We don't care; we don't have to.

It's not just utility monopolies that routinely slough off concern for the effects of their actions. I find this depressing. My reaction may be self-indulgent.

We the people of these United States simply find it more than we can do to attend to wars in which we don't, right this minute anyway, have our own soldiers dying.

Just 17 percent reported following news about Russian troops entering Georgia very closely, while 37 percent said they didn't follow it closely at all. The level of attention given to the Georgia conflict is comparable to previous international conflicts when they don't involve U.S. troops. The spike in military tensions between India and Pakistan in 2002 was followed very closely by 24 percent of Americans, and the conflict between the Russian military and rebels in Chechnya was tracked very closely by only about one-in-ten Americans. Even the 1993 civil war in Bosnia, which ultimately had far-reaching consequences for European politics, was followed very closely by just 23 percent of Americans.

Pew

I know, it is only human to pick and choose what we attend to. And all this agony is very far away in places we can't locate and don't understand.

But since we've been an empire since at least 1945, and the sole Alpha Global Dog since 1989 (though now on the wane), the quality of our democracy at home depends on whether our rulers are unregulated in their behavior toward the rest of the world.

And though we may not care now, as U.S. power declines -- as it must when other peoples demand their place in the sun -- we will have to care about what is done in our name in those faraway places.

Pelosi meets some of her constituents

Last night Congresswoman and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a book promotion event at Cowell Theater in Fort Mason in San Francisco. It was the only one of a series of these book events held in her Congressional district. Though despite Cindy Sheehan's challenge there's no real possibility that Pelosi will not be reelected, San Francisco is not very happy with its Congresscritter. This is not very surprising, since in general, most people are very pissed off with Congress. And Democrats, which is all we have here, are among the most pissed off. In July,

just 9 percent say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52 percent) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.

Last month, 11 percent of voters gave the legislature good or excellent ratings. Congress has not received higher than a 15 percent approval rating since the beginning of 2008.

The percentage of Democrats who give Congress positive ratings fell from 17 percent last month to 13 percent this month.

Rasmussen Reports

Naturally Madame Speaker catches lots of this disaffection, especially from the local left whose core complaint is her undermining of Constitutional checks and balances by "taking impeachment off the table." A few protesters stood outside before the event.


Code Pink was on hand.


Some carried a bill of particulars of the crimes facilitated by the do-nothing Democratic Congress.

Interestingly, the regular organization Democrats who shared the line for admittance to the event with the protesters did not seem in the least put out by the dissent. In fact, to judge from the ones several of us talked with, they too feel frustrated with the Speaker.


The media were happy to get an explanation from articulate pro-impeachment cab driver Brad Newsham who has been expressing himself at several of the Pelosi book events. This is his account of being (gently) thrown out in San Rafael.

My moment with Pelosi -- non-intellectual but, thank goodness, non-arresting

I love the San Rafael Police. But I think I may now have a "personal thing" going with Nancy Pelosi.

I honestly didn't plan to get myself escorted out of the auditorium tonight. I was told by the organizers that the event was sold out and that I was #25 on the waiting list and I should definitely not expect to get a ticket. But on Tuesday morning I made myself a banner (a one-foot by six-foot strip of white sheet, with "IMPEACH" spelled out in blood-red paint), and in the evening I drove over to San Rafael anyway, to participate in the protest outside. For about half an hour prior to the event I positioned myself so that incoming traffic could see me holding my banner aloft -- lots of honks and waves and thumbs-ups. ...

At the start time for the event I folded up my banner and stuffed it into my backpack and joined the 50 or so protesters from Marin Peace and Justice who were gathered in front of the auditorium. Ted Newman, who ran in the June Democratic primary as a write-in impeachment candidate from Marin, told me that there were still some tickets available. At the door, I paid my $26, got my copy of Pelosi's book, and the next thing I knew I was walking into the auditorium.

The place was full -- not a single vacant seat. I sat on the floor in the aisle toward the back. No one bothered me. For 30-45 minutes I listened to Pelosi answer softball questions lobbed to her by Elaine Petrocelli, owner of Book Passage. As I listened to Pelosi's answers, I kept thinking: "This is unreal. You'd think that the only things in life that mattered were that a woman was Speaker of the House and that Democrats were gaining ground." ...

Petrocelli told Pelosi that there had been many cards passed in by people who were distressed about the damage to the Constitution. And when Pelosi started a long rambling non-answer -- something about the judiciary and the Supreme Court -- I suddenly was removing my banner and unfolding it in my lap. I sat looking down at the ground for 15 seconds listening to my heart thump-thump-thump-thump and thinking, "So this is how it is..." while Pelosi's voice droned on in the background. And then I was slipping my pack over my shoulders, pushing myself to my feet, grasping the corners of my banner, extending it over my head, and walking slowly down the aisle toward the stage. The Secret Service agent (?) near the stage headed my way. I turned toward Pelosi -- I was maybe 40 feet away. I turned toward the audience so they could read the banner. There was applause -- not overwhelming, and far from unanimous, but while I was in the room, the people who were clapping did not stop. I turned again. Then again. The Secret Service agent poked something (I think it was a finger) in my back. Four people in blue uniforms surrounded me. As the police herded me toward the back, I heard Pelosi call out to me, "Thank you for your passion." She said it in that politician voice -- you know the one. And if she'd left it at that, maybe I wouldn't be feeling the things I'm feeling right now. But she didn't leave it at that. She waited a beat, and brought the snitty back into her tone: "And for your intellect." There were a lot of Pelosi supporters in the room. One might have expected to hear a wave of laughter. I did not hear one. All I heard was clapping.

And then I was out on the front steps, showing the police my driver's license. They quoted the code for "disrupting a meeting." I said, "Was I disrupting?" They said, "You were."

They were always respectful to me. The sergeant said, "We have to talk to the agent." Over a walkie-talkie he asked, "Should we arrest him, or release him?" He told the agent: "Clean record." He said: "He's a good guy." Finally, to me: "If you leave the premises we won't have to arrest you."

I made it home in time to watch some of the Olympics with my family.

You can get on this cheerful agitator's email list via his Beach Impeach website.

I didn't go into Cowell Theater last night, but I've heard some protesters were ejected there. Our Congressperson has to expect protest on the rare occasions she shows her face in San Francisco.

Update: Not long after I posted this, I heard more from Brad about the inside festivities:

Toward the start time, everyone filed into the auditorium, which holds 400 and was maybe 80% full. Pelosi and her interviewer, Michael Krasny of KQED "Forum," came on stage to much applause and a few scattered boos and hisses. Early on, someone near me hummed "Nah-nah-nah-nah, hey-hey, good-bye" and I hummed it back, but that was the last time I heard it during the evening. I don't personally know all the activists who were there, so it's really hard to give an accurate count, but we were scattered individually and in clusters throughout the crowd, and a few minutes into Pelosi's talk someone, not me, yelled "Impeach" or something, and the cry was echoed by other people around the auditorium, then it stopped, and Pelosi droned on. She told a lot of stories about her start in politics, most of which are from her book. And every now and then, someone in the crowd, not me, would scream, "Iraq!" Or "Torture!" Or "Impeach!" And pretty soon I was screaming right along with everyone.

When she scolded us all, "You're just being silly now! If you want the Iraq war to end, you should put all this wonderful energy into electing Barack Obama!" At which point I found myself pointing my finger at her and screaming, "We elected YOU to do that..." My cry was drowned out by a chorus of others: "Do your job!" "IMPEACH!" "War CRIMINAL!"

It went on like this for quite a while, causing several stoppages. Soon there were security people running up and down the aisles like ballpark popcorn vendors, trying to identify who was screaming, but it was so spread out, and so loud, that they really couldn't do much. If they went to one area of the crowd, protesters in another area shouted out, and if they surrounded someone, protesters yelled, "Leave her/him alone!" Pelosi and Krasny several times stopped and pleased with us to stop. The crowd was, numerically, mostly in Pelosi's corner, screaming at all of us screamers to stop.

And on it went... I have to say that Pelosi was pretty much unflappable -- I don't think we caused her any big reconsiderations, don't think we did anything to budge her, but you never know. In the film "The Fog of War," former head of the US Department of Defense, Robert McNamara, said that it was the demonstrators, particularly the one who set himself afire right outside McNamara's office, that got him to question what he was doing in regards to the Vietnam War.

... I came away from the evening with the sense of having screamed at the Speaker of the House for about an hour -- and even though I don't kid myself that it accomplished anything, it FELT good, it felt RIGHT. She has so choked off debate on the subject of impeachment, and anything else she doesn't want to talk about, that this kind of thing is about the only avenue of protest we have left, and it felt absolutely fair to me that we took that avenue.

I love that we are irrepressible around here.

Friday critter blogging

This beauty was perched on our front door this morning. It's about an inch and a half long. Anyone know what it is?

Georgia on my mind *

Some observations on the Caucasus kafuffle, not deeply informed, but heartfelt and perhaps useful.

• A considerable number of people who had homes and lives until last week no longer do. That's wrong. People need urgent help -- and the global mechanisms for providing aid in a way that doesn't fuel the conflict are probably broken.

• In the 1990s, it became something of a truism in circles I ran in that nationalism had become dangerous to human thriving. We were looking at the post-Yugoslavian Balkans among other examples. Since 2000, the emphasis of concern has turned to places that were becoming "failed states." After all, U.S. military might created failed states as fast as possible in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the Caucasus, nationalism is back with a vengeance. And it is deeply destructive to all parties.

• At the beginning of the 21st century, probably the only places left that really believed that the U.S. was in the business of "democracy promotion," rather of our own empire, were those that had suffered under the Russian empire. They counted on the U.S., probably none more than the nationalistic Georgians who clearly believed they could bait the Russians and would get U.S. support. Now in Georgia

  there's a universal belief that the United States betrayed Georgia, so you have people who are really in despair and profoundly hopeless. We've lost 70 percent of our influence in the Caucasus in four days.

  Charles Fairbanks,
  TNR

  The U.S. didn't deserve the reliance Georgians placed on it; but what hope can any of these smaller peoples have to offset Russian dominance?

• The U.S. has clearly been shown up as overextended and led by incompetents, if anyone in the world had any doubts after Iraq and Afghanistan. After Iraq, it is hard to claim that recognized borders should protect any country from invasion. For those of us who already knew that, the clear demonstration can feel satisfying. But evidence of U.S, impotence does not translate into global betterment.

• John McCain is a complete wackjob, obviously unsuited to become President. Not only is his "top foreign policy advisor" a paid flack for the country of Georgia, but McCain can only respond to conflict in the Caucasus by trying to wedge events into the old Cold War paradigm. He demonstrates zero ability to discern what is actually going on; rather, he seems to welcome the opportunity to go back to the framework he grew up with: all the world's ills are the mean Ruskies' fault. Bomb them. The guy is dangerous.

  John McCain said “Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgia territory.” That is ultimatum talk. But if McCain were president today, just what would he have done if Russia defied him?

  William Pfaff

• The rest of Washington's leaders are suckers for the Cold War framing with McCain driving it. Even Bush showed some signs of sanity at the beginning of this crisis, indicating that Georgia's provocation and the Russian response called for no more than verbal admonitions. Now McCain's bellicosity is raising the ante for all of them. Now Obama is adding to the silly chorus suggesting bringing Georgia into NATO, a sure way to drag the U.S. into future iterations of this nasty little nationalist squabble.

A debacle all the way around, especially for people in immediate proximity.

* This article, probably through unconscious appropriation, shares a title with an excellent piece by Scott Horton of the Atlantic who has actually been to the region and knows some of the players.

Beware

This could happen at your house if you went away for three months.


Determined, isn't it?

David gets a skirt

Encountered in Vineyard Haven, Mass. When last seen, he had less clothes, but a funny hat.

I'm on the road today, so probably no posting. I'm thinking hard about the postures of the Presidential candidates on the Georgian war. It's worth thinking about. More eventually.

Better Ballots -- some good ideas

Even the New York Times is concerned about the morass of local confusion mixed sometimes with partisan "strategic incompetence" that U.S. elections often reveal.

Much about the presidential election is up in the air, but one thing is certain: voters will have trouble casting ballots on Election Day. In a perfect world, states and localities would handle voting so well that the public could relax and worry about other things. But elections are so mismanaged — and so many eligible voters are disenfranchised — that ordinary citizens have to get involved.

The Times is probably right that a large part of the problem is the stinginess of jurisdictions that have to manage elections. Constituent eagerness for funding efficient elections is small -- until something goes wrong, and then the arguments turn passionate, heads roll, but little reform comes out of the noise.

Some folks are trying to make a constructive contribution to managing better elections. The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law has published a study of how election officials could design voting materials so that voters had an easier time understanding them. Better Ballots is available for download and well worth reading in its entirety.

But their findings needn't be restricted to election officials. Anyone preparing instructions for large numbers of people for any task could benefit from thinking about their checklist.

Ballot instructions should be brief, simple, and clear.

Paper ballots:

• Display general instructions in the top left-hand corner of the ballot.

• Place specific instructions and related actions together. Do not put all instructions at the beginning of the ballot.

• Let voters know that if they make a mistake, they can get a new ballot. Include this information in the initial instructions.

Electronic ballots:

• Display startup instructions in an easy-to-spot location in the voting booth.

• Place specific instructions and related actions together. Do not put all instructions at the beginning of the ballot.

• Instruct voters to review their selections and provide clear instructions on how to change a selection and cast the ballot.

All ballots:

• In instructions for write-in votes, state plainly that voters should not vote for both a named candidate and a write-in a candidate for the same office.

• Write instructions in an active voice and in positive terms. ("Fill in the oval for your write-in vote to count," rather than, "If the oval is not marked, your vote cannot be counted for the write-in candidate."

• Use common, easily understood words. ("Move to the next page of the ballot," or "Move to the next screen," rather than "Navigate forward through the ballot."

• Provide the context of the action first, then the action. ("[Context] To vote for the candidate of your choice, [Action] fill the oval to the left of the candidate’s name."
  Place each instruction on its own line.

I didn't have much trouble coming up with a few suggestions of my own.

• Voters don't think about whether the offices they are voting for are "Federal," "State," "County," or "City." Legally the jurisdictional names will have to be included, but make it clear to folks, for example, that they are voting for a "Congressmember," not just a "United States Representative."

• make the type on your ballot large enough for older or near-sighted readers to read!

What suggestions for clear design of instructions can you make?

Enter the arc of mountainous agony

Looks like we are going to need this map. Click on it for a somewhat larger version. Click your browser's "back" button to return to the post.

There's a war on in another of those distant places people in the United States don't know about and our government is, as usual, not an entirely disinterested bystander.

Some basics: the country of Georgia is one of the successor states that emerged out of the break up of the Soviet Union. This Southwest Asian Orthodox Christian statelet, located south of Russia between the Black Sea, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan, was absorbed by Tsarist Russia in the 19th century. In the communist era, it was a decidedly non-autonomous republic, most notable as the birthplace of Stalin.

Since becoming an independent republic after 1991, the state has been something of a protectorate of the United States. Our government has so far failed to persuade reluctant Europeans to bring Georgia into NATO. (Maybe someone knows enough not to embrace trouble they can't handle?) Georgia had the largest contingent of occupation troops in Iraq after the U.S. and Britain, though its government has rather desperately sought to bring them home to face the Russian army in the last few days.

South Ossetians are an ancient demographic group in Caucasus Mountain region, Orthodox Christians who speak an Iranian Indo-European language -- and who decidedly do not identify with the Georgians inside whose state they found themselves. Some 70-90 percent of them carry Russian passports. Since 1991, there's been a good deal of ethnic cleansing in the area, sending Georgians south and Ossetians north.

But Georgia, with U.S., European and U.N. support, has refused to recognize Ossetians separatist aspirations. Russia, never happy with being surrounded by U.S. supported statelets (however demographically distinct and historically ancient), has been propping up the South Ossetian separate entity. The President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, decided the opening day of the Olympics would be a great time to take back the disputed territory; the Russians threw their enormously superior force into the fight; and as of today the question has become, will the Russians carry the war into Georgia proper?

Then there is Abkhazia (see that map), where the Georgians claim the Russians are also attacking. Abkhazians speak Abkhaz, and comprise a large (how large is disputed) fraction of this bit of the state of Georgia. They accuse Georgians of attempting ethnic cleansing in the area -- and the Georgians respond that the Abkhazians were the aggressors. Interestingly, the area's economy consists of its desirability as a destination for Russian tourists. It's a resort. Russia has supported the separatist ambitions of the Abkhazians and 80 percent of them carry Russian passports. ***Where’s the U.S. in all this? Getting its ass bit by its inattention to on-the-ground grievances, including those of the Russian state which doesn't like being encircled by hostile U.S. clients. There is not a lot the U.S. can do to protect the rash Georgians at this point. Our administration is currently trying for a U.N. resolution -- and Russians, Ossetians, Abkhazians, and Georgians are getting chewed up in the great power meat grinder. ***I went to the trouble to research this post which probably no one wants at all because I think in the next few years people in the United States will be forced to learn the geography and history of Central Asia, just as the last few years have forced many of us to attempt at least a nodding acquaintance with the core states of the Middle East. The war the U.S. sponsors in the failed state in Afghanistan is going to move front and center. The whole region, in a band from Turkey east to through Kashmir, is profoundly unstable and the U.S. is mucking about in it ignorantly and incompetently. Readers can expect more pre-primer efforts like this one in the days to come. I think I'll label the series "arc of mountainous agony" in the tags.

How we find out what we know...

At the same time that technology is unveiling everyone's life to the ubiquitous national surveillance state, it is interesting to realize that plain old fashioned print books are frequently the medium through which coherent information about how our U.S. torture regime came to be has dribbled into public consciousness. How retrograde...

Investigative journalism is no longer worth the cost to shrinking print newspapers; as their money making content migrates to the web and other niches where the eyeballs have gone, they can't afford to do it.

TV "journalism" has a hard time telling stories in which whatever dramatic images may exist are unavailable -- and has even more extreme pressure to make a fast profit.

Some highbrow magazines have sponsored investigative journalism, most notably the New Yorker by employing Seymour Hersh and Jane Meyer.

But it has been the role of full length books to pull a great deal of what we suspect together. Hersh started the flood with Chain of Command, fleshing out the Abu Ghraib atrocity story. Phillipe Sands nailed Donald Rumsfeld's endorsement of torture in Torture Team. Jane Meyer has given us The Dark Side which chronicles Dick Cheney's paranoid megalomanias. (I'm currently reading this one and will have more when I finish.) And apparently now Ron Suskind's The Way Of The World brings yet more of the hidden story of emerging US tyranny together.

Does it just take a book to recount the complex narratives that need exposure? Does the book publishing industry present a haven from the profit pressures that have pretty well killed off investigative reporting in more immediate media? That seems unlikely, though maybe the very paucity of deeper, coherent information in all the various print, visual and web media that live the immediacy of the 24/7 news cycle creates a niche for book length narratives.

The fact remains that we do live in a world in which it has become more, not less, likely that secrets will leak out. If the book distribution channel closes up, that same technological environment seems to promise that some alternative niche media will appear. The forms in which the long struggle between the enforcers of silence and people's urgent desire for truth may be changing, but the contest isn't going to stop. Quite the contrary...

Bomb the lawless lawmakers today!

In honor of the 34th anniversary of the resignation of President Richard Nixon, forced out by public disclosure of his disdain for the rule of law, the Accountability Now PAC/Strangebellows campaign is gathering a "moneybomb"* today. They are collecting funds for a populist campaign, in the words of Glenn Greenwald to work for:

...the preservation of core Constitutional principles, civil liberties, basic accountability, and to undermin[e] and remov[e] from power those who enable the assault on those principles.

Given the inevitability of Democratic control of Congress for the foreseeable future, our campaign has thus far focused, and will continue to focus, on those incumbent members of Congress who, through both their active complicity and craven capitulation, ensure that there is no real "opposition party" standing against any of these assaults.

As I explored last month, putting together a serious campaign to impede the national surveillance state is going to require some reconfiguring of the political landscape. Neither existing parties nor existing politicians value preserving privacy and legality in the context of cheap and easy technological assess to universal spying. And that goes for both our aspiring Presidents too.

I gave to the Strangebedfellows campaign this morning and urge others to do so, even if you run across this entry after the August 8 "moneybomb." Rolling back the national surveillance state is going to be a long haul.

*A "moneybomb" is the tactic of aggregating donations on one day to maximize the sense of mass community involvement in a campaign distributed across the net.

UPDATE: As of 8:20 am, Saturday August 9, this effort had raised almost $150,000. A good start.

Olympic air

James Fallows of the Atlantic took this picture of Beijing's air (!) on August 7. His blog is a sympathetic chronicle of life in China.

Mostly I want to share this because I find it astonishing. Sports journalists are hard working writers whose beat features frequent, tough deadlines and sometimes repetitive story lines. To their corporate employers, they serve to promote the local corporate entertainment franchises. If the fanciful dramas offered by the big leagues sell the paper, sports journalism has done its job.

Sally Jenkins writes sports for the Washington Post. Over last weekend, she trashed the corporate storyline on the Beijing Olympics.

The Chinese government has labored for years to clear the air in Beijing, with some success. But in the meantime the Games themselves have become polluted. No governing body truly interested in peak physical performance, in helping athletes to be swifter, higher or stronger, would have awarded the Games to a venue in which you can see the poisons in the air. According to Greenpeace's local director, Lo Sze Ping: "Beijing's air quality is not up to what the world is expecting from an Olympic host city. The sports teams have reason to be concerned."

So what is this Olympics really about? It's about 12 major corporations and their panting ambitions to tap into China's 1.3 billion consumers, the world's third-largest economy. Understand this: The International Olympic Committee is nothing more than a puppet for its corporate "partners," without whom there would be no Games. These major sponsors pay the IOC's bills for staging the Olympics to the tune of $7 billion per cycle. Without them, and their designs on the China market, Beijing probably would not have won the right to host the Summer Games.

...The clouded air is just the most observable sign of the many unfulfilled promises since then. If the society has opened somewhat, there has also been a specific crackdown on dissidents as a direct result of the Olympics. Thousands of people have been rounded up and jailed for expressing dissent -- right now a man named Hu Jia is in a prison just outside Beijing for "inciting subversion" because he testified via Webcam before the European Union that the Chinese government wasn't living up to its Olympic commitments. Hu is ill with hepatitis B and undergoing "reform" in Chaobai prison, while his family is under constant surveillance. The crackdown continued this week with the jailing of several farmers, and efforts to censor the Olympic media. Amnesty International estimates that half a million people are being held without charges here.

...Most disgraceful of all is the fact that six of the 12 worldwide Olympic partners are American companies. This has to heart-sicken any patriot. These companies will reap the full exposure of the Summer Games, swathing themselves in the flag, and rationalizing that their business is helping uplift the Chinese people. Don't buy it -- or them. You should know exactly who they are: General Electric (which owns NBC), Coca-Cola, Visa, McDonald's, Kodak, and Johnson & Johnson.

That last bit is important. Yes, China is a closed, authoritarian society for dissidents. But a lot more Chinese think their country is on the right track than we in the U.S. think ours is. If the Beijing fest goes on with a grumbling undertone of dissonance, as seems likely, take it out on the corporate sponsors who pander to the worst of China, not the mass of Chinese people who just want a better life.

Hiroshima remembered

Members and friends of the Martha's Vineyard Peace Council gather at dawn at Aquinnah Lighthouse to mark the anniversary.

Sixty-three years ago today, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Two days later, we dropped a second one on Nagasaki. No other country has ever used a nuclear weapon. Nine states -- the U.S., Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea -- now possess nukes. Fear that rogue individuals might acquire and use such a weapon provides much of the cover for our developing national security state. (People who actually know anything about this threat think it relatively minor compared to numerous other hazards.)

One of the best ways to keep nukes out of the hands of terrorists is to get rid of the ones already loose in the world. And some of our rulers seem to get this. An amazing January 2008 Wall Street Journal oped by former Secretaries of State (and Cold Warriors all) George Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Former Senator Sam Nunn aimed to round up support for

a global effort to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, to prevent their spread into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately to end them as a threat to the world.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama says:

It's time to send a clear message to the world: America seeks a world with no nuclear weapons. As long as nuclear weapons exist, we'll retain a strong deterrent. But we'll make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy.

While I don't think we'd hear that from the Bush Administration, we'll have to wait and see whether that means anything real if we happen to elect the guy instead of his bombastic opponent.

Meanwhile, the work of organizing people to do anything about nukes gets done by tireless advocates like Peace Action West. Today they are asking us to urge our congresscritters to co-sponsor a "Global Security Priorities Act" (H Res 1045) that addresses the threat of international terrorism by reducing the number of U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons and preventing their proliferation. Click this link and send along an email. It's the least we can do.

And one more thing...

This seems pertinent to the last post. There was a time, not so long ago really, when resistance to the uncaring rule of bishops, peers and princes bore a completely indigenous British face. [2:33]

I wonder whether the bishops of the Anglican Communion walking in support of the excellent Millennium Development Goals carried any residual awareness of these people who proclaimed:

"They make the laws that chain us well;
The clergy dazzle us with heaven or they damn us into hell.
We will not worship the gods they serve:
The god of greed that feeds the rich while poor men starve."

All churches -- all our attempts to institutionalize our experience of a Loving Creator -- have a lot to live down.

The song is by Leon Rosselson. H/t to Suburban Guerillas for reminding me of it.

Lambeth afterthoughts

For the last three weeks, my work for Claiming the Blessing, a coalition that works for full inclusion of LGBT people in the Episcopal Church (TEC), has been to monitor the press coverage of a conference of Anglican bishops in England. This wingding, which comes along every 10 years, is called "Lambeth" after the official residence (palace) of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The conference is not held at Lambeth Palace as the 800 or so Anglican bishops wouldn't fit in the place, but that's the name. That bit of explanation will give you some sense of the obscure cultural byway this event inhabits, significant as it is to the 77 million members worldwide of this brand of Christians. Good history here.

In a substantive sense, little happened at Lambeth. Bishops talked and perhaps listened. Nobody declared a schism -- except perhaps among the 200 or so bishops who had already created a schism by ostentatiously not attending. LGBT people were not thrown out of the church, though the only gay bishop who cops to being gay, Gene Robinson, was excluded. Lots of bishops, probably most, wish those pesky gay people would go back in the closet -- but since we are here (in every country and continent) and queer and Christian, that's not going to happen. Eventually the absurdity of trying to proclaim a Good News that lifts up the lowly and sets captives free while tamping down pious gay folk will overwhelm even the councils of Anglican-organized Christianity. Bishop Michael Ingham from Canada nailed it:

"If this becomes the position of the Communion, it will put the Anglican Church of Canada in the position of having to support and defend irrational prejudice and bigotry in the eyes of our nation."

I can't manage to get fearful about this.

But digging through all the press coverage, I did learn some things that seem worth raising up here.

• In the United Kingdom, and maybe elsewhere around the world, Anglicans seem to take a lot more seriously what the Roman Catholic hierarchy thinks of them than any Episcopalians I ever was around. Maybe Episcopal indifference to the RCs in the U.S. is because the denomination used to call itself "Protestant." Maybe it is because in the U.S. context, the Roman hierarchy (though certainly not all Catholics in the pews) has vigorously positioned itself as the enemy of women's and gay civil equality. TEC has a decent if spotty record on these matters. Heck, in this country, the Roman Church is right in there with the Mormons, fighting for reaction. I say this in sorrow, since I learned my Christian activism in the context of Roman Catholicism from the Catholic Worker and Latin American liberation theology.

• Maybe the fact that we have a powerful right wing in the United States that thrives on encouraging gay bashing makes the Episcopal Church more sensitive to gay inclusion issues than folks in the United Kingdom where gays live under the protection of the European Charter of Rights, as well as national law. Being gay in the U.K. isn't a political issue -- except in the church. That doesn't explain the Anglican liberalism of Canada though, a nation where gay marriage arrived years ago as a consequence of constitutional interpretation.

• More happily, I learned there's a guy, an "emerging church" non-denominational evangelical, named Brian McLaren, that I'd like to know more about. In general I'm a little allergic to attempts to create sweeping historical categories (except when I indulge myself) but he tweaked my interest with this as reported by ENS.

  McLaren told participants that "on our one planet now we have three worlds co-existing:" a pre-modern world, a modern world and an emerging world. He said evangelism may feel "effortless" when pre-modern people are entering the modern world because "the Christian church so effectively became connected with modern culture."
  
  Meanwhile, churches in the modern world are either "static or declining," he said, noting that most church growth comes from people shifting denominations and "evangelism is hard to come by."

  I'm comfortable with how McLaren seems to think, his recognition that so much of how we perceive the world, our relations with each other, and with whatever Deity we affirm if any, is a to a significant extent a product of the circumstances in which we live. I experience no conflict in my faith that God inexplicably is with us and in us when I admit that my experience of God is necessarily mediated by my time and place.

• Headlines about Lambeth tended to read like this: "Gay bishop led to ridicule for Anglicans." Oh I thought -- some of these bishops come from patriarchal societies where being a man who is thought to be receptive like a woman dishonors himself and his clan. And that may be true. But mostly, reading the stories, I discovered the headline writers had been inaccurate and patronizing. The complaint about gays characterized in this language actually was more like [my paraphrase from several articles]: "we live among Muslims who condemn homosexual people as sexually decadent. We lose our reputation for being moral people when you approve this license." The stigma here is at least partially about undisciplined promiscuity in societies where the community trumps the individual, not only about approximating femininity. This doesn't exactly make me feel sympathy with those holding these views, but I shouldn't mischaracterize them either.

• In a conversation with a Fr. Kelvin Holdsworth in Glasgow, Scotland, Bishop Robinson offered some interesting reflections on how the speed of global communications is changing the material reality in which religious bodies must function:

  I think that one of the reasons that my election and consecration caused such a worldwide reaction versus the election of the first woman bishop, also in America, was that for all intents and purposes the internet didn't exist in 1989. ... By 2003, when I was elected, my election was on every computer screen in the world. [This] also allowed both advocates of what was happening and opponents of what was happening to find each other instantly and to whip each other up into a frenzy and keep that frenzy going. It is a different world and it is both wonderfully so and horrifyingly so. ...What we do and say in one part of the world effects people in other parts of the world. It was not that long ago that what happened in one province of the Anglican Communion didn't matter all that much because it was completely unknown... and now that is simply not so.

  Global awareness brings possibilities for peace -- but also frantically brandished swords. Where'd I hear that before?

All very educational. But thank goodness this Lambeth thing only happens every ten years.

McCain consultant's nightmare

"There's an interesting line building on Obama that somehow success and intelligence are a handicap," said Mark Sawyer, a UCLA political scientist. "If he wasn't extraordinary, he wouldn't be there. But then he is extraordinary and it becomes, 'He is just too good, too well spoken, too accomplished.' "

Los Angeles Times,
August 4, 2008

It must be a tough day for a political handler when his candidate has so little to run on that he has to attack the other guy for being too attractive and too smart.

A guy whose plane got shot down, suffered, married a beer heiress, and ran, ran, ran for the big house on whatever looked popular at the moment is tough to sell.

Found object

Once upon a time, milk was delivered in these. Rather attractive.


Also delivered, the rules of the gender game.

Why?

It would be nice to live in a world in which maleness and femaleness were firm and unwavering poles.

I cannot urge you strongly enough to read this remarkable New York Times oped.

Photo caption in the first comment.

A toy for people interested in names

Is your name rising or falling in popularity? When was your name most popular? In your grade school, a quarter of the girls seemed to be named Jennifer, but now many of your daughter's friends seem to be named "Emma." Is this a fluke? You can find out by typing a name into the NameVoyager pictured above.

In the example, we see that my name ranked 142nd in popularity in the 1950s and declined precipitously thereafter.

The site's creators explain:

The NameVoyager tracks names of babies born in the United States, as reported by the Social Security Administration (SSA).

The site is the creation of Laura and Martin Wattenberg. It serves to market a book for parents choosing a name for a baby.

But that's not why it came to my attention. Think for a minute about the micro-targeting that campaign hucksters now promise they can do through enhancements to voter files -- improvements to the raw list of names of eligible voters they get from state and county authorities. When they don't have birthdates, they analyze names using statistical tools that work like this one in order to guess at voters' ages. The method is not perfect, but combined with other data can be informative.

Watch out -- someone somewhere is selling very sophisticated tools to sell you a candidate. Of course, you may have wanted to vote for that candidate anyway. ...

Listening to Dr. King

In the last few days, I've been "reading" a wonderful book, Michael Eric Dyson's April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Death and How It Changed America. Dyson examines Dr. King's musings on the all too likely prospect of his own assassination, how such thoughts formed the civil and human rights leader and how he flipped the implications of that prospect to empower his movement. The narrative is by turns eloquent, visionary, and substantive.

In the latter category, I particularly appreciated Dyson's quick statistical overview of the current condition of Black America in comparison to white America. I have not encountered such a sweeping, yet compact summary of shameful truths since Andrew Hacker's Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. I also appreciated that Dyson called out what a blow to attainment of full African American equality the Clinton-facilitated trashing of the welfare safety net was. Subsequent misdeeds of right wing Republicans have given memories the 1990s a rosy tint. But in truth, for sheer unprincipled political betrayal of the interests of a core constituency, Bill Clinton set a miserable standard in the so-called "welfare reform."

Dyson then moves on to recount the history of charismatic African American leadership after King. He questions and applauds what that style has won for the people -- and wonders whether the United States is finally seeing something new in Senator Obama.

So why did I use the odd construction "reading" in the first paragraph of this notice? Because I "read" this book as an audiobook (Audible.com). And I am sure this is the best way to read it. Dyson has made available a recording in his own voice. The author is so steeped Dr. King's speeches that he mimics the voice of his subject extremely well. A New York Times reviewer found merely hokey a fantasy interview Dyson describes with an imagined 80 year old Dr. King. In Dyson's oral delivery, this slightly strained exercise largely succeeds.

If you want to think about Dr. King, read this one as an audiobook!

TSA shifts blame to airlines

For several years, this blog tracked Transportation Security Administration (TSA) doings closely. (See No Fly Follies on the blog sidebar.) After all, I'd had my own rather dramatic brush with security theater as practiced during U.S. air travel.

In the past year everyone has been writing about it. No terrorists are impeded, but absurdities pile up. In just the last month, it took an act of Congress to get Nelson Mandela off the list. A CNN reporter tries to shed some light and gets hassled by "security." The ACLU has pointed out the famous list is now up 1,000,000 names. It's not just the elite media that have taken notice. The Muskogee Phoenix points out that implies there 133.3 people from the Oklahoma town of 40,000 on the list.

But today's news from USA Today surpasses previous heights of surrealism.

Airlines may face fines over mistaken terrorist IDs
WASHINGTON — The Transportation Security Administration is threatening to fine airlines up to $25,000 when they erroneously tell passengers they are on a terrorist watch list. ...

Airlines compare passenger names to government watch lists before a flight. When airlines find an apparent match, passengers cannot print a boarding pass at home or at airport kiosks and must go to an airline check-in counter with ID to show they are not a suspected terrorist. ...

"We will not tolerate anyone saying to a member of the public that you're on a watch list," [TSA Director Kip] Hawley told the House aviation subcommittee. "That undercuts the credibility of the system."

The mind reels. They create a list (and won't really tell anyone how they assemble it.) They demand the airlines enforce their list. Then they threaten the airlines with fines if the airlines tell people they've been snared by the list.

That's some mighty public, transparent ass-covering Mr. Hawley.