I’ve had enough of cruddy people, lowlifes who occupy high office and have glowing pictures taken of themselves as they perform their slimy duties. (Yeah, Max – you.) I need some cleansing.

I’ve been trying to conjure up a list this morning, and it is turning out to be quite a short one. It is a list of courageous people, people who, even though famous, actually embody noble qualities. These are people who took risks that involved great sacrifice and personal peril, and paid a price for their actions. Their actions were for a cause … not for fame, so daredevils need not apply.

Here’s what I have come up with:

Daniel Ellsberg: Few people remember that prior to Nixon’s people breaking into Ellsburg’s psychiatrist’s office (thereby destroying the court case against him), that Daniel was on his way to prison. He released the Pentagon Papers to the press knowing that he was breaking the law and that there would be a price to pay. He was willing to pay that price. To this day he claims that his only regret was that he did not act sooner, before so many millions had died. He is publicly asking for someone in the Obama Administration to do the same dirty deed – tell us something true about Iraq or Afghanistan.

Jane Fonda: As the old saying goes, it is dangerous to be right when your government is wrong. Jane was famous, though a bit malleable, and foolish. She didn’t seem to care how her activities affected her movie career – she used her fame to expose wrongdoing. She got up on a platform – a gun turret used to defend the Vietnamese people from American attacks – and that act has defined her. She paid a price – to this day she is hated and maligned by our most dangerous people – right wingers with guns.

Muhammad Ali: Cassius Clay was on top of the world, the best boxer alive, a charismatic and dynamic man who decided to … adopt the Muslim faith? Refuse to be inducted into the military? Go to jail? He had more to lose than almost any man alive, and he put it all on the line.

Philip Berrigan: He willingly went to jail time and again to protest American wars, pouring blood on jets, destroying the killing equipment. He never hid out – he felt it is duty to submit to authorities after defying them. (That part I don’t admire – the willing submission part.) He and his brother Daniel, two Catholic priests, antagonized the government and the Catholic Church by openly involving themselves in war protests. Courage? Yes. Were I Philip, and I am nowhere close to being Philip, I would perform my deeds in Clyde Barrow fashion, hiding out, and giving it up to a hail of bullets in the end. That would be a strong message. (Side note: I imagined Mr. Berrigan in a lonely jail cell in need of human contact, and so wrote to him while he was in prison. He wrote a brief note back saying that it was really hard for him keep up with all the correspondence he was getting.)

Rachel Corrie: This young gal perhaps did not know she was giving it all up that day, but she defied the Israelis by standing in front of a bulldozer that was leveling Palestinian homes. She was 23 years of age on March 16, 2003, the day she was pancaked.

Pat Tillman: He was killed by friendly fire, and not in combat. I know that. But he did something unusual – he left a lucrative career in football to sacrifice himself for a cause. Perhaps he was gullible, perhaps he bought into the wrong cause, but he was courageous. He took a risk, gave up something real and valuable. Perhaps he knew more than we know, but it’s hard to tell. His legacy is being sanitized. However, before his death, he had arranged to have lunch with Noam Chomsky. As Mencken said, … how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

I am trying hard here to come up with people who are courageous in support of right wing causes. The problem is that right wingers seldom have to give up much. If they lose office they go to work for right wing think tanks. There’s always a job and income for them somewhere. Somebody help here … I’m not paying enough attention. Please – a right wing hero or two? Are there any? I can think of only one:

Bruce Bartlett: Employed by a right-wing think tank, and had bad thoughts. He wrote book critical of George W. Bush. He got fired. “Nobody will touch me,” he says. He wrote Impostor: Why George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.” He was toasted, and not with champagne.

Please add to this list -I have overlooked many, I know.

______________

I just got done reading Glenn Greenwald, who in a similar vein honors Jerald terHorst, President Gerald Ford’s press secretary, who resigned in protest on the day that Ford pardoned Nixon.

“As your spokesman, I do not know how I could credibly defend that action in the absence of a like decision to grant absolute pardon to the young men who evaded Vietnam military service as a matter of conscience and the absence of pardons for former aides and associates of Mr. Nixon who have been charged with crimes — and imprisoned — stemming from the same Watergate situation. These are also men whose reputations and families have been grievously injured. …Try as I can, it is impossible to conclude that the former president is more deserving of mercy than persons of lesser station in life whose offenses have had far less effect on our national wellbeing.”

Indeed, refusal to fight in a war to defend one’s country from aggression might rightly been seen as cowardice, but refusal to fight on the side of the aggressor requires courage. Some Vietnam era draft evaders went into hiding, some went to jail, some went to Sweden or Canada. One, who was not acting out any discernible high principle, became president. One man who was truly unworthy of clemency, Nixon, got it anyway. Jerald terHorst belongs on this list, along with anyone who has ever paid a price for refusal to fight an unjust war.

It was a visit to a bygone era. We ran across one of those stoner stores in Santa Fe. It was loaded with hemp and post cards and bumper stickers, but, I am sorry to say, no lava lamps. Among the treasures I found were a post card of a grandma with over-sized glasses as grandmas tend to wear, a delightful smile, and a sticker affixed to her blouse that says “Fuck your war.”

Another is a bumper sticker with words by Abbie Hoffman:

You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.

That’s a well-known quote. We supposedly have free speech here. Alexander Solzhenitsyn had to come to the U.S. to speak freely … about the Soviet Union. If he had unkind words to say about the U.S., he would have died in obscurity. In the post below, Paul Craig Roberts whined about how he ceased to matter when he became critical of the wrong people.

In this country fame is reserved for actors, athletes and apparatchiks. Dissidents need not apply.

Except … for the curious case of the Tea Baggers. This movement has gained considerable momentum and enjoyed wide publicity on cable news casts and in newspapers. Why does our media not ignore this movement as it does all other dissidents?

I can think of a couple of reasons: One, it is not a spontaneous movement. It is the product of a public relations campaign. This is high-level professional manipulation. (To what end? Violence? To give the appearance of rebellion that covertly achieves other purposes? I don’t know. As with everything else in life, my wisdom will come after the fact.)

Second, the content of the protests, at least what I can make of the gobbledygook, is anti-democratic. Tea Baggers don’t like universal health care or taxation of any sort. They are opposed to “socialism” in much the same way that creationists are opposed to “science.” It is something they don’t understand, but know somehow threatens them.

Tea Baggers are not just dead intellectually, their brains are gone. Watch the manipulators. Why does the phenomenon exist? Why are they not cast out and left to rot away, as our real dissidents are? Why have they been elevated to special status?

One can only guess, and I don’t even have a good guess handy.

Be isolated, be ignored, be attacked, be in doubt, be frightened, but do not be silenced. (Bertrand Russell)

Tea Baggers, heed Russell’s words, be not silenced, but for God’s sake, be not fucking stupid.

The legendary Civil War-era reporter Simpson B. Ashley played poker with plantation owners late one night, when they were a bit liquored up and guards were down. They were being pilloried and demonized in the Northern press, and needed to fix up their image. According to Ashley, they had hired a writer, Mary Chesnut, to re-define slavery in such a way that it did not seem like such a bad thing in the mind of the public.

Slavery had been well-defined by that time – it was simply “forced labour”, using the British spelling. Chesnut spent many sleepless nights trying to get around such a blunt-force concept so easily understood and used to damn her clients. At last she had it. She presented it to the plantation owners at a meeting in July, 1858, in Richmond. Slavery, she said, should henceforth be defined as “unlawful forced labour.

It was a Eureka! moment, though that expression had not yet some into use. What the plantation owners were doing was in fact not slavery, because it was legal.
——————-

Simpson B. Ashley is a real person, but he’s too young to read this. I just made all of that up. Yesterday I listened to a radio broadcast where the participants were experienced angst and frustration in trying to come up with a definition of “terrorism.” “Why is it so hard?”, mused David Sirota, the host.

It’s not hard at all, just as slavery is not hard to define. Here’s the definition:

The calculated use of violence or threat of violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.

That is not at all hard to understand, and from that definition it is easy to see that the biggest purveyor of terrorism on this planet is the United States Government, followed closely by that of Israel. But such a definition yields what one might call the “slave owner’s dilemma”: A straightforward and honest definition makes us look like terrorists. Hence the angst, the intellectual quandary faced by Sirota and callers yesterday.

He need not have struggled so. The Pentagon long ago solved this quandary. Here is the “official” definition of terrorism:

The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.

We’re officially off the hook. When we do it, it’s lawful.

Just a reminder:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. -H.L. Mencken

Steve and I looked high and low for a header for our new blog some years ago, and settled on that one … it is timeless and true. There is no “War on Terror”, for instance, and if we wanted to we could all just get on airplanes and fly, and nothing bad would happen. The “shoe” and “underwear” bombers were probably stupid people who were conned for political purposes into futile acts. There was never a threat that they could actually blow up a plane.

The chances of being mugged or burglarized are fairly slim, and oddly, we are safer in big cities than small ones, since numbers provide good odds. Shit does happen, but it is random. The odds are that your neighbors are nice.

Young people today are like young people have always been.

There never have been two parties, never really. Liberals have always been malleable, and right wingers have for years masqueraded as Democrats. The idea of “gradualism” is not even an idea, but an excuse for inaction.

Aspirin doesn’t work on pain, coffee doesn’t hurt you, living to be 90 is overrated, especially if your brain is not active. Viagra is not a good idea, as women tire of sex in their older years. It only makes men want what is not desired by their partners.

Drinking too much is not good, but so is not drinking at all. Smoking is both openly discouraged and and sublimely encouraged at once (it’s actually nice that you die shortly after your working years, as you are less a burden). Tobacco companies need young smokers, and so aggressively pursue them, but very subtly.

Our professions are not that difficult, and easily learned. Other people do our stuff pretty well after a few weeks or months except for law, which really is difficult. (Lawyers have constructed a large set of illogical rules which can only be memorized by rote). Doctors are mystified mythologized, and they like it that way.

Our kids mostly don’t think about us. Most exceptional kids turn out pretty ordinary. We all think we are special though we don’t say so.

Religion is nice and stupid all at once, and those who realize it is stupid and still practice it know more than those of us who are too smart to practice it.

Movies are mostly bad and quickly forgotten.

There is a level of discourse among smart people that bypasses me. They are talking about concepts I do not grasp, and so I do not even notice the things they mean. This is the problem I have when I talk about propaganda, as most people are unfamiliar with it and do not think it exists, and so do not pay attention to it. Nothing penetrates the mind controlled by it – one cannot even get its attention.

Scientists don’t get politics, which is why the global warming deniers won the public mind. Scientists have to be honest, while the deniers do not, and are not.

Most businesses are simply trying to get stupid people to buy useless products. Advertising has two purposes: 1) to make us unhappy so that 2) we change our behavior.

Family gatherings are tense, but what choice do we have? We mostly imitate emotions all day long- the real ones come out at sporting events.

We are really lucky if we are married to a friend and lover both. It’s hard to stay in love, but it helps if your partner stays physically attractive. Most don’t.

Everyone is insecure about money, especially those who have more than they need.

Meetings are pointless and boring. Blogs are only interesting if they say something different. Most don’t. I live in fear that 1) I don’t say anything new or different and that 2) I am, as usual, the last one to know that.

And neck ties – there is something going on there, something in our subconscious that makes us hang a perfectly useless piece of cloth around our necks. I get that the Pope’s hat or a king’s crown is a penis symbol, that a tailored suit conveys a sense of power, that a motorcycle is power between the legs otherwise lacking, that a Hummer screams small penis … I get all that. But neck ties … I’ll get back to you.

Has this ever happened to you? You have some habit, some peccadillo, that you think makes you different from other people. And then you are reading this or that and find out that it isn’t just you … it’s everyone. Like me wearing the same shirt three or four days in a row to cut down on laundry. What a nice guy I am! What a good husband!

And then I find out that almost all married guys do that.

Advertisers know this about us. They know that we like to think we are unique. Hell, they know everything about us. That’s why advertising works. They know more about us than we know about ourselves.

So here is what is unique about me: I am self-employed. The people I do work for don’t own me. So I am free.

This happened in 1986, when I was 36. I’m almost 60 now. I didn’t plan it – my boss, Mary Alice Fortin, could not stand me almost as much as I could not stand her. I had five kids to feed, so she did me a favor – she cut me loose, but she gave me a big client to get me over the hump, the Mayo Clinic. They are big and sophisticated, and they surely did not need a land grant BS like me, but they allowed me to oversee the oil and gas properties that she had given them. This allowed me to pay the bills while I developed a practice of my own. I owe my freedom to that lady who disliked me so much, and before she left Montana, I told her so and thanked her. We never spoke again, and continued to dislike each other.

I didn’t know what I had. I didn’t understand anything. My very first day of self-employment, April 1, 1986, I got up, showered, shaved, put on a jacket and tie and went to my little office and just sat there. I had a computer, I had a client, and I had time. I thought that I must still behave as an employed person would, punching a time clock, being diligent … work work work.

It did not go smoothly, I depended far too much on Mayo, but did manage to find other clients, one big, most small. In essence, I was simply lucky. There were many times when I scoured the want ads looking for a suitable job. But the truth was that I had been cut loose. I was no longer part of the employment world. The thought of employment – the security of a paycheck and health insurance, was alluring and depressing all at once.

In short order after April 1, 1986, I lost my political bearings, abandoning the right wing. My wife divorced me, and hard as that was, it had to happen. And I left the Catholic Church, taking my kids with me.

I won’t bore you further. The question is, am I unique? If all of my other experiences in life are any gauge, the answer is no. I am more like everyone than everyone. Anyone in my shoes, give anyone that kind of freedom, would finally develop into a fuller, richer, happier person.

So I write stuff here that is kind of a meandering and long shot across the bow of people who are still mired in employment, and, as with the post below, it can be harsh. I criticize people who behave exactly as I behaved as an employed person. I was harder to get along with than most, but I do not kid myself. I had my mind right. They broke me, as Luke would say. I believed as I must believe to maintain my existence.

So, after the nasty exchange below, I say to Mr. Kemmick, and from long ago, Mr. Crisp, that I don’t envy you your position. I know how hard it is. I know what it is to be bought. That sounds, I know, like a resounding backhanded slap. It is, and it isn’t. It just is. That’s the way most of us live.

Anyway, I’m done for the week, and we have fun stuff to do, and dammit it, if it keeps on being fun, we’ll just keep right on doing it through Monday … Tuesday …. here’s something I didn’t realize when I was employed. We don’t need to work so long and hard as we do. That too is a control mechanism. Too much free time is not a good thing for the servant of wealth …

My final thought on passage into yet more delightful freedom:

By the way, if there is such a thing as karma, now would be the time.

Shhh! We went to a Mormon baptism yesterday, and then later we had dinner with the parents, and my wife mentioned that she was taking a history class at the local college, and the father of the young boy that was baptized into the Mormon faith (he’s 8, and it was his “choice”) said that he thought she was probably being indoctrinated.

Shhhhh!

Glenn Greenwald offers up a well-linked piece to an action that ought to set all party Democrats back on their heels – the Senate’s passage by voice vote of extension of key provisions of the Patriot Act. There was no debate, no threatened filibuster, no nonsense. They just got it done.

Contrast this with a list put out by Nancy Pelosi’s office” 290 pieces of legislation passed by the House that have stalled in the Senate. The reason? The filibuster rule, intransigence, and, of course, the blah blah blah.

The paralysis is indeed institutional in nature, but the key institution is not the House or Senate. (The House appears to be functioning quite well, but don’t be fooled – they have ease of action knowing that most of what they do does not matter). The key institution is The Party, our lone political party, the essential feature of our “democratic” society, and the fact that it is financed by one source, corporate America. We have two nominal parties, but when called upon to do anything of importance for the general public, such as regulation of Wall Street and banks or repair of our health care system, they are lost in procedural constipation. When called up to re-up one of the most totalitarian laws since Alien and Sedition, a simple voice vote gets it done.

As Casey Stengel would say, “Amazin.'”

When the Republican wing of The Party holds power, there is no talk of bipartisanship, and filibusters rarely happen. Legislation is rammed through – dammit, they just somehow find a way. When Democrats take power, the wheels grind to a halt. Nothing can be done, they tell us. The votes just aren’t there. (They really aren’t – that is, there are not enough progressives or liberals in the Democrat Party to pass an even mildly aggressive agenda.) The leadership of the Democratic Party (starting at the very top), and the punditry, cry out for bipartisanship. As Greenwald notes, some of the worst and most damaging legislation of the past decades was done on a bipartisan basis. When The Party wants to stick it to us, its two wings agree and move forward.

When something of importance is on the agenda, like health care, The Party splits into two factions, and nothing gets done. And we then get frustrated, and to vent our frustration, we replace one branch of The Party with the other branch of The Party. And we get screwed that way too.

As should be a commonplace, there is essentially one political party, the business party, and two factions. Shifting coalitions of investors account for a large part of political history. Unions or other popular organizations that might offer a way for the general public to play some role in developing programs and influencing policy choices scarcely function. The ideological system is bounded by the consensus of the privileged. In congressional elections, virtually all incumbents are returned to office. There is scarcely a pretense that substantive issues arise in presidential campaigns. Articulated programs are hardly more than a device to garner votes, and it is considered quite natural for candidates to adjust messages to audiences as public relations tacticians advise, another reflection of the vacuity of the political system and the cynicism of those who participate in it. Political commentators ponder such questions as whether Obama is too dependent on his teleprompter, or whether McCain looks too angry, or whether Obama can duck the slime flung at him by speech writers and pundits of the right wing. In the 2008 elections, the two factions virtually exchanged traditional stands, the Democrats presenting themselves as the party of Keynesian growth and state intervention in the economy, the Republicans as the advocates of fiscal conservatism; few even noticed. Half the population does not bother to push the levers, and those who take the trouble often consciously vote against their own interest.

Those are actually words taken from a letter by Noam Chomsky to a now-defunct publication, Lies of Our Times. The letter was dated December 30, 1990. These are not unusual times we live in. Here’s what he actually wrote, picking up where the names of the actors are used:

…Political commentators ponder such questions as whether Reagan will remember his lines, or whether Mondale looks too gloomy, or whether Dukakis can duck the slime flung at him by George Bush’s speech writers. In the 1984 elections, the two factions virtually exchanged traditional stands, the Republicans presenting themselves as the party of Keynesian growth and state intervention in the economy, the Democrats as the advocates of fiscal conservatism; few even noticed. Half the population does not bother to push the levers, and those who take the trouble often consciously vote against their own interest.

Our choices? Join The Party, and enjoy the stage presentation, or leave The Party, and be marginalized.

I had an interesting exchange below which has nagged at me. In the post, I noted that American scientists had studied the possibilities for weaponizing the Ebola virus, but that doing so only meant that if such a weapon could be developed, it would be the U.S. using it. It could be no other way.

Further, I offfered the following hypothetical:

Imagine the following passage from a book written, say, in 1943:

“The splitting of an atom can release massive amounts of energy, and can be potentially deadly. American scientists at White Sands, New Mexico, have tried to see if there is a way Nazi scientists would be able to come up with a way to make a bomb capable of destroying entire cities.”

In the exchange that followed, a commenter said

To our great detriment, nuclear weapons _are_ feasible and therefor, inevitable. I’m very glad the Nazis did not succeed.

Evil exists. We can’t wish it away.

I suppose that we are all glad that the Nazis did not succeed. Who knows -might they have done something crazy, like incinerate two cities?

President Obama today makes a stop in Denver – this is unusual. He is doing a Big Foot in the Democratic primary on behalf of appointed Senator Michael Bennet over State Representative Andrew Romanoff.

Bennet is a former investment manager for the Anschutz Investment Corporation. (Philip Anschutz made his fortune in oil). He was a Rahm Emanuel-inspired appointment, and has distinguished himself in the senate with the speed at which he filled his campaign coffers with Wall Street and health insurance money. He replaced Senator Ken Salazar, who was elevated to Secretary of the Interior by Obama.

Romanoff is campaigning for a public option and elimination of the antitrust exemption for the health insurance industry. Bennet strongly supports some things, and is passionate about other things. But he is realistic about what can be accomplished, and doesn’t really expect to do much if elected except to be a really good senator. At a debate last night in Auroria, he expressed a wish that they not debate, telling Romanoff that he loved him.

It’s really odd for a Democratic president to weigh in heavy in a state primary, but given Romanoff’s seeming liberal credentials, I suppose it is to be expected.

In other news, Obama has appointed former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles to head his new commission on the Deficit. Bowles is an investment banker by trade. This is the “left” side of this balanced bipartisan commission. The “right” side, as usual, will be occupied by a true right winger, Alan Simpson, former Wyoming Senator.

This is America, where the right is right, and the left is right too, and everyone else is marginalized. But Alan Simpson is a good man, an honest man, a smart man, a witty man – at least there will be some entertainment as the commission studiously concludes that the fiscal problems in our land are the result of Social Security and Medicare. This commission will report to the president after the 2010 election, and there will be thereafter yet another attack on Social Security.

It’s scary, however, as when Democrats attack Social Security, the chances of success are better. It’s called “triangulation.”

Two stories are being used to control perceptions today, one of them even somewhat spontaneous.

1. Capture of Taliban #2 man: If anyone reading this has ever heard of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar before today, do speak up. In television drama, this is known as “moving the story forward.” Afghanistan is a murky place, and we’ve never really given a good demon to focus our hatred on. But somehow we have to be ushered along, rooting for our team as they seek to defeat the villains.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is just some dude, and he cannot possibly lead to the capture of Osama, unless it is a fake Osama, as Osama probably died in 2003 shortly after he denied any involvement in 9/11.

There are military objectives in Afghanistan, and somehow it became an emergent situation in 2008 after it became apparent that patriotic resistance in Iraq had been beaten down. Whatever is going on over there, public opinion is being managed right now, and the occasional capture of the “number two” man is part it. Move that story forward.

Evan Bayh, presidential timbre, steps down. In case no one notices, Evan Bayh probably was facing a tough reelection battle, as he is a conservadem, a right winger, part of the cadre of Democrats who led the party down the conciliatory path that will lead to a well-earned disaster at the polls this year. A good thing.

His wife, Susan, has been politely called a “boardwalker”, serving on the board of numerous health care companies, including Wellpoint, since his election, and making boatloads of money. Bayh is compromised in total, useless now if ever of any use before.

So why is he being touted as a potential presidential candidate? Right wing democrats have automatic credentials.

So here’s how the read the story – he’s going down due to lack of popular support even though he has tons of money behind him. He’ll be resurrected at some point. Loser Republicans usually turn up at Heritage or American Enterprise. Bayh will most likely turn up at Wellpoint.

Susan Bayh may be out of work now, if she ever worked at all.

Footnote: According to John Amato, Bayh’s primary lead in Indiana was “insurmountable”, so he was not to be undone by a Democratic challenge. Perhaps it is the quandary that Harry Truman described, that given a choice between a Democrat who acts like a Republican, and a real Republican, voters will take the real thing every time.