March 26th, 2007 9:16PM  66!  48%H  33I  46dewpoint   bar, steep rise   17mph   a clear night with a few clouds

  windrose shows NW 

First Quarter Wildcat* Moon   

  Lent 

14 degrees cooler than noon.  And further to go.  This is Minnesota weather.  

Just watched a movie called Festival Express.  This was a 1970 festival idea by a Canadian promoter who booked bands like the Grateful Dead, the Band, Janis Joplin, and the Flying Burrito Brothers, then rented a train for an east to west tour: Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary.  It had great live clips of the Grateful Dead and Janis.  Everyone was young, the music was alive.  The dream still danced on their notes, the opportunity for freedom careened through all their lives on the train and on the stage.  

Then, too, it was self-indulgent.  The protesters for free tickets.  The booze.  The anything goes atomsphere.  It was radical individualism live and in Technicolor. Warts, energy, juice, and bumps.  The times.  A long, long time ago.

The hope of those days, the passionate drive for justice, for peace, for racial and class equality only seems to have ebbed.  It lives in the multitude of ways those of us active back then have chosen to spend our one wild and crazy life. It lives for me, these days, in the Ge-ology work, the Lake Superior work, and the work on liberalism in our time.  We cannot go back to those times, nor would any sane person want to, but, boy, were they fun while they lasted.

I don’t take his point to be about modernization/non-modernization within Islam, but about the end of empire and the winding down of modernity on our side as its precursor.

 

post:politics

                                  Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds       

                               The Christian liturgical season of  Lent    

First response to the article about the fall of modernity:

Dear Charles, I have a few minutes to write. I read the article. I think it a bit pessimistic, to be honest. I think the true struggle for modernity is within Islam itself. Indeed, when I attended Indiana University, there were Iranians going to school there. They had come over after the fall of the shah. I remember distinictly an Iranian telling me that the cause of the Iranian revolution was the struggle for modernity within Iran. Islam was used as a force to preserve traditional values. The Iranian revolution is the obvious beginning point for reawakend Islamic militancy. I see the situation, as previously stated, as a profound battle with Islam to modernize. Islam never had the Renaissance. The Enlightenment never came to Islamic societies. Islam is seeking a renewal. It is groping towards modernity, slowly. I see the current militant Islamic struggles as basically a reaction against modernizing trends within Islam. I think the forces of change and modernization will win in the end. The militant Islamic struggles will be looked upon as a time of transformation. Islam will become a modern religion, reformed from its medieval roots. Regards, Mark

Sent this article out and I didn't know what to expect in way of responses.  Maybe I'd get none.  The germane piece in my mind is his analysis of our current predicament, vis a vis Islam.  That is, we are now King George III, sitting in our throne room, slowly going mad as the world changes.  Oh, my, what will we do?

I also liked his attitude about the possible result.  So we become a second rate power.  We can then tend to our cultural knitting without the burden of world hegemony or Hyperpower status.

post:politics

New Moon   The Christian liturgical season of  Epiphany (ends 2/21/07 on Ash Wednesday)  Quinquagesima Sunday - Shrove Sunday
The fiftieth day before Easter

"Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Compare Roosevelt to compassionate conservatism. 

post:politics

This list from Tom Crane:

"It is not our affluence, or our plumbing, or our clogged freeways that grip the imagination of others. Rather, it is the values upon which our system is built. These values imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose. When we depart from these values, we do so at our peril." - James William Fulbright

"Summing up a year of setbacks, President Bush conceded Wednesday that insurgents in Iraq thwarted U.S. efforts at "establishing security and stability throughout the country."

I am ordering the immediate severing of diplomatic relations with France , Germany , and Russia . Thanks for all your help, comrades. We are retiring from NATO as well. Bon chance, mes amis.
A special note to our neighbors. Canada is on List 2. Since we are likely to be seeing a lot more of each other, you folks might want to try not pissing us off for a change.

Mexico is also on List 2. President Fox and his entire corrupt government really need an attitude adjustment. I will have a couple extra tank and infantry divisions sitting around. Guess where I am going to put em? Yep, border security. So start doing something with your oil.

Oh, by the way, the United States is abrogating the NAFTA Treaty - starting now.

We are tired of the one-way highway. Immediately, we'll be drilling for oil in Alaska - which will take care of this country's oil needs for decades to come. If you're an environmentalist who opposes this decision, I refer you to List 2 above: pick a country and move there. They care.

It is time for America to focus on its own welfare and its own citizens. Some will accuse us of isolationism. I answer them by saying, "darn tootin."


Nearly a century of trying to help folks live a decent life around the world has only earned us the undying enmity of just about everyone on the planet. It is time to eliminate hunger in America . It is time to eliminate homelessness in America . It is time to eliminate World Cup Soccer from America . To the nations on List 1, A final thought. Thanks guys. We owe you and we won't forget.

To the nations on List 2, a final thought: You might want to learn to speak Arabic.

God bless America . Thank you and good night.

If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you are reading it in English, thank a soldier.

"Salvation for a race, nation, or class must come from within. Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted. Freedom and justice must be struggled for by the oppressed of all lands and races, and the struggle must be continuous, for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationships." - Asa Philip Randolph

from the AFL-CIO website of labor biographies:

Philip Randolph brought the gospel of trade unionism to millions of African American households. Randolph led a 10-year drive to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) and served as the organization's first president. Randolph directed the March on Washington movement to end employment discrimination in the defense industry and a national civil disobedience campaign to ban segregation in the armed forces. The nonviolent protest and mass action effort inspired the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

A. Philip Randolph

Asa Philip Randolph was born April 15, 1889, in Crescent City, Fla., the second son of the Rev. James William Randolph, a tailor and ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, and Elizabeth Robinson Randolph, a skilled seamstress. In 1891, the family moved to Jacksonville, which had a thriving, well-established African American community. From his father, Randolph learned that color was less important than a person's character and conduct. From his mother, he learned the importance of education and of defending oneself physically, if necessary. Randolph remembered vividly the night his mother sat in the front room of their house with a loaded shotgun across her lap, while his father tucked a pistol under his coat and went off to prevent a mob from lynching a man in the local county jail.

Asa and his brother, James, were superior students. The Randolph brothers attended the Cookman Institute in East Jacksonville, for years the only academic high school for African Americans in Florida. Asa excelled in literature, drama and public speaking; starred on the school's baseball team; sang solos with its choir; and was valedictorian of the 1907 graduating class.

Randolph joined the Socialist Party and began to harangue the crowds at Harlem's soapbox corner (135th Street and Lenox Avenue) about socialism and the importance of militant class-consciousness. In January 1917, William White, president of the Headwaiters and Sidewaiters Society of Greater New York, asked them to edit a monthly magazine for the society, Hotel Messenger. Randolph and Owen dropped "Hotel" from the masthead and in November 1917 published the first issue of the Messenger, which soon became known as "one of the most brilliantly edited magazines in the history of American Negro journalism."

Their magazine provided an outlet for those who, like Randolph and Owen, were opposed to both the cautious elitism of the NAACP and the utopian populism of Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association. By now established figures in the Socialist Party in New York, Randolph and Owen embarked on a nationwide anti-war speaking tour in 1918 that brought them to the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice and almost got them arrested.

In June 1925, a group of Pullman porters, the all-black service staff of the Pullman sleeping cars, approached Randolph and asked him to lead their new organization, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph agreed. Besides his abiding interest in and knowledge of unions, Randolph's primary qualification for the job was his reputation for incorruptibility and the fact that he was not a Pullman Company employee—meaning the company could not fire him or buy him off. For the next 10 years, Randolph led an arduous campaign to organize the Pullman porters, which resulted in the certification of the BSCP as the exclusive collective bargaining agent of the Pullman porters in 1935. Randolph called it the "first victory of Negro workers over a great industrial corporation."

I have been uneasy for years with my lowered level of political activism.  Reading Randolph's quote and this brief biography has reminded me why.

The hand of the oppressor never lifts on its own.  This is an old, an age old truth.  Ask women, African-Americans, gays and lesbians, Jews, Palestinians, Christians in Muslim lands and Muslims in Christian lands.  Struggle, what the workers in Central and Latin America call la lucha, is the price of freedom.  The Exodus story and the Seder remind those of us raised in Judaeo-Christian cultures of this simple, stark reality.  They also remind us of the equally exorbitant price of doing nothing--slavery.  

As with the Judaism realizations below, I'm not sure where I'll go with this, but it's important to say it out loud. 

"The chief duty of governments, in so far as they are coercive, is to restrain those who would interfere with the inalienable rights of the individual, among which are the right to life, the right to liberty, the right to the pursuit of happiness and the right to worship God according to the dictates of one's conscience." - William Jennings Bryan

Bryan, ill-treated in the movie about the Scopes trial, was a populist and a progressive at a time when many in the US suffered because they had not received equal treatment, in particular emancipated enslaved and women.  Two large groups of humans ignored by Jefferson's high-sounding, but partially hollow sentiments.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men. We... solemnly publish and declare, that these colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states... and for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honour." - Thomas Jefferson

Well, sorta.

One of the problems with having so little history means we have a tough time making analogies.  September 11th, 2001 was not Pearl Harbor.  The similarity lies in the unexpected nature of both occurrences.  Since we have so few historical instances of enemy attacks without warning, we have little corporate experience in differentiating among them.  Both days live in infamy, that much is true, but a better analogy to September 11 would be the Oklahoma Federal Building.  In these two instances terrorists, albeit of widely divergent intents, decided to make a political statement by attacking civilians in a large city and chose locations, prominent buildings, where many people congregate.

Pearl Harbor was a military strike with a strategic and tactical purpose.  The strategic purpose was to cripple our ability to wage war in the Pacific long enough for Japan to dominate.  The tactical purpose eliminated many offensive naval weapons and forced the US to scramble to respond on two fronts.  

A major dilemma with inaccurate analogies lies in their tendency to encourage us to draw the wrong conclusions.  Many jumped from the Pearl Harbor analogy to war and declared the struggle against Al Qaeda and its like a war against terror.  It was not a long step at all then to a war in Iraq.  Soon there were ships in motion, bombs dropping, land forces invading.  A better analogy might have been the early days of the revolutionary war with us in the role of the British.  We could learn from that analogy that sending a conventional military force using conventional military tactics with strategic decisions made almost as an afterthought would only strengthen the rebellion and force fence sitters into the arms of the resistance.

(I was a bit premature here.  Calendarically challenged, I guess.)

Armistice Day

It’s hard to imagine that World War I involved 35 countries. It lasted five years, from 1914 to 1918. The United States only fought from 1917 to 1918. A year was more than enough time, however, to claim too many lives, and people held tight to the notion that this was the very last war. When the fighting stopped, leaders of several countries signed an Armistice on the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month. An Armistice is an agreement to stop all fighting, in other words a truce. This truce was signed on November 11th, 1918 at 11 A.M.

This is important to know because Veterans' Day was originally called Armistice Day. This day was set aside to reflect and remember the sacrifices men and women made during World War I in order to ensure peace. The first official celebration was on November 11th, 1919. Veterans who survived the war marched in parades and were hometown heroes. A Veteran is any soldier who has fought in a war. Ceremonies were held and speeches were made. World War I was called ‘the war to end all wars’ because everyone hoped there would never be another one.

Didn't recall the name change.  Anyhow, listened to an interesting history course on the modern world and discovered the true and underlying meaning of armistice day.  An armistice puts an end to fighting, but it does not provide for resolution.  In effect, historians say, the world put down their arms on November 11th, 1918 and took them up again when Germany launched its first blitzkrieg. This understanding, new to me, casts the interwar years--our 20's & 30's--in a different perspective.   It is an important distinction if we pull out of Iraq...that will, in the struggle against terrorists, be only an armistice in that region, not a peace, not an end to the fighting.  Not even there.

Still absorbing the election.  "To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser." - Robert Louis Stevenson  It feels as if I have spent more than a score of years as an unteachable brat.  Even though I still hold a radical political analysis, I now have a good deal more respect for the politics of the center to center-left.  It is here that decisions get made, where policies found traction for the long run.  

This election has told me a lot about what is possible in America, and what is not.  Some change in my political perspective is underway, not sure where it will end up.

Here's what our peerless President had to say:  "The message yesterday was clear: The American people want their leaders in Washington to set aside partisan differences, conduct ourselves in an ethical manner and work together to address the challenges facing our nation."  Not sure how he's going to do a complete reverse field move to meet these expectations.  Perhaps a new Defensive Lineman will help.

The vote now seems to have given the Democrats control of the House and the Senate, if the two independents go along in the Senate.  The DFL took back to the State House to return to control of the Legislative branch, the Attorney General, and the State Auditor.  As someone on TPT news hour said this was not a Democratic victory; it was a Republican defeat.  I agree.  

At the national level the difficult question of Iraq will now come to the fore in a different political context, but, as several people have written, the underlying dilemmas there remain the same.  If we pull out and leave a power vacuum behind, it plays into the hands of Iran, now bidding to become a nuclear power.  Iran would become the strongest force in the region.  GB the First left Hussein in power as a barrier to Iran's regional ambitions.  GB II has undone what his father did.  Realpolitik is a distasteful foreign policy position, but Iraq is an example of why it also has merit.

We have a no-good choice situation.  Stay and the Iraqi's hate us; we provide more in the field training for future mujahideen; and, we lose more troops while spending astronomical amounts of money.  Pull out and Iraq may descend to an even more bitter civil war; Iran may rise as a regional power; and, we have an unstable region in possession of a vital resource for our economy.  

I hope the Democrats can bring an energy policy to the forefront, put bread and butter issues back on the table, and offer the nation a chance to debate the options in Iraq in an atomsphere less poisoned by ideological rhetoric.

Here again is:  

My Agenda for an Interdependent America (AID):

1. Create an energy economy that can sustain rather than damage future generations and the ecosphere in which they will live.

2. Base our foreign policy on a world with balance among superpowers:  China, USA, Europe.

3. Continue to take the fight to those who would murder innocents--but only to those.

4. Encourage moderate Muslims and moderate Arab and Muslim governments through Marshall Plan type foreign aid.  Give them a stake in our well being.

3. Make the health and education of each US citizen a national responsibility with the delivery systems developed by states

4. Encourage fundamental research in all the sciences in partnership with universities.

5. Use creators of popular culture to articulate why we honor the individual, the creative, freedom, religious and cultural diversity

6. Develop a Pan-American reality with easy travel, aid, and sharing of cultures

7. Develop and implement a secure safety net for the elderly.  Do this with a seven generations perspective.

I spent 16 hours yesterday as an election judge.  We had an excellent turnout, so the day passed, night came, and the election moved into the columns of county, state, and federal keepers.  

"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost." - John Quincy Adams

Well, we shall see.  The polls open in a little less than two hours.  It will be a long day.  A bit punchy, but I won't be late this time.

As Election Day nears, the fundamental dynamics of this cycle have not changed on either the national "macro" level or the "micro" level. Looking at the individual 435 House, 33 Senate and 36 gubernatorial races, this still looks to be a very ugly midterm election for the GOP.

The Senate still looks likely to see a net loss for Republicans of at least four seats, putting the best case scenario for the GOP at a 51-49 seat majority, but a five-seat gain that would result in a 50-50 Senate with Vice President Dick Cheney breaking the tie, or a six-seat gain that would give Democrats a 51-49 seat majority is most likely. There remains an outside chance of a seven-seat, 52-48 Democratic majority.

In the House, it would take a miracle for the GOP to hold onto their majority. The losses look very likely to exceed 20 seats, and a 20- to 35-seat loss is most likely, but we would not be surprised for it to exceed 35 seats. The vulnerable GOP seats are there, the wave is there, maybe it happens, maybe it doesn't.  This from the 11/4 Cook report I have listed under websites.

We'll see.  I remember 1994 and I remember Reagan and Nixon.  I remember 2000 and 2004.  Those of us who care about the an egalitarian society allowed the political reigns to slip from our hands and the sleigh went careening out of control.  You can read any of a number of analysts who show the incredible skewing and concentration of wealth that has happened since the Republicans took over.  It is to our mutual and national shame.

The outdoor water for the birds froze over last night, so I switched plugs from the pumpkin to the dogbowl warmer.  This should keep the water open during the day and I'll turn on the pumpkin one last time tonight then I can devote the cord to the blue bowl with the heating coils.      

Election thoughts:  Looks like the Republicans are the rascals this time.  Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch in my opinion.  But.  The Democrats have done little to define a new path for our country, either in our common life or in the struggle with the radical Islamists.  I'll like Democrat control better, but only nominally.  Without a vision, the people perish.  And we have begun to wane. 

David Brooks had an astute column on these times in which he discerned a dying conservative movement, bloated with power and corrupt through arrogance.  It is a between time, he said, a time between one vision and the next, but, and I agree with him, the other vision is not on the table.  The party or candidate who can find that vision and articulate it will shape politics over the next few decades.

He did not add, but I will, that those decades are critical in ways we have not known before in human history.  Tony Blair hired Al Gore to advise him on climate change issues.  If we don't get some consensus and get to work on lower greenhouse gas emissions, the future for our children looks warm and troubled.

Here is my Agenda for an Interdependent America (AID):

1. Create an energy economy that can sustain rather than damage future generations and the ecosphere in which they will live.

2. Base our foreign policy on a world with balance among superpowers:  China, USA, Europe.

3. Continue to take the fight to those who would murder innocents--but only to those.

4. Encourage moderate Muslims and moderate Arab and Muslim governments through Marshall Plan type foreign aid.  Give them a stake in our well being.

3. Make the health and education of each US citizen a national responsibility with the delivery systems developed by states

4. Encourage fundamental research in all the sciences in partnership with universities.

5. Use creators of popular culture to articulate why we honor the individual, the creative, freedom, religious and cultural diversity

6. Develop a Pan-American reality with easy travel, aid, and sharing of cultures

What does it mean to be an American?  The Scots, the Welsh, the English, the Germans, the Thai, the Khmer, the Israeli, the Chinese, the Japanese, even the residents of Singapore have a coherent vision, could articulate what it means to be Thai, Welsh, German.  Americans have a more difficult time.

We are younger by many centuries than any of these cultures/nations.  

Here is a hopeful sign and one that converges with the Slings and Stones notion of how to deal with Fourth Generation War.

The House ethics committee opened an expansive investigation into the unfolding page sex scandal Thursday, approving nearly four dozen subpoenas for witnesses and documents as House Speaker Dennis Hastert held his ground against pressure to resign.

"I'm deeply sorry this has happened and the bottom line is we're taking responsibility," Hastert, R-Ill., told at a news conference outside his district office.

Can you say closing the barn door after the horse is gone?   At one level I feel sorry for Republicans because sexuality related peccadilloes are as old as the human race.  Probably happened in the cave though back then it would have been rough justice.  In one sense politics follows the same rules.  The public often meets out rough justice at the polls.  

On the other  hand, the political issues hand, I hope this will give democrats, liberal reformers in the classical understanding, a chance to rule effectively.  The classical liberals (we call them conservatives) are stuck with a flammable mixture of those who believe in limited government, the invisible hand, and a three olive martini after lunch coupled to a train of moralists who want to interfere in the bedroom, the laboratory, the doctor's office, and at the altar.  These last, not conservatives at all in any political understanding of the term, have made their particular, and peculiar version of right and wrong into litmus tests for those who make political decisions.

It is a marriage made in some level of Dante's Inferno because it splices leave me alone folks with we know what you ougtha do folks.  Uneasy lies the bed with...

Liberal reformers, those willing to put up with capitalism, but mindful of its excesses and its blindnesses, have fallen into a sad version of the moralist camp.  Hopefully, this last round of scandals, and outright political bad judgement on the part of Republicans, will push us back toward a country where politicians make deals and compromise their positions, not their pages or their foreign policy.

Over the last few weeks I have listened to 48 lectures on European civilization in the modern age.  Once the story hits the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the rise of National Socialism in Germany the case against confident ideologues becomes so strong as to brook any return.  A confident ideologue in my youth, a New Leftist, I now see the error of that path and so I have returned to the liberal reformist politics of own family.  

Let's hope the Democrats win, and that the Republicans can become the loyal opposition.  A plague on the politics of right and wrong, up with the politics of struggle and compromise. 

"In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club - the 'hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.' " - Spiro Theodore Agnew

"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws." - John Adams
Oh, Johnnie we hardly knew ye'.

"The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced." - Frederick Douglass

It is just such a time, again.  The need for the prophetic voice seems to wax and wane.  The stimulus changes, and sometimes the prophets fall behind in their work.  Over the years since 9/11 many prophetic voices have grown silent, hushed by a monstrous act.  They became uncertain faced with a great evil yet unwilling or unable to unleash another evil to combat it.  

This prophetic dilemma has led to a paralysis only lately relieved in part by what used to be Gold Star Mothers like Cindy Sheehan.  They have lost their sons in war, misplaced war, a wrong kind of war aimed at the wronged people and executed in the wrong way.  Grief has made their voice clear, their eyes bright and sharp.

The eyes of faith and love often see what the cunning mind cannot, or will not.  

In the case of the terrorists who use Islam and Arabism as a cloak of righteousness the eyes of faith see not religious zealots, but zealots with a religious patina.  This clear eyed seeing allows solidarity with the millions, the hundreds of millions of Muslims for whom, like most of us, murder of the innocents has no redeeming value.

These same clear eyes see the civilian casualties in Iraq for what they are:  murder of the innocents.  It was a horror when Herod did it;  it was a horror when Al Qaeda did it, and it is still a horror when the US does it.

None of this denies the struggle which has come to us, a struggle with stateless ideologues whose complete commitment  has its equal only in their callous disregard for civilian lives.  In this struggle we must come to understand the enemy as they are and see themselves, not as we see them.  Otherwise, as in Vietnam, or,  the battles of the American Revolution, our own asymmetric war, we will lose and continue to lose, a blinded Cyclops hunting for NoMan. 

"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." - Plato

Plato was an oligarchist at least, a fascist, too, perhaps, but he was not stupid.  

Same day  11:20PM  "Equal laws protecting equal rights ... the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country." - James Madison

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." - Barry Morris Goldwater

I remember this campaign very well.  1964.  LBJ was a hero to me.  Here is a summary of Goldwater's position:

"Goldwater suggested the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam if necessary. He called for deep cuts in the social programs. He also opposed much of the civil rights legislation. He suggested that Social Security become voluntary, and that Tennessee Valley Authority be sold."   In that time the thought of his ascendance seemed impossible.  Was impossible.

Now 42 years later it is as impossible to imagine how we can break the grip of people who have even more radical perspectives than he did.  In that truth, I suppose, lies a certain hope for the future.  Perhaps Bush has done for us what the Democratic party has been unable to do.  Create the climate for a return to liberal politics.  We shall see.

"For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. Soe that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world." - John Winthrop

In the Christian Century this last week they ran article with definitions of things religious.  It include Puritan:  They know you're going to hell and they're sort of glad.

"If I were to attempt to put my political philosophy tonight into a single phrase, it would be this: Trust the people. Trust their good sense, their decency, their fortitude, their faith. Trust them with the facts. Trust them with the great decisions. And fix as our guiding star the passion to create a society where people can fulfill their own best selves - where no American is held down by race or color, by worldly condition or social status, from gaining what his character earns him as an American citizen, as a human being and as a child of God." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson

In 1952 my father and I sat before a small black and white television, one of the first in Alexandria.  The hour was late, but Dad wanted to see the election returns as they came in from the west coast.  He was a Stevenson supporter, and, so was I, at age 5.  The living room was dark, I was sleepy, but Dad stayed up and I would to.  An important evening from my young perspective.  Stevenson lost and I can still recall the sense of disappointment Dad had.  Oddly, I felt disappointed, too, mirroring, I suppose, my father's feelings.

"The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded." - Abraham Lincoln

"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day." - Thomas Jefferson

How people become enlightened matters.  The press used to have the primary burden of providing more or less objective information for all citizens.  It did this job in a hit or miss fashion, but, when the morning or afternoon paper (remember afternoon papers?) was the principle source of news most people had at least some idea of what the major issues in their community or state were.  The nation was bit more fuzzy, and often the world outside the US was virtually invisible.

Now the news delivery mechanisms have splintered into a thousand shards:  cable and satellite television news channels, access to blogs and gathered news stories on sites like Yahoo, Google News and to a paper in any part of the globe, local television news and talk radio, NPR and public television.  As a result, say recent articles about bias in the news, we tend now to get our news from sources which reinforce rather than challenge our political bias. Go to this site to take an interesting test about your political typology.   Run by the PEW Survey.

Born into a newspaper family and with strong memories of the smell of ink and melting lead from the linotype I believe collecting, reporting, and delivering the news is a sacred calling in a democracy.  No one can act as a responsible citizen without some level of knowledge about issues and arguments relevant to electoral politics.  Reading a newspaper has lost its cache among the young, in part I believe because the technology is seen as so yesterday.  And maybe it is.  

The mission of a news organization should never find itself strapped into the cockpit of any one technology.  Most newspapers now have internet sites, but, without advertising support, or a way of getting subscription dollars for those sites, they won't stay up long.  I'm not sure what the next turn of the screw will be on informing citizens so they can make intelligent choices, but I hope it will congeal soon.

My hunch is that it may be a means of collecting relevant news, as Google attempts to do based on internet searches and stated preferences, imbedded within broadly selected news stories with hyperlinks for more information.  This may make more seamless use of video, even music.  

This is no small conundrum for us.  As a people, we have committed ourselves to a system of government that cannot last without individuals who at least understand the stakes of each election, and have enough information they trust to decide on which side they find themselves.

"With breathtaking rapidity, we are destroying all that was lovely to look at and turning America into a prison house of the spirit. The affluent society, with relentless single-minded energy, is turning our cities, most of suburbia and most of our roadways into the most affluent slum on earth." - Eric Sevareid

I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty. But we shall not be poor if we love liberty, because the nation that loves liberty truly sets every man free to do his best and be his best, and that means the release of all the splendid energies of a great people who think for themselves. A nation of employees cannot be free any more than a nation of employers can be." - Woodrow Wilson

"Trickling water, if not stopped, will become a mighty river." - Confucius (551-479BC) Chinese Ethical Teacher, Philosopher

So, what about a rising tide floats all boats?  How did Confucius know about the levee's?  These old guys knew a lot.

"We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security." - Dwight David Eisenhower

"President Bush, likening the war against Islamic radicals to the Cold War threat of communism, told U.S. Military Academy graduates on Saturday that America's safety depends on an aggressive push for democracy, especially in the Middle East.

The president took a subtle jab at Syria and the nuclear ambitions of Iran. He chided previous U.S. administrations, saying that decades of excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make America safer.

"This is only the beginning," Bush said. "The message has spread from Damascus to Tehran that the future belongs to freedom, and we will not rest until the promise of liberty reaches every people in every nation."'

Constant war is the cup of tyranny; it drains out liberty and freedom and into it we pour the blood of the sacrificed young.

 Every observation of history inspires a confidence that we shall not go far wrong; that things will mend." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)   Well.  Yes, but the inverse is also true.

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." - Mark Twain

"America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair." - Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1852-1883) English Historian, Author

Guess who shut down the bakery?

"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way." - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English Philosopher

A corollary is the old joke about why academic politics are so vicious.  Because the stakes are so low.

"The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution." - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English Philosopher

A good point.  One I suspect is the key to this project.

Surprised I didn't catch until now the connection between the Seder, an ancient ritual of political and religious liberation, and the undocumented rally I talk about below this posting.  They could have caught it, claimed there place as today's Jews in Egypt, making brick with straw and asked to be quiet and grateful for the opportunity.  They might also have claimed the Spanish/Mexican/Latin American emphasis on the crucified Jesus, bleeding on the cross for those who sinned against him, an innocent and poor Galilean. They might have held a vigil on Good Friday into Black Saturday, then had a joyous sunrise service to celebration their spiritual and political liberation. Maybe next year in Washington.

An interesting world into which Ruth has come, a state to which she is native, a state with a rich, though compromised history. This does not differentiate Colorado from anywhere else.

The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself." - Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) American Political Activist

With spring I guess my political motor got a kick start:

Tom,

Because I respect you as both a man and businessman, I want to clarify my appreciation for the movie Corporation. 

It establishes, to my satisfaction, that corporations are creatures of the state, designed for specific purposes and chartered by the state to engage in those purposes.  It does not say that corporations per se are bad, nor that the people who run even the worst of them are, ipso facto, bad persons either.

I have never observed in what little I know of the conduct of your business affairs any of the pathological behavior this movie describes.  Also, it is quite possible to have corporations that do serve the public good.  They are many, I’m sure, but I imagine that the ones not in pursuit of profit as their primary rationale are usually small to medium-sized like your own. 

I’m a socialist at heart and an advocate of what Scott Nearing calls a mixed economy.  He recognized that many goods and services need a market economy: refrigerators, fishing rods, forensic engineering services, widgets of all kinds.  But, he said, there are some services and products too important to the common good:  education, health care, public infrastructure, postal services, affordable housing, and food.  These products and services have to be assured to all, not subject to corporate decisions based on the profit motive. 

Well, anyhow…

Letter to the editor submitted on this day to Anoka County Union and Mpls. Star-Trib.

Marriage entails commitment.  It creates a binding contract between persons, a contract that gives legal form to the  human desire to share life and responsibility with one other. 

Over my 29 years in the ministry I have performed many marriages and never once have I encountered a couple who thought sexuality defined their relationship.  In fact, those who believe sexual activity defines a relationship tend to stay away from marriage, or, better, marriageable partners tend to stay away from them.

Gay couples are no different.  Why?  Because, it turns out, they’re human beings, just like everyone else.  Should we, as a state, demand that they follow through on their commitments to each other?  Yes.  As a community  we have just as much at stake in gay relationships as we do in straight.

The anti-marriage amendment will add nothing to our common life, rather it will take something valuable away:  a state committed to all its citizens.

The Reverend Doctor Charles Buckman-Ellis     3122 153^rd Ave NW   Andover , Minnesota

"The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine." - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"One who condones evil is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it." - Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

It is so sad to see 1968 by King's name.  Assassination destroys the democratic process when it kills leaders of King's type.  The frisson and dialectics of public work need politically intelligent public figures, without them, as now for example, many problems go unmentioned, let alone unsolved.

"Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most." - Samuel Johnson

Oh, yeah.

"The greatest danger of bombs is in the explosion of stupidity that they provoke." - Octave Mirabeau (1848-1917) French Art Critic

This quote reminded me of an early teach-in type event I attended during the first days of the war in Iraq.  Back in the days of Shock and Awe.  The event took place at the Humphrey Institute and featured UofM professors from different disciplines offering different takes on the war.  One guy, a historian whose name I no longer recall, said that bombing is a primary competency of the US military, so we tend to use it first, often, and throughout.  

As Mirabeau points out though, and as this historian did, it often results in what political analysts call "blow back."  Blow back is unanticipated effects of a policy.  Iraq becoming a theatre of terrorist training operations, blooding the next generation of jihadists is an example of blowback. In a sense you could say that the planning for the Iraqi war, focused as it was on Shock and Awe, then the joyful greeting of our liberators in the streets of Baghdad suffered an early explosion of stupidity, sort of anticipatory dumbness occasioned by the mere thought of bombs bursting in air, and on the ground, and everywhere.

"The most violent element in society is ignorance." - Emma Goldman (1869-1940) Lithuanian-American Political Activist

This is Emma, If I can't dance, I won't come to your revolution, Goldman.  One of my favs.

Whenever there is authority, there is a natural inclination to disobedience." - Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865) [Sam Slick] Canadian Jurist, Author

Boy.  Is that true.

"If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past." - Baruch 'Benedict De' Spinoza (1632-1677)

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."

"Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be outraged by silence." - Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881) Swiss Philosopher, Poet, Critic

"Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so." - Bertrand Russell

I sense this is true, though I find it hard to comprehend.  He must mean, think critically, or, rather, he probably assumes thinking is critical and analytical. And, that is what most won't do.  It's scary, because once you begin applying critical and analytical you can't decide to stop.  Just doesn't work that way.  So, once you begin questioning authority, simple obedience is no longer possible.  The metaphysics your parents had may no longer fit your world.  That easy acquiescence to government sponsored brutality becomes a question of personal responsibility once you think carefully about politics.  

Russell may have identified the cognitive equivalent of the hot stove; it hurts, so, don't. 

"When twenty years ago a vague terror went over the earth and the word socialism began to be heard, I thought and still think that fear was translated into doctrines that had no proper place in the Constitution or the common law. Judges are apt to be naif, simple-minded men, and they need something of Mephistopheles. We too need education in the obvious - to learn to transcend our own convictions and to leave room for much that we hold dear to be done away with short of revolution by the orderly change of law."  Oliver Wendell Holmes

I hope the bi-partisan horror of easy breaching of our liberties will grow.  On this one I don't care if any partisan gains are made, I only want this Orwellian grasping to cease.

"Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious." - George Bernard Shaw 

Write. Act. Love. Worship. Pray. Live.

In the early years of movement political activism the anti-racism, civil rights struggle occupied equal or more time with the anti-war actions.  In 1968 I led a civil rights march in downtown Muncie, Indiana. We marched down Walnut which, at the time, divided the segregated black quarter of Muncie from the equally segregated Appalachian white community.  In the bars that lined this southern stretch of Walnut racial violence happened every Friday and Saturday night, fight night.  

The day before the march I received a phone call, southern accent, more hill than deep south.  "Y'all die if ya lead that march." Scared the bejesus out of me.  Still, I counted on bluster, not follow through and I wasn't disappointed.  It was also this march where, as we formed up, I watched sheriff's deputies reach in the trunks of their tan and white squad cars with Delaware County Sheriff and the Delaware County seal on the sides.  They pulled out the trademark white robes of the Ku Klux Klan.  

Madison County, my home county, and Delaware both had long and deserved reputations as Klan territory.  As recently as the 1990's, I have seen photographs of men in Klan regalia handing out recruiting posters at the SuperMart on the corner of Church Street and Indiana Highway 9 (better known in Indiana as Highway of Vice Presidents.  No, I'm not kidding.)

Indiana is a place, a sort of type-site to use art-history jargon, too often defined by its embrace of radical rights politic:  the John Birch Society, the Minutemen (an early militia group), the Klan, and fundamentalist Christianity.  I don't mean to say this impression isn't just; it is, but it isn't the whole story.  More on that later.

This project speaks to me.  I have a green cabinet filled with books, periodical articles, magazines, and my own notes.  They await systematic attention, note-taking, writing. I have experience, decades, in both religion and the arts, as well as politics.  These are my areas.  And, they are important to the culture at large and to the development of human and humanistic culture in general.

Yet, like the Lake Superior project and the Pilgrimage project, I let them sit.  No forward movement.  All goes, for now, into the Docent program and the occasional sermon, these notes.  Perhaps a commitment on MLK day about a time-line for this project?  

I believe there must be a politics which builds up from the experience of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, women, Jews, the immigrant Irish and Italians.  A politics that builds up from the concerns of the poor, the working poor, the lower middle class.  A politics that draws on, but does not begin with, the academic and scientific worlds.  A politics that celebrates the religious and ethnic diversity we have, while expressing itself and the aspirations of its constituents in an American politics.  

We have so long limited ourselves to the tired distinctions of capitalist and socialist, liberal and conservative, republican and democrat.  These distinctions may have told real tales once, they may have limned the boundaries of real groups, and helped solidarity in so doing; but, now, they hide more than they reveal.

Watched a bit of the Alito hearings.  Like Roberts, I can't get excited about this guy.  He seems intelligent, knowledgeable about con law.  He's served on high courts.  I don't like his politics; I don't like the thrust of his decisions; and, I don't  want a supreme court with Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito on it.  Even so.  Bush is the President (although, I have to admit, it was the supreme court who gave him the office.) and he has a right under our system of government to appoint Justices who appeal to his sensibilities.  

It is, then, of course, the Senate's to advise and consent (if it deems the candidate worthy), or to advise and dissent if they don't.  Still, I don't think we want to go to a place where every Justice has to toe an ideological line before affirmation.  Instead, we should be concerned with their commitment to the Supreme Court as an idea, as an interpreter--an interpreter--an interpreter of the constitution.  If they say the constitution is black letter law and cannot, ever be understood to apply to matters not obviously within its ambit...well, then, we have a fight on our hands.  

I don't find Alito to be such a person.  

"Even after a bad harvest there must be sowing." - Seneca (4BC-65AD) Spanish-born Roman Statesman  

A reminder to all of you who yearn for a politics of compassion and justice, an American politics that celebrates the enormous geographical resources of our country and the depth of personal and communal resources of our citizens, those who labor undocumented, and those who are part of First People nations, too.  An American politics stands for freedom, liberty, equality--the ideals of the Enlightenment--it stands for them both at home and abroad.

Seems I've done a bit of progressive thinking and moved the holiday backward a week.  I still stand by what I send below, but wait until next week, when it'll really mean something.

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) American Clergyman, Reformer

Beware the fury of a patient man." - John Dryden

It is true.  Silence is the ultimate sin of omission in the civil religion.  It is silence that allowed the Jews to go to the deathcamps; silence that allowed the Klan to lynch blacks; silence that allowed slavery to gain a devil's footprint on our soil; silence that allows the poor and thier children to go to sleep hungry each night here and abroad.  Silence even allows the radical Muslim fringe the voice of the much, much larger Islamic ummah.  Silence emboldens the wife beater, the child abuser, the animal neglecter.  Silence pushes poison into our streams and pumps them into our air.

Vox populi stands out in gold gilt above the speaker's rostrum at the Minnesota Capital House of Representatives Chamber.  The Voice of the People.  It goes out to say est vox deum.  The voice of the people is the voice of God.  This voice is the sine qua non of justice.  When we neither vote nor speak, we deserve what happens to us. Why?  Because we have, by default, chosen it.

If vox populi est vox deum, then the silence of the people is the drumbeat of tyranny, the quiet that precedes the whirlwind..  

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." - Theodore Roosevelt  This, too, can be a starting point; many regional politics merging into a national politics.

Something, a vestigial Movement organ, a continuing intensity, a gut sense of right and wrong, something keeps me coming back to this work, to the hunt for an American politics shorn of faction, devoid of ideology, bonded to this place and its history, yet universal enough to respect our interaction with the world.  I'm not sure why this feels like something I need to do, yet it is.

My political experience is shallow compared to so many, but I do have some experience, and it is experience of street and church and academic politics, three of the nastiest ever invented.  At least I should be able to detect unworkable political thought, stuff that has no chance of making a connection with the average person.  That's worth something.

The mine disaster at Tallmansville, West Virginia breaks my heart.  The mining companies have wrecked family after family after family over many centuries--look at the Athenian silver mines, for example.  This time they managed to compound their criminal negligence with the worst communications screw-up I can recall...at least this year.  Telling anguished wives and children that their men were alive; then, several hours later, long after they knew the truth, coming back and having to recant.  Dead after all.

Working folks in this country, by that I mean folks who earn their livings with their hands and their backs, often get short shrift, even more now that we've shifted to the knowledge economy.  Brain, not brawn, is the human commodity of the hour.  Unless you're a deep shaft coal miner or iron miner.

"But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power." - James Baldwin (1924-1987

What if we sought among the writings of the disenfranchised:  blacks, native people, women, glbt folk, American born Japanese and Chinese for the keys to an American politics?  This may not be a new idea, but the power of clear eyed observation should give us the lineaments of a strong, American tao of politics.  Baldwin's quote triggered this idea for me.

"There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you." - Will Rogers (1879-1935)

Looks like I haven't had a political thought since last year.  

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