Otis Redding at Monterey, 1967

January 21 is the King Holiday, a day set aside to honor the memory of Martin Luther King and all for which he lived, worked and was killed. His mission and focus was the plight of black Americans, but no one who listens to that timeless speech can argue that he was not speaking only about them and their issues, but everyone "everywhere and at all times" struggling with the pain that comes from loving...whether it be romantic love, which is how we most carelessly use the word, or love in a more cerebral sense.

We may not have enough different ways to speak of love as the Greeks did, but we are smart enough to know what is being said when we talk about love of baseball or country or music or anything else. We understand that people give their lives for love of country but consider it foolish to suggest dying for the love of baseball. We know the difference.

Love of enemies, as commanded by Jesus, pushes the notion to the limit. But it is exactly that kind of extreme, irrational, mystifying love to which He referred, and in a sense it is the same challenge we face any time we confront those with whom we disagree. Loving an opponent (we like to use the word respect because the word love seems so inappropriate when fighting an opponent) then becomes man's greatest and toughest Divine commands. Take away all the smoke and love is at the heart of the matter.

I put together what follows last June when NPR aired a forty-year anniversary remembrance of the Monterrey Jazz Festival. No one alive at that time can forget what happened in the Sixties, even those who now, forty years later, disagree about what it meant and which "side" was right or wrong. Just the mention of some events still triggers arguments.

Along with a couple of other older posts, I am reposting my comments with one addition, a YouTube snip of Otis Redding which I did not find at the time. Maybe one day I will go back an clean up all this messy blogging to make it more digestible, but in the meantime here it is, like an old magazine clipping. Take from it what you will.

§§§§§

Radio blogging here...

If you do nothing else today, go to NPR, directly to the Otis Redding clip.
You will find it two links above Janis Joplin's picture.
It's four minutes long. If that does nothing for you, move on to something else.

But those of us who hear the moment will always get chills whenever we listen.

The festival also exposed soul great Otis Redding to a new, primarily white audience, whom he called "the love crowd," Phillips says.

"A whole new audience opened up to him," she says.

Redding was killed in a plane crash just months after that performance. A few, short years later, Hendrix and Joplin died within weeks of each other. Their performances at the Monterey Festival have become part of music legend.

The interplay of life and music has always been around, but I think the Sixties took the juxtaposition to a new level. Musical traditions at that time into blended into a hybrid that has no historic equal. Folk music, Blues, Gospel, and popular dance music intersected with mass production and broadcasting of records. Add to this trend politics, substance abuse and contraception. Mix in an awareness of global realities combined with death from drugs, assassination, auto and plane crashes resulting in a spate of ersatz martyrs and you have the makings of an "era." Electric amplification made volume levels unimaginable, and acoustic instruments either got closer to the microphone or went electric altogether.

Human bodies, minds and voices pushed to maximum endurance levels and many didn't recover. Those that did often bore bruises and scar tissue marking their past. Willie Nelson is only a few years past seventy, but he had the look of someone with a lot of mileage soon after the Sixties. He is one of the beloved survivors. So is Arlo Guthrie who turns sixty next month and seems to have escaped the genetic condition that took out his father, Woody "This Land is Your Land" Guthrie.

Readers with another fifteen minutes to spare might enjoy listening to a Terry Gross interview of Brian Wilson, the creative force behind The Beach Boys. His music is in a genre of its own but in many ways he is an archetype of the Sixties. The interview was memorable for me. It was aired about a year after 9/11 when I was coming to terms with a good many changes in my own life.

Hate and it's children

This morning's post by The Anchoress is one of those treasures worth keeping, found on the shore of the ocean we call the blogworld. I'll get to that in a moment, but first I want to address a question someone asked me a few days ago.

I told one of my children who does graphic design work that for Christmas I wanted some cards, like business cards, that I could give to people I meet identifying my blog. A blog card, if you will, instead of a business card. She came up with a layout of ten to be printed on photo paper that I chop up into cards. I gave one to someone who asked what made me start blogging and I realized I didn't have an answer. Not a good one, anyway.

In the beginning there was a fantasy about becoming well-known as a sage or thinker, someone whose insights and opinions would be sought by those seeking clever or wise commentary about matters large and small. I admired the wit of James Lileks, sharp insights of Michelle Malkin, over-the-top excesses of Rachel Lucas, timely scoops from Matt Drudge, and catholic attention to the whole universe by Glenn Reynolds. I knew that Steven Den Beste and Bill Whittle were writing long pieces that were atypical of blogs generally, but even they had respectable followings. I could tell by the comment threads how people were perceived. This was before the TTLB ecosystem emerged as a gold standard for traffic and links. All I knew was that the ocean was out there and the water looked fine, so in I jumped.

I realized as time passed that the sites that had excited me most shared a common political undercurrent I had not noticed at first. I saw myself as a veteran of the Civil Rights movement, a child of the Sixties whose anti-war predilections led me to change my draft status to conscientious objector, later to be drafted as such to serve two years as an Army medic. Yet here I was, twenty or thirty years later, having gone into the world of business, serving as a manager and boss, attracted to the Conservative wing of political writing like an ant to sugar. Like Freddy said to Eliza, "It's the new small talk...you do it so awfully well!" I didn't particularly appreciate the content, but the form was truly wonderful.

Oh, there were places from what can be called "the Left" that also were pumping out stuff. But they were the lunatic fringe, you know...conspiracy theorists, astrologers, practitioners of exotic (typically Asian) alien philosophies, Marxists (who never tire of endless fountains of words, words, words) and other cranks who were hard to peg. Pejorative use of the word "moonbat" came about quite naturally because those of us from the nether edge of the political spectrum do tend to be poorly coordinated, less focused on practical details and more taken with crazy dreams. (Two of my favorite lines are Will Rogers' I'm not a member of any organized political party...I'm a Democrat and Ambrose Bierce's definition of a "Conservative" as One enamoured with prevailing evils as opposed to a Liberal who wished to replace them with new ones.)

Pajamas Media represents the Right perfectly, creases pressed and colors coordinated, small points of discussion notwithstanding. That venerable assembly preceded Netroots by a few years, but that latter-day rag-tag outfit with all its profanity and outrage, emerged as the Left's reply to Pajamas. I have watched helplessly as the aftermath of 9/11 and a knee-jerk reaction have polarized national politics to the point that I no longer identify easily with either pole. When I started blogging I felt comfortable with a messy but principled Left, such as it was, but I have been embarrassed by extremes from that side. Excoriating the name of General Petraeus and failing to recognize positive efforts by the president to bring about meaningful immigration reform come to mind (not to mention uncoupling health insurance from employment, an idea which has great practical appeal to me but which no one is speaking about openly...though it is an idea specifically from the White House).

Anyway, getting to what The Anchoress said, she opens by describing an important difference between what I call partisan hate and personal hate. Partisan hate is rather generic, enabling the hater to close ranks with others of like persuasion in a feeling of power or solidarity. Personal hate, on the other hand, tends to be individual, more inner-directed and as a result more corrosive to one's character and temperament than an outburst at a rally or surge of excitement seeing one's letter to the editor in print. Personal hate is like tinnitus, always ringing or buzzing in your head, never going away. Sometimes, even in your sleep, grinding teeth and nightmares nurture the poison, leaving a kind of mental pus staining the rest of life, dampening happiness and excitement into dull tolerance.

That is the end of Part One of my thinking this morning.

In order to fully appreciate the pain and suffering that grows from what I have termed Personal Hate, go there now and read this woman's incredible confession, self-examination, and journey toward absolution. She is articulate to the point of tears. Her description of personal hate and how her family members, the angels that God has given her to let her know He loves her, lead her out of her darkness into the light that only comes from faith.

What upset me more than anything is that for the first time in my life, I was actively hating someone. I’ve never hated anyone - not even people who have done me physical and spiritual harm. But I was hating this fellow. And hating him even more for “making me” hate him.


Which, of course, he could not do. No one can “make” you hate; I simply allowed hate in; I welcomed it in, gave it an honored chair and fed it. And fed it. And it was incredibly destructive and oppressive - to me, mostly - but it did nothing good for anyone who had to be around me if the subject had my head. My whole family, and a few friends, have had to endure watching me give myself over to this resentment, allowing it to have its way with me, and to own me, body and soul.

I'll wait here while you read the rest. She tells her story better than any excerpt can capture.

§§§§§

For Part Two I want to redirect the reader's attention to what I have called Partisan Hate. Partisan hate is imporantly different from personal hate. Partisan hate derives from groups more than individuals, although individuals plant the seeds and nurture its growth. What impulse attracts others to this or that category of hate is not clear. The reasons are probably as diverse as the numbers attracted. My instinct is that partisan hate may be an outgrowth of personal hate, but I don't want that laid on me. MY partisan hate is not as bad as YOURS, of course, so we know there are exceptions to such a rule.

I don't want to run down that road too far because it will have us all running in circles. What I want to point to is a partisan argument now developing over the use of the word "fascism." Individuals are involved in the discussion, so I want to be clear here: my aim is not to "disrespect" (I think that's the right modern usage of that neologism) any person, but to point to an idea or trend with which I find problems.


With September 11, 2001 now six years past, we divide contemporary history into Pre- and Post-9/11 eras. Thanks to what seems to have been a carefully-orchestrated narrative America's response to that event has had two misleading concepts at the core. The first is that there is no significant difference between Muslim extremists and Muslims as a population. The second is that the attack on the World Trade Center was an act of war, not just an act of terrorism.

Recently a voice of reason in Britain finally pointed to the naked king, stating the obvious:

The Director of Public Prosecutions said: 'We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language."


London is not a battlefield, he said.


"The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers," Macdonald said. "They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way."


His remarks signal a change in emphasis across Whitehall, where the "war on terror" language has officially been ditched.

This important moment has gone unnoticed both there and here but a few people have taken note and perhaps one day in the future, when more reflective than reflexive observers are doing an analysis of the post-9/11 era that moment will find "new" meaning.

Regarding the other misleading idea, that there is little or no difference between Muslim extremists and Muslims as a population, it was plain to me from the start that there was a serious disconnect between the Muslim faith and terrorism. Having worked with a few people who were Muslim, both devout and nominal, I had and continue to have a clear impression of them standing in sharp relief to the images being fashioned and fed to Americans for popular consumption.

Helplessly I watched as preparations for the invasion of Iraq got underway. I had mixed feelings about what was being advanced as a "preemptive" invasion, and along with everyone else I gave credibility to the "threat"scenario. Once the war was underway, matters got out of control and there was little that anyone could do to bring about coitus interruptus in an international violent rape.

In the aftermath we see that General Petraeus and his insights should have been involved from the start, but you know what they say about hindsight...

Underscoring my instincts, I heard General Sir Michael Rose say in an interview last night that "by invading Iraq, of course we were going to make it almost impossible for the West to be able to mobilize the very people we need to help us fight Al Qaeda and that are the Muslim people of the world."

Which leads me to a neologism that has bothered me ever since I first heard it: Islamofascist. I'm not sure where the term originated, but I don't think it came from any confessing Muslim. Since no one wants to be associated with fascism (even those who are by definition fascists, I believe) it becomes a perfect label to attach to any group or individual one wants to discredit. Since the end of World War II the word fascism has the same stench to the children of the Allies that terms like Commie and fellow-traveler had in the Fifties or Nigger-lover had in the deep South about the same time. In fact, the term fascist is worse. I know people not ashamed to have been associated with the idealistic Communists of the past. And I, myself am satisfied -- no, honored, to be called Nigger-lover.

But that word fascist is another matter. I haven't met anyone who wants to own that designation, just as I have yet to meet anyone (or hear of anyone) pleased to be called Islamofascist.

All of which gets me to the point of this post.

The book Liberal Fascism and it's cute logo, a happy face with a Hitler-type mustache, is emerging, thanks to its provenance, from the mire of pulp slime trolling to the status of acceptable commentary. If a less well-known writer had produced this book it would not have attracted as much attention. It certainly would not have been viewed with as much respectability. But we are living in a time when the Ron Pauls of the world can go tromping across the national carpet with muddy boots and get away with it because what they say scratches a national itch that just keeps getting worse.


I saw the logo before I saw reference to the book. I dismissed it as so much sillyness. Then I saw it was a book, but I didn't pay much attention. We who openly call ourselves Liberal are accustomed these days to all kinds of personal invective. Then I noticed David Niewert's remarks followed by Jonah Goldberg on C-SPAN talking about his book. That got my attention. I see now that a heated argument is underway among pundits, historians and other experts regarding the pros and cons of Goldberg's book.

It's not hard to discern which side of this discussion is which.

I'm not enough of a scholar to say comment about the derivation of the word fascism. Moreover, I'm not interested in doing the homework when people like David Niewert are on duty. (Someone in the comment thread even linked to a critical review by Michael Ledeen.)

But I am smart enough to know it is an execrable insult to anyone to be called a fascist. There is an old saying in the South that even a dog knows when he's been kicked. There's a difference between being kicked and being tripped over. And I, as a self-identified Liberal, feel kicked and it really pisses me off. I'm not to the point of personal hate as referenced above, but it is fair to say that in the same way that The Anchoress draws the line between partisan hate and personal hate, I have to say I am full in the glow of partisan hate, resentment and insult.

This rant is as far as I will allow myself to go. But the issue has been stuck in my craw ever since I became aware and I had to get it out so I can move on with my blogging.

The Voice of Chesterton

Another You Tube treasure...or should I say, another treasure ensconced at You Tube.

Killing the Buddha, R.I.P.

A durable root of faith has now become a stump. The living branches have been chopped off and all that remains is an archive. It preceded blogging. It offered a place for those on the margins of faith to explore whatever semblance of faith survived in their materially encrusted lives. It was a place of refuge for those crippled or smothered by overexposure to logic and science, political correctness, blind fundamentalisms of all stripes, and rational thought. After all, faith is, in Twain's words, believing what you know ain't so.

Seven years. That’s how long it's been since

KillingTheBuddha.com began. Seven! That’s 63 in Web years.

When KtB was born, there were no blogs; Salon was big news; the guy who started Facebook was in junior high.

Old enough to know better, young enough to find something else to do, we who have been here since the first day have moved on to writing books, having babies, and publishing in magazines that use actual paper. Much as we wish we could keep KtB going, there’s just no more time.

It has been great fun making this site happen. Many thanks to all who rode along with us. If there’s something we’ve published that you can’t live without, have no fear: We’ll leave the archive up until the internets fall down.

Sleep well, ya'll.

Jeff Sharlet remains on my blogroll. He's on my list of the best journalists working today.

Lebanon Video "It's About Time"

I linked this video last year but didn't embed it. The post in which it was only a footnote came up this morning in the stats. I watched it again and found it very moving.
Those with a taste for the complexity of international relations can drill into the other links. Others can get a small taste here of the hopes and dreams of Lebanon's Cedar Revolution which is still in progress.
This is a Google Video, not You Tube, so if you have trouble reading the subtitles go to Google Video where you can click "full screen" to get theatre effect.


A political documentary covering 30 years of war and post war in Lebanon. It highlights the real mistakes by the lebanese people throughout the Syrian and Israeli occupations. Different formats are used. War footage, drama and graphics. 14 minutes.

Sullivan on Clinton

Andrew Sullivan snips...

If you want yet another president who cannot say he or she made a mistake, who can never cop to errors, and who uses everything as a political tool against his or her opponents, you have your candidate. And she is ready on Day One. LINK

Bill Clinton is campaigning for himself as well right now, his own future power. He'll be in a Clinton White House, ready from Day One. And if they get there for a third term, the marital psychodrama they inflicted on us for eight long years will be with us once again. LINK

And from a reader...

I am voting for Obama. He may not have Hillary's experience, but he also does not have her constitutional inability to be honest, and for that I am thankful. LINK

So much political trash talking this morning. I feel like a kid in a candy store. I'd rather read than post.
Sorry, folks.
Like they say on the Cheez-Its, "Get your own box" .

This morning's best video...

Who is Wayne Dumond?

If you've never heard of him you haven't been doing your homework. This is an election year and Wayne Dumond, who died a few years ago, is part of a background story that at least one candidate would like to go away.

It's a slimy, tawdry mess and I'm not getting involved other than making mention. Both political parties have dirt so this doesn't have to be a partisan issue. Those with an appetite for skeletons can go here.
...
and here
...
and here
...............................................I'm done.

When Your Cell Phone Dies...

The Story of Stuff has infected my mind. A piece in today's NY Times, The Afterlife of Cellphones, looks at what happens when cell phones are tossed out. As I write, the article is printing out to be read later. (I like to copy/paste to a two-column page in 12-point type for easy reading later. This item runs to nine pages.)

The metals exit the smelter’s base as a glowing sludge. It streams into another caldron the height of a house. From there, it moves into tanks of acid. The acid is electrocuted. As electricity flows through the mixture, copper accumulates on the tank’s end plate. I watched a giant claw move across the ceiling, rip out the plate and, with a violent whack, cleave off a gleaming layer of 99.9 percent pure copper, with the unmistakable sheen of a new penny. It was thrilling to see something so clean and recognizable emerge from such an alien process.

After explaining the final stages, Thierry Van Kerckhoven, Umicore’s e-scrap manager, handed me another of the end products from this process: a one-kilogram bar of gold. It felt the way I thought it would, based on what you see in the movies: substantial, mesmerizing. It was worth about $24,000. “This gold is recycled gold,” Kerckhoven said. “This gold is green gold.”

Battle of the Sexists (Updated)

Sunday:

That didn't take long. I put this post together yesterday and this morning the Times hits the same theme. Compare and contrast what follows with Rights vs. Rights: An Improbable Collision Course. My observations are not so marginal after all.

Women rallied to Mrs. Clinton in New Hampshire — 57 percent — after what many perceived as an unfair piling on by Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards in a debate on Saturday. (Mr. Obama was tagged as being dismissive and patronizing after he told Mrs. Clinton she was “likable enough.”) In post-election surveys, many women said they were both heartened by Mrs. Clinton’s choked-up response to a voter’s question on Monday, and incensed by the ridicule she endured in its aftermath.

Likewise, many blacks took offense to a remark Mrs. Clinton made in an interview with Fox News that struck some as dismissive of the contributions of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ...

To many, the comments echoed a building tone of disrespect that Mrs. Clinton had been expressing toward Mr. Obama — pooh-poohing his commitment to change as merely “hoping for it,” implying that her fellow United States senator was all talk. Bill Clinton took things even further, ranting against the media for not challenging the “fairy tale” that he said Mr. Obama’s rise was predicated on. (He was referring specifically to the perception that Mr. Obama was totally pure in his opposition to the Iraq war.)

§§§§§

Saturday (yesterday early morning):

It was bound to happen. Hillary Clinton's run to become president is having the same effect for women that sit-ins did for blacks in the Sixties. Last week's tears were the last straw. Everywhere I look now I find writers weighing in on the insulting manner that women are treated and spoken about simply because of gender.

Sara Robinson's case study of Chris Matthews, inspired by a Media Matters collection of his nappy-headed-ho moments, is a devastating examination of his degrading treatment of women as a group during his career. She wants him fired.

MSNBC needs to hear, loud and clear, that this is not charming, nor attractive, nor even acceptable in this day and age. (Even FOX News won't go this low -- Bill O'Reilly's on the record saying that Matthews' recent comment on Hillary's success being a result of Bill's cheating was an unacceptable attack. When BOR takes you to the woodshed on on-air propriety, you know the bottom is well in sight. Looming ahead: diplomacy lessons from Michael Savage.) A new generation of women is rising to power in this country; and if Matthews is too ossified in his sexism to get with the program (and, at 62, if he hasn't gotten over it now, let's not hold our collective breath), then he needs to give up his seat in front of the camera to someone who doesn't think that strong women are "scary" and the men who admire them are "castrated."

She's on to something. Hillary Clinton is a lightening rod. Like a black face in a previously all-white restaurant, she has all kinds of people talking about sexism, whether or not they call it that. Like it or not, when the subject of gender enters a political discussion those who introduce the subject are either feminists or a sexists, depending on their point of view. Feminists argues that being female is positive. Sexists argue that being female is negative.

I heard Neal Boortz try to sanitize his sexist position yesterday by arguing that women by their very "nature" prefer safety and security over freedom, suggesting that women are not fit to be leaders by their very nature. And that women would vote for Hillary Clinton in great numbers, not because she would be a good leader, but because she appeals to their sense of safety and security. Of course he doesn't want to hear any of this "not ALL women" nonsense. That would open a rhetorical door that has to remain closed for his position to pass without criticism. The language of sexism is every bit as nuanced as that of bigotry. (Oh, yes...this particular talk-show host also draws a meticulous line between racism and bigotry. He's neither, don't you know. But he wants you to understand the difference.)

As I read Mrs. Robinson's post I recalled another blogger's comment I came across yesterday in response to Maureen Dowd's sexist column in the NY Times the other day.

Noted hysteric female unwed childless columnist MoDo Maureen "Dowdy" Dowd of the "who,-me-sexist?" New York Times has really got her panties in a twist!

I mean, looky here: is this uppity old broad riding the cotton pony, or whut?

CAN HILLARY CRY HER WAY BACK TO THE WHITE HOUSE?

She's being SUCH a bitch! She's so totally playing the bitch card at Hillary!

Big-time bitch-slapping MoDo, you will recall, is an unmarried woman.

She engages in spin. Why, some might call her a -- spinster.

Plus -- shrieky MoDo is unmarried to Bill Clinton. Who probably, also, never made a pass at her. Having made passes at, we are told, every female who ever lived and then some.

Now that must hurt.

It could really make one hold a bigtime Clinton grudge.

Plus -- unmarried Maureen, who's probably always been a little ambitious for a girl, maybe a little shrill, a little pushy, a little masculine, a little oh, steely-eyed, therefore maybe, questionably, you know, dykey, a little loud, a little angry, way bitchy, moody, puffy, unstable, emotional, and certainly getting a little long in the tooth, a little wrinkly -- Maureen Down probably has noticed that it is Hillary Clinton, not she, who is the one who's running for President of the United States.

That must sting, deep down inside.

So, you know, Maureen, keep it real, and do let your petty jealousy and untrammeled sexism fly forth freely.

Cry about it.

(Or have you noticed -- ouch -- that no one is interested in your tears?)

I guess that's what can be called fighting fire with fire. It, and a torrent of other responses to the column, illustrate the level of passion the subject is raising.

This could be the election that surprises everyone when the dust settles. It is definitely the most multi-faceted in the last thirty-two years. Not since Watergate and Richard Nixon's resignation has national politics been as suspenseful. Both parties are picking from the most eclectic slates we have seen in a long time and Michael Bloomberg might open a third-party effort which will take votes from both major parties...depending on who is chosen.

I'm not holding my breath, but I would like to hear Bloomberg say something to indicate on which side of the gender debate he falls. Is he sexist or feminist?

Want to freshen up your feminist consciousness? Go read Echidne.

I'm in a bad mood and the viper-tongue is out. Which means that what you will ultimately read is a many-times-revised euphemism of what I originally wrote.

But I shouldn't be in a bad mood! The New York Times, the place where David Brooks and Maureen Dowd are nestled while scribbling missives about that contemptible sex, women (can smart women get laid?, can female eyeballs actually see?), has a piece on sexism today! Snoopy-dance time. Make it a stripping dance if you are a woman, because otherwise you are a tight-ass and no fun to be around. Then go and read the piece. Oh, and get me a coffee while you're at it.

Gawd I sound old-fashioned. We all know that this is the era of post-feminism. Sexism is dead and buried, all women have completely equal rights in everything and more than equal rights in some fields. It's mostly men who are oppressed, these days, and the oppressors are the feminazis. To say anything else means identity politics, and identity politics are wrong unless your identity is a white, Christian, heterosexual male. But otherwise they are wrong. And we don't do identity politics on the left anymore.

The mission never ends, does it?

This morning's edition of NPR's Wait! Wait! Don't Tell me...opened -- about three minutes into the show -- with a very ugly satire of Hillary Clinton's moment, a male voice quoting her in falsetto. They were having a high old time hooting and joking about "bad hair days" and Mitt Romney's tears in Michigan...as though it had nothing to do with bashing women.

Great sport, huh? When NPR is that insensitive, the battle for feminist awareness will be uphill.

Let's be clear. This is not about defending Hillary Clinton. There is no doubt in my mind that she is clever enough to know everything there is to know about feminism versus sexism and to use that knowledge in whatever manner will advance her political objectives. Her campaign has not been free of race-baiting or exploitation of religious intolerance...both in one fell swoop in one recent instance. Moral "flexibility" (I'm trying to be nice here) has never been a handicap in politics. And she is capable of playing The Female Card with as much manipulative success as blacks survived Jim Crow racism by shuckin' and jivin'. But that doesn't make it either okay or admirable.

I'm beginning to worry that Democrats are weakening their political strength by internal splits brought about by advancing two important causes, racism and sexism, at the same time.

One final nail in Ron Paul's political coffin

David Niewert's post at Firedoglake, Moral Responsibility, brings the Ron Paul trash into one easy to access pile for all to read. I'm tired of hearing it in the background, although he has made a couple of good hits. Hopefully this will be my final post about Dr. Paul.

Well, we have two choices here:

-- Paul allowed racists and homophobes to publish material under his name for over a decade and did nothing about it until called on it, at which point he in fact denied any responsibility for its publication (his response at the time: "I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren't really written by me. It wasn't my language at all."); or

-- Paul is lying, and these newsletters really do reflect his longtime views.

Either choice, as it happens, should disqualify the man from the presidency.

Niewert's workmanlike journalism sets a gold standard. His site is one place on my blogroll I seldom skip. Someone has to keep an eye on the crazies and he does so with the efficiency of a forensic specialist.

Which candidate matches your views best?

Yep. About what I thought...

83% Dennis Kucinich
82% Mike Gravel
79% Barack Obama
78% Hillary Clinton
77% Bill Richardson
76% Chris Dodd
75% John Edwards
69% Joe Biden
46% Rudy Giuliani
39% John McCain
33% Ron Paul
32% Mike Huckabee
31% Mitt Romney
21% Tom Tancredo
18% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

Totten's Latest

Michael J. Totten has another installment. The article and comments are recommended reading.

They have to be careful when they talk about politics even indirectly. One mid-level officer, whom I shouldn’t name so I won’t get him in trouble, strongly recommended that I read Fiasco by Thomas Ricks. “Especially make sure you read the chapter called How to Create an Insurgency,” he said. “Ricks gets it exactly right in that chapter. But you can’t quote me by name saying that because it’s another way of saying the insurgency is Paul Bremer’s fault. And Bremer outranks me.”

Talking above their pay grade isn’t the only thing the Iraqi Police officer I call Ahmed was concerned with. “The Iraqi Police in this area are considered enemies by some people because we work with the Americans against the insurgents,” he said. “So we don't want our pictures to be shown in any newspapers.”

§§§§§

For all the hatred in the Middle East, there is also forgiveness, and moderation. Where are the moderate Muslims? ask many Americans. I find the question bizarre. I meet them every day in Iraq, and everywhere else in the Middle East, too. The problem is they have a hard time getting attention in newspapers and magazines that wallow in sensationalism.

“What happened before, happened,” said Omar, returning to the discussion of the American invasion with the Iraqi Police. “One mistake was committed, but it's gone. Let's just close it and not keep analyzing the same problem again. According to our analysis, American troops are now here to help Iraq.”

§§§§§

Every mosque in the Fallujah area – and there are more than 200 of them – broadcast pro-American messages from minaret loudspeakers. The messages inside the walls are as pro-American as the ones outside. The Marines have fluent Arabic-speakers listening in so they can keep their ears close to the ground of public opinion. If the mosques turn against Americans again, the Marines need to know.

When Mahmoud says Al Qaeda does not belong to Islam, he is not speaking theologically. I’m afraid Al Qaeda does belong to Islam if you look at it that way. But he is right that Al Qaeda does not belong to Islam as it is currently lived by the people in his community.

Totten's reports stand in sharp relief against the narrative most Americans are hearing. The man comes across as truly non-partisan.

Obama Dropped the Ball

Barack Obama's non-reaction to Hillary Clinton's very public surge of emotion is turning into a political fumble. He missed a chance to be more than "classy" by not looking like a pig. It would have been a good moment to extend a gesture of sympathy to a worthy opponent.

But he missed the chance. Anything he says now will be received as too little, too late. A spontaneous immediate positive response would have been like money in the bank...but he missed it. Too bad. With the New Hampshire primary less than a day away, the timing could not have been worse. It didn't take long for feminists to interpret his silence.

Tom Watson puts it together better than me. Go read his post. I was starting to feel good about Barack Obama. In fact, I still do. But this faux pas was so in-your-face it's hard for me to imagine he missed it. Hell, it doesn't matter if he's a closet pig...but as a political professional sometimes you have to be quicker on the uptake than that. He should have seen this one coming.

Obama has benefited mightily from sexism in this campaign, and has remained silent. And that sexism is starting to be noticed, and commented on - even in places you don't expect it. John Cole, to say the least, is no Hillary Clinton fan but the gender-based attacks have gotten to him:

Quite frankly, I hate to say this, but I think what we are actually seeing is a double-standard here, and the feminists may be right. This is all about Hillary being a woman. John Edwards has been 150 times as angry the whole campaign, and has built his entire campaign around it. Howard Dean was angry, and people lapped it up. Here, Hillary isn’t really angry, just matter-of-fact and frustrated, and people are giving her shit.

I don’t want Hillary as President, but it sure looks to me like she isn’t getting a fair shake and is being subjected to a double standard. It’s bullshit.

If you don't think Obama's non-response hit a nerve, take a look at the comment thread. No one expecting to be called a Democrat can let misogyny pass without mentioning it.

Later, in another post, Tom Watson summarized examples of how pundits exhibit blatant sexism. Chris Matthews illustrates the point well. I love this litle snip from Digby (who has her own collection of offenders):

I wonder if Chris Matthews realizes that every time he or one of his fellow gasbags blithely reveal their sexist lizard brains like this, another little feminist gets her (or his) wings.

Where do my readers come from?

According to the Stat Meter, fewer than half of the last 100 readers of this blog come from the US. In fact, only 38% of inquiries are from America. Look at this:

7.14% Germany
7.14% Australia
5.95% France
5.95% United Kingdom
3.57% Spain
2.38% Egypt
2.38% Israel
2.38% Indonesia
2.38% Denmark
2.38% Netherlands
2.38% Canada
1.19% United Arab Emirates
1.19% Belgium
1.19% Italy
1.19% Romania
1.19% Philippines
1.19% Sweden
1.19% Algeria
1.19% South Africa
1.19% Iran, Islamic Republic Of
1.19% Poland
1.19% Pakistan
1.19% New Caledonia
1.19% New Zealand
1.19% India
1.19% Iceland

These numbers are not typical for my blog. They reflect an incredible interest in one post that I put together over a year ago, What is Barack Obama's religion? Updated

The world is watching what we do here.
I hope we make a good and right decision.

After the Iowa caucus last Friday my traffic spiked to nearly two thousand hits. Upwards of ninety percent were reading that one old post. There was and continues to be a keen interest in that question.

I expected that interest to wane going into New Hampshire, but I was wrong. The numbers as of this writing continue to soar. Yesterday saw over two thousand readers.

There is no way to determine how many like what they find but I think many are surprised to learn that Obama is not only a Christian, but a very sincere one at that. The comments thread reflects a wide range of opinions, including my own. I try hard to keep opinions separated from facts but that is not easy.

Lining up to see and hear Obama

This. Is. Historic.

Mort Reicheck on Language

The following is stolen from The Octogenarian.

One of my pet peeves is the way political reactionaries and the religious right play games with the English language. Terms like "values voters," "pro-life," "pro-family," and "socialized medicine" take on significance as ideological code words. They become major political issues as Republican candidates--particularly those on the extreme right-- compete for support from the party's so-called "base" that twice saddled the nation with George W. Bush. In the process, genuine meanings are lost or badly distorted.

Take "socialized medicine," for example. As I understand what "socialized medicine" really is-- as actually practiced in some foreign countries--doctors are employed directly by the government and citizens cannot choose a doctor or hospital for their medical care.

None of the medical insurance plans proposed by the Democratic Presidential candidates contain such provisions. As I've studied their proposals, the plans would essentially extend the current Medicare system, which now limits coverage to the aged and the disabled, to any citizen willing to pay for the insurance.

Since I became eligible for Medicare in 1989, I have always selected my own doctors and hospitals and have never been forced by the government to seek treatment from a specific physician. For me and millions of other senior citizens, Medicare has been a blessing.

As a World War II veteran, I have on rare occasions used the services of the Veterans Administration. I have received hearing aids, which were available free to qualified veterans. I also occasionally buy prescription drugs from the VA at relatively low cost.

Some critics might describe the VA medical system as "socialized medicine." But it covers only those veterans who want to use it. Some veterans may complain about by the quality and availability of VA services. I am unaware, however, of any ideological complaints about socialized medicine, particularly from veterans too young to qualify for Medicare.

The opposition to extending Medicare coverage to all citizens, as proposed by the Democrats, comes largely from some elements of the medical establishment and from insurance and pharmaceutical industries concerned about the potential impact on profits. Allied with them are social reactionaries who want to reduce the role of government in American private lives.

These zealots, labeling themselves "pro-family" and "pro-life," are hypocrites. (Have you ever known anyone who is "anti-family" or "anti-life"?) Indirectly, the zealots are proposing greater government interference in private lives. They want to restrict both a woman's control over her own body and to limit the rights of homosexuals on matters dealing with taxes, health care, inheritance, and related legal issues. They also contradict their opposition to government interference in private lives by their efforts to promote religious faith as part of the political dialog.

Interestingly, the anti-abortionists appear more concerned with an unborn fetus than with the welfare of born children. I am confident that the vast majority of the Congressmen who supported President Bush's veto of legislation to provide health insurance for children from low-income families also identify themselves as "pro-life" proponents.

Religious and social reactionaries want to ban gay marriage on the grounds that it endangers the sanctity of marriage. My wife and I have been married for nearly 55 years, and we have never felt that our relationship is threatened because gays and lesbians want the same legal and financial privileges that we enjoy. In all candor, I do regard formal same-sex marriage ceremonies as strange events and believe that the rights that homosexuals seek can be provided through more straightforward civil unions. I am enough of a libertarian, however, to recognize that I have no right to object to what they want to do.

I am insulted that so many political pundits describe the so-called pro-lifers and pro-family crusaders as "moral values" voters because of their obsession with what they regard as the sacredness of marriage and the sanctity of life. The implication is that the rest of us are unconcerned with moral issues. But our moral values are linked to the belief that Americans should enjoy personal freedom that does not interfere with the rights of others.

Obama Notes

Traffic to Hootsbuddy's Place spiked within hours of Barack Obama's Iowa win. My post of December, 2006, What is Barack Obama's religion? Updated ,has been amended and updated so often it resembles my poor ten-year-old Toyota pickup. Patched up but still running okay. There were nearly two thousand hits to this blog Thursday and upwards of ninety percent were to that post. I don't know how Google works but I'm pleased that the search terms Obama and religion kick up that post on the first page. Thanks, Google.

On a side note, the proliferation of fake blogs is a growing spam menace. I have my Google search preference set to return fifty items per page instead of the default ten or so. Using the Google search bar I can also selectively search News, Blogs, The Net, Images, Groups, etc.

The blog search feature can also enable searches that select only the last hour, last twelve hours, last day, etc. Using the terms Barack Obama and selecting only the last hour brings up only a dozen or so legitimate hits. If you scan down the list you soon come to the gobbledygook that only comes from computer generated prose aimed at fooling other computers. It's not yet clever enough to fool even a stupid human being, but I'm sure that day will come. Meantime get a load of these...

"Well, alex d linz filmography ku klux klan today sake here bill cowher falcons 'Gene senator barack obama nfc playoffs american gladiators zap todd collins washington redskins the bed-plate, and punic wars soldier hines ward nfl ...

She had been made. mrs doubtfire quotes the field rob dyrdek house a barack obama age innocent high jasmine tame rocco dispirito recipes the green turtle restaurant will kate snow bio democratic nominees republicans gma breaking news ...

Strother kate snow rob dyrdek dc shoes this you tube funny videos was rob amp; big season 3 middlin' fernley jobs detroit pistons myspace layouts etonline newslink too barack obama cattle-bars, abc debates jeffrey chodorow free agent ...

Suppose mobile phones gutter topper the sasquatch gang jacksonville fl matt hasselbeck abc debate amit goswami amnesty usa ama supercross to detroit pistons 2007 2008 schedule swimming slowly barack obama age campaign rhythmically ...

This is the new pornography. The difference is that no one can get off looking at it. What a mess. I'm sure someone at Google is working on it. This is the toxic waste of cyberspace.

Back to Obama...

Andrew Sullivan had a hunch last year that Barack Obama was gonna amount to something, so he started collecting his speeches. His post In His Own Words has links to more Obamaspeak than anyone has time to read. Scanning the links, I am struck by the measured tones and consistency of what I find.

Around a year ago, when I was first struck by Barack Obama's oratory, I decided to use the Dish to record his speeches in full as they occurred. I did it because they are rare among contemporary political speeches in being readable and literary. But also because I had the sense I was witnessing history. Here are some links to those posts - and the full text of various speeches - for those of you who would like to hear Obama in less frenzied times over the last twelve months, as he laid out his concrete proposals and general ideas and approach to politics.

Here he is at DePaul, the moment when he reignited his fall campaign. And here's his address at Howard in the wake of the Jena 6 controversy. Here's a commencement address from last summer. Here he is on foreign policy. And here on poverty. There is a meme beginning to go around that he is vague and empty. If you do not know what Obama is proposing in many areas, it's only because you don't know how to use Google. If you want to know more, click the links.

It didn't take me long to find an interesting clip. Here is a part of the Howard University speech following the Jena Six episode in which he candidly agrees with President Bush about something important.

I think its time we took a hard look at the wisdom of locking up some first time nonviolent drug users for decades. Someone once said, and I quote: 'While minimum sentences for first-time users may not be the best way to occupy jail space, and/or heal people from their disease.' You know who said that? That was George W. Bush--six years ago. And I don't say this very often, but I agree with George W. Bush. The difference is that he hasn't done anything about it. When I am President of the United States, I will. We will review these sentences to see where we can be smarter on crime and reduce the blind and counterproductive warehousing of nonviolent offenders. We will give first-time nonviolent drug offenders a chance to serve their sentence where appropriate, in the type of drug rehab programs that have proven to work better than a prison term in changing bad behavior and reducing recidivism. So let's reform the system. Let's do what's smart. Let's do what's just.

No observer of politics needs to be reminded that there is a great gap between what someone says and what they are able to do. Ask George Bush how far he got with this reference. Or his immigration reform package. Or uncoupling health insurance from employment. Ask Bill Clinton how far he got standing up for gays in the military. That was one of the first initiatives of his first-term administration and he got shot down. Badly shot down. That don't ask, don't tell foolishness has to be one of history's silliest political compromises, but it's all that Clinton could get.

But political realities notwithstanding, we can see where someone stands in principle by hearing what he aims to do. Whether or not he is able to accomplish that goal is a very different subject. Building the political will is the critical first step, and keeping that will alive until the job is done is as important as birthing it.

There is no way to predict how successful anyone will be. Too many unknowns. The best we can do is put someone in office and hope...
Wait...did I say HOPE?

Where have we heard that word before?

What is Barack Obama's religion? Updated

Welcome, readers. This post was published in December 2006 and has become the most frequently read entry for this blog. As the election gets closer and Barack Obama's place in the competition continues to hold strong, traffic here from search engines swells accordingly. According to Sitemeter, at this writing forty percent of all my traffic is linking here.

Update: January 4, 2007, Obama comes out on top in Iowa. Traffic here is up ten-fold this morning. Mr. Obama has got a lot of attention. Thanks for visiting. You are invited to read another older post I put together last May, Barack Obama on Reinhold Niebuhr

Curiosity about Obama's religion is clearly on the minds of a lot of voters. This is not surprising in light of the number of malicious and misleading stories that remain current about the subject. As late as two months ago a Fox News (you know, the "We report, you decide" people) was deep into the guilt-by-association game with a piece aimed at staining Obama's reputation and that of the head pastor of his black Chicago United Church of Christ with one of their "some critics say" obliquely negative pieces. Read and decide for yourself, but read more than that one link which I will put near the end of what follows. The comment thread has turned out better than I expected, so if time permits you may want to check it out.

Update August 23, 2008
Today Joe Biden was revealed as Obama's running mate. The party conventions will be held during the next two weeks. Democrats first then Republicans.
It is fair to say that the race became ugly just recently. Negative advertising is unfortunate, but history shows that it "works." That sad fact may be the worst stain on our system. Until Obama's trip abroad the contest appeared to be civil. But with McCain polling poorly negative ads were aired to even the numbers. It worked. At this writing most polls are reporting a "dead heat."

My guess is that the second week of September will see the beginning of really vile advertisements from both camps. It's too bad. In this writer's opinion this election has two of the most decent men running in my adult life. Barack Obama has an edge because he is one of the brightest men, along with Phil Gramm and Patrick Moynihan, ever to be in the US Senate.

But this post is about his religion. Over the last two years it has become too long, but I keep it up because it still turns up on the first screen of most Google searches for the subject. Traffic to this post continues to be solid which indicates that a lot of people remain curious about Barack Obama's religion.

Read what is here carefully and critically. But know that the subject will be exploited to the max between now and the election. Drill into the links. Do other searches. Seek facts, not innuendos. Get informed. I hope that what I have collected here, including a long comments thread, will be of help in the reader's search for facts.

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[Here starts the original post...]

Fair question. It came up today at work.

Somebody said, "What is Obama's religion? Is he Muslim?"

This turned up. It's from a speech he gave in June. [2006] I sure like how he explains things. Tough for anybody to twist the meaning when he makes it as plain as this. He may not make it in American politics. Far, far too candid.

...I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people's lives -- in the lives of the American people -- and I think it's time that we join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.

And if we're going to do that then we first need to understand that Americans are a religious people. 90 percent of us believe in God, 70 percent affiliate themselves with an organized religion, 38 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people in America believe in angels than they do in evolution.

This religious tendency is not simply the result of successful marketing by skilled preachers or the draw of popular mega-churches. In fact, it speaks to a hunger that's deeper than that - a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause.

Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds - dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets - and they're coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough.

They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They're looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before. And so they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them - that they are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards nothingness.

And I speak with some experience on this matter. I was not raised in a particularly religious household, as undoubtedly many in the audience were. My father, who returned to Kenya when I was just two, was born Muslim but as an adult became an atheist. My mother, whose parents were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists, was probably one of the most spiritual and kindest people I've ever known, but grew up with a healthy skepticism of organized religion herself. As a consequence, so did I.

It wasn't until after college, when I went to Chicago to work as a community organizer for a group of Christian churches, that I confronted my own spiritual dilemma.

I was working with churches, and the Christians who I worked with recognized themselves in me. They saw that I knew their Book and that I shared their values and sang their songs. But they sensed that a part of me that remained removed, detached, that I was an observer in their midst.

And in time, I came to realize that something was missing as well -- that without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone.

And if it weren't for the particular attributes of the historically black church, I may have accepted this fate. But as the months passed in Chicago, I found myself drawn - not just to work with the church, but to be in the church.

For one thing, I believed and still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change, a power made real by some of the leaders here today. Because of its past, the black church understands in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and cloth the naked and challenge powers and principalities. And in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world. As a source of hope.

And perhaps it was out of this intimate knowledge of hardship -- the grounding of faith in struggle -- that the church offered me a second insight, one that I think is important to emphasize today.

Faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts.

You need to come to church in the first place precisely because you are first of this world, not apart from it. You need to embrace Christ precisely because you have sins to wash away - because you are human and need an ally in this difficult journey.

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street in the Southside of Chicago one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice, and not an epiphany. I didn't fall out in church. The questions I had didn't magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt that I heard God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.

That's a path that has been shared by millions upon millions of Americans - evangelicals, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims alike; some since birth, others at certain turning points in their lives. It is not something they set apart from the rest of their beliefs and values. In fact, it is often what drives their beliefs and their values.

And that is why that, if we truly hope to speak to people where they're at - to communicate our hopes and values in a way that's relevant to their own - then as progressives, we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse.

Because when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations towards one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome - others will fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends.
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Obama spoke at Rick Warren's Church on the occasion of World AIDS Day. There was a bit of carping from some quarters because they didn't like his Senate voting record on pro-life/pro-choice issues. Those objections apparently didn't impress anyone enough to void his invitation to speak. Andrew Sullivan noticed.

Like no other illness, AIDS tests our ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes - to empathize with the plight of our fellow man. While most would agree that the AIDS orphan or the transfusion victim or the wronged wife contracted the disease through no fault of their own, it has too often been easy for some to point to the unfaithful husband or the promiscuous youth or the gay man and say "This is your fault. You have sinned."

I don't think that's a satisfactory response.

My faith reminds me that we all are sinners. My faith also tells me that - as Pastor Rick has said - it is not a sin to be sick. My Bible tells me that when God sent his only Son to Earth, it was to heal the sick and comfort the weary; to feed the hungry and clothe the naked; to befriend the outcast and redeem those who strayed from righteousness.

Living His example is the hardest kind of faith - but it is surely the most rewarding. It is a way of life that can not only light our way as people of faith, but guide us to a new and better politics as Americans.

For in the end, we must realize that the AIDS orphan in Africa presents us with the same challenge as the gang member in South Central, or the Katrina victim in New Orleans, or the uninsured mother in North Dakota.

We can turn away from these Americans, and blame their problems on themselves, and embrace a politics that's punitive and petty, divisive and small.

Or we can embrace another tradition of politics - a tradition that has stretched from the days of our founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another - and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done for the people with whom we share this Earth.

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Update and followup...

This post was first published two months ago (12/12) and has become the most frequently hit item I have ever written. Nearly all my traffic is from Google (and other) searches. Even now nearly forty percent of the traffic is looking at this post. As my dozen or so readers know, this blog is an eclectic mix of many topics, but in this case it seems important to do a followup.

Here is the link to the Fox News piece mentioned in the opening paragraphs.

I'm not pushing any one's candidacy. My identity as an old-fashioned Sixties-style Liberal is slowly being overcome as a Flaming Moderate. Pretty dull, huh? Even so, the more I follow politics, both domestic and international, the less impressed I am with polar extremes. We seem to be living in a time when it is a politically fatal move to endorse a reasonable and practical but not flashy remedy for high-profile problems. Or to change one's opinion, God forbid.

This commentary by Van at Judith Weiss' blog summarizes the central challenge that Barack Obama faces. Sadly, it has nothing to do with his suitability to run for president. Nothing.

Melissa V. Harris-Lacewell, a Princeton University professor who has followed Obama's political ascent, said that he may be forced to choose: "You can be elected president as a black person only if you signal at some level that you are independent from black people" -- a move she said would be "guaranteed" to make black people angry. "He is going to have to figure out whether there is a way not to alienate and anger a black base that almost by definition is going to be disappointed," she said.

Something like Catch 22.

Somehow relating to this problem of polarization -- after all, that's the nub of the problem -- I listened to Ira Glass at This American Life yesterday afternoon. The program ended with an intense look at how majorities and minorities behave (rather MISbehave) in Congress. Looking back at the five or six last decades, he concludes that Washington politics seems more prone to vengeance than comity. (The main program was a somewhat salacious take on Valentine's Day, but the Coda at the end was thought-provoking, replete with actual examples of politicians doing what they do best...being mean to one another. I'm not linking because it would take too much time for the reader to find the reference, but if you're interested to learn about Crisco Corner, find out for yourself. [I should never have used the term "Crisco Corner" because it keeps coming up on Google searches that return this post, which is very much beside the point. The episode called "Houses of Ill Repute" has a segment at minute #27 called "The Crisco Kid." Following that, at minute #43, is the segment talking about the House of Representatives.] It's not accidental that the same reference is applied to Congress as a place where "randy gay guys" go to see some action.) It makes me wonder why anyone would intentionally want to be a career politician.

"They said this day would never come..."

The Story of Stuff

Like it or not, these viral videos are catching fire.
When I tried to find the origin this morning, I hit a wall. The site is down.

Google cache has a backup.

This is Video Number One.



Here is Number Five.



There are seven videos in all. I doubt many people will take the time to see them all. Nut jobs and people from the lunatic fringe like me may do so, but the majority of people I have known are so caught up in the "stuff cycle" that they have neither the time nor inclination to escape. They are like the people in this video.

But should archivists come across Hootsbuddy's Place some day in the distant future, I want to be numbered among those who saw it coming and tried to do something to avert an implosion of historic proportions.

My three decades in the food business can attest to a breathtaking amount of waste. No restaurant can operate without a good-sized dumpster that has to be taken away two or three times a week, a pumper-truck to empty the grease trap at least quarterly, and a daily delivery of disposable packaging in which patrons carry away food to be eaten elsewhere. I once figured that for every pound of food we sold about twenty pounds of garbage was sent to the landfill. That does not take into account the tonnage sent through the garbage disposals in the dishroom, kitchen and potsink. Add to all of the above dozens of refrigeration compressors keeping freezers and coolers operating twenty-four-seven, maintenance costs, and an endless number of smaller vendors whose services are necessary to the operation...window cleaners, landscaping, CO2 deliveries, even services to take away the sanitary napkin recepticles in the ladies restrooms and shine lavatories and urinals while they are there. Time, labor, transportation costs, cleaning chemicals...it all adds up. And it all has to be paid for by the price of the product.

This American Life dedicated one program to The Middle of Nowhere. The prologue featured endless floating masses of human garbage, mainly plastics, that can be found floating in the world's oceans.

Host Ira Glass talks with sailor and researcher Captain Charles Moore about a gigantic area in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as far away from land as you can get, that is filling with plastic trash. There are five spots like this on the world's oceans. For more, check out Captain Moore's website. (3 minutes)

Here is a You Tube video about the phenomenon.



This will be the 1st posting of segments depicting Human Impact on our world ocean. The program documents a project in CA toassess plastic debris loading in urban runoff. The introduction of an action plan for addressing marine debris "trickle down" from watersheds.Humans need to consider ways of stopping the flow of plastics and trash in urban runoff.

Obama Ad

It's still early in the campaign, but Obama is doing better than I thought he would. My original characterization of him as a boy scout with a sash full of merit badges now looks a little weak. He's starting to look like a scoutmaster instead. If nothing more, he and a couple others are giving negative campaign ads a bad name because they are doing okay without them. (This is like Al Qaeda giving terrorism a bad name...which may be why the IRA and maybe the PLO have let up a little.) From a distance, a bully looks weaker than his or her (Sorry. Couldn't resist...) victim.

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There is clearly a lot of interest in him. I can monitor internet search activity about his religious background because my post about the subject, now over a year old, is getting about seventy percent of all my traffic.

New Year, 2008

Retrospective bits for New Year's Day...

Jacques Barzun turned 100 a few weeks ago. It is unlikely that casual readers of this blog will have any knowledge of this name, but he was part of my education by way of his Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage, written in 1941, which I came across about eighteen years later in a quest to de-provincialize myself in the stacks of a public library. Giving a kid a twenty-dollar bill and sending him off to the mall is one form of neglect, but it can be far more risky to let him loose in a library where alien ideas can infect pliable young minds. Little did my parents suspect that their child's tight, safe little Southern world was being assaulted by cultural seducers like Barzun. It was strong medicine for a teen, but I drank it all the same. I almost forgot, but my memory was refreshed by tributes to Barzun on the occasion of his passing the century mark.

No need to relive that part of the past, but Gerald J. Russello's tribute in First Things is worth a look.

...what appears to be stagnation in one era may appear to be something else to another. Religious belief, in particular, was not afflicted by boredom; indeed, “fundamentalisms are vocal everywhere; religious issues and personalities occupy the media as never before.” Islam “is again fighting the West, and where it conquers it is much more intolerable than it was in the sixteenth century.” In light of these contradictions, Barzun explores what it may mean to live at the close of a cultural epoch and what may be worth fighting for. The result is a nuanced and innovative look at Western culture. Contra the left, Barzun does not believe that all cultures are equal, and contra the right, a culture of Birkenstocks may still better than one of burqas. What is needed is an understanding of what it means when a society adopts, say, athletes and pop stars as role models and how we can distinguish those models of legitimacy and authority from those of other times and places. Further, Barzun’s analysis can help tell us whether, in the face of our new threat, decadence can be halted.

Later he comments...

...American style was defined by the large expanse of country that softened the edges of the Old World, giving everyone a place to settle. Moreover, Barzun writes, our mad dash of industrialization forced everyone to get along, so that “[i]n Europe a thousand years of war, pogroms and massacres settle nothing. Here two generations of common schooling, intermarriage, ward politics, and labor unions create social peace.” This process has been messy, and with some serious failings, but nonetheless it represented a new type of social order – unplanned, but ultimately wildly successful.

Reading these observations, I wonder if we have not lost some of that creative energy and imagination. The current crop of political wannabes to a man (er, uh...person, I should say) are pussy-footing through a minefield of cultural/ethnic bias that continues to reinfect our national persona. Simply saying the word immigration out loud is enough to trigger a discussion in which polite people first palpate one anther's attitudes before revealing in many cases nothing more than old-fashioned racism in modern patriotic, legalistic, isolationist clothing.

As Barzun noted, two generations in North America can be the equivalent of centuries of ferment in Old Europe. Just yesterday I heard someone commenting on classical music, mentioning how images of the East, particularly Turkey, became stylish among the Eighteenth Century elite. Mozart and others nakedly played to this trend in music, appealing to the romantic images of the day. But up close and personal the shimmering beauty of fantasy reveals warts and scars not seen at a distance. Sure enough, the visceral cultural hatred dividing Greeks and Turks is every bit as savage at that between Arabs and Jews, Koreans and Japanese, Tutsis and Hutus...or Anglos and Latinos. Or even, I dare add, Christians and Muslims. That cute reference to Birkenstocks and burqas is enough to animate a prickly debate.

Nouri Lumendifi is a brilliant youngster whose blog I have been following since he was in high school. He is now off at college, on the way to becoming a Jacques Barzun in his own right. With penetrating insights and the disciplined concentration of a good scholar he looks at conflicts and contradictions in the Arab world with the same detachment that Barzun looked at what we now quaintly call Western Culture (even though it is not strictly Western nor particularly cultural any more).

Nouri looks at the Levant and Mahgreb and sees a hodge-podge of ethnic/tribal/cultural communities at odds with one another and the world beyond. Commenting on an Al Jezeera poll showing over half their viewers to be in basic sympathy with the activities and/or views of Al Qaeda, he notes....

As most of the poll's participants were most likely not Algerians, but Arabs from across the Arab region, with the bulk of them probably being in Levantine countries, the Gulf and Egypt, I would say that it also reveals a popular lack of information and sympathy about and for the Maghreb in the Arab east. Whereas North African newspapers and television stations were quick to denounce the attacks, eastern Arabs often cheered or blamed the attacks on the US. While Algerians had their own conspiracy theories, the other Arabs either looked at the attacks in the context of some Western conspiracy to control the Muslim world, rather than a power struggle within Algeria itself. Major Arab news outlets tend to ignore political happenings in the Maghreb, contributing to a dearth of information and a flourishing ignorance of Maghreb affairs in the Gulf and the Levant.

Culturally and politically, the Arab world is ignorant of its brotherly west. A common stereotype in eastern Arab regions is that Algerians do not speak Arabic, but French. More pernicious stereotypes paint North Africans as ignorant of language, religion, and history. A Mauritanian colleague once told me that on meeting a Levantine woman in Boston, she remarked to him "You speak Arabic so well! Where did you learn to speak it?" Little did she know that of all Arabic dialects, Hassaniya, the dialect spoken through most of the southern and western Sahara (including Mauritania), is closest to classical Arabic. At al-Azhar University, Mauritanians were known for being exceptional students above others when it came to grammar and religion.

But one cannot ascribe such ignorance to eastern Arabs alone; Maghrebines tend to be almost as ignorant of the internal workings of say, Lebanese or Palestinian political life. They also follow the same pattern of turning somewhat of a blind eye to terrorist atrocities, particularly in Iraq. But because the Arab media is so dominated by Mashreqi personalities and happenings, they tend to have a firmer grasp on things eastern than their cousins in the Mashreq have on things western. A superficial sense of solidarity creates an "any means necessary" attitude that leads a nihilistic and cold world view in which even fellow Arab and Muslims are expendable if their deaths aid in the march against the enemy. The same bizarre thinking that causes some Arabs to question the identity of the 9/11 hijackers cause the same ones to condone acts of mass violence against themselves. While the results of the Aljazeera poll are not indicative of the opinions of the vast majority of any Arab polity, they do highlight a continuing problem within a specific sector of the Arab population; the minority that cheers on terrorists and other fanatics and straps bombs to their bellies and head into "battle" against children. Sadly, poll's results are neither surprising nor heartening, but they do not represent scientific data and are taken from anyone who passed through website. My question is this: if the same bombings took place in Qatar, would Aljazeera have run the same poll?

I know from personal acquaintance that what he says about the speaking of Arabic is true. I have had the privilege to meet and know an Oxford-educated man from Egypt who assures me that the Arabic spoken in Egypt is to the rest of the Arabic-speaking world what British English is to our own mother tongue world-wide. It is considered the gold standard. This little personal insight makes the whole essay ring true to me.

One final note before I start my day, also related to cultural changes. With a great sigh of relief I see that the Brits have taken a step in the right direction by cutting loose from the inflammatory language of "war on terror."

The words "war on terror" will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country's chief prosecutor said Dec. 27.

Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless "death cult."
The Director of Public Prosecutions said: 'We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language."

London is not a battlefield, he said.

"The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers," Macdonald said. "They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way."

[H/T TimN at YAR who found it a Boing Boing]

It has taken several years and thousands of lives lost for real steps to be taken in what can correctly be called counter-insurgency. Ever since I read Abu Khaleel's sketch about Nihad Had to Die I have known without further elaboration that for every innocent victim killed there are extended families and networks of acquaintances more alienated from those responsible and ripe for conversion by those we call insurgents.

All along, there have been voices calling for a different approach. Thomas Ricks was among the most persuasive, and General Petraeus himself, who literally wrote the book on counterinsurgency, was brought to the front in a last-ditch effort to make things better. Unfortunately, anything he has done (and it has been noteworthy as recent stats from Iraq show) has been too little, too late. And even now, as we flounder about in Afghanistan and Pakistan like a bull in a china shop, his type of approach can find no purchase.

So I start the new year with a renewed commitment to hope. Seems like that is some one's buzzword these days. I watched him on C-CPAN giving a speech in Iowa Sunday afternoon and among other things he admitted to being a "hope-monger." The Iowa caucus is not for a few more days, and I have little expectation that he will prevail, mostly because he is "too nice." Guilty as charged, it seems. But still, we cling to hope.