Mos Def and Cornell West on Bill Maher

Contagious Stupidity

From today's NYTimes:

Americans’ support for the initial invasion of Iraq has risen somewhat as the White House has continued to ask the public to reserve judgment about the war until at least the fall. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted over the weekend, 42 percent of Americans said that looking back, taking military action in Iraq was the right thing to do, while 51 percent said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq.

WTF?

Isn't it 5th-grade wisdom - perhaps rather 2nd or 1st - that an invasion with no justifiable purpose that has only gone from worse to worst is not and was never worth supporting? Why does America now so value its presence in Iraq? (Did no one else read Theater of War?)

The article doesn't help a ton, and neither does Mark Schmitt's snarky attempt at boo-hooing Democratic pres. candidates' ability to make detailed plans.

It's not comforting to e-open the paper and see that 1) Americans are increasingly, not decreasingly comfortable with the idea that America invaded Iraq, way back when (Gawd, that was, like, four American Idols ago!) and 2) New America Foundation members are not fans of good policy papers.

They want more blather. Empty, Republicrackerish blather, good for nothing, to be held to nothing, to be sprinkled like the chaff of millet on the strong winds of a next CBS fall lineup, or the next celebrity murder-suicide.

"The candidates disappear behind a screen of white paper," Schmitt writes. Paper = reading = the intellectual = reason. And we can't have that. We're a country of Faith, a good, honest, Sarkozy-ian realm...

Ba-humfuckery.

I suppose comfort isn't to be wanted or even warranted these days. I'll keep my policy papers and my anti-war stance, thankyouver'much. How much longer before this America now starts to resemble the Britain of Children of Men? Not much longer, perhaps. But by then I'll have my alligator ranch, so the New American "centrist" faux-radicals won't be able to sneer at me without (reptilian, masticatory) repercussions.

Boo! Hiss! to the stinky Supreme Court

I know I'm always permalinking articles from the New York Times, and I'm not even a huge Times fan, compared to The Nation or blogs, but the Times has the advantage of a huge staff and a fuckton of money. For coverage of something as depressing as the Supreme Court's actions yesterday, one can't beat their slew of journalistic attempts to put the SC's back-assward-ness in context.

Here's what I want you to read (or at least skim for juicy/juicily depressing nuggets):

The hard news - the Supreme Court in no uncertain terms gives America five pasty-white middle fingers.

The related study - where are we, decades after Brown? (The answer: not anywhere we'd wanted to be.)

The other side speaks out - what the Brown lawyers think about this mess.

The Times editorial.

The Dark Side speaks out - because, you know, Brown was so long ago, and so much has changed, it's really not fair to say that it has any relevance to today's America.

Juan Williams makes a good point that desegregating kids doesn't help much if their parents are still holed up in class- and race-centric enclaves. If there are white neighborhoods, black neighborhoods, good neighborhoods, bad neighborhoods, won't the kids grow up racist or classist anyway? I for one believe that desegregating kids is a great and necessary first step towards reaching parents. Of course desegregation isn't the only answer, but it is such an obvious attempt at being one answer.

Until we understand each other, we will not respect each other. At least let us help our kids understand one another... Or come up with better legislation, better programs, some positive idea or attempted answer; don't tear down the icon of progress, inter-racial love and understanding, and hope that has propelled us from the pre-Civil Rights movement Dark Ages into at least a partially enlightened future.

In less bad news (actually, in good news, couched in badness by the news surrounding it), the SC did rule that people with severe mental problems who commit crimes should probably not be executed. Seems like common sense, but it took until 2007 to make it the law.

As I have said before, anyone interested in mental health and the vast, bizarre system of vocations, rules, and prisons surrounding it should read R. D. Laing's brilliant The Politics of Experience.

A sad day in America

Today the Supreme Court, in a 5 - 4 vote (of course) voted to end desegration in our schools. Justice Breyer, exasperated and emotional, made an historic appearance on CNN after the vote (and his anguished dissent) to claim (about Roberts and Alito), "never before have so few undone so much in so little time". And a couple of hours later, the House passed heinous anti-gay legislation as part of a DC appropriations bill. You may ask yourself, how could a discriminatory law be passed in our Democratic House? Because 40 Democrats voted for it. 40. Democrats. Excuse me while I go throw up.

Newsflash: Another Rich Man Seemingly Devoid Of Sane Thought Enters Presidential Race

We seriously admonish you not to vote for Fred Thompson, a former Tennessee senator and retired movie actor.

Here are, in his own words and ours, four good reasons why we think Thompson will make, if not an immoral president, then at least an unhelpful one:

CLIMATE CHANGE

"Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. ... NASA says the Martian South Pole’s ‘ice cap’ has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Maybe Mars got its fever from earth. If so, I guess Jupiter’s caught the same cold, because it’s warming up too, like Pluto. This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, nonsignatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists who run their airconditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle." -- March 22, ABC Radio.

Damage to the environment due to rapid climate change is both real and acknowledged as real by a vast consensus of scientists.

We're not sure how candidate Thompson plans to address environmental damage, but we firmly excoriate him for opting to mince words about such a vital problem, make silly suggestions about Jupiterian SUV-driving, and insinuate that the Bush administration's refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocols is somehow good for us.

If Mr. Thompson wins, we can only hope he will think more lucidly about the future of our planet.

(Or, if he has no interest in this increasingly hot, increasingly crowded, hurricane-riddled planet, he can move to another one. We suggest Mercury.)



TAXES

"President John F. Kennedy was an astute proponent of tax cuts and the proposition that lower tax rates produce economic growth. Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan also understood the power of lower tax rates and managed to put through cuts that grew the U.S. economy like Kansas corn. Sadly, we just don’t seem able to keep that lesson learned." -- April 14, The Wall Street Journal.

While targeted tax cuts may indeed help some of us, some of the time (check out Bill Richardson's past and proposed cuts), the country overall is lucky to have not kept learned "that lesson" -- the lesson of taxing those who can afford to be taxed, so that we can build roads, keep schools open, etc.

A self-styled Federalist, Thompson plans to follow in George W. Bush's footsteps and make the rich richer and poor poorer. We doubt that this strategy is good for anyone.

(The rich can only spend so much money in their lifetimes. But perhaps Thompson's Jupiterian friends -- he also makes frequent reference to "dwarf planets," perhaps in an effort to make Jupiter feel bad about its size -- can find a way for the rich to continue their spending posthumously. Perhaps by buying up dwarf planets...)

Separation of Church and State

Thompson has concerns of federal judges deciding "social policy." "Many federal judges seem intent on eliminating God from the public schools and the public square in ways that would astound our founding fathers. We never know when a five to four Supreme Court decision will uphold them. They ignore the fact that the founders were protecting the church from the state and not the other way around." -- The National Review.

We stand by a government that is entirely, 100% divorced from expressions of any particular faith.

The various odious, gay-bashing, abortion-for-raped-teens-denying pseudo-religions espoused as Truth by so many conservatives (among them Fred Thompson) should have no greater or lesser standing, in the eyes of the state, than Islam, Judaism, Yazidism, Wicca, atheism, Scientology, Yo-ism, or subGenius-ism.

Courts do not need to post the ancient tenets of the Abrahamic God in sight of accused criminals who may or may not believe in them; schools needn't trespass on the minds of young capitalist, imperial Americans than they already do.

(Jupiterists, of course, should be burned at the stake, if we can only figure out how to tie-down their fifty undulant tentacles long enough to light the kerosene-soaked witch-sticks below them. Amen.)

Torture

"I doubt, for example, that our television networks have spent as much time exposing the horrors of life for millions of women in pre-liberation Iraq and Afghanistan as they've spent covering Abu Ghraib. For some reason, everyday atrocities such as the endemic beatings, honor killings and forced marriages of women just don't seem to be newsworthy." -- a Thompson essay for the American Enterprise Institute.

We feel that this statement is so obviously antithetical to good thinking, good government -- to sanity -- that it needs no further amendment.

Please vote; please don't vote for Fred Thompson.

The Failure Of The Democrats To Live Up To Their Mandate, Plain And Simple

As Julianne notes, there are few great pundits left in the world of televised news. (And perhaps, I add, there weren't that many to begin with.) But, in the spirit of Murrow and the fictional but all too realistically mad-as-hell newsman from Network, this Keith fellow has his heart and tongue in exactly the right spot. You should watch the video or, if not, read the transcript. Many of us at Culture Project strongly agree with Keith's view that the Democrats had no task other than to extract America from Iraq, and by extension from all the corruption of Bushismology, and that any compromise on this point is a sort of betrayal. We await the day true power--the power to make change--in politics returns to those on the side of the irenic, the rational, the anti-imperial.

Wowee-Wow: Another Anti-Gay Religious Leader, I R Surprised

From the Times:

The archbishop of Canterbury sent out more than 800 invitations yesterday to a once-a-decade global gathering of Anglican bishops. But he did not invite the openly gay Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire and the bishop in Virginia who heads a conservative cluster of disaffected American churches affiliated with the archbishop of Nigeria.

The exclusions offended liberals and conservatives in the worldwide Anglican Communion, which has been threatened by schism since the election in 2003 of the bishop of New Hampshire, V. Gene Robinson, who lives with his gay partner.

...Bishop Robinson said he was extremely disappointed at his exclusion and asked in a statement, “At a time when the Anglican Communion is calling for a ‘listening process’ on the issue of homosexuality, how does it make sense to exclude gay and lesbian people from the discussion?”

LOL, I think I'm going to call up Hezbollah to hold a Quorum On Healing Society In Lebanon and not invite any secular Muslims, Christians, or Druze. Post-Falwell / pre-fixin stuff.

A Book Worth Investigating, We Think; Wind Farms; & Carpet Conversions You Might Emulate

From the NYTIMES, May 22, 2007, Books of The Times, "Al Gore Speaks of a Nation in Danger," By MICHIKO KAKUTANI:

In “The Assault on Reason” Al Gore excoriates George W. Bush, asserting that the president is “out of touch with reality,” that his administration is so incompetent that it “can’t manage its own way out of a horse show,” that it ignored “clear warnings” about the terrorist threat before 9/11 and that it has made Americans less safe by “stirring up a hornets’ nest in Iraq,” while using “the language and politics of fear” to try to “drive the public agenda without regard to the evidence, the facts or the public interest.”

The administration’s pursuit of unilateralism abroad, Mr. Gore says, has isolated the United States in an ever more dangerous world, even as its efforts to expand executive power at home and “relegate the Congress and the courts to the sidelines” have undermined the constitutional system of checks and balances.

The former vice president contends that the fiasco in Iraq stems from President Bush’s use of “a counterfeit combination of misdirected vengeance and misguided dogma to dominate the national discussion, bypass reason, silence dissent and intimidate those who questioned his logic both inside and outside the administration.”

He argues that the gruesome acts of torture committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq “were a direct consequence of the culture of impunity — encouraged, authorized and instituted” by President Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. And he writes that the violations of civil liberties committed by the Bush-Cheney administration — including its secret authorization of the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a court order on calls and e-mail messages between the United States and other countries, and its suspension of the rights of due process for “enemy combatants” — demonstrate “a disrespect for America’s Constitution that has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of democracy.”

Similar charges have been made by a growing number of historians, political analysts and even former administration insiders, and President Bush’s plummeting approval ratings have further emboldened his critics. But Mr. Gore writes not just as a former vice president and the man who won the popular vote in the 2000 election, but also as a possible future candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 race for the White House, and the vehemence of his language and his arguments make statements about the Bush administration by already announced candidates like Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton seem polite and mild-mannered in contrast.

And yet for all its sharply voiced opinions, “The Assault on Reason” turns out to be less a partisan, election-cycle harangue than a fiercely argued brief about the current Bush White House that is grounded in copiously footnoted citations from newspaper articles, Congressional testimony and commission reports — a brief that is as powerful in making its points about the implications of this administration’s policies as the author’s 2006 book, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was in making its points about the fallout of global warming.

This volume moves beyond its criticisms of the Bush administration to diagnose the ailing condition of America as a participatory democracy — low voter turnout, rampant voter cynicism, an often ill-informed electorate, political campaigns dominated by 30-second television ads, and an increasingly conglomerate-controlled media landscape — and it does so not with the calculated, sound-bite-conscious tone of many political-platform-type books, but with the sort of wonky ardor that made both the book and movie versions of “An Inconvenient Truth” so bluntly effective.

Mr. Gore’s central argument is that “reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions” and that the country’s public discourse has become “less focused and clear, less reasoned.” This “assault on reason,” he suggests, is personified by the way the Bush White House operates. Echoing many reporters and former administration insiders, Mr. Gore says that the administration tends to ignore expert advice (be it on troop levels, global warming or the deficit), to circumvent the usual policy-making machinery of analysis and debate, and frequently to suppress or disdain the best evidence available on a given subject so it can promote predetermined, ideologically driven policies.

Doubts about Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction were sidestepped in the walk-up to the war: Mr. Gore says that uranium experts at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee told him “there was zero possibility” that aluminum tubes acquired by Saddam Hussein were for the purpose of nuclear enrichment, but felt intimidated from “making any public statement that disagreed with the assertions being made to the people by President Bush.”

And the Army chief of staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki’s pre-invasion recommendation that several hundred thousand troops would be needed for a successful occupation of Iraq was similarly dismissed. “Rather than engaging in a reasoned debate on the question,” Mr. Gore writes, administration members “undercut Shinseki for disagreeing with their preconceived notion — even though he was an expert, and they were not.”

Moreover, Mr. Gore contends, the administration’s penchant for secrecy (keeping everything from the details of its coercive interrogation policy to its National Security Agency surveillance program under wraps) has dismantled the principle of accountability, even as what he calls its “unprecedented and sustained campaign of mass deception” on matters like Iraq has made “true deliberation and meaningful debate by the people virtually impossible.”

Mr. Gore points out that the White House repeatedly implied that there was a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, between the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and Iraq, when in fact no such linkage existed. He observes that the administration “withheld facts” from Congress concerning the cost of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, which turned out to be “far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the president.”

And he contends that “it has become common for President Bush to rely on special interests” — like those represented by the Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi before the war, and ExxonMobil on the climate crisis — for “basic information about the policies important to these interests.”

...

Much the way that the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” showed a more accessible Al Gore — at ease with himself and passionate about the dangers of global warming — this book shows a fiery, throw-caution-to-the winds Al Gore, who, whether or not he runs for the White House again, has decided to lay it all on the line with a blistering assessment of the Bush administration and the state of public discourse in America at this “fateful juncture” in history.

We applaud Mr. Gore's efforts: In an age of journalistic weakness, he has joined Lewis Lapham, a handful of bloggers, and too few others in his commitment to tell the truth -- even about the president, even about money -- even if the oil barons and CIA bunglers would prefer that the illusion of an omnipotent, universally and infinitely good-hearted American Government remain the only image that government casts.

More good news we recommend to you:

May 22, 2007, "An Old Steel Mill Retools to Produce Clean Energy," By DAVID STABA:

LACKAWANNA, N.Y., May 21 — Empty grain elevators and dormant railroad tracks line the Buffalo River to the east and Lake Erie to the west, interspersed with empty fields overgrown with gnarled shrubbery. Test wells that monitor decades of buried industrial waste dot the landscape. A passenger ship, rust overtaking its aqua paint, sits beside a decaying mill.

The road from Buffalo to this city to the south offers a stark reminder of the region’s faded past as a hub of industry and shipping.

Yet in the past few months, a different sight has emerged on the 2.2-mile shoreline above a labyrinth of pipes, blackened buildings and crumbling coke ovens that was once home to a behemoth Bethlehem Steel plant: eight gleaming white windmills with 153-foot blades slowly turning in the wind off Lake Erie, on a former Superfund site where iron and steel slag and other industrial waste were dumped during 80 years of production.

“It’s changing the image of the city of Lackawanna,” said Norman L. Polanski Jr., the city’s mayor and a former Bethlehem worker who lost his job when the company stopped making steel here in 1983. “We were the old Rust Belt, with all the negatives. Right now, we are progressive and we are leading the way on the waterfront.”

Christine Real de Azua, of the American Wind Energy Association, said Steel Winds, as this wind farm is known, is the largest to rise in a city, and according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation, it is the first to rise on land overseen by New York’s brownfields program. (Brownfields are low-level toxic waste sites concentrated mainly around abandoned factories.)

“It’s a way to convert the Rust Belt to the Wind Belt,” Ms. Real de Azua said.

...

The greatest effect of the eight windmills, however, may have more to do with attitude.

“A community that has had difficulty moving forward has accepted a technology that leapfrogs other forms of energy generation,” Mr. Mitskovski said. “Decades of steel-making created this environmental legacy. But that also created the opportunity to take this fallow, contaminated land and reuse it.”

And once more, from Atlanta:

May 22, 2007, "Executive on a Mission: Saving the Planet," By CORNELIA DEAN

VININGS, Ga. — What Ray Anderson calls his “conversion experience” occurred in the summer of 1994, when he was asked to give the sales force at Interface, the carpet tile company he founded, some talking points about the company’s approach to the environment.

“That’s simple,” Mr. Anderson recalls thinking. “We comply with the law.”

But as a sales tool, “compliance” lacked inspirational verve. So he started reading about environmental issues, and thinking about them, until pretty soon it hit him: “I was running a company that was plundering the earth,” he realized. “I thought, ‘Damn, some day people like me will be put in jail!’ ”

“It was a spear in the chest.”

So instead of environmental regulation, he devoted his speech to his newfound vision of polluted air, overflowing landfills, depleted aquifers and used-up resources. Only one institution was powerful enough and pervasive enough to turn these problems around, he told his colleagues, and it was the institution that was causing them in the first place: “Business. Industry. People like us. Us!”

He challenged his colleagues to set a deadline for Interface to become a “restorative enterprise,” a sustainable operation that takes nothing out of the earth that cannot be recycled or quickly regenerated, and that does no harm to the biosphere.

The deadline they ultimately set is 2020, and the idea has taken hold throughout the company. In a recent interview in his office here overlooking downtown Atlanta, Mr. Anderson said that through waste reduction, recycling, energy efficiency and other steps, Interface was “about 45 percent from where we were to where we want to be.”

Use of fossil fuels is down 45 percent (and net greenhouse gas production, by weight, is down 60 percent), he said, while sales are up 49 percent. Globally, the company’s carpet-making uses one-third the water it used to. The company’s worldwide contribution to landfills has been cut by 80 percent.

“He bet his entire company,” said Bob Fox, an architect who specializes in “green” buildings and who, like Mr. Anderson, is a member of the advisory board of the Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment. “It worked out probably better even than he hoped. He has set the mark for every other corporation in this country.”

And in the process, Mr. Anderson has turned into perhaps the leading corporate evangelist for sustainability. He had a head start, he acknowledges, because he ran his company and controlled its voting stock. But he can make the case effectively, he said, because his Interface experience teaches that sustainability “doesn’t cost, it pays” — in customer loyalty, employee spirit and hard cash. He says Interface sustainability efforts have saved the company more than $336 million since 1995.

In fact, sustainability has been such a successful strategy that Interface established a consulting arm last year, to market its methods to other companies.

As befits an evangelist, Mr. Anderson, a trim 72-year-old, has taken his message on the road, preaching the sermon of sustainability in at least 115 speeches around the world last year alone.

Since last year, when he turned operating responsibilities over to Dan Hendrix, his successor as chief executive, selling sustainability has been “pretty much my full-time job,” Mr. Anderson said, and several people on the company payroll work more or less full time on it too, handling his schedule and fielding inquiries. “I think he was a typical corporate executive: the bottom line was everything,” said Eric Chivian, director of the Harvard Center. “He really did not think about the impact of his work.”

But today, Dr. Chivian said, Mr. Anderson is “a model of creative thinking about sustainable business practices.”

When Mr. Anderson began his crusade, there were those who thought it was quixotic, and some in the company worried that he was a bit too intense about it. Others thought carpet tiles — squares of nylon pile glued ubiquitously underfoot in offices, classrooms, hospitals, airports and elsewhere — were an unlikely focus for an effort to change the way business does business.

“Well, he won us all over,” said Jo Ann Bachman, one of Mr. Anderson’s assistants.

...

So he put together the necessary financing and started Interface in 1973. Today, the company says it has about $1.1 billion in annual sales and 38 percent of the global market for carpet tiles.

But when it comes to the environment, he eventually realized, carpet “is a pretty abusive industry.”

Carpet makers use lots of petroleum and petroleum derivatives, both as components of synthetic carpet and to power its production. Dyeing carpet is water- and energy-intensive. And when people are finished with the carpet, “it goes into landfills where it lasts probably 20,000 years,” Mr. Anderson said. “Abusive.”

So he challenged his employees to find ways to turn all of that around. And he forestalled objections from his own stockholders, he said, by making the elimination of waste the first target. “We saved money from Day 1,” he said.

He acknowledges that some of the advances the company has made so far are relatively obvious and easy, and that some of its claimed progress relies on steps, like carbon credits, that are far from ideal. For example, the company pays to plant trees that, in theory, take up enough carbon to compensate for the greenhouse gas generated by airplane flights on company business.

“All you are really doing is inventorying the carbon for 200 years,” Mr. Anderson said of the company’s tree-planting efforts, which it subcontracts to a company in the carbon credit business. “It’s better than nothing, but it’s temporary.”

In the future, he said, progress will come “in a lot of little steps and a few very big ones.”

Developing recyclable nylon — “that’s a big step,” he said. (Whoever does it will get all his company’s business, he has said.) Substituting “carbohydrates” — using corn dextrose instead of petroleum — would be even bigger. Renewable energy at a reasonable price would be another big step. Transportation remains “a huge issue,” in spite of the carbon credits.

Even so, customers responded to the campaign, he said, noting that it was questions from customers that prompted the sales force to ask for his environmental views in the first place. “In the aggregate, our products are not costing any more,” he said, and customers do not seem to resist those that are more expensive. “Our profit margins are up, not down,” he said.

...

And after an argument with the landlord, Interface’s office space here is now illuminated with low-energy, long-life light bulbs.

Mr. Anderson is also proud to say that as a member of an advisory council at Georgia Tech, he persuaded the institution to modify its mission statement to proclaim the goal of “working for a sustainable society.”

...

After the speech, he said, “I heard the whispers, ‘Has he gone round the bend?’ ” Mr. Anderson recalls proudly how he confessed at once that he had. “That’s my job,” he said. “To see what’s around the bend.”

The Survival of America's Democracy

Al Gore has a book coming out. It's called The Assault on Reason. You can read an excerpt here. It's an intensely thoughtful look at the current state of Democracy in America. What a different world it would be if the Senator had taken the reins on January 20, 2001. It's almost too painful to think about.

Jerry Falwell Deceased; Tinky Winky Alive And *Wink* Still A Good Dresser

Details >>

The brief lives of the intolerant and ineloquently spiritual pass with much fanfare but little substance. My personal Criswell predicts that, decades from now, we will still honor progressive thinkers such as William James, Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Irshad Manji, but will have relegated the likes of Falwell to the dutifully beskipped endnotes of religious history.

To quote the AP:

In 1999, he [Falwell] told an evangelical conference that the Antichrist was a male Jew who was probably already alive.

Well, yes, whynot... And he lives in Clinton, NJ, and wears Pumas and loves sour cream. (Come on, Jerry, be specific. The shadow government you propped up through the Eighties didn't invest in that hope-powered JewFinder for nothing.)

In a statement, President Bush said he and First Lady Laura Bush were ''deeply saddened'' by the loss of a man who ''cherished faith, family and freedom.''

''One of his lasting contributions was the establishment of Liberty University, where he taught young people to remain true to their convictions and rely upon God's word throughout each stage of their lives,'' Bush said.

(The Reader ponders this latter nugget for herself.)

Goodnight, Mr. Falwell; we luminists and humanists and Sufis and hippies and mothers and siblings and average Joes bid you only the softest goodnight. And we hope you find yourself somewhere pleasant but challenging, or at least as challenging as fin-de-siecle America must have been for you. The secret of death is now in your hands. One only hopes you wield it with more grace than you so potently wielded your backward convictions in life.

Falwell is survived by his wife, Macel, two sons, and a daughter, Jeannie Falwell Savas. He was 73.

Three Snippets Of Life On May 4, 2007

1. Ms. Rice gets a cookie for doing her fucking job, wtf. (Thanks, Nancy P.; you still my boo.)

From "U.S. and Syria Discuss Iraq in Rare Meeting," By HELENE COOPER and MICHAEL SLACKMAN, NYTimes:

The White House in April sharply criticized the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, for visiting Syria’s capital, Damascus, and meeting with President Bashar al-Assad, even going so far as calling the trip “bad behavior,” in the words of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Less than a month later, Ms. Rice walked through the cavernous hallways of a conference center in this desert resort town and into the “Sun” room to sit down with Mr. Moallem.

2. For those of you who imagined that America had miraculously transcended racism, there are better examples of its persistent existence than Don Imus's use of the word "ho." Case in point is the treatment of yesterday's rioters by police in California. Welcome to the new slave-empire: We pay you silly "Illegals" (sort of), so how can you blame us?

From "Action by Police at Rally Troubles Los Angeles Chief," By JENNIFER STEINHAUER and JULIA PRESTON, NYTimes:

LOS ANGELES, May 3 — Chief William J. Bratton of the Los Angeles Police Department said Thursday that the episode here in which police officers clashed with demonstrators and journalists on Tuesday at an immigration rally was the “worst incident of this type I have ever encountered in 37 years” in law enforcement.

3. Khalil Gibran--like Hafiz, Rumi, Augustine of Hippo, Basho, and many, many other poets who address spirituality in their works--is much worthier of a school's name than, say, the slave-owning George Washington et al.

And of all the none-American (i.e., non-English, non-Spanish) languages we should be teaching our youth, I can think of none better than Chinese, and, after Chinese, Arabic. These are major world tongues, and Arabs constitute a significant and growing minority in New York City and America at large.

What then is the problem with opening a new middle school in order to facilitate a better understanding of Arabic culture and language in New York? Well, let the New York Post explain! Of course the Post has a solid grasp on the logic behind its Frankenstein-inspired flame-adulation...

From "Plan for Arabic School in Brooklyn Spurs Protests," By JULIE BOSMAN, NYTimes:

Alicia Colon, a columnist for The New York Sun, wrote that Osama bin Laden must have been “delighted” to hear the news of the school. “New York City, the site of the worst terrorist attack in our history, is bowing down in homage to accommodate and perhaps groom future radicals,” she said. “I say break out the torches and surround City Hall to stop this monstrosity.”

Yick, how disturbing...

Lewis Lapham, Representin'

Check out L Magazine's typo-pockmarked but otherwise wonderful write-up of our Lewis Lapham reading tonight. Tickets are probably still available; check cultureproject.org.

Lewis is a very funny, very smart man, and his collection of anecdote- and pith-filled letters by great American letterists (letterers?) is second to none.

(Thanks, L: I love your train and your magazine.)

Overt Memetic Warfare

Well, the witches don't believe in you, Mr. President.

(Neither do Luminists such as myself, for that matter.)

In any event, we are heartened by the news that America's fastest-growing religion (don't believe Scientology's reports on itself, but look into CUNY's recent study of American faiths, and into this amazing book), Wicca, is now grave-safe, according to our ethics-meting G.I. spokespersons. Bravo, USofA. Bravo.

From the Times,"Use of Wiccan Symbol on Veterans’ Headstones Is Approved," by NEELA BANERJEE:

WASHINGTON, April 23 — To settle a lawsuit, the Department of Veterans Affairs has agreed to add the Wiccan pentacle to a list of approved religious symbols that it will engrave on veterans’ headstones.

The settlement, which was reached on Friday, was announced on Monday by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, which represented the plaintiffs in the case...

It normally takes a few months for a petition by a faith group to win the department’s approval, but the effort on behalf of the Wiccan symbol took about 10 years and a lawsuit, said Richard B. Katskee, assistant legal director for Americans United.

The group attributed the delay to religious discrimination. Many Americans do not consider Wicca a religion, or hold the mistaken belief that Wiccans are devil worshipers.

“The Wiccan families we represented were in no way asking for special treatment,” the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United, said at a news conference Monday...

There are 1,800 Wiccans in the armed forces, according to a Pentagon survey cited in the suit, and Wiccans have their faith mentioned in official handbooks for military chaplains and noted on their dog tags...

In reviewing 30,000 pages of documents from Veterans Affairs, Americans United said, it found e-mail and memorandums referring to negative comments President Bush made about Wicca in an interview with “Good Morning America” in 1999, when he was governor of Texas. The interview had to do with a controversy at the time about Wiccan soldiers’ being allowed to worship at Fort Hood, Tex.

“I don’t think witchcraft is a religion,” Mr. Bush said at the time, according to a transcript. “I would hope the military officials would take a second look at the decision they made...”

“I was just aghast that someone who would fight for their country and die for their country would not get the symbol he wanted on his gravestone,” said John W. Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, which litigates many First Amendment cases. “It’s just overt religious discrimination.”

listen to this!

musician Peter Buffett thinks we need voices of reason and has decided to amplify this one:




rock on MLK.

People Speakin...

Mos Def Reads Malcolm X:

Re-Posting Great Ideas

March 17, 2007
The Best Idea In The World

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

I'm so happy to see John Edwards saying this:

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards on Thursday outlined his plan to tackle global poverty that calls for educating 23 million children in poor countries and creating a Cabinet-level position to oversee other initiatives.

Seeking to link poverty in other countries to U.S. national security, Edwards argued that militant extremists in nations torn apart by poverty and civil war have replaced government educational systems and are teaching young people to hate the United States.

"When you understand that, it suddenly becomes clear: global poverty is not just a moral issue for the United States -- it is a national security issue for the United States," he said at Saint Anselm College.

"If we tackle it, we have the chance to change a generation of potential extremists and enemies into a generation of friends," Edwards said.

You can read the rest of the address here.

Like the Cold War, our struggle against Islamic extremism isn't going to be won by miring our troops in a sequence of latter-day Vietnams, but by cultural engagement and 21st-century versions of the Marshall Plan. When we win, it'll be by feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and teaching those who would otherwise grow up in ignorance. Actions like these are respected in all human cultures, and for every Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, there are tens of thousands of ordinary Muslims who care a lot more about their children's prosperity than about killing Americans. For them to take our side, we have to take theirs.

I hope what we're seeing here is the beginning of a distinctive Democratic approach to the problems posed by radical Islam, with its own grand story about how we're going to win. Being able to promise that you'll lead America to victory is very important in rallying people around your foreign policy, and one of the reasons why perceived Republican advantages on foreign policy lasted as long as they did, even in the face of wanton dishonesty and catastrophic blunders, was that Republicans kept making the promise of victory in Iraq. Democrats had to face up to the truth that Iraq was collapsing into disaster, and they were too conscientious to make any similarly grand and impossible promises. But plans like the one Edwards expresses here credibly promise victory in the larger struggle of which the Iraq War was supposed to be a part. It's how we triumphed over Communism, and it's how we're going to triumph over Islamic extremism too.

The reason I've given this post such a grandiose title is that global poverty is the biggest problem in the world. Serious though they are, our problems with militant Islam pale before the enormous scale of suffering due to malnutrition, preventable disease, and the other consequences of crushing poverty. Getting America to devote some share of its massive resources to this problem as the best means of waging a general campaign against anti-American extremism would change millions of lives, and be an event of great significance in human history.

March 17, 2007
Comments

But... but... but... educating 23 million children might cost somewhere around 120 billion dollars...

Incidentally, the cost of the Iraq War now may be reaching 2.5 trillion, according to a new study.

Posted by: Phoenician in a time of Romans | Mar 17, 2007 3:56:45 AM