Amsterdan

Make sure it's your life you've been living

2010-12-28T12:34:00.000-08:00

Carla Gugino, actress, quoted in Spirit magazine, December 2010:
I was 16 years old, living on my own in Los Angeles, working very hard to become a professional actor, and this woman, Shelly, who became my mentor, said to me, "Make sure when you're on your deathbed, it's your life you've been living."

Favorite Fortune Cookie message

2009-09-07T13:18:00.000-07:00

"Long life with blessings of family and friends is yours."

Our lives a metaphor for our times?

2009-06-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

I used to think I was a trendsetter. Turns out I was only an early adopter.

In my 20’s I felt that I was at the forefront of social movements and pop trends. I was the first white kid to room with an African American in my college in 1965. I was an early feminist and among the first to document “neo-feminism” in the film Cindy: Shadows, which debuted on May 15, 1969. My pivotal years were 1968 and 1969. Only asthma – and my mother’s persuasion of a doctor to certify it – kept me from dying in Viet Nam in 1968 (and believe me this unathletic, asthmatic, wide-eyed kid would have been fodder). I was greatly affected by ‘60’s assassinations, especially that of Bobby Kennedy; in fact, I was driving with Charlie Reum through Utah, headed permanently west in my ’67 Mustang toward Los Angeles on June 6, 1968, the day Bobby was assassinated in Los Angeles. Mine was a multi-racial marriage on the Ides of March, 1969 – I had my own Yoko – which would have been illegal in 16 states only two years earlier, and in California and Nevada ten years earlier.

On September 17, 1968, I was a walk-in visitor at 4115 S. Central Avenue, the LA headquarters of Huey P. Newton’s and Bobby Seale’s Black Panther Party, engaging a BPP member there in a brief conversation about police brutality, hunger, disease, ignorance, and the oppression of Black people generally (and buying a poster of Newton sitting proud in a wicker chair, a guerilla leader with ammo belts strapped across his ebony chest), a year before the LAPD shootout with BPP leaders and subsequent raids at that same Central Avenue location on October 18, 1969 and the five hour shootout on Central Avenue on December 8, 1969. “The day after the raid, Angela Davis and others set up a vigil outside BPP's Southern California headquarters, during which LAPD attacked, forcing people to flee in all directions.” In the late 1960’s I truly felt I was riding the Pilot Wave.

Fast forward 40 years. At age 62 I again find my life a metaphor for our times. Weeks after the September 2008 apex of the global financial crisis and the global stock market crash, I fell on a defective brick staircase and broke my right leg in seven places. The metaphor, for me, is powerful: the staircase appeared to be solid and safe but was critically flawed, like our financial system – a flaw that had been there for years, unnoticed or unacknowledged. That flaw led directly to my fall and the crushing of two bones which had held me upright and stable for 62 years, like our financial system. The result was enormous pain, loss of ability, loss of income and ultimately all this was tied together – personally and economically – in a significant loss of net worth.

During these past six months I have endured and overcome much of the pain but still find myself mentally diminished, physically unstable and working diligently to regain the strength and mental clarity I once took for granted. My real estate investments took the fall, too, and I’m gradually steering them toward a completely reorganized future; there’s healing – and still pain – all around me. Others in our society and our economy have suffered far more and continue to be disabled; I recognize that and count myself fortunate, so far. I am changing and I perceive our culture is changing, hopefully rapidly enough and deeply enough. We can no longer live disconnected from each other, from our deepest needs and values, from reality and from the consequences of disconnection. The consequences are “in our face” – both in the sense of being unavoidable and in the sense of revealing themselves in our physical manifestations.

I’m engaged in three initiatives of physical therapy: the traditional insurance-paid work-your-joints therapy, a highly-evolved Egoscue musculoskeletal alignment with a series of stretches and gentle muscle-training exercises, and often painful deep tissue massage to continue to relax the knots that still form in post-traumatic musculature. What is the corollary in our financial system’s recovery? Certainly not the bailouts and phony bank stress tests. Those are comparable to splints. De-leveraging is a therapy. As are new financial regulations. Bankruptcy and business failure – very therapeutic. In this one area, perhaps, my own life’s recovery and therapy is ahead of the culture.

And yet the future remains unknown and unknowable. And all we have is – dare I say it? – our health, our relationships, our ethics and values, and our sense of community to pull us forward. We’re riding the Pilot Wave again. Are we hitching our wagons to a star? Or are we like Slim Pickins in Dr. Strangelove, strapped to a plunging bomb? Gee-haw!

Hey! How’re ya doing?

2009-02-18T22:32:00.000-08:00

Hey!
How are you doing?
Sandy says hi!

Mike

Dear Mike,
How am I doing. Let’s look around me. I’m here with seven pieces of my broken leg knitting back into one and now bearing weight, living each day in the middle of a state capital that is one grownup short of a complete financial meltdown, in the middle of a nation that is two years (or two weeks) short of a complete financial meltdown, plopped on a blue marble about 98 of whose nations are teetering on the brink of a complete loss of confidence in unbridled capitalism accompanied by complete financial meltdown.

Can democracy be far behind? If there are no jobs and no money for adequate police, can civil disorder be far behind…at least in pockets here and there?

Or will the collapse be so sudden, so severe and so complete that nearly everyone will pull together, assess their neighborhood situations and figure it out, three or four dozen families at a time?

Doing well, thanks. You?

Fortune-telling in the War on Terror

2008-08-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

In an essay on Norman Mailer's books on 1968 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/books/review/Berman-t.html) occur these lines:

[In 1968] "Mailer prophesied that Communism, based on its inbuilt inadequacies, was going to collapse. There was no reason to go to war against it. His analysis would loom today as totally brilliant if only he had added a 20 percent tip about what was meanwhile likely to happen to the unhappy people of Indochina during the interval between America’s withdrawal from the war and the Communists’ eventual withdrawal from Communist doctrine — the interim experiences of policy-driven famine and poverty in Vietnam, extreme oppression, “boat people” fleeing for their lives and Cambodian horrors: the Indochinese catastrophes that have still not registered in the consciences of Americans when they are feeling dovish, just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not yet registered in the consciences of Americans when they are feeling hawkish.

Somehow this informs the discussion on the "War on Terror", just not sure how.

By the way, it is the likes of Bailey's jack-off analysis of a 40 year old text that sent me running and screaming away from a graduate degree in English and a life of professordoom. How can so many people spend so much time over-analyzing the musings of others. Digging into Shakespeare and Joyce, yes, I can see it, but the rest is, at best, cocktail conversation waiting to be distracted by the sight of a leggy blond (of whatever sex).

What you wish for

2008-06-08T11:37:00.000-07:00

“Barack Obama’s candidacy was the Clintons’ worst nightmare. They had dreamed of the day when an African-American could be elected president. But they never anticipated it would happen on their watch and were utterly confounded.”
— CARL BERNSTEIN, the author of “A Woman in Charge”, in the New York Times Op Ed “Low Riders”, 6/8/08

Reading this comment by a former Watergate reporting hero and recent biographer of Hillary Clinton took me back to the late summer of 1965, beginning my sophomore year in college, during the heart of the civil rights movement. In April, I had been one of fourteen students – seven black, seven white – who had attempted to desegregate the seven local Winfield, Kansas barbershops on a sunny Saturday morning.

It was my first civil rights activism, if you don’t count my speaking against my minister in 1962 for reading Uncle Remus stories (complete with Stepin Fetchit accent) to the Oklahoma white kids’ church camp in which one lone African American girl had quietly and single-handedly desegregated that little tradition.

Now I felt mainstream. I wasn’t taking the bus to Alabama to sign up Black voters, like some in my class, but I was acting locally and meaningfully. The barbershop incident had sparked a furor in the town of 10,000 and had split the mostly white town right down the middle – even the Methodist church in which I was student minister. After initial resistance, the barbers did, gradually over years, begin cutting everyone’s hair.

And it had highlighted other, closer racism within our own church-related college including an unstated policy of segregated dorm rooms. So when, in May, the Dean posted a signup sheet for students willing to room bi-racially, I was one of the first to sign it.

And I was one of the first three to be chosen, come the fall of 1965, to room bi-racially: Willie Williams, Roger Winfrey, and me. Roger was a Kansas boy and also a pre-ministerial student. Willie was from Texas, son of a sharecropper, who only had enough money for three of the four years of college (he would go on to graduate after three years).

Of the three of us only Willie and I survived the experience. Roger found it too stressful, too unreal, and eventually even left the school. But Willie and I grew to know each other very well, to share our very different childhoods, to cross the wide social divide and become genuinely warm friends.

All eyes were on us. Seriously, from a four-decade perspective it sounds silly and melodramatic, but it was quite simply revolutionary. My own grandmother denounced me. I lost my scholarship because the Tulsa racist right wing Christian who had put up the money refused to fund an integrationist. But for my Dad and an understanding banker in Oxford, I would not have been able to pay for my senior year – the college financial head would not sign off on a student loan.

But in all of it, the ring of truth in the above Carl Bernstein comment is my memory of my first reaction when I was told I had been selected to desegregate Southwestern College student housing. “Oh, my god.” I had no idea it would be me. An impulse of right thinking had prompted me to sign up for desegregated dorm living. Why wouldn’t I sign up? But I do remember that first thought, that first moment when it actually was about to alter the course of my own life.

I know, just a little bit, what the Clintons might be feeling. But I also know that my nine months with Willie Williams was a profound experience and a most healing one. And I know the same will be true for America when Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20, 2009.

Letter to my cousins: Why Obama?

2008-04-17T12:15:00.000-07:00

Dear cousins, I completely understand both of your perspectives. And at 61, I, too, have lost much or most of my naivety. And I agree that anyone who would vie for the job of President or any state or federal level political post, is likely self-absorbed, much-flattered, and likely to compromise in far too many ways, just to get there. Since the ancient Greeks, politicians have pretty much been given to such traits and behavior.

But when I look at our loss of historic and constitutional freedoms, including habeas corpus;
when I see that in our name torture is now an official practice which is (or at least for a time was) decided by top administration officials meeting in the basement of the White House;
when I look at the exploding national debt with accumulating interest (to which we will likely add $1 to $3 trillion for the Iraq experiment, if you include costs of maintaining the veterans who have been injured in body and mind) and the fact that that debt is almost wholly financed by foreign, substantially, Chinese, money which can be quickly withdrawn, if they choose;
and when I pay attention to the surging economies of China and India, whose growth rates will eventually doom us to second class world economic status, especially when factoring in our miserable public education system which fails to graduate roughly 40% to 50% of high schoolers;
when I look at the overwhelming burden of Social Security and Medicare for which no solutions are being proposed and for which too few in our generation are saving;
when I ponder the exploding price of oil, the loss of the dollar's value throughout the world, the exploding cost of food which this very day is leading to riots in many countries, and the shrinking glaciers and the climate change they portend (regardless of whether you think it is natural, manmade, inevitable or whatever) -
then I think we cannot, for the sake of our grandchildren - allow ourselves to be so bitter and disillusioned that we become disconnected from being part of some solution.

I choose not to tie my happiness to the outcome of these awful circumstances; I'm ok with my little day to day bubble. But I also choose to move past my own security to ponder what I can do, what we cousins can do, what our children and their friends can do to take control of this careening car of the future and get it somewhat steering in a more positive direction. And when I entertain those thoughts, and I look at the choices for President, I feel obligated either (a) to run myself (which ain't gonna happen), (b) to choose a third party candidate (which I've done several times to no effect) or (c) to choose among McCain, Clinton and Obama, which of those might be most likely the one to create an atmosphere in Washington which fosters effectiveness for my own efforts at solutions, that's when I choose Obama.

While I do personally hold out hope, "the audacity of hope" (if you will), in fact, one need not be hopeful nor need one "believe" in anything political. One only needs to reject the thought of being totally helpless. And if one can reject being helpless, then there is some action-imperative growing from that. That's all I'm saying.

Danny

McCain’s Secret Iraq Exit Strategy

2008-03-23T11:49:00.000-07:00

While the Democratic presidential candidates plan a two-division-a-month withdrawal strategy beginning in the Spring of 2009, John McCain cheneys his way across the Mideast talking of keeping American troops in Iraq for a century.

During a town hall meeting in Derry, New Hampshire 1/3/08, McCain told a crowd of two hundred that it “would be fine with” him if the U.S. military stayed in Iraq for “a hundred years“:

Q: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years — (cut off by McCain)

McCAIN: Make it a hundred.

Q: Is that … (cut off)

McCAIN: We’ve been in South Korea … we’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea 50 years or so. That would be fine with me. As long as Americans …

Q: [tries to say something]

McCAIN: As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me, I hope that would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al-Qaeda is training and equipping and recruiting and motivating people every single day.

Two-thirds of the American electorate see the Iraq fiasco as unsustainable and draw a direct line to the depressed dollar, soaring federal deficits and a growing subservience to Chinese cash. McCain echoes the Veep’s “So?” and promises more quagmire with honor.

But McCain is one of our most knowledgeable foreign policy leaders – his senior confusion about Shiite Iran training Sunni Al-Qaeda notwithstanding.

So how about some “Straight Talk” from the old soldier? Once in office, how would the Iraq fiasco really play out?

“In an exclusive new index, [the magazine] Foreign Policy and the Center for a New American Security surveyed more than 3,400 active and retired officers at the highest levels of command about the state of the U.S. military. They see a force stretched dangerously thin and a country ill-prepared for the next fight.” (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4198)

"Today, the U.S. military is engaged in a campaign that is more demanding and intense than anything it has witnessed in a generation. Ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now entering their fifth and seventh years respectively, have lasted longer than any U.S. military engagements of the past century, with the exception of Vietnam. More than 25,000 American servicemen and women have been wounded and over 4,000 killed. Additional deployments in the Balkans, on the Korean Peninsula, and elsewhere are putting further pressure on the military’s finite resources. And, at any time, U.S. forces could be called into action in one of the world’s many simmering hot spots—from Iran or Syria, to North Korea or the Taiwan Strait.

"In all, more than 3,400 officers holding the rank of major or lieutenant commander and above were surveyed from across the services, active duty and retired, general officers and field-grade officers. About 35 percent of the participants hailed from the Army, 33 percent from the Air Force, 23 percent from the Navy, and 8 percent from the Marine Corps. Several hundred are flag officers, elite generals and admirals who have served at the highest levels of command. Approximately one third are colonels or captains—officers commanding thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines—and 37 percent hold the rank of lieutenant colonel or commander. Eighty-one percent have more than 20 years of service in the military. Twelve percent graduated from one of America’s exclusive military academies. And more than two thirds have combat experience, with roughly 10 percent having served in Iraq, Afghanistan, or both.

"More than 80 percent of the officers say that, given the stress of current deployments, it is unreasonable to ask the military to wage another major war today. Nor did the officers express high confidence in the military’s preparedness to do so. For instance, the officers said that the United States is not fully prepared to successfully execute such a mission against Iran or North Korea."

Over forty percent agree with the statement: “the demands of the war in Iraq have broken the U.S. military.”

Nearly 90 percent say that they believe the demands of the war in Iraq have “stretched the U.S. military dangerously thin.”

And therein lies the secret McCain exit strategy.

If McCain wins the 2008 election, he will continue a Bush-Petraeus surge-forever policy until some external new crisis forces him to redeploy the troops to a more urgent region.

There will be a new, more urgent war, sooner or later, and if John McCain lives to turn 80 in the White House, then on his watch he will have found an “honorable” excuse to redeploy our military to another war. Perhaps it will be another front in the thousand-year War on Terror. But sooner or later, Iraq’s security will have to be turned over to its neighbors without the massive presence of US military forces.

Regardless of the timing of the Iraq exit, the cost to America will likely approach $3 Trillion and the damage to the US economy and the US dollar will be irrecoverable. Don't believe it? Listen to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Hooray for Chris Wallace

2008-03-21T17:16:00.001-07:00

It's time to be grownups. All of us. To stop the petty bickering and sniping and tackle the snowballing problems the dawn of the 21st century has brought us (with a lot of help from radicals on all sides).

So when, in David Gergen's words, "Barack Obama spoke to the American people like grownups" about race, it is time to respond with genuine national dialog about race and truly begin to get his divisive bigotry behind us.

One of Obama's lines was: "The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, you know, there's a reaction that's been bred in our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that's just the nature of race in our society."

And when, the next morning, "Fox and Friends" began running, out of context, a clip of Obama describing his grandmother as "a typical while person" Sunday anchor Chris Wallace came on and took them to task. The clip is worth watching:

Just words?

2008-02-24T09:29:00.000-08:00

Journalism is America's Fourth Estate. Investigative reporters, analysts and pundits are important guardian's of the people's interest in government and politics. But has the Fourth Estate become a cadre of slackers? Case in point: it has become cliche to discuss Hillary's attempts to stop her snowballing primary losses to Obama as creating a "firewall" first in one primary state and then another. This term "firewall" has been used repeatedly by journalists, analysts and pundits of all stripes:

11/30/07 - The Boston Globe: "I would argue that New Hampshire is the firewall of last resort," said Dante Scala, a University of New Hampshire political scientist. [http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/11/30/ with_iowa_tight_nh_becoming_clintons_firewall/]

12/18/07 - The New Republic - John B. Judis: "This hostility of Latinos toward blacks has sometimes showed up in political behavior....[this is] Hillary Clinton's Firewall." [http://www.tnr.com/politics/ story.html?id=314e8fae-3fd3-4af2-bfde-f0f8e069c1fe]

2/2/08 - The Atlantic - Mark Ambinder: "Clinton's Firewall Scenario" [http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/02/ clintons_firewall_scenario.php]

2/13/08 - The New York Times - David Leonhart: "Is it possible that Barack Obama has become the favorite in Texas, a state long considered to be a firewall for Hillary Clinton?" [http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/ online-market-watch/]

2/22/08 - Bloomberg.com - Lorraine Woellert and Kristin Jensen: "Ohio was supposed to be Hillary Clinton's firewall." [http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/ news?pid=20601087&sid=akZsaWjVqF90&refer=home]

There are, indeed, over 300,000 such "Clinton Firewall" references on Google.

Here's the problem. A "firewall" is a partition to inhibit the spread of fire within a structure or in a computer system to prevent unauthorized access.

Obama's wins are in wide open spaces - the 50 states - and he is moving like a prairie wildfire. When fighting a wildfire, professionals use a "firebreak", which is a strip of cleared, open space to arrest the spread of a wildfire through a forest or a prairie.

The correct word for Clinton's failed attempts is "firebreak".

Perhaps the only ones who care about such things are those of us who study language and feel passionately about precision in language. But shouldn't that include journalists and editors - those who live by their use of precise language? And if some early journalists, analysts, editors and pundits chose the incorrect word, are the rest such lemmings that they thoughtlessly follow suit?

The number of uses of the correct term "Clinton firebreak" on Google? As of today, three: FOXnews (sweet irony), The Baltimore Sun, and Mother Jones magazine. There are three journalists and their editors who know the difference between a firebreak and a firewall; and all of those correct references occurred in February 2008, months after the imprecision began.

Whatever word is used, it appears that Hillary Clinton will be ineffective in supressing the political wildfire of Barack Obama.

RJB2 on the Democratic Debates

2008-01-31T19:27:00.000-08:00

RJB2 on the Democratic Debates at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood:

ROUND THREE: HILLARY DROPS THE “J” BOMB
Her voice makes me want to go clean my room.
His voice is like curling up to a warm fire and putting on some Marvin Gaye.

DanZ Top 10 Stories of 2007

2007-12-30T07:23:00.000-08:00

Why Cheney and Bush should be impeached now

2007-10-04T07:26:00.000-07:00

Most politically astute citizens seem to believe that the time for impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney has past. We are in the midst of the next presidential campaign cycle. Let it run its course.

I disagree. Because of the sweeping power of the executive branch - significantly magnified by Cheney's and Bush's assumptions of even grander power - the only control for an out-of-control chief executive is impeachment. It is the constitutional remedy of last resort. Both Bush and Cheney must be impeached at the same time lest we inherit President Cheney (begin shudder here).

Cheney and Bush have suspended habeas corpus, violated the constitution, continue to use torture...ah, hell, you know the charges. The point is that the next president, whomever she or he may be, needs to know that the American people will not sit quietly during the next 15 months and let the hemoraging continue. Nor will we accept the next administration's only slightly ratcheting back the abuses of power we have endured (and ratified in two elections, only objecting in the most recent mid-year fiasco) during the Bush-Cheney reign.

Our rights are endangered, our reputation is on life-support, and our moral high ground is now a swamp. It must stop now.

The "distraction" of an impeachment would in fact be invigorating and clarifying to the campaigns. These unworthy successors must know that we're fed up and will not roll over any more. The executive branch must be rebooted. Now.

OJ: a pretzel of irony

2007-09-16T13:32:00.000-07:00

"I don't hang out with gangsters. I hang out with golfers." - OJ Simpson poolside in Las Vegas during an interview with an LA Times reporter moments before being arrested for armed robbery of items including photos taken by Nicole Brown-Simpson.

W lost me in the first 2 minutes

2007-09-13T19:43:00.002-07:00

Not that he ever had me, but I really listened to George W. Bush tonight in his post-Petraeus-testimony Oval Office address on Iraq. But by his fourth sentence, Bush’s PR spin cycle was whirring away.

“In Iraq, an ally of the United States is fighting for its survival. Terrorists and extremists who are at war with us around the world are seeking to topple Iraq’s government, dominate the region, and attack us here at home. If Iraq’s young democracy can turn back these enemies, it will mean a more hopeful Middle East and a more secure America.”

The Sunni Maliki government an ally of the US? Well, they do go into hiding during the whole month of August, like Bush and the US Congress.

Some cohesive Iraqi central government struggling against a massive war from outsider “terrorists and extremists”? Hardly. Al Qaeda in Iraq (a gift of the Bush/Rumsfeld fiasco) has less than a thousand foreign fighters.

Besides that, Anthony Cordesman, Middle East expert and holder of the Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, pointed out in July 2007 that over 90 percent of the members of Al Qaeda in Iraq are not foreign fighters, but Iraqi natives who, after the American invasion, adopted the Al Qaeda brand to gain attention to their cause.

The enemy of Iraq is Iraqis. And the inept leadership of George Bush.

A more hopeful Middle East? Ask the four million displaced Iraqi’s and the millions left behind who huddle in dark houses in ethnically cleansed neighborhoods praying that death squads don’t come in the night.

A more secure America? Check your gut.

Goodbye, Alberto Gonzales

2007-08-27T22:37:00.000-07:00

Oh, Judge Gonzales, your loyal patron, Mr. Bush, said today, “It is sad when a talented and honorable person who is impeding (sic) from his work because his name was dragged through the mud for political reasons.”

Was that why you left the Justice Department so suddenly? Or was it because of your shame over authoring the White House memo authorizing torture and denial of habeas corpus? Was it for the nighttime dogging of a hospitalized Attorney General Ashcroft to get the pained and drugged old man to sign off on the previously rejected illegal surveillance program you wanted? Or was it for your failure to stand accountable before the US Senate for actions taken on your watch in firing perfectly competent US attorneys for political reasons? Was it for the half-truths and mis-truths under oath? Or was it because of your incompetent management of the Department of Justice, and your putting loyalty to the President above loyalty to the Constitution and the American people? Which of these are the reasons you did not survive your brief tenure as America’s top justice official, Mr. Gonzales.

“Justice”, hmm, a concept worth pondering. Not unlike “karma”.

Perhaps the most revealing statement you made during your brief resignation speech on August 27, 2007, was “my worst day at the Department of Justice was better than my father’s best day.”

Your father was reportedly a humble man, a migrant worker who labored hard in construction and plant maintenance to raise his family of eight children.

You have said of your father: “He was an alcoholic, and there were many nights when I remember him coming home and, you know, severe arguments with my mother and throwing the pillow over my head and just trying to not listen to all of that. I mean, unfortunately, those happened way too often. But one story I do like to tell about my father is, no matter how much he drank on a particular night, if it was a work day the next morning, he was always up and he was always gone to provide for his family, so I learned that lesson very early on. But, you know, in that respect, I mean there were some difficult times in my family.”

Was it from these early painful episodes you decided that torturing others was not so bad? Was it the resentment of your father that made you feel that attempts to trick an old man in pain into signing off on an illegal surveillance program?

Your father lived a difficult life, anonymously raising eight children in relative poverty (though less poor than if he had stayed in Mexico). Your opportunities grew from his pain and sacrifice, and that of your mother, oh, and from the largesse of Mr. Bush.

I would wager that air conditioned offices and celebrity aside, your best days in the White House and Department of Justice were really never more damaging to this nation and our Constitution than your father’s drunkenness, unless you choose to blame that for your cavalier dealing with truth and constitutional rights.

That you would so casually devalue your father’s life before the American people, and that you would so easily boast of your life in comparison to his, speaks volumes about you, Judge.

Letting Dad go

2007-05-07T06:25:00.000-07:00

From the Earthship near Wichita

We spent the last week with Dad and Mom in Kansas, America’s cul-de-sac. Dad has had a couple of small strokes – small only in comparison to large or catastrophic – and, as a result, has had difficulty focusing for more than a phrase or two, and difficulty expressing his thoughts in words.

“It’s clear in my head,” he says, “just can’t say it.” So over the past year or so, he has said less, and with a weaker voice, and moves less, shuffles really, and stoops. That’s not the confident 20-something I knew as a kid, but that was 60 years ago.

It’s troublesome to see a dominant male falter. Disturbing, really. So we four siblings came to Kansas to share time with him and Mom. My brother and I decided we wouldn’t let him go silently. We plotted to encourage him to finish his life the way he lived it, showing us the way, giving us an idea of what is to come.

Dad beat us to the punch. In a quiet moment, he told me, “I want to go. I want to see Mom.” His mother died at age 53 – over 50 years ago – and he has missed her terribly since then. Every day.

His lip quivered as his eyes looked beyond the moment. “Dad,” I ventured forth, as planned, “you’re free to go. You’ve finished it here. You’ve gotten everything ready and we’re all fine and the work of your life is complete. If you want to go, then move forward. But do it with confidence, Dad, do it with style and grace and joy. Show us the way to do this, just as you taught us all the other lessons of life.”

Then my brother Randy came into the conversation, and he stroked Dad’s foot while I put my arm around him and hugged him and kissed his bald head gently with a tenderness he had taken seven decades to muster for us. He cried some, and let it out. We talked a bit more, but mostly just listened to him as he, haltingly but steadily, said some final things.

That was two days ago, and we’ve had another deep conversation again since, about the surety of the next life and what we know and how we know it; what his own dad said as he passed suddenly, “Beautiful, oh, so beautiful.”

And for the last two days Dad has been smiling and talking more and has been more engaged in people and less cloistered in TV reruns.

It matters that we stay engaged with each other. It has finally let me cast off the anger and rejection of the past and just move beyond childhood emptiness.

I love my Dad, now more than ever. Enough to encourage his next adventure.

Why al Qaida need not come here

2007-04-22T18:12:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are given to a frequent mantra that if we don’t fight them “over there” in Iraq, the Islamic terrorists will come to America and fight us here. There are at least a dozen logic flaws, misunderstandings of history, culture and geography and several cruel ironies bundled into this statement. But none of them is the real reason why this is a flawed foundation for the initial action in Iraq.

The simple fact is that - except for an occasional terrorist plot in the U.S. for PR purposes - al Qaida doesn’t need to bring the fight to our shores, for the same reason that if I worked in a supermarket, I would not choose to walk across town to buy milk at a 7-11.

Iraq and Afghanistan are the supermarkets of terrorism – the latter courtesy of the Taliban and the former courtesy of the Wolfowitzian neocons. Working in those local terrorism supermarkets, al Qaida can not only recruit more boxboys among the regional population and readily attack US and NATO forces sent to the region, but they have access to the Achilles heel of the West: cheap oil.

By accelerating civil disorder and economic conflagration in Iraq and soon in Saudi Arabia, al Qaida is setting the stage to disrupt oil supplies and drive up the price of crude in dramatic measure.

We saw the world price of crude oil double in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War OPEC Oil Embargo. On October 19, 1973, the official price of Saudi Light was roughly $5 a barrel; within a few weeks it jumped to $12 a barrel. It rose dramatically again following the Iranian Revolution in 1979 from about $15 a barrel to nearly $40 a barrel ($70 in 2006 prices) at the height of the Iraq-Iran War in 1981.

World oil was about $25 a barrel on September 11, 2001. Today it fluctuates between $60 and $80. Doubling, tripling, as a consequence of four planes crashing.

Following an eventual withdrawal of US Forces from Iraq, should the region explode as predicted, the disruption could easily double or triple the price of oil again, this time to $160 or even $250 a barrel. At that point no Western economy can absorb the increase without massive economic and social disruption. Daily life as we know it will change drastically. The resultant depression will do to the US, European and Japanese economies what 9/11 did not: bring them to their knees.

However incidental or complicit al Qaida’s role in this, its initial aims will have been realized. There will be celebration in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And no al Qaida member need have crossed the US-Mexican border to achieve it.

R.I.P. Kitty Carlisle Hart

2007-04-19T22:18:00.000-07:00

“With a soupçon of courage and a dash of self-discipline, one can make a small talent go a long way.” Kitty Carlisle Hart, died today. As described by Marilyn Berger in the New York Times, "a doyenne of New York culture and society and a perennial entertainer who appeared on Broadway and in films and was still singing on the stage as recently as last fall, well into her 10th decade, died Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 96."

The playwright Norman Krasna wanted to marry her, George Gershwin proposed to her and the financier Bernard Baruch wanted to leave his wife for her, she said.

She refused everyone, however, until she met Mr. Hart, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who, with George S. Kaufman, wrote “The Man Who Came to Dinner” and “You Can’t Take It With You” and who directed “My Fair Lady.”

As described by Ms. Berger: Mr. Hart, a man of sparkle and wit, largely directed their lives as well, organizing their homes and their dinner parties, even choosing his wife’s wardrobe.

When Mr. Hart died of a heart attack in 1961, Miss Carlisle was devastated, she wrote, but she went on to live by his precept that “you can’t escape from life, you escape into it.”

“I’m more optimistic, more enthusiastic, and I have more energy than ever before,” she said just after her 79th birthday. Energy, she said, came from doing the things she wanted to do. “You get so tired when you do what other people want you to do,” she said.

Bi-czar failure

2007-04-11T14:48:00.000-07:00

The Bush-Cheney White House is seeking a “war czar” to take control of their ill-conceived, incompetently executed, out-of-control Mid-east fiasco.

“Czar” and its spelling variants are a contraction of the word Caesar, referring to emperors, dictators and supreme leaders, especially in Russia, Bulgaria, and Serbia. In the US, it most recently refers to an expert in charge of implementing policy, e.g. the drug czar.

American czars have a sad history of failure. A series of Presidential drug wars, led by drug czars, have produced an exploding prison population (as befits dictatorial epochs) and little else. Meanwhile, our leaders can focus on fund-raising and PR, having delegated responsibility for real issues to some czar.

Three top retired generals have passed on the “war czar” job, including Army General Jack Keane, who, last December, promoted the idea of a U.S. military surge. Bush bought the Keane’s PR idea of a surge – which is, in fact, a mere escalation of “stay the course”. Now Keane wants no part of running his surge. His Marine counterpart, retired four-star General John Sheehan also rebuffed the White House job offer, telling the Washington Post, “The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going. So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, ‘No, thanks.’”

Bush’s failures of competence are reaching critical mass. The administration is imploding. Having failed to deliver a competent Commander in Chief, the Bushies now seek a surrogate.

Why do we need a “war czar” anyway? Isn’t that the job of the Commander in Chief? We need a competent Commander in Chief.

It's bad. It's very bad.

2007-04-01T22:21:00.000-07:00

I yield the floor to Tim Dickenson writing in Rolling Stone (rollingstone.com), March 22, 2007. A panel of experts tells writer Tim Dickinson the war is lost, surge or no surge. "Even if we had a million men to go in, it's too late now," says retired four-star Gen. Tony McPeak, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Persian Gulf War. "Humpty Dumpty can't be put back together again." How awful can it get? The panel's three scenarios:

BEST CASE -- Civil war in Iraq and a stronger al-Qaida: "The best we can hope for is an Iraq that is politically passive but hostile toward America," says Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser.

"It's complete anarchy now," says Nir Rosen, author of "In the Belly of the Beast." "Americans are still killing Iraqi civilians left and right. There's no government in Iraq; it doesn't exist outside of the Green Zone. We deliberately created a weak government so that we would have final authority over everything in Iraq. ... The best you can hope for is that doesn't spill into the neighboring countries."

MOST LIKELY -- Years of ethnic cleansing and war with Iran: Rosen says our Sunni allies like Saudi Arabia are pushing the United States to switch sides and support the minority Sunnis in Iraq. "The whole buildup to a new war against Iran, which sounds so much like the buildup in 2002, is part of that," he says.

Bob Graham, ex-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, adds: "This administration seems to be getting ready to make -- at a much more significant, escalated level -- the same mistake in Iran that we made in Iraq. If Iraq has been a disaster, this would be multiple times Iraq. The extent to which this could be the horror of the 21st century is hard to exaggerate."

Brzezinski says, "If the war continues without any American willingness to accommodate regionally and to pull out, the Iraq war will be extended to Iran."

WORST CASE -- World War III: "Israel sees that it's threatened by these developments," says McPeak. "Once the Israelis get involved, then everybody piles on. And you've got nuclear events going off in the Middle East."

He concludes: "Our country's international standing has been frittered away by people who don't have the foggiest understanding of how the hell the world works. America has been conducting an experiment for the past six years, trying to validate the proposition that it really doesn't make any difference who you elect president. Now we know the result of that experiment . If a guy is stupid, it makes a big difference."

George W Bush Irony #44

2007-03-28T07:38:00.000-07:00

In his public speeches, the man who has command of so few words keeps saying "in other words".

R.I.P. Anna Nicole Smith

2007-02-09T08:30:00.000-08:00

“I love the paparazzi. They take pictures, and I just smile away. I’ve always liked attention. I didn’t get it very much growing up, and I always wanted to be, you know, noticed.” - Anna Nicole Smith in an interview with Los Angeles magazine in 1994.

Where is Bandar Bush when the world needs him?

2007-01-27T19:18:00.001-08:00

In two current New York Times analyses, the think-for-yourself conservative David Brooks points out that Iraq is now in the pre-Darfur, pre-Rwanda, pre-Bosnia phase of the coming bloodbath.

Brooks writes, “Iraq already has the psychological conditions that have undergirded the great bloodbaths of recent years. Iraqi minds, according to the most sensitive reporting, have already been rewired by the experiences of trauma and extreme stress.

"Some people become hyperaggressive and turn into perfect killers. Others endure a phased mental shutdown that looks like severe depression. They lose their memory and become passive and fatalistic. They become perfect victims.” (http://select.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/opinion/25brooks.html?th&emc=th)

The solution is a “soft partition” of Iraq.
Brooks outlines a 4-step plan including (1) modify the Iraq Constitution, which already decentralizes power, to equitably share oil and gas revenue; (2) get implicit consent from all sects that separation and federalism are in their interest; (3) relocate people into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish districts as was done successfully in Bosnia; (4) get Iraq’s neighbors – who have everything to lose in the coming transnational bloodbath – to buy into the arrangement. (http://select.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/opinion/28brooks.html?hp)

Brooks concludes: "In short, logic, circumstances and politics are leading inexorably toward soft partition. The Bush administration has been slow to recognize its virtues because it is too dependent on the Green Zone Iraqis. The Iraqis talk about national unity but their behavior suggests they want decentralization. Sooner or later, everybody will settle on this sensible policy, having exhausted all the alternatives."

But does anyone think Bush-Cheney will actually plan this or just pretend it isn't happening and screw this up, too? And where are Iraq's neighbors in all this? If a transnational bloodbath is a possibility; if “failure is unthinkable” as Bush said in his State of the Union; then why aren't Iraq’s neighbors, many of them our allies, stepping up and offering to help? Where is Bandar Bush when the world – and George W – need him most?

A plan to fail, following a failure to plan

2007-01-13T09:36:00.000-08:00

President George W. Bush is sending 17,500 more people to Baghdad. I agree that now that Bush has our tit in their wringer, we should do what we can to overcome the myriad disasters there. But Bush's half-measure, hell, quarter-measure, will fail. Period. After failing to plan, Bush now offers a plan to fail. The only potentially winning MILITARY strategy is the Powell Doctrine, and now that Bush and Clinton have reduced the size of the standing army, that would require an FDR-like mobilization of the full resources of the United States of America and its people. Not gonna happen? Right. Because George W. Bush correctly says that the stakes are huge, Western civilization hangs in the balance, and then Bush antes only enough to lose. The best alternative is a POLITICAL strategy like the one advocated by the Iraq Study Group with emphasis on engaging regional neighbors, forcing political compromises within Iraq, phased troop withdrawals and an serious, renewed effort to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace.

We will have to wait till 2009 for what we hope will be a strong, intelligent (A-student), inspiring leader to reassess the whole Mideast mess and devise a long-term, full-throated strategy involving the entire country.

Irony Redeux: Carney heads Iraq reconstruction

2007-01-12T09:24:00.000-08:00

The State Department announced on January 10, 2007, that Timothy Carney, a retired Foreign Service officer who served as a senior civilian American authority in Iraq for three months in 2003, is the new coordinator for Iraq reconstruction.

Carney is no stranger to working amid political instability and conflict. After graduating from MIT in 1966 and joining the State Department, Carney, who speaks Cambodian, Thai and French, was posted to Vietnam and Cambodia during the Indochina War, and Lesotho and South Africa before the end of apartheid.

 As part of a number of United Nations missions, he was the senior American on UNTAC in Cambodia from March 1992-August 1993; then in Somalia for UNOSOM II from December 1993-February 1994 (just after U.S. military's 1993 campaign to capture Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid – a period captured in Ridley Scott’s movie Black Hawk Down); and in South Africa with UNOMSA from March-June 1994 for Nelson Mandela's election.

 Most significantly, Carney was Ambassador to Sudan from 1995-97 and is the last accredited U.S. Ambassador there. Why? Because, in Carney’s words, “In early 1996, CIA director John Deutch convinced Secretary of State Warren Christopher to pull U.S. diplomats out of Sudan out of fear for their safety. His anxiety was based on intelligence that implicated the Sudanese government.”

“Soon afterward,” Carney wrote in the Washington Post in June, 2002, “the CIA figured out that its analysis was wrong. A key source had either embellished or wholly fabricated information, and in early 1996 the agency scrapped more than 100 of its reports on Sudan. Did the State Department then send its diplomats back? No. The bad intelligence had taken on a life of its own.”

In the Post article Carney concludes, “Whether hunting terrorists in Afghanistan, judging the integrity of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, mediating a dispute between India and Pakistan, or contemplating the virtue of an attack on Iraq, the Bush administration has given great weight to the content of U.S. (and sometimes foreign) intelligence reports. As the United States wages war on terrorism and Congress reorganizes and bolsters U.S. intelligence agencies, the influence of intelligence on foreign and military policy will only grow.

 "But American policymakers have to be intelligent about using intelligence. The story of U.S. policy in Sudan shows how bad intelligence -- or good intelligence badly used -- can damage U.S. interests. In Sudan, it confused us about political Islam, hurt our ability to intervene in the 47-year-old Sudanese civil war, and in 1996 undermined our best chance ever to capture Osama bin Laden and strangle his organization, before he was expelled from Sudan and found his way to Afghanistan. We write from experience.”

Pity George Bush was not listening to Carney before invading Iraq and creating the mess Carney now hopes to help unwind.

2008 Reality Game Show: PICK!…YOUR!…DICTATOR!

2006-12-24T12:51:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve, 2006, Wise Men & Women Seeking Peace
After decades of a working relationship with a successful Iraqi dictator – one moment America supplying arms, the next America enforcing a “no-fly zone”, but always enjoying stability among the factions – suddenly in the throes of neo-con theory, we Americans destroyed the stable US-Iraq relationship willfully and foolishly, then stood by weakly as we starved off any sense of order and watched almost helplessly as the anarchy turned against us.

We should have known. “A relationship is an organism,” Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld wrote in 1991’s “The Ex-Girlfriend”. “You created this thing and then you starved it so it turned against you. Same thing happened to The Blob.”

The Iraqi Blob began to devour all the neo-cons’ dreams. In response, Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld began to “tweak” the miserably-executed strategy.

But as Peter Mehlman scripted for Kramer and Elaine in 1997 in “The Money” episode:
“KRAMER: Well, you know, I really like this girl and I, you know, I think if I could just work out this one thing...”  
“ELAINE: (interrupting) Yeah. I gotta be honest with you Kramer. You might be more than just a coupla tweaks away from a healthy relationship.”

We thought Iraq was our bitch. Oh, Iraqis, we bought you democracy. How could you have done us so wrong?

Today in the New York Times, Carmi Turchick of Buffalo, NY, observes that we need a magic plan. “Come to think of it, invading Iraq was supposed to be the magic plan. The reality that we cannot possibly stay there as long as Iraq’s neighbors and other locals like Al Qaeda is precisely why the invasion was ultimately doomed to fail. Staying longer changes only how much money we waste and how many brave Americans die. The Iraqi units we are training will melt away or divide up into factions after we leave as quickly as Saddam Hussein’s forces did when we went in. Waiting for some future when they will be ready to take over without us is a fool’s errand. Iran thanks us for coming, and suggests we avoid the door on our way out.”

Bottom line: Iraq needs a new dictator. Rather than replace a very effective, but overly-brutal dictator like Saddam with a proposed Arab-style democracy (“my sect will outvote your sect and then kill you”), we should have replaced Saddam with a nicer dictator. It takes a good dictator to rule an Arab mob. But, hey, nature abhors a vacuum. There is still time.

I have a magic plan.

As the 2008 Presidential election approaches, I propose an election-year summer-season, July through September, TV Reality Game Show “Pick!...Your!...Dictator!” in which contestants – Hillary, McCain, Obama, Guiliani, heck, thousands can apply – propose a handful of their own picks for future Iraqi Dictator to be inaugurated January 20, 2009 (same day as the new American President). Week by week, the candidates for American President and Iraqi Dictator – assisted by clever blends of past and present Iraq video footage and computer-generated graphics – will run the bevy of candidates through assorted virtual, very-visual future-Iraq scenarios.

The show will be simulcast on Fox and Al Jazeera with week-by-week voting ala American Idol, both in the U.S. and Iraq. Gradually we will narrow down the best “Dic-pick”, the beneficent tyrant most desirable both to Iraqi’s and Americans. This is true democracy, by the way, and might begin uniting both sides of the world’s divide.

Concluding six weeks before the American election, there will be a final Dic-off with the two finalists for Dictator along with their sponsors, American Presidential candidates, going head-to-head, toe-to-toe with platforms, strategies and body counts (re-establishing order among warring factions will not come cheaply).

Once chosen, the winning Presidential and Dictatorial candidates will be well-positioned to work together in a new beginning in 2009. The American and Iraqi people will have spoken (and maybe even bonded) and the real Presidential election in November will serve to ratify or reject the wisdom of the Game Show.

Ok, scoff. But do you have a better, more entertaining, more promising idea for a truly new beginning in 2009?

Is the moon made of green cheese?

2006-12-04T18:03:00.000-08:00

San Diego, California
As reported in the New York Times December 4, 2006: Scott Horowitz, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration, said crews of four astronauts would make weeklong missions to the Moon starting around 2020 (I will be 73). As more equipment was set up, human stays would eventually grow to 180 days, permanent staffing by 2024 (I will be 77). By 2027, officials said, a pressurized roving vehicle on the surface would take people on expeditions far from the base.

I can’t wait to see that! I was walking the beat as a Wells Fargo rent-a-cop in July 1969 when Neil Armstrong took one small step on the moon. Some of us thought humans would stay permanently shortly thereafter. Who knew it would take 51 more years!

So by 2030, say, when I’m 83 there will probably be Lunar vacations for maybe $100,000. But I won’t feel like pulling all those G’s and getting that too-frequent motion sickness that often comes with weighlessness, so it looks like I will neither walk nor ride on the moon. Not in this body.

But you go ahead. You’re young. If you kick in a hundred bucks every month from now till 2030, you’ll have invested a little over twenty-five thousand, but at 10% interest it would be worth over $100,000 by 2030 and that should get you there and back in style.

And in answer to the title question, check out this little observation:
http://www.planetfusion.co.uk/~pignut/cheese.html

Review: The Conservative Soul by Andrew Sullivan

2006-11-23T13:53:00.000-08:00

From Live-Free-Or-Die, New Hampshire
PLEASE READ THIS BOOK. Andrew Sullivan travels the talk show circuit as an engaging political thinker with penetrating insights and the courage to openly debunk the leader of his party. But one cannot know the depths of this 40-something British immigrant without reading The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back.

Sullivan is refreshingly honest, about his own life and his journey to today, and about what has happened to the Republican party and the American people.

"I think of my own analytical errors in the past few years. Looking back, I can see that my outrage at the atrocity of September 11, however merited, may well have blinded me to the intricacies and dangers of a subsequent war in Iraq…We were all wrong."

But this is far more than a confessional about a war gone wrong, or about “the ineptness and neoconservative recklessness I saw in the Bush administration.” This book is an exploration of how the conservative movement was led into a “rival form” of religious, political fundamentalism and why the resultant loss of constitutional freedoms and America’s moral high ground was the logical next step in the seizing of power by ideological fundamentalists.

"The essential claim of the fundamentalist is that he knows the truth….It isn’t an argument from which he could be dissuaded by something we call reason….The values of the fundamentalist are facts. God has revealed them in a book that is inerrant, whether that book is the Bible or the Koran; or he has entrusted them to hierarchy whose interpretation of scripture and tradition and history and nature is authoritative and even, in some cases, literally infallible."

Sullivan revisits the founders of the American constitution and finds they were “well aware of the dangers of religious fundamentalism allied to government power, hence the First Amendment.”

"The Founders, [to the dismay of fundamentalists like former Senator Rick Santorum], did not write a Constitution dedicated to the inculcation of virtue. In fact what is stunning about the American Declaration of Independence and subsequent Constitution is how morality and virtue are all but absent as a primary concern. The tripartite goal of the American founding was “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” They did not write, “the pursuit of virtue or the pursuit of morality….Americans insisted on freedom first."

In Sullivan’s analysis, the lurch toward George W. Bush’s theocracy violates the foundations of conservatism. “Tax cuts were simply a matter of faith,” and accompanied a “staggering expansion of government power and spending [which] increased by an astonishing 38 percent since 2000” resulting in “a bankrupting of the American government” so that “by the end of one term, President Bush had more than doubled [the US Government’s future spending commitments] to $43.3 trillion [with] absolutely no way to finance it.” Sullivan details the Bush excesses in fiscal, social and foreign policy as “intransigent recklessness” accompanied by “a refusal to account for reality, to acknowledge error, to prepare for all contingencies.” In place of Constitutional safeguards and limited government “came a new theory of [presidential] constitutional powers [in which] the president had the right to ignore the law.” This has led to a “decision to end decades of humane warfare in the United States military” and to sanctioned torture.

This is not conservatism, Sullivan asserts. "The conservatism I grew up around was a combination of lower taxes, less government spending, freer trade, freer markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility….The defining characteristic of the conservative is that he knows what he doesn’t know."

Sullivan, himself, avoids the errors he finds in the theocratic Bush administration, by admitting up front that “this book…is an attempt to explain what one individual person means by conservatism.” Sullivan suggests “there is more to life than politics [but] the best form of politics is that which enables us to engage in nonpolitical life more fully and more freely.”

By reaching back into the wisdom of the American Founders and of observers like the fifteenth century Montaigne, and by carefully, thoughtfully analyzing the strangeness of recent years, Sullivan has returned reason, quiet analysis and civility to the public discourse and brought hope to those who, like Sullivan, “have felt like throwing in the towel and simply saying: all right, I’m not a conservative if that’s what it now means.”

Iraq exit plan is part of an overall strategy for a sustainable campaign against world terrorism

2006-10-26T09:07:00.000-07:00

San Diego, California
Echoing a popular opinion among both conservatives and liberals, Peter Bergen writing the New York Times (What Osama Wants, October 26, 2006) opined:

“Another problem with a total American withdrawal is that it would fit all too neatly into Osama bin Laden’s master narrative about American foreign policy. His theme is that America is a paper tiger that cannot tolerate body bags coming home; to back it up, he cites President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 withdrawal of United States troops from Lebanon and President Bill Clinton’s decision nearly a decade later to pull troops from Somalia. A unilateral pullout from Iraq would only confirm this analysis of American weakness among his jihadist allies.”

What Bergen and many others misunderstand is that this Kissinger-esqe thinking leads to Viet Nam-like wars of stubbornness for stubbornness’ sake. “Staying the course” is stupid when the course itself is stupid. A blunder is a blunder.

America’s leaders must learn once and for all that we must not commit even a few troops anywhere until we understand the Four Dimensions of Victory: (1) the realities on the ground, (2) the cultural and political context of those realities, (3) what resources will be required to achieve swift and overwhelming victory, and (4) what will be the larger, long term consequences of victory.

I call these the Four Dimensions of Victory because the term “dimensions” refers to the parameters required to describe the position and relevant characteristics of any object within a conceptual space. A military action takes place in a definable time and space, and can thus be viewed as an “object” occurring within the space of our shared planet.

America’s leaders failed to address any of these Four Dimensions before Reagan committed a tiny force in Lebanon in 1984, Clinton committed a tiny force in Somalia in 1993 or Bush committed a woefully inadequate force in 2003. That is why they all failed. And because withdrawal is part of any military campaign, and because the Four Dimensions of Victory were not properly analyzed prior to withdrawal of troops in Lebanon and Somalia, the consequences of those failures were to reinforce the perception of America as a paper tiger.

Remarkably, between the Defense Department, the State Department, the intelligence agencies and the National Security Agency, America’s government has much of the data and the brains to analyze the Four Dimensions of Victory prior to any military entry or exit. Our leaders have simply not bothered collating them. Our leaders too often have lazy, undisciplined minds.

So withdrawal in Iraq might or might not reinforce the perception of America as a paper tiger – that depends on the wisdom of the withdrawal plan, which must be developed utilizing an analysis of the Four Dimensions of Victory. (We didn’t analyze and plan properly as we entered, so it is even more important that we analyze and plan properly as we exit.)

Clausewitz continually emphasized “strategy as the intelligent use of individual battles for the design of a sustainable campaign.” (Von Ghyczy, Clausewitz on Strategy) We must intelligently use a brilliant, well-conceived Iraq exit as part of an overall strategy for a sustainable campaign against world terrorism.

I just woke up 60

2006-09-27T13:21:00.001-07:00

Big Sur, California
Not 60 times or 60 degrees or 60 minutes…
60 years.
Not a long time if you’ve done it.
I know lots of people in their 60’s
We all grew up in the ‘60’s.
Many of us still haven’t grown up
Which is maybe why it’s disorienting, just a bit.

I had two years to prepare for this moment.
When I was 58 I miscounted, so I’ve been “almost 60” for a long time.
Now even that is behind me.
What is ahead of me?

Death, certainly. The obvious.
Probably not for 25 years, both my parents are in their ‘80’s.
I wouldn’t mind being an octogenarian like Mom,
Still sharp, working, in good enough health not to complain.
Don’t want to get old like my dad, slow and frustrated.
His genes have the edge in my body – based on physical appearance – but
I have the edge in being able to see into the future by looking at my dad.
He didn’t have that edge, his dad died at 59, and his older brother, too, at 59.
That was the family curse my dad broke just after his
Quadruple bypass operation
At 59. If truth be told, I’m a little relieved to edge past 59.

Except that means I’m 60.
The people I love, most of them, tell me I don’t look 60.
I sure as hell don’t feel 60 – whatever that means.
Plenty of great things have been done by people older than 60.
And I’m not poor or sick or homeless.
I think I could probably talk my way out of being poor or homeless.
I have learned something.

But, sick, I couldn’t talk my way out of. And that’s a problem.
I have this really healthy body that required no maintenance whatsoever
Till I was in my ’30’s. Then only a little exercise like walking.
Then by my late ‘40’s stuff started to go, first my stomach,
But there’s a pill for that,
Then my esophagus and a hernia, but there are simple surgeries for that.
My asthma has gotten worse, and there’s a steroid for that
(which recently added a warning that using this steroid can kill you, but don’t discontinue it).
God must have written that warning on one of his more ironic days.

The old BP and cholesterol are borderline, and
When they redrew the border, they
Gave me some more daily pills for that.
Evidently my prostate has as big an appetite as I do, and the pill for that
Stuffs up my sinuses, so staying on saw palmetto, a simple
Herb, fixes that for now.
Who knows what the next thing will be, but I rely on medical science’s weekly miracles.

Obesity, that’s the next thing that pills can’t cure.
Oh, the irony: an overworked epicure who can afford his tastes but
Dares no longer indulge them.
I hate exercise, don’t know why, but always did.
Wasn’t a problem in my 20’s.
Was kind of enjoyable in my 40’s.
Now it may be THE issue, so okay I’ve gotta do it.
I picture myself 61 and 30 pounds lighter and in pretty good shape.
There. Satisfied?

Oh, that’s the other big problem at 60 … too much to say.
Have you noticed how the lines have gotten longer the more I write?
I work on brevity, and it’s strictly enforced by my partner.
I’ll work harder.
On brevity.
I picture myself 61 and speaking
In sentence fragments
To applauding audiences of
Twenty-somethings.
So I’ve got that going for me: a rich fantasy life.

What lies ahead?
That’s what today is for, and tomorrow:
To figure that out. And, gimme a break,
I just woke up. 60.

Haiku on the Thai Coup

2006-09-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

From the Grand Tetons, Idaho
a politic clock
unwound today in Bangcock
starting anew Thai-m

-by Richard Bayer, Esquire

Cheney’s Victory on “Meet the Press”

2006-09-10T13:09:00.000-07:00

Sunday, September 10, 2006
Russert: Mr. Vice President, I ask you again: What is victory? What is ‘staying the course’? What is winning?

Cheney: Tim, victory in Iraq will be a situation in which (1) there is a viable government, representative of the people of Iraq, elected under their constitution, and we’re part way there. It will be (2) an Iraq that is not a threat to the United States in terms of being a safe haven for terrorists. It will be (3) an Iraq where Al-Qaida has been pretty well eliminated, where, in fact, (4) the Iraqis are able to govern and deal with the difficult political situations obviously that exist inside Iraq, given their history. Those are all things that need to happen. But I think we’re well on our way to doing it….Saddam Hussein sits in jail today.

There. We have our victory metrics. Interestingly, the conditions described in Cheney’s victory metrics 2, 3 and 4 were status quo BEFORE we invaded Iraq. It was not a threat to the United States, according to the Conclusions section of the Senate Intelligence report just released Friday, September 8, 2006.

Al-Qaida was not operating there, despite Al Zarqawi having fled there after the invasion of Afghanistan. In fact, Saddam was no friend of Al-Qaida and recent reports suggest Al Zarqawi was being sought by Saddam’s security forces prior to the US invasion.

And the “difficult political situations” (the history of which the Bush Administration seemed to be unaware in planning for the post-invasion period) were under control by Saddam’s repression. The only thing that was not status quo BEFORE we invaded Iraq was “a viable government, representative of the people of Iraq.” It was a dictatorship, much like those that exist in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, United Arab Emirates and Pakistan today – though it does not seem likely that we will be invading those countries anytime soon, since they are our principal Arab partners in the War on Terror. Indeed, it is “governments, representative of the people” in Iran and Palestine (and likely soon in Lebanon) that are our principal foes in the Middle East. We have cleverly thrust Iraq into that club.

So Cheney’s No. 1 victory metric has been met (the only one not in place BEFORE the US invasion). But 2, 3 and 4 – which had been in effect BEFORE the invasion – are now reversed. One step forward, three steps back. Post-invasion Iraq is a haven for terrorists; Al-Qaida now has a firm foothold in Iraq, and the new Iraqi government is not effectively dealing with “the difficult political situations obviously that exist inside Iraq, given their history.”

Moreover, by the fumbling interventions of the Bush Administration on behalf of the American people, the region has been further destabilized. A Shia’a crescent running from Lebannon through Syria and Iraq and into Iran is rapidly firming, aided significantly by recent clubfooted military moves against Hezbollah, encouraged and supported by this Administration.

Our American military is literally stuck in Iraq hoping to stave off a full-out civil war. Stuck for probably ten more years, and unable to restrengthen or even recover for the next battle front in this War. Yes, it could get worse. We can not leave, just as we could not leave Viet Nam in the 1968 Tet Offensive. But, thanks to the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq, and more thanks to the incompetent post-invasion non-plan, we Americans are no longer in control of our own military destiny. We have ceded control to that other incompetent government, the one in Baghdad: “When they stand up; we will stand down.” And our $300 Billion loss will likely become a $500 Billion loss by the end of the Bush-Cheney watch in 2009. A wholesale squandering of treasure and lives.

But, hey, Saddam sits in jail. Heckuva job, Mr. Vice President.

Clausewitzian Trinity

2006-08-13T13:00:00.000-07:00

Foundational Military Strategy
Clausewitzian Trinity is a term used in discussions of military strategy, and even geo-political strategy, whose basis is the unfinished, but seminal treatise On War by the Prussian military philosopher General Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831). Clausewitz is referred to by some as the millennium's preeminent strategist and his work On War is widely considered to be the Western peer, but not necessarily the equal, of the ancient Chinese war philosopher Sun Tzu, The Art of War. Read by Eisenhower, Kissinger, Patton, Mao and most great modern military and business strategists, Clausewitz’s and Sun Tsu’s works are foundational studies in war colleges around the world.

Clausewitz’s introduction of systematic philosophical thought into Western military instruction and operational planning is embodied in what has come to be called the “Clausewitzian Trinity”. In On War (page 89) Clausewitz describes this trinity:

"As a total phenomenon its dominant tendencies always make war a remarkable trinity--composed (1) of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; (2) of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and (3) of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone."

Some have shortened the Clausewitzian Trinity to the three single words: emotion, chance, and policy.

Clausewitz correlates each of these forces to one of three sets of human actors (his “social trinity”) – the people, the army, and the government – each of which is associated “mainly” with war’s three components, in the order listed. However, Clausewitzian does not equate the social trinity to the larger “categories of forces” we call the Clausewitzian Trinity, which are larger and more powerful forces at work.

West Point and Army War College instructors Edward J. Villacres and Christopher Bassford, writing in Parameters, the Journal of the U.S. Army War College, Autumn, 1995 (http://www.clausewitz.com/CWZHOME/Trinity/TRININTR.htm), describe the Clausewitzian Trinity as one of the Clausewitzian concepts most frequently cited in all of recent military literature.

After the Vietnam and first Gulf War experiences, in two influential studies, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (1982) and On Strategy II: A Critical Analysis of the Gulf War (1995), Col. Harry Summers moves away from the classical Clausewitzian Trinity and emphasizes the Clausewitzian-correlated "people, army, and government” as the essential trinity for military operations.

Other authors including Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: The Free Press, 1991); John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Knopf, 1993), dismiss the Clausewitzian Trinity as largely irrelevant to nonpolitical wars against non-state opponents like terrorists.

Nevertheless, as illustration of the continuing validity of the Clausewitzian Trinity in considerations of military strategy, Villacres and Bassford point out, “Clausewitz saw his theory as a basis for study, not as doctrine.”

The term Clausewitzian friction refers to Clausewitz’s theory that reality exerts a kind of friction on ideas and intentions in war. This term is commonly associated with the diverse difficulties and impediments to the effective use of military force, as cited in Barry D. Watts, Clausewitzian Friction and Future War (Diane Publishing, 1996, and National Defense University, 2004).

The general term “Clausewitzian” is also tossed around casually as in Clausewitzian thought, Clausewitzian perspective, and even inappropriately in the phrases Clausewitzian buffer and Clausewitzian humor.

Stagflation, is it baaaaack?!

2006-08-09T10:56:00.000-07:00

Amsterdan After 17 consecutive increases at each meeting since June 2004, in a rare split decision the Federal Reserve voted August 8th to hold its benchmark interest rate steady at 5.25 percent. A pause in the bombing.

Inflation continues, prompted by oil prices (orchestrated by a Middle East policy that has failed on multiple fronts, by Exxon-Mobil greed, BP incompetence, rising demand from China and India, well, you know the litany…) and continually rising raw materials prices for steel, cement, copper, PVC and other building materials in high demand in the booming Far East. But Greenspan’s almost-ready-for-prime-time replacement Ben S. Bernanke seems to be figuring on the sudden retreat of the housing market and the consequent evaporation of billions of dollars in homeowner equity to put downward pressure on prices and forestall further inflation.

The Fed is hoping we’ll all say, “My home is worth less so I’ll shop only at Walmart.”

But an observation by writer Edmund Andrews in the New York Times raises concern: “At the same time, economic growth has slowed sharply, unemployment is creeping up and productivity growth — the primary determinant of overall prosperity and the crucial ingredient in having healthy growth without rising prices — has stalled.”

Hmmm. Sure these conflicting trends happen. Ebb and flow. It takes a while to put the brakes on the US economy or to slow the creep of inflation, so sometimes there can be a brief disconnect. But look at the source of the trends.

Oil could hit $100 a barrel if any of a half-dozen known dangers materialize – Iraq civil war, Venezuelan assassination, overthrow of the Saudi kingdom, another Katrina event in the Gulf, terrorist attack in Dubai, Iranian blockade of the other Gulf – ok, I’ll stop, I’m depressed already. So in response, say the US Administration and the Fed make a couple of rash, bonehead moves – what are the odds – and maybe Kim Jong-Il accidentally bombs Tokyo and the neocons react and all of a sudden China decides to flex its economic muscle and draws down some cash from the US banking and investment system. The squeeze is on. Economies begin to react. Jobs are lost. The US economy stagnates.

BUT…inflation continues because of the oil and commodities pressures. Guess what, stagflation. A stagnating economy with high inflation. From 1979 to 1981 the US prime rate soared to a high of 21.5% (prime, not credit card rate), while costs of labor and materials continued to spiral upward and the economic metrics continued to decline. It could happen again and those of us who suffered greatly a quarter-century ago know this could get ugly before it gets better.

Is it time to hunker down?

Bono investment group buys into Forbes

2006-08-09T10:18:00.000-07:00

New YorkReuters picked up the story early: “Family-held publisher Forbes on Monday said it sold a minority stake in its collection of business media properties to a private equity firm that includes rock star Bono as a partner. Forbes created a new company, Forbes Media LLC, to encompass Forbes magazine, founded in 1917, its Internet and other properties.

“Elevation Partners, a $1.9 billion media and entertainment buyout firm, bought a stake in the new company, making it the first outside investor in Forbes media assets. Bono, lead singer of rock group U2, is one of its six partners.”

Elevation Partners was formed in June 2004 by Bono (aka Paul Hewson) and what the Forbes/Wolfe Blog then reported as “an all-star team [including] Roger McNamee of Silver Lake Partners, John Riccitiello (ex-president of Electronic Arts) and Fred Anderson (who just retired as Apple’s CFO).”

According to the Mercury News, “the Forbes deal is Elevation's third investment. It invested $100 million in Move.com, formerly Homestore, a home and real estate site, and $300 million in Pandemic Studios and BioWare, two independent video game developers. For Bono and McNamee, a musician himself whose telephone music for callers on hold featured the Doors on Monday, the Forbes deal is more than an investment.”
``I think the Web is becoming more important in people's lives,'' said Roger McNamee, managing director and co-founder of Elevation Partners. ``The next transformation is that people will want content when they want it, how they want it, where they want it. They have a tremendous need for insight because they don't have enough time.''

Mercury News quoted Steve Forbes, chairman and publisher of Forbes, as saying that despite what naysayers may think about the Internet killing off traditional media, ``the media universe is expanding. We see opportunities and we want to seize them before others seize them.''

This investment positions Bono and Company squarely in the business media content world, just as U2’s media campaign for the Apple iPod featured U2’s “Vertigo” as the soundtrack. U2’s Vertigo tour started here in San Diego on March 28, 2005 with the last performance set in Honolulu December 9, 2006.

The Forbes acquisition comes on the heels of Bono’s being named one of three of Time Magazine’s 2005 “Persons of the Year” along with Bill and Melinda Gates. Time described the trio as "Good Samaritans" who made a difference in different ways.

"For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are Time's Persons of the Year," the magazine said in its December 19, 2005 issue. The Irish rocker was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 and 2005 for his work in combating poverty in Africa and the U2 album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.

``When Bono talks about getting rid of poverty, a big part of what he does is give people the tools to improve their lives economically,'' McNamee was quoted by Mercury News, who said he expects to see a Forbes magazine wherever there's a growing economy. ``That's about entrepreneurship and capital. And it's at the individual level. You have to do it from the bottom up. Forbes isn't the whole answer, but they are part of the answer.''

As RTE Business described it today: “It brings together Bono, one of the world's most prominent celebrity activists fighting poverty, with the 'entrepreneurial capitalism' advocated by the Forbes family.”

And in the words of Anthony Clark in Britain’s The Guardian, “Bono has cemented his reputation as the establishment's favourite rock star.”

I woke up crying this morning

2006-07-28T20:54:00.000-07:00

Amsterdan
I woke up crying this morning,
An echo of the sobbing I had just fallen into in my dream.
I remember it clearly.
It was me walking along in some back yard
Thinking about when I was 30, about the feelings of hope and happiness
And how those feelings had become lost,
Like a box of treasures during some house moving.

It was not so much that they didn’t materialize, those hopes,
They did. They came true in the person of a beautiful daughter.
We lived her life for 17 years, then gave her up to
What would become her own life
Which has gone on without us.

And I too have gone on.
I have a new life, too. One more of many.
This new life, too, has its feelings of hope and happiness
And I will make those come true.
Then at some point those feelings will be lost
In a radical passing that destroys my body
And brings a new adventure.
A few others will cry. Three will sob.

But in my dream, I was thinking about
My companion back in those old days,
Those days about which I was sobbing in my dream,
My companion who had been young and cute
Who had shared the feelings of hope and happiness,
She, too, lived our daughter’s life for 17 years,
But when we gave her up to her own life
My companion’s life did not go on.
She retired, died, almost. Nothing could stop it.
A combination of choice and destiny.
And as she died to the world, I died to her, too.
So I went on. She did not.
She occupies her old body, this morning,
In her old house, with her old thoughts.
She probably wakes up crying
More than once.

It is not tragedy.
It is the human condition.
It cannot be fixed, only dealt with.
I rarely cry about it, just face it daily with determination and hope,
Except this morning.

The American Insurgency

2006-06-16T23:45:00.000-07:00

Amsterdan “An Insurgency is an armed revolt, or insurrection against an established civil or political authority, such as a constituted government.” (Quoted sections are from Wikipedia.) One thinks of the 20,000 in Iraq who are waging armed revolt against their duly elected, constituted government as well as what they perceive as a military occupation by an invading force, the Coalition comprised of mostly American men and women sent by the American government.

The real “American government” is constitutionally of the people, by the people and for the people. The people are the Stockholders of the American democracy. And it is the American people who are under attack by a daring insurgency whose recent actions have been breathtaking.

In the last two decades a band of greedy and corrupt men and women has taken control of our government at top levels. For their own selfish gain – and that of their cronies – they have taken control of our arms and our treasury, and the treasury of future generations, and have taken action against these stockholders of the American democracy even abandoning our founding ideals of right to trial, presumed innocence, habeas corpus, the sanctity of one’s home and one’s private conversations.

While far more sophisticated, the parallels with traditional insurgents are legion. Our insurgents “have established ties with other outlaws” (the Abramoffs and Enrons) “and double agents” (like Chalabi) to further their goals.

Their tactics appear more subtle than traditional insurgents and they are cunning enough to direct most of their violence against those outside our borders. But like insurgents everywhere, many of their number seem to have no remorse at the killing of thousands of innocents, or of our own people, in furtherance of their ends, so long as it all occurs on foreign soil. Better there than here, they warn, ominously.

And like Islamic insurgents, they invoke their deity to cloak their deeds with righteousness and divine sanction.

“Some elements of an insurgency may use bombs, kidnappings, hostage-taking, hijackings, shootings and other types of violence to target the establishment's power structure and other facilities with little regard for civilian casualties.” The Iraqi insurgency is like that. But “other elements may only target their attacks on military objectives and avoid the targeting of civilians.” Our American insurgents fall into this category.

The term “insurgency is most commonly used to describe a movement's unlawfulness by virtue of not being authorized by or in accordance with the law. When the term is used by a state or an authority under threat, ‘insurgency’ implies an illegitimacy of cause upon those rising up.” This is not the case in our American insurgency, and that is the genius of it, and the source of its resilience. Because the American insurgency uses the law and civil authority to violate the law and manipulate civil authority.

In many traditional insurgencies “leaders of differing backgrounds from the insurgency movement itself may, at times, take over the insurgency.” So it is with the American insurgents. Decade by decade Democrats and Republicans alternately trade control of this insurgency. In a clever ruse of carefully structured elections of increasingly questionable accuracy, the American insurgency gives the illusion that it is sanctioned by those against whom it is being waged.

Be not deceived. We Stockholders in America, our values and futures, are under attack.

We dare not let the insurgents prevail.

It is our very good fortune that this American insurgency can be put down without bloodshed and violence, using the very rules this mob has seized upon in their rampage. We must educate ourselves, recover our dignity and moral authority, and vote them out. All of them. They are all tainted. All of them.

Then we must immediately change the rules they have steadily rewritten: the bias toward incumbents, the sanctioning of corruption in lobbying, the gerrymandering, the ear marks, the privately-financed never-ending campaigns for more money.

143 years ago (seven score and three) the first Republican, Abraham Lincoln, rallied us: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

How many of our future years of freedom and prosperity must we endure being stolen from us, before we rise up as citizens, put down this insurgency and take control of our government and our destiny?

Soccer Prevents Iraq Civil War

2006-06-16T11:08:00.000-07:00

AmsterdanThe juxtaposition on the 6/16/06 New York Times front page was inspired: "Argentina Crushes Serbia-Montenegro" next to "Mosque Bombing Kills at Least 11 in Baghdad". "Crushing" in front of billions has got to be at least as emotionally satisfying as killing in front of hundreds. Let's organize Sunni's and Shiia's into soccer teams and duke it out in internationally televised soccer matches with the whole world watching. Not for all the marbles, just one game to settle each dispute as it arises. With Al Jazeera TV revenues and international corporate sponsorships we could employ thousands currently out of work and maybe even raise a couple of extra bucks for reconstruction.

Bush after Bush

2006-06-09T11:48:00.000-07:00

It’s not too early to start imagining what George Bush will do after January 20, 2009. After all, ex-Presidents have lately been a more active group, with Jimmy Carter trotting around the globe monitoring elections and building Habitat houses, and Bush 41 and Clinton raising money for victims of hurricanes and tsunamis. So what will W do to make his mark after making such a big splat?

Cut brush probably. For a few weeks. Till his hands start to callous and boredom sets in. There will no need to travel the world; he’s traveled the world, and besides his distaste for sightseeing is well known.

He’s not much of a brain, and what part he has used has gotten us all into quagmires like Iraq. So it’s not likely he will be writing any scholarly articles on international politics. Probably doesn’t know how to use a computer, anyway.

He’s not much of a manager, and what he has tried to manage has pretty much looked like Katrina, so it is not likely any non-profit group will be seeking him out to help them run things.

He could open an employment office. He seems to love giving jobs to people regardless of their qualifications. And there may be a lot of his cronies looking for work in 2009, so there’s a “maybe” on the employment office thing.

Perhaps a better question to ask is what will Bush’s Brain be doing after January 20, 2009. After all Karl Rove’s plans will probably be pretty important to W, at least after retiring from the brush-cutting gig. We can pretty much count on Rove wanting to make more kings. So maybe Karl will get W to pack his suitcase and go on the rubber chicken circuit raising millions from Evangelicals and wealthy Republicans. Bush can raise money. Lots of money. The W ‘n Karl comedy team could spawn a whole new generation of incompetent, but imminently electable neo-cons. Now there’s a legacy.

Yeah, my money is on the money. I’m thinking George W. will find his retirement niche on the $1,000-a-plate circuit. Heck, he might even roll across the border and bring his talents to the Mexican political process. They’re a little short on Evangelicals down there, but Karl will find some good wedge issues to further divide those Estados Unidos, too. Then when, in the words of Excelsior, the national newspaper of Mexico, "the American Southwest slowly returns to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot," W will have positioned the Bush family to be central players in running the formerly American Southwest. Heck, New Mexico won’t even have to change its name.

The Administration

2006-04-19T08:12:00.000-07:00

Karl Roved around W's Bush and Dick
Tugging at the flag draped deck chairs.
First a circle, then in a square,
Huffing, puffing in a panic,
Re-arranging Republicans.
All aboard SS Titanic!

My life is a time capsule

2006-03-03T08:11:00.000-08:00

My life is a time capsule,
Filled daily,
Kept religiously,
Then gradually lost –
Every little bit of it –
Along the way.

Like memory.

Lost
Those precious things,
The photos – so many that meant so much then faded like the friendships and the memories –
The posters – especially the one of Huey P. Newton with the ammo belts across his naked black chest, taken just weeks before the LAPD shoot out in the very building I visited weeks before as a seminarian learning about "the ghetto" –
The posters of Peter Yarrow’s one film, You Are What You Eat, the documentary of the hippie movement, before Peter, Paul & Mary, given to me – ok stolen by me – the night Barry Feinstein and I crashed the world premier, and the closing, of that great film.
The keepsakes and mementos – a rusting, bent spoon with a plastic flower tied to it, what was his name? David, I think.

Lost.

Not irresponsibly. I kept them for years. Packed and unpacked them countless times. Squirreled them away in the attic (one time when I had one)
Or in the garage, till she took it over for her craziness.

Lost.

Like memory.

The stories are there to be told, if anyone had any interest.
They have their own time capsules.

So my life is a time capsule
Filled daily,
Kept forever in the silent memory of my Beloved.

Empty Wine Bottles

2006-02-28T19:31:00.000-08:00

Empty Wine Bottles

There are probably about 80 wine bottles I’ve wanted to save
In the last 59 years.
Each bottle a dead soldier representing a glorious evening
Usually with some beautiful young person,
As often with myself alone,
But each a memory worth preserving.

Mistake.
I saved some, even had my companions sign them
(or I recorded their names and the date later, when alone)
and too often
all too often
a year or two later the memory had so faded I would ask:
“What was I thinking? Why the hell am I saving this stupid, dusty bottle?”

Why, indeed. Memories. The past. Good nights. Wine.
Whazzit?

80 bottles
In 59 years.
Not that many, come to think of it.
Come once a day for 80 years, that’s 25,000 explosions
Most of them not into anything, or anyone.
Penny ante.
Hardly worth remembering.

Such is my life.
And I’ve tried harder than most.

Dust.