The Biggest Threat to America

Fresh from looking over a Facebook poll (one of probably thousands of mostly inconsequential, trivial, inane, asinine and/or idiotic queries) with the title “Which country is the biggest threat to America as of now?”, I am bemused to discover that nearly half of the respondents opt for N. Korea. It was a shock until I discovered that only 21 people responded. I have no idea whether it means anything, but I live a short bicycle ride from one of the points from which the northern cousins could be expected to ooze out of their sorry little enclave, should they eventually opt for national suicide, and launch attacks against the South.

On the other hand, a quarter million FBers weighed in on the question, “Do you approve or disapprove of the job President Obama is doing in office?” The choice of responses one is given to this one are “approve”, “disapprove” and “undecided”. Wanting to make certain my opinion matters almost not at all like everyone else’s, I am forced to vote twice in order to tally my correct position, viz. “approve” and “disapprove”.

As for “Which country, etc.”, it should be perfectly clear to anyone who spends any time at all considering facts before they arrive at their opinions, that the nation representing the greatest threat to the United States of America today is the United States of America. There isn’t another country on the planet capable (or terribly desirous) of doing much more than hurting our feelings. Collectively, all of them put together spend less on their military establishments than we do.

Our problem in America is that at least half of our fellow citizens have been free to pursue courses of study (which is really stretching the acceptable meanings for the word) that have led them to conclusions the factual support for which are utterly lacking, when it comes to matters affecting US national survival. Additionally, they embrace ideologies of the right that shore up their “gut instincts” about who are our adversaries and what we must fear. As a result they conclude our problems are caused by  “immigrants” and the greatest evil facing us is the “Liberals”.

On the basis of such conclusions as this, they  drive themselves and each other bat-guano-crazy from sniffing the glue secreted in the oral mucosa of rightwing media commentators (since we’ve already stretched meaning of one word out of shape, let’s deform “commentator” and paint it  shit-brindle brown, as befits the metaphor of  brains transformed to bat guano).

Somewhere near half of all Americans are comfortable, even proud, to know almost nothing  about most everything worthy of scientific investigation outside of sports, TV programs, antique religious documents, and celebrity wardrobes. The most comforting quality of opinion in these realms is that it so eagerly relegates itself to the realm of relevant fact. It is a condition that, unremedied by universal education and less febrile electronic and print media input, will be more than enough to eventually collapse the roof of the American house; that creaking noise you hear probably isn’t your joints.

Our problem, in my arrogant opinion, is that the views and behaviors of the reactionary Right are so unspeakably foul that, when the bat guano finally overflows into the fan, and America’s run as the Big Dog has finished , the other good people of the planet who, under normal kinds of crisis circumstances would step in to assist the America that has so often in the past been there for them and others, will be left with nothing to do but to sit back engulfed in clouds of schadenfreude and pot smoke, wondering what possible use can be made of this planet-size heap of shredded bat guano.

Cheerleader Tryouts for Death Squads

I selected the title for this post to highlight the cause and effect relationship I see between the collective message of the raucous talking heads of rightwing radio and TV in the US, and recent events and atrocities occurred in the name of political opposition to the leftward course of US political economy and administrative policy. The global economic collapse that started with the policies of the Reagan Government and finished by that of W. Bush, culminated in the election of Barack Obama to the US Presidency, and the scattering of the forces of Republicanism into a richly-deserved disarray of evangelicals, demagogues, bankers and the media flacks and others amorally predisposed to suck sustenance from the oceans of wealth produced by maintaining oligarchs at the top of the economic heap, and at public expense.

These voices from the extreme right, and the mindless internalization of all they espouse by true believers in American exceptionalism, have a similar position in American life as did media supporters of the power elites in the Third World who were responsible for dispatching death squads,  often on the American dime, to brutalize and kill  citizens attempting to change their societies for the better, in the same ways America is trying today. They are cheerleaders for a way of governance that is selfish, corrupt, inhumane, and to the extent that it encourages zealots to think they are on a mission from God if they go out and take the life of anyone detested and vilified by  the mouthpieces of the ugly right, they are criminal inciters to hate crimes and they deserve to be muzzled as such. It doesn’t seem farfetched at all that, allowed to continue their venomous oral ejaculations, life in the US could subside into a monstrous version of the last century’s epic national abortion that was US involvement in El Salvador.

When George Lakoff writes about “frames”, in terms of the way people choose to present arguments or ideological positions, and likewise the way we interpret and understand the postions presented to us, he generally can be counted on to instruct us in the ways of progressive thinking, and how we fail to frame our ideas as effectively as does right-wing opposition to it. Writing for Truthout about the spurious arguments driving opposition to President Obama’s pick of Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter on the US Supreme Court, he concludes: “Above all, Democrats should be aware that the attack on Sotomayor is not just about Sotomayor. It is an attack on the basis of our democracy and must be answered.” The premise is that the definition of empathy depends on who is invoking the concept to frame their presentation. The right has done it more effectively, and Sotomayor’s “empathy” is the latest example.

This touches a raw nerve for me, already smarting from multiple exposure to some of the vilest events and blather about them coming from the right that I can remember in my lifetime. The odious, utterly surreal spectacle of the likes of Pat and Bay Buchanan braying about anti-white racism as if the examples they think they see of it, are equivalent to the monstrous crime against humanity represented by the history of black slavery in America simply leave one speechless before it. Likewise the endless litany of canards spewed by Bill O’Reilly, in defense of his inciteful diatribes against Dr. George Tiller, the abortion doctor murdered in his church recently, gives one an inkling of how the caffeine-addicted clinic rats feel just before they bite themselves in the discomfort of withdrawal. The difference is that this is a withdrawal from humanity.

A thought had been nagging at the base of my consciousness, growing as weeks passed and I continue to inflict doses of Hannity, Coulter, Malkin, Rove, Beck, Cavuto, ad nauseam, much like the SNL sketch where the character spluts out successive sips from a carton of spoiled milk, as if trying to believe the next taste will be somehow less foul than the last. Reading Lakoff’s piece, it finally came to me what I have been trying to put my finger on, i.e. the death squad connection to rightwing media mouths. I can explain it now, but it requires  some history review to get there.

I was too young to be paying attention when America started to get really serious about globalizing the so-called American Way, pursuing an economic form of geopolitics that, anything but new, has its roots in slavery, opium, gold and the empires that grew fat on trade in them. When the Shah was imposed on Iran, Somoza on Nicaragua, Pinochet on Chile, Montt on Guatemala, and others, it was US policy to back them strongly with pronouncements of support and admiration, with money, and most importantly, with CIA connections to facilitate the flow of weapons, funds and personnel, tasked to terrorize and destroy any efforts to oppose these dictators friendly to US efforts to control the economic, social and political fortunes of the countries they ruled. These people are still around; we just don’t hear as much about them because they know we have them under much tighter surveilance in this technology-rapt modern day.

These things, these…people, are a matter of history, and the chauvinistic howling, braying, and bloodthirsty voices from the right today, are of an ideological piece with those responsible for the atrocities committed in the bad old days of US unilateralist interference in the internal politics of other nations, often directed against democratically elected governments of the sort that, when they fawn on America, the US administrations lavish aid and support on them. If, however, a Hugo Chavez, a Salvador Allende, or a Mohammed Mossadegh (and this list just hints at the extent of the problem) should come to power through elections, US administrations have become everyone’s worst enemy, and done so secretly, without the approval of Congress, and certainly without the approval of right-thinking citizenry.

Everybody Eats!

I take a nap almost every day. I become torpid from eating a full meal at midday. Before and after my nap, whether I am at home or at work (Yes, America, you too can nap at work!) I am likely to spend an hour or two reading news on the Internet, which is lately about the impending demise of newspapers. Today, I’m watching Arianna Huffington’s presentation on the subject to Sen. John Kerry’s committee. Fortunately, La Huffington delivers more stimulating product at the Post than she does at the podium. Most of what HuffPost delivers is essential for an informed progressive-minded person to know, but not all.

I can let the C-Span video run and surf on, this time arriving at a post so outrageous that it almost causes me to stop breathing as I read, so entirely am I offended by it. Growing up in agricultural regions of the United States, and reading about the hunger experienced in much of the Third World, and in war-torn regions of more developed and developing parts, I have ever been conscious of a vague guilty unease, knowing that only greed and politics stand between a well-nourished humanity, and that very different one of our experience. At least, I consoled myself, I was fortunate enough to be born into a country where babies didn’t have to go to bed hungry.

So today, as I perambulate the pages full of stories about the trillions going to so-called “defense”, and mega-billions to bailout banks and insurance companies, and millions being skimmed into the pockets of government contractors and office-holders and bagmen and bosses in every big industry, I must also read that millions of American children will, indeed, go to bed hungry tonight, and tomorrow night and every uncounted night that selfish, greedy, arrogant xenophobes in high places continue cockroaching about in the utterly self-absorbed orgy in pursuit of authority and material gain.

There is a criminal conspiracy between corporatists, authoritarians, social conservatives, anti-intellectuals and religious obscurantists that together are the cause of these pestilential practices that have brought our once-robust country to the brink of total dysfunction. If almost one in five American children is experiencing even one day without adequate food, then exactly what makes the United States of America so special after all? I encountered former US Secretary of Agriculture Cecil Andrus outside the offices of the Snake River Alliance in Boise a few years back, and I asked him if he was happy to be back in Idaho. He replied that, Yes, he was, because he ran into a lot fewer people in Idaho that needed to be watered daily. Looking back on the moment, it occurs to me that we should have stopped watering them long ago, in the hope that the most noxious would simply dry up and blow away. Replace them with varieties of human cultivars that bear more heavily, so that when outsiders inquire how things are back in the USA, we can say at the very least that “Things are still all fucked up by politics and greed, but at least everybody eats!”

Torture is Crime

It is not legal for agents of the US Government to torture those in its custody. Torture is therefore considered a crime. When more than one person set out to torture, or when one person tortures and another knows about it, or has authorized it from an administrative position, or has knowledge of it being, or having been underway but sits silent and fails to act to end the torture in whatever way or ways may be available, the person or persons are complicit in the crime. Complicity in a crime, committed and/or covered-up, is conspiracy. Conspiracy is therefore also a crime.

Today we have a vast and shallow sea of people on the right in the United States, drumming out this dark mantra that by committing this crime of torture, the United States is made safer from terrorism, even though torture is a crime (of terror?) and everyone knows it is a crime.

Are these right-wing torturers not co-conspirators in the crime, then? Is it a part of the right of free speech in America to advocate and condone the crime of torture as an instrument of state policy before and after the fact?

What is the point of laws against torture if so many can conspire openly to break the law, and to be exonerated by the co-conspirators? This is Cheneyism gone berserk. It is an open conspiracy, and the attorney general is derelict in his duty if he fails to act against it.

Torture is a crime. Enforce the law.

Your Honor, the State Rests….

What a spiritually painful profession to be in, lawyering. It must be, when the practitioners stand back and face the handiwork of their most public, and therefore prominent fellows,  namely prosecutors mishandling cases against government figures, and defense counselors who then cry “Foul” as they rub their sweaty mental palms gleefully,  knowing that the outcome of their opponents’ malfeasance must be the abandonment of charges against their client. Wherever crimes against people and property are occurring, the legal scavengers will be found making a feast of the piles of carrion produced by the apprehension of those perpetrating them. The relative seriousness of an offense, once it enters the system of “due process”, is of no account.

Examples today include that against former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, and that of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. Both cases were brought by the Justice Department under the W. Bush administration, and both demonstrate the sorry truth that, to the extent it is possible for ideologues in the political system to subvert the workings of our legal system, no help for America’s mounting social and economic problems is on the way.

The two cases are most interesting in their juxtaposition to each other, because of the political affiliations that come attached to each. Stevens, a powerful and long-serving Republican, of the state where Sarah Palin can be elected governor running as the candidate of ethical probity, is an influential supporter and friend to arguably the most hogwild powerful administration-without-impunity the Republicans have yet produced, thanks to their record of diligence at trying harder and harder and getting it wronger and wronger for such a very long time.

The other case is the one pursued as a pet project of Karl Rove against a popular Democratic governor in the South, where it would be rightly feared that the days of knee-jerk response of super-patriotic Bible-believers and taxation-loathers to Republican candidates plastering of the “Liberal” label over everyone and everything not in their kit, may be coming at last to a welcome end. Rove broke so many laws against the politicization of the US justice system, from the loyalty-based vetting of US Attorney appointments and the firing of those who withstood it, to the use of the system to attack officials like Siegelman who threatened, by his popularity in a traditional GOP stronghold dating back to Nixon, the “permanent Republican majority” that, in their self-absorbed lunacy he and his ilk see it as a good thing.

There is a conundrum in all this that bears some thought. We Americans have long let ourselves be directed by slogans and soundbites, and one of the older ones has stood the test of time because it well describes the workings of a government system that, for all its faults and failures, has worked reasonably well until recently. It is said that “the wheels of government grind exceedingly slow, but exceedingly fine”. Unfortunately, when the legal machinery of government is hijacked, the result is coarse and unpalatable.

Sen. Ted Stevens took the money and got caught. Compared with him, Rep. George Hansen (Republican, Idaho), the first sitting member of Congress to be jailed for taking the money and getting caught, was a real lightweight. It should have been a slam-dunk, open-and-shut, game-over-zip-up-your-pants (we love you for phrases like this, Stephen King!) prosecution. How could it possibly have been turned around so that this W Bush ally could actually be released back into the wild, to quack “Fowl, fowl” loudly, knowing that only the few thousand of us who are really paying attention would see it for what it is.

I feel, and I believe (though I nor others probably will never be able to prove) that the prosecutors of Ted Stevens blew his prosecution because their political minders expected and demanded it, and this was the only way to bring it off. In other words, The prosecution and the defense were on the same side. In fact, being on the same side, and therefore possibly not the bulbs of most penetrating brilliance on the Republican Tree of Christmas, one imagines there must have been some awkward moments as the prosecutors had to point out to the distaff that, since rules governing evidentiary procedures had been broken, defense would have no choice but to….. (nudge, wink).

The Siegelman Case stinks far worse, because real crimes were committed to bring him down, and he spent a long time (which means something very different to the incarcerated than it does to you, if you haven’t been) behind bars as a result. But don’t take my word for it. As the farmer’s daughter is said to have uttered, “Google it!”

When Heads Roll

Reading about President Obama’s meeting with banking and finance CEOs from Wall Street, I couldn’t avoid the unbidden urge to schadenfreude, because, as Michael Moore has observed, “Nothing like it has ever happened”. I am so thrilled at the prospect and spectacle of it that I am capable of swallowing the momentary reflexive gorge that comes up with the realization that, as much as the big shots may feel the pinch, it will be nothing alongside the pain their excesses will have inflicted on the rest of us by the time its over, and they will still be capable of entertaining each other lavishly behind their gates, on the proceeds of their systematic looting.

One automaker CEO is ordered to fall on his sword, while the fat cats get a drink of White House water (okay, but was it tap or bottle?) and a slap on the hands. But it’s a start of sorts, and enough to bring me to consider the whole issue of what happens when a few people are brought to account by erstwhile collaborators for the misdeeds of many, when the number of victims is in the millions. What we have seen, for as long as we’ve been paying attention to such things, is a scenario in which those at the pointy end of the spear, the most exposed, exposable and most easily disposed of, are fingered to take the fall for all.

Take the example of wartime atrocities such as those wearing the name tags of Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Guantanamo, et. al. In each case, a handful of low-level (if highly culpable)  participants with weak means of defense were sacrificed, leaving their superiors and the evil geniuses who crafted the context within which the outrages occurred (Cheney, Rummy, Rove, Addington, Yoo, et.al.) escaped scot-free, nearly so, to a life of appearances netting them multiples of ten grand in honoraria and a rubber chicken, each case.

This time around, though, and no small thanks to Obama, the cat is losing some fat, and that’s just fine. But it still doesn’t, nor will it ever, go far enough or deep enough, or be driven by practical rationales truthful enough, to diminish the certainty that we will be brought back here again and again, as long as certain givens are not altered. In this case, the Big Given is the notion that the best economic paradigm for a planet stretched at its seams with its human populations and the pressures they exert on space and natural resources, is one of constant material increase and no limits on an individual’s share of them.

So when we rejoice that one or two of these CEOs are brought to ground for their failures and excesses, lets keep in mind that they are, like us, the merest mortals, distinguished only by their ability to perform in the game prepared for us by a dozen times a dozen generations of vested, landed and capitalized interests-the owners of the Big Enterprise. They give us jobs, and we pay taxes to governments that provide for infrastructure that enables Big Enterprise and the profits that cascade uphill to it to continue business as usual. Until we become capable of acknowledging what is unusual about business as usual, we will fail to recognize that these few heads, large and small, that we see srolling around are just so much mulch for the tree that, once pruned in this way, is encouraged to send its foundation-shattering roots even deeper, while the soaring crown captures the sunlight so necessary to any garden.

Facebook Fuddlement

When I realize how long it’s been since I posted here, and look at the content of my last post, and calculate the quantity of time spent at my workstation coupled with the nature of my activity here, a few things become clear to me.

First, I have spent an inordinate amount of time deleting email announcements of Facebook group announcements, and that must end. Most of the announcements are about events I can’t possibly attend, publications I won’t purchase, awards and deadlines that either don’t apply to me, or I don’t care about them, and friends’ comments about other friends’ comments , posts and whatnot, that have nothing to do with me, and other drawbacks. Conversely, if I were to make a list describing in detail the various ways in which I might actually feel I was getting benefit from Facebook, it would turn out to resemble earlier permutations of the site, which seems to become less for me and more for somebody I don’t know every time changes are made.
I don’t want to be mistaken for a total crank here, because I’ve gotten a few benefits from dipping my toes in the FB pool, entirely related to making connections with people I had lost touch with, or people I know in common with my closest and dearest friends, and family, extended family and those with whom I share some sense of spiritual propinquity, especially those who write compulsively, to whatever end.
So look for me less in Facebook in the future. Twitter me not. I’m coming back to the blog. Almost nobody reads it, but I don’t mind. The day may be coming when I unplug completely.

The last time I was in Yakima, an extraordinary gentleman poet, Jim Bodeen, walked me around his premises. Outside, near the corner where sidewalks intersect, he spent some time pawing through the papers attached to the cedar post he’d planted there for the purpose a couple years previous. He calls it the Poetry Pole, and it collects the writings of his friends and neighbors, his former students and colleagues, and the occasional itinerant poet vagrant on a pilgrimage. I hope I’ll make it back there in the latter category before I drop off the twig myself.

Jim publishes books under the Blue Begonia imprimatur, and one of his titles consists of some of the harvest from his poetry pole. He and his wife Karen, and the poetry pole, and Blue Begonia, and everything he’s every written and/or published, are a thing of such surpassing beauty that it makes me feel a little arrogant trying to characterize it. The point is that neither Facebook nor any other online endeavor can ever bring the same exalted sense of one’s shared humanity with others. They can only reference it.

World’s Biggest Breasts-and they Speak Five Languages!

I’m determined to get back to this blog more, and more often. I’ve been sidetracked by Facebook (did I tell you this?) and am looking for ways the two can achieve synergy. Here’s a start. I found this item at HuffPo today, and shared it on Facebook. It triggered an email exchange with a young mother whose visceral reaction (no pun intended) to the post prompted her to request in the most reasonable possible terms, would I please take it down, as it was simply too offensive? I responded as best I could, and she accepted my response.

Her request, and my reply, and our subsequent ripostes, are recorded here for posterity:

Jennifer: any chance you’d consider taking that blog post down? It’s really offensive — I’m not really like that, but looking at it over and over on my news feed is kind of bumming me out. Mostly I don’t know you but enjoy your posts and your updates — especially loved the one about your mother…

Familographer: Hi Jennifer, I am utterly sincere in apologizing for this offensive post. Let me explain why I put it up, and if you still want it gone, well I’d much rather it were gone, than you, as a reader of other posts, were gone, and I’ll delete it.

It offends me too. I think it will offend most people, and that’s why I put it up. I’m trying to highlight what Barbara Ehrenreich, in the most recent of her vids I watched last night, this process of the dumbing down of America, this fascination with the trivial, the superficial, the sensational, and how the inevitable end of that process, men’s fascination with mammaries, for one example, and its signal of the objectification of women, is a part of that utter dumbness. Hence my comment about them speaking five languages fluently! Does anyone really believe that, even in today’s multi-cultural, polyglot world, that a twenty-three year old “model, singer, actress” et.al who will undergo the surgery necessary to top her breasts up with a gallon of silicone, actually has the mental wherewithal to become fluent in more than a couple of languages at most?! I’m a language teacher, and I have seen some extraordinarily gifted learners in 40 years of it. The claim is just bullshit, and yet there will be those silly enough to accept it at face value.

I posted the item as a reminder to all who see it just how monumental is the task we face if we are to survive as a species. When a young person concludes that the best measure of her personal worth is something so utterly grotesque, it does give me the same unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach as it does you. By that rationale, I hope you will post it on, for it is every bit as disgusting and freakish as you and one other woman have said, and for that reason it needs to be broadcast as a warning of coming extremes of vacuity. The image is its own antidote.

Now tell me if you still want it to disappear.

Your friend,
(father of a lovely, brilliant 18-yr-old daughter who DOES speak 5 languages, and who is just as repulsed by it as you are).

Jennifer: Thanks for this — it makes much more sense. The problem is just the image — looking at it and what it means for women. Her too — compassion. Women and what they connect to their bodies — what the feel the need to do or be –
sometimes you can choose a second photo for a post –

anyway — thanks for the consideration and the explanation.

Have a good day.
Jennifer
(mother of an 8 year-old who is too into Hannah Montana.)

Familographer: You’re completely welcome, and I share your compassionate slant toward this young woman; even though we know its already too late to help her, if other young women and girls can get more reminders that there are very respectable people who value them for far better qualities, it may encourage them to develop those qualities instead. For some reason Warren Zevon’s “Mr Bad Example” popped into my head.

About that thumbnail, it actually didn’t appear in the original article as displayed in the Huffington Post. I have no idea where it came from, but I’ll definitely investigate the possibility of choosing less flashy ones in the future, though I hope it won’t be too soon that a store of this particular type appears (though I fear the worst).

Good luck with your daughter. I don’t know anything about Hannah Montana, maybe because we got rid of our TV when our daughter started adopting certain behavioral quirks of cartoon characters. We’ve never been sorry, but we’re culturally impaired by it, at least in the pop sense. We screen DVDs on the living room wall with a beam projector when we crave big A/V.

Jennifer: I got rid of my TV too — unfortunately, I can’t get rid of my x-husband…
it’s been lovely talking to you.
smiles.

Familographer: The pleasure is entirely mine, and my ex-wife knows exactly what you mean.

The Facebook Infundibulum

I haven’t posted for weeks, and the reason is Facebook. I responded with what I thought would be a simple, single gesture, to an invitation to be a friend. I don’t even know who it was-probably a complete stranger with a cute name, like Verandah P0rche-one that came along today.

Silly me!

Almost 800 friends, two user groups and a thousand message exchanges later, here I come with a blog post at last. What is it? “25 Random Things About Me”! It wasn’t, as usual, something I contributed because I had the idea to do so. Nononono! It’s just one of many ways Facebook and those who revel in it (and it is nigh impossible to resist everything offered) Hoover up a participants’ time and consciousness.

A dozen people “tag” me in a post by this title, thereby obliging me to follow suit or risk being thought a ratbag for ignoring such gracile acts of online camaraderie. It almost endears one to those one knows considers one a ratbag, for they would never think of providing one such an opportunity.

Since I haven’t liked my “About me ” statement from the beginning, maybe this Facebook post will redeem me in the eyes of readers who feel the same about it. So here it is:

25 Random Things About Me
1. This is hard for me because I disapprove of certain random things about me.
2. I live with four females, a café-au-lait French girly dog, and the ghost of my father, and I love them all.
3. My daughter will graduate high school in June; my granddaughter a year later.
4. My son is a better man than I will ever be, but may not see it just now.
5. I miss a half-dozen people who don’t miss me.
6. Wherever I am, I’m homesick
7. I was born in a place I have no recollection about.
8. I am the oldest in a sib of 6, with 5 years between oldest and yongest.
9. The last time I drank alcohol, and hundreds of times before that, I couldn’t stop before losing consciousness.
10. I imagine a cold beer would taste fantastic several times every day.
11. I haven’t had a cold beer since July 7, 1975.
12. My father’s life during WWII, was described by Joseph Heller in Catch 22, where he details the reality of US Air Force bomber crews and seemingly endless series of missions. Dad survived dozens of missions, some of them in aircraft that would never fly again. He was a navigator.
13. I was born while that War was winding down; I was the only baby shared by 3 beautiful sisters, who sang to me as they listened to the jazz and swing music over black Louisiana radio stations between newscasts about the War. I imagine that the two years of my existence begun 6 months pre-natally (or whenever hearing develops in utero) were the happiest of my life. Nine months after he returned from the War, my brother was born. I was 6 months old when Dad first saw me, a fact that shaped my life, to some extent.
14. For his wartime service, my father got fantastic education benefits. He used them to study botany and forestry at Utah State University, where his English professor was Wallace Stegner Stegner introduced him to the writings of John Wesley Powell, who became his hero and role model. My two sisters were born there in Logan.
15. I started school in Jackson, Wyoming, where Mom had six jobs, the two most recent of which were newborn twins; Dad had three jobs in self defense (having distinguished himself as a survivor of defense). He drove the daily freight run over the old Teton Pass highway between Jackson and Victor, Idaho; he was a temporary worker for the U S Forest Service, and he was the Principal of Jackson Hole High School.
16. I skied half a mile to and from kindergarten every winter day, through snow deeper than I was tall, beside Flat Creek, drifts in places towering many feet overhead. The occasional earaches probably dampened for me the enthusiasm most skiers have for the sport, but never killed it entirely.
17. My father’s permanent appointment as an assistant forest ranger was with the Teton National Forest, and consisted mainly of marking trees for removal from the area soon to be inundated by the Palisades Dam on the Snake River, where it enters the eponymous Swan Valley. Thanks to Dad’s job, I got to grow up in or near some of the most beautiful places in North America, including the Yellowstone country, the Idaho Primitive Area, and the Canyonlands of southern Utah.
18. I ruined a plate of buckwheat cakes for Edward Abbey at Elmer’s Restaurant in Pocatello in 1985. I took him there after his lecture at Idaho State University, where I was finishing a graduate program in anthropology. We were talking about places we both knew better than most, and I described the practice of “chaining” virgin pinon pine and sagebrush plains and hillsides by the Forest Service prior to seeding vast areas with “forbs” or forage grasses for livestock. Ed signed my dog- eared copies of his books. He lived a few more years, until ’89.
19. In 1965, George Hansen (R-ID), the first US Congressman to do time for taking the money and getting caught, found a job for me at the Pentagon Heating Plant, through his connections at the General Services Administration. I caused a stir when I arrived, because the job was on the labor crew. Who knew that the plant was still de facto a segregated shop, where the engineers were white, and the workers were black, each with separate dressing rooms. I was given a desk in the Superintendent’s office, where my only task was to spend 15 minutes at the beginning of each day calling each of the divisions and getting the work attendance data and recording it. I hated it, and demanded after two weeks to be sent to the repair crew, where GSA assigned me, per the job order. To punish me, (so he imagined), the boss agreed. That was one of the best jobs I ever had, among some of the finest and most interesting men I have ever worked with.
20. I stood on Pennsylvania Avenue watching as the Inaugural motorcade bearing Lyndon Baines Johnson to the White House swept past. I made eye contact with him, both of us waving. As a result, I always felt a little guilty for my small part in derailing the Vietnam War for him. I have a photograph of his vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, presenting an award to my father for saving the government a bunch of money while improving the morale and efficiency of brush crews and smoke chasers in the national forest system.
21. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was an inspired act of governance, and one of few, often-overlooked, reasons to trust and respect nationalism. One worthy program of the Great Society was the Job Corps, which had two divisions: urban centers and rural centers. My father was the assistant director of the rural center program, and established the first camp, built adjacent to Camp David in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland. It was a pilot project intended to preclude as many of the inevitable missteps of a new government undertaking as possible (yes, my long-suffering fellow victims of the Misrule of W-there was such a time!). They day I spent exploring that camp confirmed me forever after as a social leftist.
22. My first airplane ride was in a three-seater, with my father and a pilot. We flew out of the Bryce Canyon (Utah) Airport, and over the spectacular national park on the way to the headwaters of the south fork of the Sevier River. Our mission was to locate as many herds of grazing mule deer as possible and count heads, under contract to a fish and wildlife agency. Later the same day, we would approach a terrified deer in a mesh trap, tranquilize it and apply an ear tag.
23. My first and last big game hunting trips were with my father. There were dozens of such trips. The most memorable ones were undertaken after I stopped carrying a rifle on them, and just went along to be with Dad in some wild place, where he was most at home, and content, except for the last two trips, which were both successful, and both utterly bizarre.
24. My name appears in the acknowledgments section of one of the best books about prehistoric stone tools and their makers, one of the best anthologies of American poets of the last half of the 20th century, and of the English edition of the primary religious document of the practitioners of Korean Zen (Son). Even so, I am one of the people included by the great author of underground comics dialogue, Dennis Eichhorn, when he observed, “I am a lightning rod for weirdos”.
25. The most thrilling stories I ever read were by Robert Louis Stevenson. I was 6. Dad gave the book to me twenty years before completing his forestry career by creating a soft woods forestry program for Jamaica, through the U S Agency for International Development. I still have the 25-cent coin he gave me that was minted to commemorate it. It was based on tree farms like the Lucky Peak Nursery outside Boise. I am not my father. I am more like the Governor of Idaho, Robert Smylie, who was supposed to cut the ribbon opening it for business, but was too drunk that day. I don’t approve of such randomness, but I do understand and sympathize.

Pardon Osama bin Laden

Dear President-elect Obama,

I’m sitting home now, an hour and a half into my Christmas morning, just me and the dogs. Missus is in hospital doing fine after surgery, and that’s all I need or want for myself, to have a cool Yule this year. The new year will start out fine, if I overlook the first 20 days of NPWTN (or “nipwit”- no president worthy of the name) during which W will be busier than at any time in his presidency, doing what he has always done best, namely looking after his cronies. I’m talking, of course, about all the pardons that are going to be conferred on the legions of mediocrity that have been Bush Administration appointees over the sorriest last 8 years in our political memory.

The names will amount to a roll call as long as that of Congress itself, more than likely, and will only be remarkable or surprising in its omission of a bunch of names that belong on both lists. Scripps columnist Jay Ambrose recently moaned in the lede of a column headed “War Crimes Trial for Bush” that we in the left are “..salivating, because here’s [our] chance to get George W. Bush, to put him on trial for war crimes, and if doing so tears this nation apart, so what? That’s what justice demands, they say.” Never mind that it was the crimes that tore us apart, not our blowing the whistle and calling the cops.

It is an apologia worthy of the dismal reign of George the W, laying as it does the responsibility for the current state of a nation torn apart at the feet of those of us who have warned from the earliest days after 9/11, of the venal folly inherent in declaring a global war on terror (GWOT) and invading Afghanistan, followed by the criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq, the total collapse of the facade of federal disaster readiness in the wake of Katrina, the scurrilous doings of the Criminal-in-Chief Vice-president “You don’t know” Dick Cheney as he betrayed career CIA operative Valerie Plame in an attempt to get ahead of the bad-news-getting-worse cycle that the Iraq fiasco was inevitably becoming, down to and including orders to torture those illegally held at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Lies. Scams. Renditions. War profiteering. Millions dispossessed, maimed or killed. And then there’s the economy, another whole supertanker of rotten administration fish.

So, Mr. President-elect, we fully expect W to save you and your incoming administration a lot of DOJ grief by pardoning his gang, up to and including  the small army of greedy bastards at the top of America’s banking-insurance-industrial pyramid (remember W’s  turkey-strutting, gobbling boast “Some call you ‘the elite’; I call you my base!”?).

In my heart of hearts, I may be even more cynical than Ambrose imagines, for it would not surprise me at all to find, on the morning of Jan. 19, that W has resigned, effectively making the already pardoned Don’t Know Dick the de facto President, clearing the way for him to become the last jerk, completing the circle and pardoning W himself. Not for nothing does the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart lay into the “Cluster-f**k at the White House”.

The mass-pardon strategem will work for the fowl-feathered minions and friends of GW Bush, but there are a lot of friendly countries whose law enforcement agencies will have a list of highly specific questions for many of them, should they attempt to leave the cozy heated stadium full of pardoned W minions in the USA, and wander carelessly abroad without checking first to see exactly what laws are on which countries’ books governing torture and the “shock and awe” invasion and occupation  of sovereign nations, including the destruction of vast swaths of civilian territory and all the brutality it occasions, and all justified by bogus claims abandoned only in the face of overwhelming evidence bleating, “But he was a bad man!” Children in America have been locked up for years for far less.

Yes, W will save you a lot of trouble by these pardons, Mr. Obama, and it might behoove you to sit down with him in the next few days and discuss the possibility of adding one more name to the list. It’s a name that has drifted into obscurity lately, but some of us remember it. We find irony in the fact that we are, ourselves, just as successful at bringing the gentleman to justice as is GW Bush, and we have a lot less to work with. I speak of that evil genius, Osama bin Laden, the architect of 9/11 who, if he is alive at all,  remains at large.

The Familographer suspects bin Laden is not alive, and that there are those at the highest levels of US and al Qaeda officialdom who know it; they keep him alive in the public mind as the last shred of justification for all that has transpired and still festers in the vast wild arc of Islam between the Mediterranean and Kashmir, Tbilisi and Mumbai, be revealed for what it has ever been: militaristic hegemonism among extreme ideological forces of capital and the ardent religionists who control them.

A pardon of Osama would save America from blundering further down this Fool’s Path on which she has been placed by a Fool’s Administration, liberating us from the throes of political and economic self-immolation. There will be those who shriek “No, No, no pardons for such a monster! He wants to destroy America!” One can only wonder what Osama could possibly do now that would be more successful than what he’s already accomplished, absent the amount of voluntary assistance given him by the GWOT?

Most every schoolboy raised in any of the villages between the Great Plains and the Great Basin  has spent many weekends becoming an expert marksman by marauding the unnaturally dense populations of  ground squirrels and jackrabbits  that exploded following the extermination of predators who lived on them, to make it safe for the beeves and woolies then herded onto the rangelands. Those who still want to deliver  justice to Osama, even after he’s been pardoned, could do worse (and have done worse for years and billions) than ask one of the juvenile nimrods roaming the sagebrush  with his .22  about the most effective strategy for plugging ground squirrels. Promise the Familographer one thing, first. Once Osama’s pardoned, and you take that big rodent out, please don’t tell Homeland Security that you learned how to do it by reading this blog. That would be viewed as a crime,  and the only criminals who get pardons for  high crimes and misdemeanors are the  ones in far higher places.