Nine years on: the human residue in Syria of the U.S. war on Iraq

Where are they now? Iraqi refugees we met in Damascus in 2006.

Nine years ago on March 20 the forces of the United States began their assault on Iraq. It's pretty universally agree that this "war of choice" -- an aggression grounded in lies -- was a catastrophe for attackers and Iraqis alike.

One of the war's major consequences, in addition to directly killing between 100,000 and 1,000,000 Iraqis, was to drive several million Iraqis from their homes. Somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the population found themselves involuntarily on the move, whether because of direct attacks from the occupying army or the sectarian civil war the U.S. invasion unleashed.

The only neighboring country that willingly took in large numbers of these displaced and dispossessed Iraqis was Syria, now in the midst of its own civil struggle. Are these Iraqi casualties of war once again going suffer for being in the wrong place at the wrong time while the fighting rages? Perhaps. A new government maintains a dubious peace in Iraq, but going home remains dicey. The UNHCR -- the UN Refugee Agency -- estimates there remain about one million of these people in Syria. Here's how they describe things in classic bureaucratese:

Beyond the general protection concerns resulting from the current unrest in Syria, its social and economic impact on people of concern is likely to require UNHCR to provide them with significant direct assistance in the near future. Moreover, the current situation in the Syrian Arab Republic is likely to cause serious delays in the resettlement programme, jeopardizing refugees' access to this durable solution.

With refugees exhausting their personal resources and international assistance for public health and education programmes on the decline, new vulnerabilities could arise even among those who used to be able to provide for themselves.

Al-Akhbar English paints a more vivid picture of what the Syrian unrest means to the marooned Iraqis.

In 2008, Iraqi activist and journalist Hana Ibrahim fled from her home in Baghdad to Damascus, taking her two children with her. They had grown up under sanctions and war, and had as such never enjoyed the level of security they found in Syria. But even that has become a thing of the past.

“For years my daughter couldn’t go out alone, because the streets had become too dangerous for girls especially. In Damascus, she felt free to do as she pleased,” said Ibrahim. “In Iraq, we had grown used to electricity cuts. Once in Syria, my children were surprised we had power round the clock. In general, life was much better for us here.”

But one year on from the start of the uprising, life in Syria has changed dramatically for Syrians and non-Syrians living there. Many face a worsening security situation, disruptions to social services, increased impoverishment, and uncertainty in the face of the future.

It is not (so far) that either the Syrian authorities or insurgents are actively targeting Iraqis, but Syria's economic paralysis threatens their continued ability to make a living. As immigrants without legal status, they have never been able to work officially, but got by on the proceeds of informal commerce.

Today, a deteriorating Syrian economy and security situation have meant that “many of the Iraqis’ small businesses have either already closed down, or are about to be forced shut. Though many of the refugees have a high level of education, they have no other means of survival,” said [Souad] al-Azzawi, [an Iraqi environmental engineer, human rights activist, and herself a refugee.] “How will they pay their rent? How will they pay their bills? How can they survive this disaster? I don’t know.”

Al Azzawi is particularly concerned about the young people.

“These children have the additional burden of suffering for the second time in recent memory,” she said, pointing out the psychological toll of displacement, which is often especially traumatic for the young. “They left as a result of the American invasion of Iraq, and have already had to deal with rebuilding their lives once. While in Iraq, some of them had lost friends, others had lost family members. Now, they have to face uncertainty once again. …”

Iraqis who have officially declared their refugee status to the UNHCR have hoped to resettle somewhere with more opportunity than Iraq in its trashed condition or an uncertain Syria. Since 2007, 28,000 of them have moved on to other countries, mostly to the U.S. and Canada. But that's just a trickle from among the millions of lives torn apart by the war President George W. launched so blithely nine years ago.

And, as Al Ahkbar points out, now that the U.S. embassy in Damascus has been closed down, even that trickle has ceased to provide an exit for Syria's unbidden Iraqi guests.

War criminal on the loose

Probably should have shown Cheney, but Bush will do. Or Afghans might substitute the current U.S. Commander in Chief. In response to all the hype about the recent Central African viral video, I remained fixated on the bad actors in our own backyard.***Too busy to blog this morning. Maybe later.

Too much shooting; too little honest attention to realities

If I'd simply come across the title of David M. Kennedy's book, I don' think I'd have bothered to read it. Don't Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America sounds like something written by a self-absorbed egomaniac, not an earnest work of popular criminology. I'd have missed something worth reading.

Fortunately, I heard Kennedy interviewed on Fresh Air and found what he had to say fascinating, so I gave the book a try. This is a man with a plan -- a plan to reduce killing in mostly Black communities. He could have been numbed by several decades of trying to find solutions; instead he's outraged. Here's how he introduces what our society is up against:

Everybody knows crime is down these days, it's a national success story. America's homicide rate hit almost 10 per 100,000 in the peak years; it's now about half that. But not for black men. Black men are dying, overwhelmingly by gunshot, at a horrendous pace. In 2005, black men aged eighteen to twenty-four were murdered at a rate of 102 per 100,000 (white men of the same age: 12.2 per 100,000). Recent data show that, even as homicide overall continues to decline, black men are dying more. …

Working to curb gang violence alongside Boston police, he discovered that if you could understand that gang members are rational within the terms of their setting, you could come up with rational measures that quickly cut the number of homicides, even while all the attendant horrors of poverty and inner city powerlessness still ruled in Black and brown communities. But he also learned that most intervention didn't continue to work because the three intersecting "communities" living within the agony -- law enforcement (culturally if not literally white), "ghetto" dwellers, and the street thugs -- had contradictory and destructive ideas about the others' realities. You could make short term gains, but the structures of power, poverty and policing made for back sliding into violence and misery.

The real problem, though, is not in our currently ineffective strategies, and the answer to the problem is not just to substitute new strategies for the old ones. The real -- the deep -- problem is what happens between communities, and how that generates the appalling situation on the ground: the communities that look at each other and say, This is your fault; the communities that see each other as toxic and malevolent; the communities that cannot imagine working together for a common purpose; the communities that do not understand how profoundly they want the same things; the communities that do not see how they are backing each other, and themselves, into corners none chose, none wants. To see what's really going on, we have to see this. …

…law enforcement has in general written these communities off. There is a powerful conventional wisdom in the law enforcement circles I live in: that these communities are at heart uncaring, complicit, corrupt, destroyed. Nobody cares about the crime, the law enforcement narrative goes, or they'd raise their kids right, get them to finish school, have them work entry-level jobs -- like I did, like my kids do -- instead of working the corners. They don't care about the violence; nobody will even tell us who the shooters are. … As long as this is how law enforcement sees the neighborhoods, they will continue to occupy them, stop everybody, arrest everybody, send all the men to prison.

The second important community is the community in even the poorest, hardest-hit black neighborhoods. It's vital, caring, resourceful; it wants what any community wants: to be safe, to prosper, for its sons and daughters to prosper. It's not happening. It's not safe, and they're not prospering. The community looks around itself, at the poverty, the violence, the drugs, and asks, why? And it has an answer. Many in the black community believe that this is all happening because we -- the outsiders, the cops, the white folks, the powerful -- want it to happen. All of it: the drugs, the killing, the destruction, all of it. …

That last insight is what this book is best at -- Kennedy describes for law enforcement and society at large how police methods and policing look to people on the wrong end of it. Here's lots more -- pay attention.

… In the hottest neighborhoods this is the dominant public narrative: The government brings the drugs in so they can put our kids in jail so the cops will have work and the private prisons can make their dividends.

Let's start with the fact that the idea, common currency in these neighborhoods, that the government is running a carefully organized racial conspiracy against black America is not as crazy as it sounds. Up until the late 1960s, when the civil-rights movement finally won out, America was a carefully organized racial conspiracy against black America. Written into the Constitution: blacks are three fifths of a person, free states will regard fugitive slaves as property. …

In these neighborhoods, the historical experience of abuse under color of law continues. It is a kind of arithmetic truth that the worst of this is in the most desperate neighborhoods, that the worst law enforcement, and the worst of law enforcement's unintended consequences, gets focused on the already most damaged, most alienated, most suspicious communities. Where the police break the law all the time. All the time.

What happens on the other side of the door when the drug guys go in: Everybody there is shouted down, manhandled, put on the floor, handcuffed. Every door opened, every room entered. Shoot the dogs, sometimes. Cereal, flour, milk poured into the sink, onto the kitchen floor. The baby's toys and videos broken open. Drawers pulled out, dumped, everything pawed through, on the floor. Beds upended, mattresses slit, furniture upended, cushions slit. The guys in armor are relieved that they haven't been shot, haven't had to shoot anybody; they're laughing, stomping around, tearing the place apart. Neighbors gather outside, watch through the door and windows, hear things. Most places when it's over the team piles out and leaves, doesn't even secure the shattered door. Anybody not arrested gets cut loose, shocky, crying. It's horrible. If it weren't the cops who'd done it to you, you'd. . . call the cops.

And we need to understand the way all this looks to the community. At best, law enforcement is not solving their problems. They are not safe, they are not secure, drug dealers own the streets, their kids are getting shot, they're getting shot. … Given the truth of our American history, it is all too easy for angry black communities to believe that this is not just incapacity: that it is malign. … Add the suspicion, or perhaps the conviction, not in fact all that wild-eyed, given history, that outsiders might be seeking to control and to oppress. It becomes not so hard to understand why conspiracy might seem a live option. Overseer, slave catcher, Ku Klux Klan, cop, DEA -- all seamless.

Residents want to know why their kids, good kids, get stopped all the time. Ministers want to know why they got pulled over and treated rudely, got treated like a drug dealer. People want to know why they're getting treated like this, the white folks in the suburbs aren't, and they're the ones driving in to buy dope. They want to know why the county is building a new jail when the ceilings in the school are falling in. They say the cops are selling dope to the corner boys. They want to know why their cousin got tuned up by the cops who arrested him. They want to know why nobody's talking about how the government is bringing the drugs in. They want to know why the cops aren't doing their job.

When this is what law enforcement looks like in poor communities, you can't end violence. Nothing works.

Kennedy maintains vigorously that the police don't want it this way, that the cops turn numb and cynical because they know the "war on drugs" they are required to carry on is a fruitless politically convenient fraud that doesn't make life better for anyone. He insists they are not racist bullies -- they just look like a racist occupying army from the 'burbs to people in the afflicted communities.

The relentless law enforcement we see is intended to save lives, to protect neighborhoods, to bring order to the streets. I have spent my adult life with the men and women who do the work, and I know this to be true. I have no time for the easy armchair cant that says this is all about profiling and racism and bias in the criminal justice system. It simply is not so. Nobody who has ever actually been on these streets could believe it for a moment. There is disparate treatment in law enforcement, no question, but that's not what's driving the problem.

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, explicitly responded on NPR to Kennedy. For all his good will, she says he is still not getting it.

… you know, much of David Kennedy's work I agree with, but I think it's very easy to kind of brush off, as he does, the notion that the system operates much like a caste system if you are, in fact, not trapped within it.

... I have spent years representing victims of racial profiling and police brutality, and investigating patterns of drug law enforcement in poor communities of color; and attempting to assist people who have been released from prison, quote-unquote "re-enter" into a society that never seemed to have much use to them in the first place.

And in the course of that work, I had my own awakening about our criminal justice system and this system of mass incarceration. Probably 10 years ago, I might have shared David Kennedy's view, but I don't any longer. My years of experience and the research that I have done has led me to the regrettable conclusion that our system of mass incarceration functions more like a caste system than a system of crime prevention or control.

Now, that's not to say that many of the people who work within it, including my own husband who's a federal prosecutor, aren't well-intentioned. Many of them are. But the problem is that the structure of the system guarantees that millions of people will be swept into the system for relatively minor crimes, the very sorts of crimes that are ignored on the other side of town, swept into the system, branded criminals and felons and then stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement.

I live in one of those neighborhoods that struggles with all this. A predominantly Brown neighborhood, not a Black one -- and that makes a difference. The Mission is not a really bad place, but still a neighborhood where street murders happen with some frequency; where parents fear shootings when their children play outside; where police hang posters hoping to get leads on crimes. A gang injunction forbidding certain individuals to congregate covers the neighborhood.

I've seen the cops treat residents respectfully --and I've seen them swarm like an invading force. I know most of us just want to be safe and unmolested as we go about our lives. I don't have any answers. But I'm gratefully to both Kennedy and Alexander for demanding that we not turn away from something very bad that goes on under our noses.

Saturday scenes and scenery: protester

It's raining in San Francisco. After an abnormally dry winter, the stuff of incipient drought actually, it has now rained for seven straight days. I should appreciate it, but Jojo expresses my feelings exactly. I'm spoiled. I want to go out and play, not splash through puddles!

Notes from our misbegotten Central Asian war

One morning's tales from Afghanistan:

An Afghan soldier shot to death a 22-year-old Marine at an outpost in southwestern Afghanistan last month in a previously undisclosed case of apparent Afghan treachery that marked at least the seventh killing of an American military member by his supposed ally in the past six weeks, Marine officials said.

Associated Press

The American staff sergeant suspected of killing 16 Afghan villagers had been drinking alcohol — a violation of military rules in combat zones — and suffering from the stress related to his fourth combat tour and tensions with his wife about the deployments on the night of the massacre, a senior American official said Thursday.

New York Times, March 16

KABUL, Afghanistan — A Turkish helicopter crashed into a house in Kabul on Friday, killing at least 12 NATO service members and two civilians, the American-led coalition and Afghan police said.

NYT, March 16

Women visiting relatives at a notorious men’s prison on the edge of Kabul have in recent weeks been subjected to invasive body-cavity searches at the order of the prison’s commandant, who has told guards and American officials that the measure is needed to keep out contraband, Western and Afghan officials said.

…Having been repeatedly rebuffed, the Americans on Thursday tried to use the best lever they have: they cut off all American financing to Pul-e-Charki until they can confirm that the invasive searches have stopped, two Western officials said. The United States has spent about $14.2 million on improvements at the prison since June 2009. 

NYT, March 16

Enough.

On warrantless executions, other executive barbarism, and pragmatism

At Politico, a Washington scandal-mongering website, Josh Gerstein asks "What if Bush had done that?" It's ultimately an intellectually dishonest and trivial article: any piece of writing that equates popular reaction to a president's sporting habits (Obama and Bush are both golfers) to the similarities between the two men's enthusiastic adoption of law-free detention and murder of the empire's enemies (or theirs) is part of the problem, not part of the solution. But the question still hangs out there.

We live in a sad time when only satire can convey some realities. Watch Stephen Colbert:

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"Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do," Colbert said. "The current process is apparently, first the president meets with his advisers and decides who he can kill. Then he kills them."

Why aren't protesters screaming from the rooftops about this administration's adoption of pre-emptive permanent detention, about a verbal renunciation of torture that leads to no prosecutions of proud war criminals like Dick Cheney, and an assertion of a right to kill individuals anywhere in the world without any adversarial process? Certainly, these retreats from the rule of law and historically evolved norms of human social decency are as grievous as those of the previous regime. Where's the outrage?

Well, of course, there is outrage. There are a faithful few among the relatively respectable, like the National Religious Campaign against Torture and the ACLU. There are also protesters -- Code Pink dogs the appearances of the last set of rulers and reminds us to watch out for opportunities to carry our message to the next set. That's faithful.

But mostly, most of us are pragmatists. When the Bushites were in power, it was possible to believe the other sort were better. Now that we know that about wars, torture, and the rule of law this set are not better, -- though perhaps they are a little verbally smoother -- we turn our attention to other struggles. The current rulers are better than the previous lot in some respects: by and large they know the earth revolves around the sun and that women are human. This is not so clear among the Republicans. We do have to try to re-elect Barack Obama and as many Democrats as possible.

But there is no way to enter into that 2012 campaign with hope of change. We are holding onto a frayed civilization and a tired democracy, sinking rapidly into kleptocracy, wondering if our institutions can evolve enough to keep our heads above water (often literally.) And we chip away at barbarism where we can.

And we laugh at Stephen Colbert. Things are not as different from 2006 as we had hoped. But we've got no other planet to escape to, so we have to keep trying to make a better place of this one. Guess that's being human ...

Warming Wednesdays: The winter that wasn't and some political dirt

This global warming stuff is hard to think about. I find graphic presentations help. So here are two images from the indispensable Dr. Jeff Masters Wunderblog.


To put it bluntly, it has been downright warm the last few months in the areas of the country that usually get all that white stuff. According to Masters:

If you lived in the Northern Plains, Midwest, Southeast and Northeast, it seemed like winter never really arrived this year--27 states in this region had top-ten warmest winters. … If you live in the Midwest, you saved a bundle this winter on heating and snow removal costs. In Minneapolis, where the low temperature falls below 0°F an average of 30 days each year, the temperature fell below zero on just two days. ...In a normal winter, there are 13 days with sub-zero temperatures in Chicago. The coldest it got in Chicago this winter was a relatively balmy 5°F on January 19.

And though it is raining outside my window in San Francisco as I write, it has barely done so at all since December. It looks as if only a dried up Texas had a good season.

So much for good old climate predicability ...***Meanwhile on Tuesday …
Rick Santorum comes from behind in AL and MSHere's the candidate spreading scientific ordure.

"The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is …"

HuffPo

Reflecting on Mitt

This little item reminded me that Mitt Romney and I are the same age.

Mitt Romney turns 65 Monday, making him eligible for Medicare. But his campaign has confirmed that he will not use the government health care program. "No, he's keeping his current private insurance plan," a Romney source told CNN.

I wonder whether he gets the same junk mail I'm getting as I come within 3 months of Medicare: official looking envelopes that say in tiny obscure print "non-governmental document." I bet he does; the vipers that scam older people make their money on volume. Though most of us throw their crap out, a few elders get taken in and that's makes the "offers" profitable.

Actually, if I'd looked at Romney's high school yearbook picture, I'd have placed Romney's age instantly. Like me, he's high school class of 1965. Actually we turn out to have even more in common: both of us graduated from exclusive private schools in Rust Belt areas that catered to the children of the small class of wealthy citizens who expected to run the town -- and still did to some extent. Our circumstances were different though: his father actually did run his city (as president of American Motors) and his state (as governor); my parents were just the dying end of a line of folks who had run their city one hundred years previously. This discrepancy probably gave us somewhat different views of the world, plus being a lesbian in my case.

The young Romney looks like most of the boys I knew as a kid -- a dangerous mixture of cocksure and anxious. None of the ones I knew went to Vietnam; neither did Romney. An awful lot of our age peers did have to serve as cannon fodder in that imperial mistake. None of the boys I knew ended up in the public arena like Romney either, nor accomplished anything very notable. Has he done anything notable except chase a series of ambitions by any means necessary?

I guess he'll never have to join the rest of his age group on Medicare. Me, I'm fiercely glad that Medicare will be there for me a few months from now and I'll spend the rest of my days fighting any politician who seeks to undermine it. In fact, how about Medicare for All? Now there's a notion about what to do with the wealth of this country … stop invading other places and use our good fortune for our own people.

No, I don't think much of Mitt. I never did like those boys that looked like him.

On the freedom to ditch college

The change to Daylight Saving Time has disoriented me enough that I have no time for blogging today. But I did want to share a chart I ran across in a Thomas Edsall NYT blog post about how access to higher education has become a factor reinforcing privilege in contrast to the decades after World War II when college acted as a ladder for millions.

What fascinates me about this is the wild gyrations in the college completion rate among the top quartile of incomes. For everyone else, college completion is either a relatively flat line or slants gradually upward. But privileged young people apparently cut back their college graduation rate in the 70s and again at the end of the 90s and into the early years of the 00s.

I have no data that tells me why this happened. I do think we can assume that top quartile students are the social group that feels the most free to follow their inclinations; they can pretty much trust that even if they wander off the beaten track, they can get back on a ladder toward a good life.

The 70s were a decade in which society was assimilating the racial and gender freedoms partially won in the 60s, as well as disillusionment with institutions that had enabled an evil war and with nuclear families that broke up in record numbers. Can freedom to explore these changes explain the drop off in degree attainment? I did know the child of a university president who adopted the harsh life of a blueberry farmer -- temporarily, I assume.

The late 90s and early 00s seems to have coincided with an even greater relative temporary drop in college completion among the privileged. I'm tempted to suggest that they looked at the ascendency of the moronic George W. and shrugged: with rich parents, who needs school? But that is just snark.

Any better ideas?

Yet more evidence it's time to go in Afghanistan

A man cries over the bodies of Afghan civilians loaded into the back of a truck in Alkozai village of Panjwayi district, Kandahar province on Sunday. Image Credit: AFP

An AP photographer saw 15 bodies between the two villages caught up in the shooting. Some of the bodies had been burned, while others were covered with blankets. A young boy partially wrapped in a blanket was in the back of a minibus, dried blood crusted on his face and pooled in his ear.

Gulf News

It's hard to know what to say about the latest from the U.S. war on the Taliban in Afghanistan … or should it be called the U.S. war on Afghans? Here's the Times:

PANJWAI, Afghanistan — Stalking from home to home, a United States Army sergeant methodically killed at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children, in a rural stretch of southern Afghanistan early on Sunday, igniting fears of a new wave of anti-American hostility, Afghan and American officials said.

Residents of three villages in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province described a terrifying string of attacks in which the soldier, who had walked more than a mile from his base, tried door after door, eventually breaking in to kill within three separate houses. At the first, the man gathered 11 bodies, including those of 4 girls younger than 6, and set fire to them, villagers said.

… Adding to the sense of concern, the killings came two days after an episode in Kapisa Province, in eastern Afghanistan, in which NATO helicopters apparently hunting Taliban insurgents instead fired on civilians, killing four and wounding another three, Afghan officials said. About 1,200 demonstrators marched in protest in Kapisa on Saturday.

Someone named Shaun Narine from Fredericton, Canada managed to say something semi-sensible in comments on the atrocity story:

I think that people in Afghanistan can probably accept the idea that a soldier will, from time to time, go crazy. It's not that surprising, if very unfortunate. I think that what may be worse is the incident mentioned in passing in this article -i.e., the death of four Afghan civilians and wounding of three more after being mistakenly fired upon by US helicopters. These "mistaken deaths" happen far too often and are the result of a matter of policy. This is the kind of thing that has made Afghans disgusted by and resistant to the ongoing American/NATO occupation.

My Canadian military friend got out with the rest of their forces a year ago. When are U.S. forces going to cut their losses and get out?

Connections that matter

My friends who track matters Anglican are following with gusto the rather obscure question of whether the Church of England will decide to adopt something called the Anglican Covenant. This document would try to lay out for the various progeny churches of the English state church worldwide a statement of belief and a procedure for disciplining or even expelling branches off the imperial tree that stray from or embarrass other branches.

Though the Archbishop of Canterbury promotes the Covenant, it is not popular anywhere. In particular, it seems designed to vote the rambunctious colonials in the United States off the island for including gay people in the clergy and moving toward marrying us. At present the initiative looks to be limping badly, probably failing -- and even if the C. of E. did manage to sign on to the document, it would not make a hill of beans difference to U.S. Episcopalians struggling to be faithful bearers of the good news of God's love in our own backyards.

But in this context, it was interesting to read Tony Judt's description of the Anglican Church in Thinking the Twentieth Century. Tudt, a Jewish Brit and the unequaled chronicler of Europe in the second half of the 20th century in Postwar, grew up in the shadow of this strange institution.

The Church of England was and is a weird animal: at its most conservative, it is far more ornate and tradition-bound than its Episcopalian brethren here in the U.S. In essence, High Anglicanism was Catholicism without the Pope (and without the Latin, until the Catholics themselves abandoned it). On the other hand, at its low end, the Anglican Church -- as embodied in village communities, particularly in certain parts of eastern England where Catholicism was weakest -- can resemble (except in its liturgy, long since formalized under episcopal authority) Scandinavian Protestantism: under-adorned, its authority vested in a single, often rather gaunt and morally and sartorially restrained pastor -- the kind who figures so prominently in much English literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Protestant in all but name.

What unites this weird religion is its long-established identification with power. From that little church in a Norfolk village through the High Anglican cathedrals of Liverpool or York, this is the "Church of England." Historically, the link between church and state in England has been unusually intimate, the ruling elite overwhelmingly drawn from Anglican families and the church itself umbilically attached to the political establishment -- not least via its great bishops, all of whom sit in the House of Lords and have in past times exercised real clout. The bishops and archbishops were typically born of a small network of families, reproducing across the years a class of ecclesiastical administrators who might just as easily have been army officers, imperial governors, royal ministers and so on. The establishment identity associated with Anglicanism is thus of far greater significance than its rather nebulous theological markers. This was above all an English church; its Christianity could at times appear almost secondary.

It is bracing to see oneself as others see one. This description sure accords with my view of the Covenant kerfuffle. Any U.S. Episcopalians clinging to nostalgic Anglophilia are likely having a tough season. ***More indicative of church life in the United States these days is probably this report via Reuters.

Banks are foreclosing on America's churches in record numbers as lenders increasingly lose patience with religious facilities that have defaulted on their mortgages, according to new data.

The surge in church foreclosures represents a new wave of distressed property seizures triggered by the 2008 financial crash, analysts say, with many banks no longer willing to grant struggling religious organizations forbearance.

Since 2010, 270 churches have been sold after defaulting on their loans, with 90 percent of those sales coming after a lender-triggered foreclosure, according to the real estate information company CoStar Group.

Yes, there are quite a few large, rich religious institutions in this country. But the deeper story is that many congregations of all sorts are in economic trouble, no longer the sole or even major community-building institution in their neighborhoods and unable to bring in the cash to support their activities.

The financial meltdown is wiping out the weakest. Lots of people probably think that is fine; religion has too often been a nasty, cramped imposition on too many of us. But these institutions are where people have met and made fellowship; I don't think virtual connections can replace the sort of face to face connections these institutions created. Even when I don't like their beliefs, I worry.

Why Daylight Saving Time?

Don't forget to spring forward tonight.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Accessible bathrooms

Bathrooms are where people whose gender is not immediately obvious on first glance most frequently experience other people's gender anxiety. Humans apparently are something like hard-wired to want to know which gender anyone we meet might be, especially in the a public restroom. This can be hard on people whose gender is not immediately obvious -- and, as a woman, I don't think women are completely crazy to want to know there aren't men in "our bathroom." Stray males can be dangerous.

The ACLU of Northern California has a solution:

Here's the door to one of two restrooms on a floor.


Just in case you are icon-challenged, this hangs alongside the door. Apparently we can be trusted to know what the wheelchair icon means.


This sign explains.


Should this seem all too much, there's always this one down the hall.

I like it. It's going to take awhile, but I suspect most of us could get used to this inclusive set up.

The national GOP through a California lens

Representation of California political geography from a new Public Policy Institute of California report.

An article by Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine headlined 2012 or Never has been the buzz of the blogosphere this week. Chait describes the Republican presidential primary as revealing a GOP sensing its own demographic annihilation and gyrating accordingly.

The Republican Party had increasingly found itself confined to white voters, especially those lacking a college degree and rural whites who, as Obama awkwardly put it in 2008, tend to “cling to guns or religion.” Meanwhile, the Democrats had ­increased their standing among whites with graduate degrees, particularly the growing share of secular whites, and remained dominant among racial minorities. …Every year, the nonwhite proportion of the electorate grows by about half a percentage point—meaning that in every presidential election, the minority share of the vote increases by 2 percent, a huge amount in a closely divided country. One measure of how thoroughly the electorate had changed by the time of Obama’s election was that, if college-­educated whites, working-class whites, and minorities had cast the same proportion of the votes in 1988 as they did in 2008, Michael Dukakis would have, just barely, won. By 2020—just eight years away—nonwhite voters should rise from a quarter of the 2008 electorate to one third. In 30 years, nonwhites will outnumber whites.

…Obama actually lost the over-45-year-old vote in 2008, gaining his entire victory margin from younger voters—more racially diverse, better educated, less religious, and more socially and economically liberal,

Yup, that's the national future, a structural Democratic majority for at least a generation.

This is not news here. I'm a Californian who has worked in state politics off and on since the 1990s. That Republicans here find themselves confined to a dwindling base of the old, the white and the aggrieved is no news. We're been there and done that and mostly the national media have missed it, written the California experience off as some left coast oddity. We're living in the world on the other side of this transition; maybe the rest of the nation would be smart to look at where California has landed, for good and ill.

Chait points out:

A strategy of managing slow decay is unpleasant, and history is replete with instances of leaders who persuaded themselves of the opposite of the obvious conclusion. Rather than adjust themselves to their slowly weakening position, they chose instead to stage a decisive confrontation. If the terms of the fight grow more unfavorable with every passing year, well, all the more reason to have the fight sooner. This was the thought process of the antebellum southern states, sizing up the growing population and industrial might of the North. It was the thinking of the leaders of Austria-Hungary, watching their empire deteriorate and deciding they needed a decisive war with Serbia to save themselves.

That last reference is to launching World War I. I think this the instinct in the dwindling Republican party as as choosing, repeatedly, to shoot holes in a leaking ship that carries them as well as everyone else. If you can't rule it, bring it down. Here in California, this took the form of enacting obstacles to taxation that ensured that the state would have a structural deficit -- it is impossible to capture a reasonable share of the wealth of the state for the purposes of the general welfare. That's a gift from the shrinking Republican rump. Our various anti-democratic obstacles to taxation -- rules adopted by white voters long gone that bar the legislature from simply enacting fiscal solutions by majority vote -- are the cause of California's notorious ongoing money crisis. The results include a once great state university system that is crumbling; crumbling canals and freeways; destitute urban centers.

You'd think that Republicans, seeing a growing non-white population, would attempt to attract the growing groups to their views. But they can't help themselves; they have to try to stomp on a rising demographic tide rather than channel it their way. Chait names their national strategy:

None of this is to say that Republicans ignored the rising tide of younger and browner voters that swamped them at the polls in 2008. Instead they set about keeping as many of them from the polls as possible. The bulk of the campaign has taken the form of throwing up an endless series of tedious bureaucratic impediments to voting in many states—ending same-day voter registration, imposing onerous requirements upon voter-registration drives, and upon voters themselves.

In California, they took an even more direct route to try to hang on for dear life. They tried to subvert demographic reality by popular vote while they could, creating structural barriers to citizen participation by the emerging majority. In 1994 they demonized immigrants (Prop. 187); in 1996, they outlawed affirmative action in state institutions (Prop. 209); in 1998, they outlawed bilingual education (Prop, 227); in 2000, they fought back against browning among the young people by pushing juvenile offenders into adult courts and prisons (Prop 21). Oh yeah, the same year they outlawed gay marriage (Prop. 22), not for the last time.

This sequence of barely veiled attacks on the emerging majority helped make California reliably and completely Democratic at the state level since 1998. Oh, but didn't you have Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor for eight years? Yes, we did. The Terminator's elevation through a gubernatorial recall election is a perfect example of Chait's caution about his conclusions:

... short-term shocks, like war, recession, or scandal, can exert a far more powerful influence than a long-term trend ...

Republicans can break through as the currently configured party dwindles, but only in freakish ways. And it is worth nothing that the Governator in office could only rule by making some level of compromise with the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature; not even an action hero could turn back the demographic tide.

If the California experience is the paradigm, what's ahead for the nation at large? We're still in the denial stage nationally, much akin to 1994 here when Pete Wilson thought it was good politics to demonize Latinos in order to get elected. So expect ugly days, more figures like Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum and the Newt. But there is a glimmer of hope from the California experience as well. It doesn't seem to require demographic change to advance to numerical non-white majorities to get over the hump. A growing section of younger white voters, raised in a different world, shrug their shoulders at their elders and wonder "what is the problem?"

These folks elected Barack Obama in 2008; a smaller but similar coalition seems likely at the moment to re-elect him this year. Given the economic storm he has weathered and the rabid opposition he has encountered from Republicans fighting demographic death, that's a testament to the strength of the tide of change in the country. Though I cannot forgive him for his abandonment of any limits to extra-judicial executive power (ain't drone assassination of U.S. citizens a fun new tool?) he may well have been a more politically sure-footed president than I sometimes give him credit for, navigating the fraught waters of demographic change and drawing the crazy so personally to himself. We live in frightening, terrible times -- but I think everyone believes that of their times.

Friday critter blogging: meet Nuzzle

When you live with a spinning and knitting fanatic, creatures like this may turn up in your home.

I'm told she is named "Nuzzle."


I think she looks better after acquiring ears, don't you?

What it took for U.S. women to win the vote

On International Women's Day, let's remember that advances toward women's equality have not come without struggle.

This video tells the story of women who dared to demonstrate for the right to vote during another time of national anxiety, the dark days of World War I. They would have fully appreciated Sergeant Pepper Spray's run in with UC-Davis occupying students -- threatened authorities instinctively turn to force to repress offenders. This doesn't always work, though the injuries and the pain are real.

The Bible viewed through an inverted telescope

Reading Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman felt to me like trying to see an object looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Ehrman is a textual critic of the New Testament, a professor of Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. He began his scholarly odyssey at the fundamentalist Moody Bible Institute, moved on to evangelical Wheaton College, and shed any remnant of belief in an inerrant, unquestionable scripture at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Perhaps because of his own intellectual trajectory, Ehrman writes with a view to showing that changes entered the Biblical text as soon as any particular manuscript was manually copied, were magnified by improvements and amplifications that supported the theological directions of dominant interpretations of the Christian faith, and became further muddled as the Greek original language became more distant from later readers in European vernacular languages. Only when he has worked his way up from the sort of minuscule (though perhaps important) textual changes that came misreadings of individual letters through technical changes in copying methods and in languages does he mention where my thoughts about Biblical textual interpolations would start: with the convenient way that what became the canon ratified existing power arrangements, including the principle of obedience to authority and the exclusion of women from influence within faith communities.

This author is clearly an accomplished scholar yet there are elements to this exposition that seem simply odd. For example, Ehrman writes as if we should assume that there lived a real (individual) Mark, Matthew, Luke and John who wrote full, original books of the Bible that later suffered distortion. He can't really mean that given what he explains about the evolution of the texts. But he writes as if the convenient authorial names referred to individuals whose historical reality was far more established than I imagine we have any reason to assume. Further, nowhere in his considerable discussion of the meanings of texts does he suggest that whoever these authors were, they probably were more concerned to share metaphorical truths than the sort of scientifically verifiable truths that moderns look for. There seems no reason to assume that first century C.E. understandings of "reality" were the same as ours. I'm not saying these ancient authors were ignorant or liars -- just that they had different intellectual furniture than we have.

These criticisms should not suggest that I got nothing from Ehrman's book. In fact, it was interesting to learn a little about the general principles that textual critics use to weigh ancient texts. And it was fun to learn that the classical scholar and theologian Richard Bentley (1662-1742) engaged in a style of academic polemic that exuded quite remarkable venom when he disagreed with another student of the Bible. Ehrman expresses my sentiments exactly here:

Such controversial pamphlets are a marvel to behold in our own day of subtle polemics; there was nothing subtle about personal grievance in those days. Bentley remarks that "We need go no further than this paragraph for a specimen of the greatest malice and impudence, that any scribbler out of the dark committed to paper." And throughout his reply he provides a smattering of rather graphic terms of abuse, calling Colbatch … a cabbage-head, insect, worm, maggot, vermin, gnawing rat, snarling dog, ignorant thief, and mountebank. Ah, those were the days.

Though I rapidly concluded Ehrman's book was not for me, I have no doubt that it might be eye opening to a person approaching the Bible through the other end of the telescope, a person breaking free from the effort to believe that the text was the wholly true, directly revealed, inspired word of God. It takes all kinds …

Too pooped to blog today ...

after contributing to the planet's excess carbon yesterday by flying to Los Angeles and back within 12 hours for a meeting. Maybe later.

This does my heart good

Professional hockey is one tough sport. Here NHL players step up to assert that if a gay athlete can hold his own, he can play. In that hyper-butch arena, that's a breakthrough statement. Enjoy.

Equally amazing is a report that 22 sitting Democratic Senators are calling for the Democrats to include support for marriage equality in the Democratic Party platform. Here's the list:

The 22 senators are Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), John Kerry (D-Mass.), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Mark Udall (D-Colo.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

Note that Diane Feinstein is among them. True, she's running for office this year, but you know an idea has gone mainstream when she's among the supporters.

Because these guys are the experts

A little comic relief; how else to bear it?

Women's Health Experts Speak Out from Judd Nelson

H/t Time Goes By.

Wars and rumors of war: "But when have the leaders of empires been sensible?"

Guest post today from Alicia Garza, via War Times/Tiempo de Guerras. If you find this kind of wide ranging analysis of global developments helps keep your head from spinning, sign up for monthly updates at WarTimes.

SHORT FUSES ATOP POWDERKEGS
The post-9/11 Neocon dream of Washington running the entire Middle East is crumbling before their eyes. But lunatic as it seems, Republican presidential hopefuls are beating the drums for still another Middle East war.

Afghan "allies" are shooting NATO troops every other day and the U.S. war in Afghanistan is falling apart. In The End in Afghanistan? Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse report that "American officials are talking about not panicking (which indicates that panic is indeed in the air)."

Evidence piles up weekly that the war against Iraq was not only a human disaster for the Iraqi people, but an embarrassing failure for the U.S. Plans for "the largest Embassy" in the world in Baghdad have to be cut in half, and the Iraqi government is closer politically to Iran than the U.S.

But on the campaign trail here, the foreign policy discussion is dominated by Republicans attempting to whip the American public into a frenzy over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons (which U.S. intelligence says Iran has not even decided to build!) and pledging 1,000% support for Israeli settlements and threats to attack Iran.

So at the end of this shortest month of the year the world is on an increasingly short fuse. The danger of war against Iran is front and center. But there is also the tense standoff on the Korean peninsula and upped threats for of military intervention in Syria where the powderkeg mix of a brutal regime, a divided population, sectarian tensions and Western and Israeli ambitions could engulf the whole region. And background to it all is the slow motion military redeployment toward strategic positions in the Pacific to keep China under surveillance and encircled to counter what Washington regards as the main threat to its power in the 21st century.

BRINGING IT ON: U.S. BUILD-UP IN THE PACIFIC
As analyzed in previous War Times columns, China’s continued ascent has been of great concern not only to the U.S. but to other countries that are skittish at what they consider China’s aggressive stance. Since 2009, China has surpassed the U.S. as Africa’s most important trading partner, making massive investments in Africa’s infrastructure. It has a growing military and has been increasingly assertive in staking claim to valuable disputed territories such as the energy rich South China Sea. This rise has Washington on guard, and putting the pieces in place to make sure U.S. supremacy is secure against the only power that Washington believes could become a global "peer competitor."

Underneath is the U.S. elite's growing awareness of declining U.S. economic and political power. China’s continued ascent as an economic and military power alongside increasing tensions in the Pacific region between the Koreas has had the US quietly increasing its maritime presence and troop deployment in the region.

One result is Washington's move back into the Philippines. This marks a shift from recent policy in the Philippines, which has rejected the U.S. military from its shores for the last 15 years (even though the U.S. military continues to train troops there allegedly to fight al-Qaeda-linked forces). However, with China adopting a more aggressive stance in the region, the U.S. is finding many Pacific leaders receptive to the idea of a larger U.S, military presence. Thus Reuters reports that "U.S. and Philippine officials are discussing the expansion of military cooperation" as part of a U.S. "'pivot' toward economically dynamic Asia." Similar agreements have been reached or are being negotiated with Australia, Japan, and Singapore.

Meanwhile, tensions between North and South Korea are mounting, where the powderkeg is especially explosive because there are nuclear weapons on both sides. The death of Kim Jong-il late last year was thought to perhaps usher in a new era between the two countries; however, North Korea recently began aggressive military exercises again, with orders coming from Kim Jong-un to retaliate against South Korea if provoked. And South Korea is cracking down on advocates of peace and demilitarization, especially those supporting the grassroots resistance of Gangjeong villagers to the naval base on Jeju Island.

Increasing geo-political tensions in the Pacific region have spurred the demand for drones, weapons of mass destruction that are generally used for combat and surveillance. Interest in purchasing drones is increasing from India, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Australia. As the demand increases, new companies are flourishing, spurring stiff competition with established industry giants. Suddenly, more and more governments are looking to get their hands on weapons that allow them to keep an eye on their neighbors and engage in destructive combat if necessary - creating a dangerous cycle in which everyone is gearing up for the potential of war.

DANGER: HIGHLY FLAMMABLE
While dangerous militarization grows in the Pacific region, shifting political dynamics in the Middle East create tremendous volatility. The U.S.’s failed strategy in Iraq is now quickly and visibly being repeated in Afghanistan, as anti-US sentiment spreads like wildfire throughout the country. And the threat of an attack on Iran looms over the region like a dark cloud, with Israel working in tandem with U.S. conservatives to encourage pre-emptive strikes based on exaggerated or made-up reports that has or is actively building nuclear weapons.

The ongoing outrage coming from Neo-conservatives portrays Obama as being “soft on terrorism,” despite the fact that under the Obama administration, sanctions against Iran are been the strictest that they’ve been. As the U.S. becomes increasingly de-stabilized by an ongoing recession and the effects of over-extension in the Middle East - and as popular movements like Occupy rise up to fight back - the Republicans up the volume on fear-mongering and the need for the U.S. to "Remain Number One" at any cost.

So far the Obama administration's policy has been to tighten pressure on Iran via sanctions but try to avoid a military conflict that U.S. realists see as a potential disaster for their own interests. But the administration's constant pledges of "100% support" for Israel combined with its electoral calculations about both the "Jewish vote" and need to "appear strong" could result in an about-face. With the unraveling of the U.S. position in Afghanistan, an Obama campaign that hoped to run on "victory in Iraq, success against Al-Qaeda and achievement-leading-to-withdrawal-(someday) from Afghanistan sees its plans in tatters. With it increasingly obvious that Afghans do not want foreign troops there, and a majority of U.S. people now telling pollsters that the war there "is not worth it," the sensible course would be to get out and fast. But when have the leaders of empires been sensible? History tells us that in moments like these, there is great danger of re-escalation in Afghanistan - or an attack on Iran to "show strength."

And the arguments from hawks for escalation are already being marshaled. Despite claiming victory in Iraq, it is clearer than ever that the U.S. did not achieve its goal of a pro-Western regime and that Washington spent eight years, billions of dollars, thousands of U.S. lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives on a war that was both wrong and lost. And now the same anti-U.S. outrage that eventually forced the U.S. out of Iraq is boiling over throughout Afghanistan. The trigger was the burning of the Qu’ran in a trash dump outside of the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan. But beneath that are the murderous night raids, the civilians killed by U.S. bombs, the daily humiliations of foreign occupation. It is, as Engelhardt and Turse write, "an explosion a decade in coming."

The U.S. elite - Obama administration included - fears that the Afghan outrage will only fuel further anti-American sentiment in a region forever transformed by the ongoing Arab Spring. (The Qu’ran burning and response has already been front-page news throughout the Islamic world.) This makes it difficult to achieve their objective of stabilizing the area and minimizing the damage done by ten years of over-stretch and lost wars. They are scrambling.

One place they see opportunity is Syria. Since that country's outbreak of the Arab Spring a year ago, the regime's brutal repression has killed several thousand protestors; reports vary with pro-dissident forces on the ground estimating up to 7,500 deaths. But overlaid on, and perhaps increasingly intertwined with, the popular protest are the ambitious of the Western powers and pro-Western regimes like Saudi Arabia. This month Obama released a statement intimating that the international community needed to become involved in order to halt the killing of civilians and noted that the al-Assad regime had to come to an end. Washington pressed for a UN resolution that might have authorized foreign intervention; Russia and China vetoed citing what had happened in Libya, where a mission authorized as humanitarian saving of lives turned into an operation for regime change. The U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia want to install in Damascus a government that, unlike the current regime, is not allied with Iran or a supporter of Hezbollah in Lebanon. The threat of U.S. intervention is increasing. (Most of the left has taken a position of solidarity with the anti-dictatorship movement while opposing all foreign intervention.) How the situation will play out, what will allow the Syrian people to determine their own destiny, whether or not Syria will become another bead in the thread of disastrous U.S. interventions- all this remains to be seen.

WILL THE POWDERKEGS EXPLODE?
Events this month on the war and peace front could supply the script for a Horror Movie Award Show. The award for the “Most Dangerous Developing Situation” goes to Israel's threat to attack Iran, with Washington winning "Best Supporting Role for Another Illegal War." The “Longest Running Conflict with the Shortest Fuse" Award goes to the standoff on the Korean Peninsula; Washington gets a "Supporting' if not "Producing and Directing" nod there too.

Both situations win the “Scariest Sub-plot” award, since while all war is destructive, there are no wars quite as destructive as those that involve nuclear weapons. With political relationships and the balance of forces shifting quite dramatically in both the Middle East and in the Pacific, this awards show ends with a cliffhanger: Will antiwar movements in the U.S. and around the world be able to organize and mobilize sufficient strength to win a "Stopped the Descent Into Madness" Award by helping resolve these conflicts in the interests of peace as opposed to ongoing, endless war?

An Islamic Reformation?

Reza Aslan wants a "Reformation" within Islam; he has said that the world is watching such an upheaval within Muslim societies at this time, though outsiders may not recognize what we are seeing.

His 2005 book No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam tells the story of Islam carefully, lucidly and with warm affection for his faith's core.

Explaining Islam to western Christians requires historical narrative. After all, for Muslims, God's revelation through the Prophet Muhammed happened in known locales (trading centers on the Arabian Peninsula) at known dates (between 610 and 622 C.E.) and led to material consequences that are fully documented (one of the worlds great empires extending from Spain to the Hindu Kush). The Muslim story makes the tales of that Jewish Galilean carpenter's perambulations around ancient Palestine seem vague, mythological, in the modern pejorative sense.

Aslan is an Iranian-American, a refugee from his native country's harsh theocracy; in this book he is exploring whether his faith can be compatible with the contemporary wider world. He makes a strong case that the history of Islam contains episodes of great openness to diversity, as well as a core commitment in establishing justice and equality among people. But whether Muslim peoples can find their way to Islamic democracies remains hard for him to envision. Here's a sample of this sort of wrestling with possibilities not yet born:

Islam has had a long commitment to religious pluralism. … And despite the ways in which it has been interpreted by militants and fundamentalists who refuse to recognize its historical and cultural context, there are few scriptures in the great religions of the world that can match the reverence with which the Quran speaks of other religious traditions. …[A]cknowledging human rights in Islam is not simply a means of protecting civil liberties, it is a fundamental religious duty.

…the Islamic vision of human rights is neither a prescription for moral relativism, nor does it imply freedom from ethical restraint. Islam's quintessentially communal character necessitates that any human rights policy take into consideration the protection of the community over the autonomy of the individual. And while there may be some circumstances in which Islamic morality may force the rights of the community to prevail over the rights of the individual for instance, with regard to Quranic commandments forbidding drinking or gambling-these and all other ethical issues must constantly be reevaluated so as to conform to the will of the community. …

… any democratic society -- Islamic or otherwise -- dedicated to the principles of pluralism and human rights must dedicate itself to following the unavoidable path toward political secularization. … An Islamic democracy is not intended to be a "theo-democracy," but a democratic system founded upon an Islamic moral framework, devoted to preserving Islamic ideals of pluralism and human rights as they were first introduced in Medina, and open to the inevitable process of political secularization. Islam may eschew secularism, but there is nothing about fundamental Islamic values that opposes the process of political secularization. Only the Prophet had both religious and temporal authority, and the Prophet is no longer among us. …

Those who argue that a state cannot be considered Islamic unless sovereignty rests in the hands to God are in effect arguing that sovereignty should rest in the hands of the clergy. Because religion is, by definition, interpretation, sovereignty in a religious state would belong to those with the power to interpret religion. Yet for this very reason an Islamic democracy cannot be a religious state. Otherwise it would be an oligarchy, not a democracy. From the time of the Prophet to the Rightly Guided Caliphs to the great empires and sultanates of the Muslim world, there has never been a successful attempt to establish a monolithic interpretation of the meaning and significance of Islamic beliefs and practices. …

I've read quite a few accounts of the history and beliefs of the Islamic faith. When Muslims get to hoping for a Reformation -- a struggle within the faith to both preserve and accommodate its core within a contemporary context -- I feel like I'm being a Peeping Tom. This is up the believers, not outsiders. But we live in a world where outsiders can and will see in; a Muslim Reformation, if one is accomplished, will happen in full view of all others. Given this reality, I can heartily recommend Aslan's depiction of Islam to others peering in the global window.

What was Fort Gunny-Bags?

While toting yet another mail bucket of petitions seeking a vote on the death penalty through San Francisco's Financial District the other day, I noticed a plaque I'd somehow missed on previous trips:

These days, when downtown is a granite wind tunnel that empties out when the commuters go home at night, it is hard to visualize the area as the vibrant center of civic life. But that is exactly what it once was, when San Francisco was a bumptious frontier port in the midst of the gold rush.

Not all the money floating about was in gold nuggets. Urban crooks made out like -- well -- bandits. According to the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco:

Politics and the government of the city and State were neglected by the residents, and naturally the offices and emoluments fell to the criminal elements who came west. Some of the worst characters driven from New York's Bowery and from Botany Bay, Australia, held office and wallowed in corruption and graft.

Trials in the courts were a farce, and those in power made no pretense of shielding their friends when charged with crimes.

An honest man's vote was worthless at the polls, and ballot box stuffing was openly practiced.

James King-of-William (that really was his surname) launched a newspaper in protest. When the gambler Charles Cora killed a U.S. marshall, King denounced him. Then a corrupt politician, James P. Casey, shot and fatally injured King.

The reforming Committee of Vigilance, made up of prominent citizens, vowed to defend life, liberty and property by punishing Cora and Casey. They holed up in a warehouse building on the present Sacramento street that became know as Fort Gunny-Bags because of the cloth sacks filled with sand which they stacked around their redoubt.

They seized Casey and Cora from the sheriff, gave the men a public "trial" and, on May 22 1856, publicly hanged them in front of their fort. The crowd watching the double hanging was called "immense."

So apparently I'm working to end the death penalty around the corner from the site of one of early San Francisco's most notorious hangings.

The old pictures come from NoeHill in San Francisco.

Sign of spring

Yes I can nest among your 2 ton behemoths! Nice sunny day we're having!

799,589 voter signatures!

Yesterday the SAFE California campaign submitted some 799,589 voter signatures to place our initiative to replace the death penalty with sentences of life without parole for terrible crimes. Above, retired Superior Court judge LaDoris Cordell speaks while some of the folks who collected petitions for the measure listen in San Francisco. After small armies of workers at the 58 country election departments validate the signatures (we need 504,000 good ones), the measure will be certified for the November ballot.

"California voters are ready to replace the death penalty with life in prison with no chance of parole," declared Jeanne Woodford, who oversaw four executions as warden of San Quentin State Prison.

San Francisco Chronicle, March 1, 2012

The idea that Californians "are ready" evoked some skepticism from the assembled reporters. Our state likes to present an image of historic wild west swagger; sure we'll string up the bad guys and achieve rough and ready justice.

But the media hasn't been out on the street gathering these signatures, an experience that amounts to experiencing a huge sample of public opinion. Voters readily understand that there is something wrong; along with the state's quite conservative Chief Justice, they know the execution system is "not working," "ineffective." They are ready to listen to the established facts about the insane costs: California has spent over $4 billion on the death penalty since we enacted it in 1978 -- and executed only 13 people. People want safe communities, not legal theater that fails to solve rapes and murders or to help their kids make it off the streets. And they worry when they hear stories like that of Angeleno Franky Carillo who spent two decades in prison for a murder he didn't commit. We don't want to get this wrong!

One of the pleasures of the signature gathering has been working with grassroots Catholics and with the California Catholic Conference. Rather than trying to dictate morals to an unwillingly and largely indifferent broader population, on this issue, the princes of the church have sought to draw their adherents into the democratic process. Their message of congratulations to the campaign tells that story:

"We were pleased to have participated in this effort by encouraging our parishioners to collect signatures and are gratified that we could join the many other individuals and groups who helped the sponsors of this initiative. We would like to personally thank all the Catholic volunteers who stepped forward and worked hard on the effort.

"Now, in November, California's voters will be offered the chance to make this prudent, life-affirming, safety-enhancing and cost-savings change in sentencing law. Moreover, passing this initiative will prevent the execution an innocent person.

"We look forward to the SAFE California campaign as a time when the voting public can learn of the wisdom of replacing the sentence of death with the sentence of life imprisonment."

Market Watch

It takes a big and broad team to pass a California initiative. The success this phase of the initiative process shows that SAFE California has assembled one!

Smart women say smart things

It might be easy to miss this, but concurrent with all the bluff and bluster about the health insurance reform somehow impinging on Catholics' freedoms, the nuns who run Catholic hospitals have filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court supporting the law. A group representing the leadership of Catholic women's religious orders writes:

Amici believe that a civilized society must ensure the provision of basic healthcare to its citizens regardless of their ability to pay for it. They further believe it is a moral imperative that all levels of government institute programs that ensure the poor receive such care. They believe Medicaid expansion under the Act is critical to the communities they serve.

***

Meanwhile, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been visiting post-Mubarak Egypt. After 19 years on the highest U.S. court, dealing repeatedly with how our Constitution both succeeds and fails to structure a free society, she offered some words of advice on Al Hayat TV to Egyptians struggling with creating a new legal framework for their country:

Q: Would your honor's advice be to get a part or other countries' constitutions as a model, or should we develop our own draft?

A: You should certainly be aided by all the constitution-writing that has gone one since the end of World War II. I would not look to the US constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the constitution of South Africa. That was a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights, had an independent judiciary. It really is, I think, a great piece of work that was done. Much more recent than the U.S. Constitution: Canada has a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It dates from 1982. You would almost certainly look at the European Convention on Human Rights. Yes, why not take advantage of what there is elsewhere in the world? I'm a very strong believer in listening and learning from others.

Goodness -- is the woman perhaps not an American exceptionalist? U.S. right wing media think she is nigh on to a traitor. Interestingly, the video of the interview was uploaded by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.