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.

Free Muntadhar al-Zeidi

The Iraqi TV journalist who launched his shoes at George W. Bush during his last attempt at a “Mission Accomplished” moment in Baghdad deserves the respect and gratitude of everyone who has seen W’s illegal use of US military forces to invade and occupy Iraq for what it was from the beginning. His action couldn’t have been more satisfying to witness if his missiles had hit their feckless target dead center. Let the image of W ducking them be the symbol of his administration and the sum of his legacy for a time to last beyond the end of the millennium begun so ignominiously with his coronation. George W Bush’s most successful act as President of the United States was to duck everything but the title “Worst US President Yet”.

Free Muntadhar and give him a Medal of Honor!

Dear P-E Obama:Bailout Quids pro Quo

There is no limit yet speculated exactly how many trillions of dollars will bleed out of the US economy before things settle on the completely new, nobody-knows-what-it-will-look-like-yet, but we’ll call it “normal”. I’ve always been poor at math, but there is a certain elegance about powers of ten that seduces me.  Let’s play with big numbers here. Everyone else is doing it.

There are in the US slightly over 300 million of us reported, and that’s around one-twelfth of Earth total.  A much smaller proportion of that number owns or controls a vast proportion of the national wealth. A mere handful of that lot, comparatively, pull the strings that convince everyone our national Punch and Judy are lly dancing and not writhing in tortured pain. The cost of this recession, only recently accepted as such by those who brought it down on us, can’t yet, and will maybe never, be calculated. Bailouts alone, however, have already danced into the balcony, near the seats marked  3 trillion dollars.

A thousand thousands equals a million. A thousand millions equals a billion. A thousand billions equals a trillion. Three trillion dollars divided by 300 million people should tell us the share each and every one of us Americans own; every old fart, toddler, paraplegic, axe-murderer, fund manager, stock broker, single mom, milk route dude, Plumber Joe and absentee governor of Alaska, will shoulder this share of the burden if it is distributed evenly. This is where the going gets tough for me, but it seems like the answer is basically 3 into 30,000, no? It certainly looks to me like (and I confess I could be off by a zero or two either way-it’s that bad) my share of this program to save the banker’s, insurocrat’s, and assorted tycoon’s asses country will be tuh-tuh-tuh-TEN GRAND!!!!

Okay, okay….I’m calm now. Let’s look at some additional facts before we start divvying up the contents of the medicine cabinet and Kevorking all over the place. We could, as a citizenry, do what the Chinese did when they were saddled with an upper class that were only in civil life for themselves.  We could have a great cultural revolution and make the wealthy and ruling classes carry buckets of night soil to the paddy, where  the aristocrats and commissars would turn it into food. Don’t try to tell me you don’t find the idea tempting when you learn the meaning of phrases like “golden parachute”. The ruling class, those who own the stuff and wield the power don’t just step up and volunteer to back away; at least very few have ever done so. Ted Turner gave the UN a billion dollars once, earning for himself our undiluted esteem, and there is  a thing called “philanthropy” practiced by a few, but most estate managers spell it “tax loophole”, and so it is not a free pass into Heaven.

What about the little guy out here on that Main Street that, to your credit, you mention in every speech. I don’t want sound selfish and say “myself”, but yeah, me. Remember, the guy who, with every man, woman and child in a family of very few millionaires, will be adding ten grand to his admittedly not very generous contribution contribution of taxes?  How should I take it? How should any of us take it? As it happens,  I have an idea.

Don’t worry, this is not a call for revolution. That would mean bloodshed, and except for the militarists, we’ve been around long enough that we should be able to demonstrate that we’re bigger and better than that. I know, I know; I’m tripping, but let’s save the revolution for last, anyway, after I’m dead of old age, say. I’m ready to take it like a grownup and accept the personal obligation to cough up ten G’s (which I don’t, by the way, have at the moment), if our leaders and all those other people on my earlier list are willing to do the same. That’s the quo. Let’s talk about the quid.

First, though, let’s talk about our whole perspective on money and government and the cost of civil society and social contracts and crime and infrastructure and environmental quality and all that other stuff that competes with the bankrupters and Big Shots for our money. Take prisons, for example. They are  expensive to build and maintain, so when a new one is proposed, many taxpayers balk at the cost. They say, “I’m not a criminal. Why should I have to pay a criminals’ room and board?” It’s a fair question, but it rolls with a narrow field of vision.

Each (mostly unlucky) felon behind bars maybe feels a little smug these days. He’s going to get a pass on the ten grand for the bailouts; he’s locked up because he couldn’t get a bailout. Imprisoning people is one of the more profitable corporate enterprises in America today. It’s a growth industry, and legislators, political leaders, lawyers, equipment makers and suppliers, weapons makers dealers and other such civic-minder individuals are invested in that industry. Dick Cheney is a case in point, with about 80 million dollars invested with Vanguard, which in turn is linked closely to the private prison industry. It pays to lock people up, and the US has more people locked up than any other country.

It would cost less to let all but the violent offenders out of the prison,  close them down, and pay them to stay out of trouble. Most were stoned and needing money when they did their crime. It would cost the public less than half what is paid to confine further warp them, and we’d be able to get that ten grand for banker welfare off the top. Every man, woman and juvenile freed could joing the rest of us in supporting the rich guys who ran America’s economic ship aground. The ex-cons  would have a bigger annual income to live on, at half the cost of their incarceration, than do most of us who are lucky enough not to get caught.

Here’s the punchline. I want something in exchange for chipping in my ten thousand dollars.  I shouldn’t be expected to just ante up with no discussion of this important fact. Saving my country has a nice ring to it, and as my British niece might say, “In for a penny, in for a pound”. It’s just that, for a long time now, I’ve had the feeling that my country is, more and more, being rigged by mega-corporations to fleece me, ruin my surroundings, wreck my health, outrage my moral sensibilities and generally refuse me transparent views of their accountability in the process.

This is what I want. I want paper. I want ten thousand dollars worth of stock, or T-bills, or securities or some evidence of an ownership position in one or more of these outfits being saved with my ten grand. To paraphrase a motion picture president, “Ah wanna chip in the big game!”.

Every American should be demanding this in return for the sacrifice we are being asked to make on faith in the people whose betrayal of our trust brought us to this point. I am ready to accept the failure of every multi-national corporation on this dying planet if moves are not made by our leaders to give each and every one of us the recognition that only one thing can prove, and that is a capital ownership position in our country. Even the poorest citizen deserves compensation for his or her output. A lifetime of defecation and urination, or a pint of blood a week, is worth something. It’s time we demand  acknowledgment for it, and every other modest contribution. It’s time we were included in the national wealth scheme of the country we are expected to save.

Dear Mr. President-elect: Please Lose the Global War on Terror

I don’t mean to suggest you need to lose it in the sense opposite victory. It was never possible to win it that way anyway. It was Cheneyesque lunacy to push the line that victory was a realistic outcome to begin with, if we still live in the world of long-accepted definitions for items in our vocabulary. At best, it was never more than a slogan designed to capture the support of that broad stripe of the populace who are satisfied to take their intellectual nourishment in sound bites. Your predecessor has demonstrated forcefully that this approach creates more dead innocents and live terrorists that any other factor, and contributes to our national and moral bankruptcy in the process. There is no GWOT victory possible.

Defeat is possible, however, and becomes more likely the longer we live by slogans coined for the simple-minded. Take us back to being a nation that speaks simply and resoundingly before picking up the big stick. In the case of terrorism, with each individual skirmish or incident involving numbers of combatants no greater than could be seated on a city bus, the big stick is less useful than the standard tool kit already employed by law enforcement forces in most developed nations. The Europeans  have enjoyed impressive success combatting terror without destroying entire nations. Israel might like to try, but their case is unique, and like the US, her people are not of one mind about strategies for peace with her neighbors.

Sir, I respectfully urge you to declare an end of the use of the phrase, “Global War on Terror” by all government officials. War, as provided for in the Constitution, is a blunt instrument. What is needed are finely tuned, complex procedures, methods and weapons that are as easily taught, lawful, precise and effective as those used for many years by Interpol, the FBI, Scotland Yard and the top security forces of such countries as Japan, Germany, and Spain, with long experience dealing with small but determined individuals and bands of fanatics and zealots who are bent on killing innocents and destroying communities in service to their hopeless and narrowly supported causes. Wholesale invasion and indiscriminate widespread attacks throughout entire regions in an effort to kill or capture a few criminals, only results in enraging citizens who, lacking jobs, incomes, and opportunities for better, become willing fodder for the planners of suicide attacks designed to kill, maim make mayhem.

We are enablers of terrorism. It’s time to stop supporting the terrorists in this way. The only ones who can claim victory by this approach are the corporations and security contractors who reap billions in public funds for “protecti0n”, all the while stirring up populations that, if the same funds were shared among them for the improvement of their lives, would become allies in the resistance to terror. Until we abandon the GWOT as an instrument of official policy, we show ourselves to be the same kind of sorry losers as those we seek to defeat, demonstrating along the way our blindness to the origins of terror in dismal social conditions, not in the simplistic formulations fed us for so long by G.W. Bush and his crowd. To hear them spin it (and praise whatever provident force pervades our universe, we don’t have to do that for much longer!), there are millions of Afghans and Iraqis running around shrieking “I hate freedom! Death to America”. We are the mirror image of the lame caricatures of late night comics.

Let’s get serious about making the world safe from terror by making the world safe from ignorance, disease, inhumanity, militarism, greed, corruption and brutality, to name but a few of our problems. That’s not a struggle that can be won if our only stratagem is to blow up everything we seek to bring to an end.

W: Resign today, and shut me up!

I am so full of negative things I want to say about you, George W. Bush, that I couldn’t possible get them all said if everyone I see for the next ten years stops by and invites me to do nothing else for the next hour or two, one after another. But I’m weary. I’m weary of detesting you for the mess you’ve dumped on our country over your term. I’m also worried. Not having a president for even another week promises to make things palpably worse.

I’m also weary of hearing the president-elect forced to accept that “We only have one president at a time”. The problem, as Barney Frank put it so well, is that right now we have considerably less than one.

So I promise you this, Mr. Bush. If you will resign in the next day or two, thereby clearing the way for Obama to work, I will hold my tongue for the rest of my days and never have another bad word to say out loud about you . I think you understand why I qualify the offer by saying “out loud”. It’s a lot more difficult to put a damper on my thoughts than it is to curb my utterances.

Quit Today, Get a Pass! This offer expires before you can complete your next grammatical sentence.

Dear P-E Obama, Empty the prisons and jails

I see my light come shining,

from the west unto the east.

Any day now, any day now,

I shall be released.

-Bob Dylan

I hope you appreciate my generosity in giving you this insightful suggestion completely free of charge, knowing that most of the advice you get, whether you take it or not, is costing you, me and every other taxpayer millions of dollars daily. In fact, that’s exactly why it is good advice. It’s going to save the country billions of dollars that are not even being well-spent, and it’s going to put one car of this long fiscal derailment back on the tracks. Allow me to explain.

America has more people behind bars than any other country. This suggests that the people who pull the strings that make the puppits of the incarceration system dance, evidently believe that there are more bad people in America than anywhere else. I have a hunch that, if I should go out into the street and put the question, “Do you think America has more bad people in it than other countries?” to a sample of US citizenry, the answer would resound in the negative. The man in the street could, of course, be wrong about this, but at least we could take from it that the people do not support the project that concludes with more of our citizens locked in iron than, say, North Korea, China or Burma. It seems all wrong.

But the wrongness of it is only part of the reason to simply bring mass incarceration to a close, as a failed experiment of civil society. There is nothing civil about it, and it only worsens an already dismal situation. The extraordinary waste of human and material resources it represents, when fairly calculated and beheld, leads one to conclude that those who support it are weak of intellect and character;  those who profit from it are venal in their disregard for justice, good, and right; those who defend it should be kept out of classrooms.

It is not meant to suggest letting everyone out all at once and dismantling the criminal justice system completely. That would be as flakey as the current system of keeping millions of sound citizens behind bars. Habitually violent inmates must be kept close to the stake. Those who habitually prey on children, or those unable to resist depredations against them, belong under tight control,  unless and until it is incontrovertibly shown that they no longer represent a threat.

A number of collateral actions must be taken in the form of decriminalization, rescinding laws that create classes of offenders of whom there are no victims save, arguably, themselves. The biggest class of these is dopers, one class of which is the alcoholics, who drink themselves to death without fanfare, and in shocking numbers, daily. The evidence of positive results from the legalization of heroin in countries like Sweden is overwhelming. Why not buy the Afghan opium, process it into heroin and give it to the addicts with clean needles to prevent disease? In the meantime, do everything within the power of educational, medical and social science to cure the addiction and prevent others from blundering into the opiate trap. Spend less, put more people to work, fight organized crime, clean up society and be better people as a result.

Also, stop making hardline distinctions between currently illicit substances and such demonstrably catastrophic drug habits as alcohol and nicotine, which only public demand and the corporate lobby prevent from their outright banning, and which together claim more lives every year than all other drugs of habituation and addiction combined. Instead, decriminalize the use of everything, and make everything available through legitimate, tightly controlled outlets.  Among immediate benefits would be the erosion of the stigma attached to use of,  marijuana (popular, widely used, minimally dangerous) and amphetamines (popular, widely used, serious health hazard). The removal of production and sale of illegal drugs from the inventory of potential criminal enterprise would be a major victory in the war on drugs. Voila! If its not a crime, there is little profit in it for criminals. Having known a few purveyors of illegal drugs over the years, I can say I never met one who was in favor of decriminalization, and less so legalization, for the simple, obvious reason that they hated the idea of plying their trade from a storefront, and paying taxes on the profits (yet another benefit of decriminalization). “What about the schools?” you say? Every school needs a mascot, and a drug-sniffing dog would make a very nice one.

Take some time and care, but get started releasing our fellow citizens from lockup right away. Seek and get recommendations for early release from parole and probation officers, social workers, medical staff and others in a position to characterize as low, the risk to society from releasing specific individuals. Let them go now. Strap a lie detector on them and if their answers to questions like, “Are you a threat to society?” and “Do you think you will be able to resist the temptation to break the laws of the land if you are released?”, and “Do you understand why you have been imprisoned and on what terms you may obtain immediate provisional release?” are satisfactory and convincing, cut them loose; no wagging fingers, no tsk-tsking, shake their hand and wish them fare-thee-well. Men and women are put on the path to jail on the basis of their answers to a lie detector every day. Is it so far-fetched that the same tools might be useful in choosing those deserving of early release?

And what of the issue of cost? At the end of the day, money is at the root of most of the evil that the penal system represents. Kidnapping, armed robbery, burglary, embezzlement, forgery, grand theft auto, insurance, telecoms, confidence schemes, all have as some part of their underlying rationale the desire to make a living. It is some kind of cruel irony that, in locking a person up and taking over responsibility for their day-to-day physical maintenance, the cost to polite society is far greater per head than is lost through their  crimes, OR would be expended by simply paying them a living wage not to commit crimes in the first place. We, as a people, save money by paying people to abjure the behaviors that land them behind bars, where it costs a great deal more to keep them. Just make certain that, as a society, we build the kind of society that doesn’t drive people to commit crimes out of frustration, boredom, resentment, intoxicated delusions, or revenge.

Reckoning the costs of the system, one must take into account everything; the physical premises, the wire, the special transport units, the weaponry, the security, the staff, the uniforms, the courts and their officers, the legislators, the law enforcement details, food, energy, medical care; all these and more, comprise a debit shocking in the extreme. It’s time for our leaders and politicians and greedy prison-building, prison-managing and prison-promoting types, among all the other and sundry supporters to grow a spine and find their conscience. It’s complete nonsense to imagine that crime doesn’t pay. It’s paying very well for those who have promoted the current system to the country as the most rational, best way of tackling the problems of anti-social behavior. Let the miscreants go, apologize to them sincerely, and start over.

I have, Mr. President-elect, enormous respect for your legal mind and social conscience. A community organizer is just the hand the people need on the helm, even those who don’t know why and can’t understand the rationale behind the claim. I started this post with the words of a great poet, so I’ll close it with videos of a couple more. One is an attorney, and the other an activist for protecting the rights of the accused. Sir, I propose to you that our fellow citizens rotting incarcerated have as much right, and deserve the same chance to demonstrate their highest worth, as does a president-elect of the United States. We believe, after all, they are created equal.

Dear President-elect Obama,

Congratulations on your election. You are the very person I wanted to win after I accepted that there was no possibility of Dennis Kucinich, John Edwards, Ralph Nader or Michael Moore getting in. In truth, the only things I had against you were that you were a senator and a Democrat. I don’t hate either of those things; it’s just that, as a class, each of them has underperformed so spectacularly through eight years of Bush debacle (a word far too polite for anything connected to that man), I lost my faith.

You are well into your cabinet picks now, and I have to say that I’m trying really hard to remember through it all that you will be telling them what to do, not telling them to do what they have done in the past, because if you were telling them the latter, it would mean you are looking to take the country back to business as usual before setting us on the path to the change you promised, and that way lies disaster and a ruined presidency, in my arrogant opinion.

I just had (well, maybe caused) a promising Facebook conversation crash and burn because I was probably too hasty in complaining that no progressives are yet to be seen anywhere near the list of cabinet choices for your new administration. I probably owe Mr James Newman of Seattle an apology for meeting ordinary bitchiness with scornful condescension. Mr Newman believes, with arguably good reason, that the centrist picks are necessary to keep the cabinet meetings from polarizing to a degree that would erode timely and meaningful progress, and keep the rabid right merely yapping at your hubcaps, or better yet, pulled right under your wheels. Wired jaw, meet wire wheels.

I’ve given the matter considerable thought in the couple days since my intemperate ripostes to Mr. Newman, reading meanwhile some of the refreshingly high-order commentary on the subject by fellow readers of Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, and it’s inclined me to take a completely different tack. Here’s why: Even if you go ahead late in the piece and include a couple of reputable progressives (and I do certainly lament the occasional conflation I encounter of “liberal” and/or “Democrat” with “progressive”) it will still be very hard to move policy through congress that its denizens will have a hard time selling back home. We’ve all seen those chilling interviews of people attending the McCain rallies out in the heartland during the campaign, and we know you have too, and that will be motivation enough to get you moving quickly fixing some of the problems with our education and health care systems.

You won’t be able to pursue some of your most deeply felt ambitions for change, because you won’t have the time it would take for you to overcome the vision deficit of the unready boys and girls of the mainstream media, or the people who will celebrate the slightest gaffe or failure of your administration. The W years have made that inevitable, and some of your best friends, moi par exemple,  will have difficulty breaking the habit. Even so, I think you and millions of others without the vision deficit might agree when I suggest that we need a way to enfranchise what appear at first blush to be the worst possible ideas that could be rendered into national policy. Even so, that’s exactly what I am suggesting we do.

As of today, we’ve seen something like 2 trillion dollars awarded to the wealthiest class of Americans to keep the organized crime of economic depression from breaking their legs and maiming their nearest of kin to the 3rd or 4th remove. And they are grateful for it, but as you’ve pointed out, still won’t forego the corporate jets and big bonuses. You say they’re tone deaf; I say that’s because assholes don’t have ears, but ehnhhh! Here’s what I’m thinking:

How about giving every state a billion dollars off the top of that big finance bailout. Yes, even the undeserving ones like Alaska. The only stipulation should be that the money be allocated in ways that help those who have gotten the least help from the public treasuries in the past. That group of people, oddly enough, turns out to be surprisingly well equipped to make the most of the opportunity. I’m talking about the people who have completed educational studies in all of the academic disciplines that are notorious for the difficulty of making a living on one’s degree).

Divide the money up between social researchers, artists of every stripe, unpaid bloggers, inventors, shut-ins and those with special needs, Native Americans without casinos, homeless families, single parents without jobs, teachers without tenure (or just abolish tenure and let the Foghorn J. Leghorn professors scratch with their adjuncts for awhile, so there is enough fertilizer for the new ideas that spring up.

If we look at the example of China today for inspiration, we want to dismiss the obvious gains they have made, tsk-tsking the fact that they still are not free and they have plenty of problems. Even so, they are a lot further advanced than they would be, had they not endured the horrible cultural upheaval of Mao’s Great Cultural Revolution. We don’t imagine for a moment that the US needs anything like it to accomplish the same degree of transformation that a growing number of people recognize will be necessary if the nation is to reach the end of this century intact, to say nothing of the next, if we get one.

In closing, because I know you are an avid reader (and given what we’ve been through, we REALLY appreciate that about you!), I promise that I will follow this letter up with another every week or two, until all this pent-up inspiration is off my chest and onto yours. You’re a much younger man than I am, and I haven’t dunked a basketball in my entire life. In the course of my life, I’ve read about thousands of interesting ways we could have gone but didn’t as a people and a nation. Usually, the forces arrayed against any effort to try new things or solve old problems were led by selfish people with either a vested interest in the status quo, or selfish people who resist any public expenditure of tax money on things they either don’t care about, or which benefit any group of citizens of which they are no part. Of course there are also the religious ideologues who believe that because they have memorized one book, and it is God’s word, the rest of us are unworthy. I will close this letter as reasonably as I know how, by not saying what I think of them.

Patriotically yours,

The Familographer