dollars above the $950 billion President Obama has been talking about, and now he and his advisors are hunkering down to try to find ways to shave more and more boldness from the administration's proposals. Can you hear the cutting edges being filed off of the word "change?"

Meanwhile, Congress (Congressional Dems, actually) yesterday revealed their own health care bill, which retains the public coverage option, offering a government-run health plan that would compete with private insurance companies and would limit what doctors could charge patients. According to the New York Times, the Congressional bill would also create a new federal agency to oversee health care, headed by a presidentially-appointed "Health Choices Commissioner." The bill would require all Americans to have health insurance, it would forbid many of the maneuvers insurers now use to deny coverage or hike rates to sick subscribers, and it would expand Medicaid coverage and payments to doctors and undo a major cut in Medicare payments to physicians. Dems claim the bill would cover 95 percent of Americans. They offer no estimate of what it would cost (it looks as if Congressional Dems, learning from the Senate experience, want to stall going to the CBO for numbers until they build as much public support as they can) or how they will pay for it.

Meanwhile, back in the Senate, the Senate health and labor committee is proceeding at a sedated snail's pace along strictly party lines on a mountain of 388 amendments to the already-weak Senate draft health care bill. 364 of the amendments are from Republicans, and most are hypocritically obstructive (example: an amendment requiring advance proof of savings before any health care legislation can be approved). Postures are struck. Diatribes are traded. The Washington Post quotes Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) snapping at Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) about "debt on the back of America" and "a wish and a prayer." Mikulski hisses back that she didn't simply write the bill "while I was getting a manicure." Two-hour lunches are taken. As of Thursday, June 18, the committee's count was 5 amendments argued and voted upon, 383 to go. According to the Post, at this rate it will take the committee five weeks to bluster its way through this sorry bill -- and that is if the senators eliminate their summer recess.

And back in Congress (is this travelogue turning you in circles?), Repubs, in their outraged opposition to Congressional Dems' plan, are achieving new levels of amnesic chutzpah. According to the Times, for instance, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) condemned the bill as a "reckless" increase in government power and spending, and he predicted a dire scenario of federal bureaucrats bullying millions of hapless policyholders. (Uh, Rep. Boehner, where have you been during these decades of corporate health insurers both bullying and price-gouging Americans? And where were you during the past eight years of radically unchecked excesses in government power and spending? Do Signing Statements, FISA, Iraq, and torture ring a bell?) And the president of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association called the Dems' plan "a recipe for disaster.” (Well, to be fair, disaster is a realm in which he has some expertise.)

Similarly, on the Senate side, the most strident objections suggest major lapses in brain function. My favorite is the claim, voiced by some Democrats(!), that a government health plan, with its greater leverage for discounts and cost savings, would be unfair competition for business. Hello? The purpose of health care is not to foster the profitability of business. The purpose of health care is to provide the best possible care for the most people in the most cost-effective manner. If government-backed health care achieves this better than private profit-based health care -- and the experience of virtually the entire industrialized world tells us that it does -- then it is the private sector that has to adjust to this hard truth of the marketplace. Since when does the most efficient delivery system for health care -- public coverage -- not count as part of the invisible hand?

To be sure, $1.6 trillion for the Senate plan is a whole lot of money. And so was Obama's optimistically advertised price of $950 billion.

But $680 billion is also a lot of money. That's the amount that Republicans and most Democrats have cumulatively assented to spend to date on the catastrophic war in Iraq, with nary a peep in its first few years about fiscal discipline or frugality.

So is $100 billion, the amount spent annually by we health insurance policyholders on the redundant administrative costs of a throng of profit-making private insurers when a single-payer public system would eliminate this audible flushing of our hard-earned dollars.

And so is $400 million, the amount spent on TV advertising alone by the two major candidates in the 2008 presidential election -- a sum that reflects not the public interest, not publicly-driven dollars, but sheer cash that the candidates were able to extract from largely private donors who have a vested interest in certain eventual policy outcomes.

Did we witness waves of proposed bills and amendments and new federal policies to rein in these crazed and destructive expenditures? Did we see processions of outraged Senatorial and Congressional speeches and traded barbs? Did we hear sustained and widespread shrieks for accountability?

As I mentioned a couple of entries ago about Toni Morrison's warning to American voters, there is only so much of this injustice we can blame on an un-heroic President Barack Obama. The rest of the blame lies with us. For tolerating it.

Partway around the world right now, hundreds of thousands of citizens in a brutal theocracy are taking their lives in their hands in a demand for fairer government. Their courage, ironically, is being loudly cheered by the fickle and corrupt moneychangers who pass for legislators on our side of the Atlantic.

So what will it take for us to actually get up and move toward reclaiming our own government?

Seeing Whose Shadow?

So a few days ago I'm looking through my window watching a woodchuck, otherwise known as a groundhog. He (I'm picking a pronoun because I can't tell a male from a female woodchuck from a distance nor do I want to make a sufficiently close examination to know) is a pleasant enough woodchuck, unobtrusive and plump, although his pointed face and narrow-looking eyes make him less cute close up in my yard than, say, from 30 feet away in my speeding car as I silently urge one of his cousins to stay on his side of the shoulder and not try a dash across the highway in search of greener grass.

I have begun calling him "Chuck," which I know is both anthropomorphic and unimaginative, but hell, he lives under my porch and I see him every day and he's chomping my garden like I grew it just for him, so why shouldn't I be on personal terms with him? Actually, I need to take that back: I believe he is chomping my garden, but I don't know for certain because a practically Bugs Bunny-sized rabbit has also been hanging around lately. So it could be either critter who is shredding my salvia and cilantro and marigolds. And before I bait and set the Havahart live trap, I need to know whether it's Chuck or Bugs for whom I will provide free, albeit traumatic, transportation to ample grazing grounds miles away. I suspect it's Chuck.

Which is why, on this particular morning, I am intently watching Chuck through my window. (That's not him above, but a stock photo; I lack the gear to get a good close-up of Chuck.) He is a medium-sized woodchuck, not yet fully grown I'd guess but big enough to have moved into his own place, and he tends to venture forth from his burrow in the mornings, when it's cool, to browse for food and chill out in the shade. Right now, as I watch, he is methodically combing through a section of lush lawn, his nose nuzzling the carpet of grass, searching out the exact green tidbits that suit his appetite. I am amazed at how picky he is. Only after perhaps 30 seconds of waddling and nuzzling will he pause to pull and munch contentedly at the desired shoots before trundling on in search of more of whatever it is he likes. Clover? Young, tender grass? I can't tell. But his patient fussiness about food is striking, as I have also noticed with other animals, such as a feeding beaver I once wrote about.

Just as fascinating to watch is Chuck's hyper-vigilance. He bolts upright on his hind legs like clockwork every couple of minutes to scan for predators or other scary developments. The slightest odd sound – say, a small plane flying some distance away – will send him scurrying toward his burrow, where he will either nervously hover near the entrance or dive inside, waiting until all seems clear before creeping back out onto the lawn. It is completely understandable, even to a dumb human, why these habits make sense for a relatively small and timid herbivorous mammal who would make a luscious lunch for any number of carnivores, including neighborhood dogs.

But what engages me most about Chuck is the way he seems to enjoy some of his more elective choices, like when he lounges at length on the porch in the shade, reclining slightly to one side, his legs tucked beneath him like a house cat. I'm no authority on woodchuck pleasure, but this sure looks like it to me. I remember once seeing a squirrel lie down out of the sun on the porch, his head laid against the plank as if resting on a pillow, looking for all the world like an instant couch potato. And I recall seeing another squirrel tucked into the elbow of a leafy tree limb outside of my office window, fully reclined on his side on the branch, head nestled against the bark, eyes closed, taking a nap. That's right: a squirrel taking a nap. Why shouldn't he? And why shouldn't he have the experience of this and other kinds of squirrel intentionality? Who is to know? Who is to say that the intensity of a squirrel's or a woodchuck's visceral experience of life, and their desire to protect that life, does not equal ours? How can we say it doesn't? When you swat at a moth and watch it try to hide, or slap an ant in your kitchen and see the injured insect writhe, what does this tell you? I talked about this very question recently with someone who argued that these kinds of behaviors among such creatures are proof of nothing but "survival instinct:" a locked-in physiological response to danger or injury. Well, okay, but one could look at we humans' sometimes-frenetic attempts at preserving our own well-being and say the very same. Yes, we humans have the power of reason and nearly all other animals don't. But the intensity of a creature's raw sensation of life is not at all the same as reason, and I see no basis other than mere human vanity for posing reason as its prerequisite.

Which brings us to the death penalty.

The human death penalty is a classic example of this kind of vanity-based comparison of lives. It assumes that a murderer's life, by virtue of his or her crime, is subsequently worth less than that of the lives of the murdered and the lives of surviving loved ones and the rest of we non-murderers. It bases this assumption on the idea that one forfeits the right to one's own human life upon knowingly and deliberately taking another.

But there are three colossal problems with this assumption.

First, as we all know, the death penalty is inequitably executed (so to speak). Even if all racial and class bias were removed, the fact of human error would always assure that some innocent people would be executed. If you support the death penalty, you support the inevitable execution of innocents, whether you admit it or not.

Second, there is no sound evidence that killing a murderer brings much-ballyhooed "closure" to the loved ones of victims. At best, research to date shows that closure means different things to different people, and a hefty proportion of survivors find, in the end, that watching the convicted murderer die does none of the work that will ultimately be accomplished by the agonized process of good old-fashioned healing and spiritual surrender.

And third and most importantly, the very premise of murder as justice for murder utterly destroys the moral stance it claims to protect: that human life is sacrosanct. Become a backer of murder as revenge for murder, and you relinquish all claims to reverence for the sanctity of human life. You nuke your own moral foundation. You become, for the sake of presumed righteousness, the other edge of the same blade that hacked your loved one away from this earth. Sorry, but the moral physics are immutable. You cannot have it both ways.

So if we cannot kill convicted murderers without killing our moral being, what ought we do with them?

I believe that a morally-grounded society would do two things:

1.) A just society would take custody of people who have murdered and do all within our cumulative psychological knowledge and moral power to bring them to awareness and accountability for what they have done. In the place of the fruitless punishments of prolonged isolation, prison gang warfare and rape, and lifelong scapegoating, we need to take hold of those who have killed and immerse them in the most potent intervention we can muster: a combination of emotional repair and unrelenting demand for personal responsibility. With the rare exceptions of outright evil and cybernetic wire-crossing, it is an unpopular but irrefutable fact that humans who brutally or unsympathetically harm others have generally themselves been harmed in some profound way, and the prospects for rehabilitation have a lot to do with the profundity of the original harm. Some forms of damage can be addressed and countered over time to bring eventual healthy self-esteem and a sense of responsibility toward others. Some cannot. But within a confined setting where murderers are prevented from harming others, we as a society need to give this our very best shot -- for the sake of both morality and public safety. Right now, we are not even trying. And the crime is that we have both the money (consider the ballooning price of today's ineffective-by-design inmate warehousing industry and the huge costs to all of us of its failure) and the professional therapeutic knowledge to actually make productive use of incarceration. We can do this. If we are willing.

2.) A just society would make accountability toward victims, and toward the community in general, a part of rehabilitation for murderers. Instead of 30 or 50 or 100 years in a cell as an abstract penalty for having committed a horrific act, real justice requires the concrete practice of a killer's personally facing the consequences of what he has done: not just for one day in court in the face of weeping or raging survivors, but for years thereafter in a process of confrontation, conversation, and reparation that would keep a perpetrator continually aware of the meaning of his actions and his attitudes. Nothing can bring back a dead victim, including the murder of the murderer. But mandatory guided accountability – including contact with those survivors of murder victims who agree to be part of such a process – is the best hope for whatever healing is possible. Our current circus of punitive imprisonment, depersonalized "justice" for victims, and (often endlessly delayed) execution is a cruel joke that offers no resolution, no healing, and no solutions.

It goes without saying, but it needs to be said, that all of this has to be underpinned by a massive cleanup of the criminal justice process so that, say, being a black killer of a white person does not magnify one's sentence as it currently does. It also needs to be said that all the criminal justice reform in the world is meaningless until we change our public policy so that we are not running a national murder factory. We can start by treating drug addiction as a public health issue, carrying out true gun control so that American life at all socio-economic levels is not flooded with firearms, and addressing the problems of jobs and education and law enforcement that disproportionately nurture violence in poor communities.

One thing is for certain: if Chuck the groundhog deserves better than our convenient and conceited prescription for who we believe him to be, then fellow human beings do as well.

Thanks to Laurie for suggesting I put this in writing.

"Run Free."

So I'm at the park, stretched out reading amid maybe 50 wide-open acres of cropped green grass, and it is a perfect Saturday afternoon, not yet sweltering here in the Mid-Atlantic steam bowl, just bright and mild and sunny blue with a breeze. Exactly what you wish for in an end-of-May day.

A young couple strolls by with their toddler toddling between them. Suddenly, as if he is newly struck by the opportunity in this open expanse of cushioned greenery, the young dad cries out gleefully to his ambling little son, "Run!! Run free!" And the child hesitates and then understands and breaks into a crazed grin and takes off like a shot, arms flailing, in the safety of this mega-lawn with no obstructions for hundreds of yards -- but he runs in exactly the opposite direction of the way the three had been walking. The dad, caught off guard, responds bemusedly, "No, no! Run this way," pointing in the direction of the car and home. At which point the toddler, suitably corrected about the meaning of "run free," does an about-face and runs in the approved direction while Mommy and Daddy cheer and applaud.

Now, I know it's a parent's job to keep tight tabs on a child running in the open. But on a huge, smooth plane of mowed grass, why not take 60 seconds to let a kid you've exhorted to "run free" actually run in the direction he wants to, while you stay close and watch, before you herd him in the expected beeline toward the parking lot?

This is a trivial anecdote, I know, and I tell it only because it connects with something not at all trivial, which has to do with our lies about living as free people.

Nobel laureate author Toni Morrison did a one-hour interview on NPR last week. One of the many things she said was that she is not so much worried about President Barack Obama proving a disappointment as she is worried about the American people themselves proving a disappointment. She explained (I'm paraphrasing here) that she fears that Obama's core supporters see no further need to kick up a political storm now that their man is in the White House, even with the pitched Republican resistance to his stated program, and she also fears that the broader American electorate, accustomed as it is to accepting its own powerlessness, isn't up to kicking up a political storm, period. (Understand that we are talking here not about single-issue zealots who are always ready to set a brush fire, but mainstream liberal and centrist and conservative voters who wouldn't know how to boldly dissent or protest or march about virtually anything.) The resulting danger, Morrison went on to say, is that Obama may end up lacking the public force he needs to push through his political agenda.

If Morrison is right and this happens, we can kiss health care reform goodbye -- which Obama seemed to be telegraphing to us when he recently said that if legislators fail to act on health care right now then the cause will be lost.

I need to say, though, that for me, Obama, so far, is not nearly as inspiring and fire-starting a leader as he might have been. He is, no doubt, intellectually and ethically galaxies beyond the sorry Oval Office Occupant we have endured for the past eight years. Obama's stands on some issues -- challenging the intransigent Netanyahu for a two-state Israeli-Palestinian solution, for instance -- are a relieving and welcome change. At the same time, his retreats on other issues, such as his bowing to the "right" to indefinitely hold terrorism suspects without charging them, are shameful. And I have to say, too, that I find Obama's steely lawyerly affect as president to be uninspiring as hell. I feel as if I'm his damn client or something.

But who were we expecting? Another Gandhi or King? I do think that after decades of worship of cardboard icons we were hoping for some such magical figure. I will speak for myself and say that I think I have harbored a hope for such a leader -- if not in Obama, then in someone who can lift us beyond our overwhelmed under-motivated 21st-century electronically-medicated selves. But I think we have to admit that at a certain point, the obligation is not for a leader to transform us but for us to kick ourselves into actually feeling and doing something. And that means kicking Obama's ass, if necessary, to get him to keep his promises. Which is basically what he needs for us to do.

Which brings us back to our lies about our freedom. What Toni Morrison is telling us is that a good portion of we Americans are afraid to be our own people. "Freedom" and "democracy" and the rest of our official recitations are worse than worthless, worse even than the racist and genocidal and thieving history we know them to conceal, if we use these slogans as an excuse to do nothing politically, to get up and work and eat and sleep and expect our designated leaders to do what we need done without our giving them reason to feel that they'd better. The irony of organizations like MoveOn.org is that while their "click here to send this letter to your senator" M.O. has done wonders for populist political leverage, it also rewards a kind of political slothfulness in us. I don't mean to be unfair to MoveOn-style cyber-agitation; it was instrumental in electing our current president, and it has prodded me more than once to call or write my own legislators. But its main stock in trade, the "click here if you're ticked" approach, is no substitute for being willing to personally stand up to or stone or storm the Bastille. Worse, it further greases the skids for the kind of couch-potato, intellectually and physically lazy stance toward politics that already afflicts us in the "consumer" life.

What we trumpet as "freedom" is nothing, a trail of spit on a curb, if an allegedly-freely-voting electorate either doesn't know enough or just can't be bothered to rouse itself to physically stomp and holler. A "free" people who submit without unholy protest to rapacious privately-ruled health care and to detentions of uncharged persons in flagrant violation of due process are like toddlers who "run free" in the direction dictated by Daddy.

And that is no path for grownups.