Buffalo Nickel

Vitality

2010-03-24T12:12:00.013-05:00

I'm happy that health reform has made it through a maze of Minotaurian convolutions. Given the uproar, though, why not go for broke, for, say for a single payer plan?

Still, we probably would have ended up with a bulky, patchwork bill full of compromises and backtracks that addresses many problems, and leaves others untouched, but still institutes reform that is still badly needed. This is a democracy, and no matter how misguided the opposition may be, everyone gets invited to the table.

Obama promised change, and this bill, it now appears, moves us significantly in that direction. Our country is, I've come to think, much like the Titanic. It takes huge energy to turn the ship of state, and it's not going to happen in a hurry just because that iceberg is looming in the distance.

So a moment for joy and revelry, triumph, success, a modicum of hope. It's deeply satisfying to see kudos being showered on Nancy Pelosi, the first female Speaker of the House.

And...better to ignore the right, with it's recriminations and sour grapes. Yet moderate David Brooks, the NYT columnist, snagged me. He tosses a red herring of congratulation to the Democrats, acknowleges the bill represents change both welcome and needed. Then, out comes that herring again and we get slapped. Those reform minded Democrats will sap our nation's vitality.

Is it possible, Mr. Brook, you are mistaking the recent bubble for vitality? Or is it the ditzy sex appeal of Sarah Palin? Is this vitality or just viagra for a 24 hour entertainment media flirting with the glee of childish misbehavior?

If you want to see real vitality, check out the Coffee Party, where a quarter of a million people have signed up to a movement which garnered more hits on Facebook in two weeks than the Tea Party mustered in two years.

And who could be more vital than Barack Obama? With his beautiful wife and children. The acceptance speech, the Inauguration, that was pretty powerful stuff, wasn't it? Would a modern Lincoln twittering Gettysburg address snippets in daily soundbites satisfy you? Or would it get boring after, you know, a few weeks?

The slave trade, now there was vigor and vitality. We owe some of our greatest world monuments to it. Something else, however, arises in the gorge when human beings are being ruthlessly exploited, which is why Obama and his family represent an incredible beacon of hope to the world.

Some of us are energized by social responsibility. All over the country inventive and even whimsical spirits are wedding with organic, sustainable solutions and proving that doing right doesn't have to be dull. Surely you've noticed? The green revolution?

Reading poems, making music, dreaming, participating in colorful extravaganzas like Burning Man are ways we celebrate the joyful, lusty, creative forces of life. These are energies are probably not found in anemic museums of conceptual mash ups that you might frequent, nor in the intellectual eye candy of NYC galleries. Everywhere you look, even in tiny towns in otherwise red states, progressive art, music, film is burgeoning.

American productivity, it's true, grew under the Bush administration. But is it really vitality or desperation that has Americans taking on second jobs and working overtime just to make ends meet?

The Republicans, I think, are suffering a big hangover. Beating raw eggs into a morning bloody Mary, and calling it an energy drink.

This nation have tremendous challenges to face up to. We need to energize our economy, rebuild our infrastructure, reduce our carbon emissions and dependence on coal and oil---and, if you want to know what does makes me angry, it's the way the Republicans are dragging their feet and hoping to sabotage the process. Wanted Obama to fail is hoping that America will fail.

With one great success behind him, can Obama harness that good will, and righteous populist anger to reign in the moguls of Wall Street, rally the progressive forces for cap and trade system? Can he create enough jobs to give people hope again and fill the vacuum left by the financial bust? And if he does, will Americans cheer him on?

Have we learned from it what we need for next battle? Because there will be a battle.

Everyman

2010-01-20T11:21:00.036-06:00

It is stunning to learn that Kennedy's seat went Red, and it's ominous for America. But it's not so surprising when you look at trends that have dominated the last few decades. What's most surprising about it, though, is that, after eight years of Bush, and a disastrous decade of Republican policies that Americans' give any credibility to the Right.

Obama's been in office for barely a year. He's stabilized the economy, and, with the stimulus programs, saved jobs and gotten money flowing, keeping us from a worse disaster. Given a financial meltdown, the worst since the Great Depression, a war on two fronts, that no one really believes in, oh-- though we support the troops, of course- given hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes and pilfered pensions, Obama has a massive job ahead of him in turning around Bush's legacy.

Tax cuts, pay outs to conservative friends, causes, and supporters have left us with billions and billions of debt that fiscal conservatives love to descry.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. But you see, no matter how awful the fix the Bush administration left us in, no matter how much worse off American's has been in the last ten years... No matter how complete and visible the failure of their core ideas; free market economics, deficit spending--- the Democrats are left holding the bag. Newly energized neocons still manage to have a lockhold on the American psyche.

No Taxes! Down with the Government!

Who wants to pay taxes? Not me. Sticker shock arrives on my desk every April, even worse now that I own property. My friend Rick used to say that the only way to get the American people to pay attention is to hit them in their pocketbooks. That's where it hurts. So, even when threatened with storms and severe hurricanes, species extinction, droughts, famines-- you just can't get many working people to care about global warming, he would say, when it doesn't cost them personally.

And Republicans understand that. The recession has hit people's pocketbooks big time, and the populace seeks blood. If you need a red herring to lead them away from, let's say, anger at the banks and Wall Street, or anger at Bush or anger at insurance companies that continue to raise their rates, while denying coverage... Or anger at corporate lobbyists who are getting fistfuls of government handouts while hacking away at the safety net that protects average Americans.

What better than a Tea Party? A new tax rebellion.

There's nothing new about this so called populism. We've been whacking at the Taxman now for thirty years. The very top 5% of Americans are paying much less in, but I'm sure it feels, to the middle class, who are losing ground in other ways, that they pay more.

No matter that, in fact, the Democrats have not raised taxes, nor plan to. Obama has promised he would reduce taxes for the middle class and family, and hasn't, so far, cancelled the Bush tax cuts. In fact, nothing has changed about that since a year or so ago. So why all the anger?

Every day, all day long, Americans are being shouted at from that screen in their living room, and now from their e-mail inbox and social networks, that the Democrats are the enemy, set to fleece Joe Six Pack for whatever they can get.

or thirty years Republicans have successfully branded the Democrats as irresponsible with money, YOUR money. If facts mattered, Ronald Reagan tripled our national debt while in office, while Bill Clinton's policies encouraged prosperity, reduced the deficit, and balanced the budget. Only to have Bush, once again, push us, pedal to the floor, back into the red.

Pedal to the metal. Republicans continue to thrive on the illusion, the wish fulfillment, that you can have it all, without paying for it.
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It is heartening to see, as Americans are pour money into earthquake shattered Haiti, that, despite the recession, we care that we are still moved to such generosity and compassion for people.

Money is power. And Republicans understand that. They spend money like water when they in power, and violently descry spending when they aren't.

Having found that they can rouse Americans anger, and direct it at so-called socialists, supposedly tax happy Democrats- well, facts don't matter. No matter that want to restore a progressive tax that would take some of the burden off the middle class, and stimulate the economy by taking it from those who've cashed in on the Bust. Democrats want to bring down health care costs, which are a large part of that hit on the pocketbook, cost which are partly responsible for our sluggish economy.

No matter that, outside of inchoate rage, the Republicans don't have to have anything, really to offer. The party of Optimism, has become, conveniently, it seems, the party of Pessimism.

Understanding what's really wrong with America, is not so easy to sloganeer. Government, is, for all it's faults, really our only hope of containing corporate power.

Conservatives, and some Democrats, in cahoots with finance and media moguls, are busy ripping the average American off, while, at the same time proclaiming to be Everyman's champion. To have some understanding of what's gone wrong in America, it helps to know something about Chicago School economics, and of the way lobbyists are sitting on the desks of your Congressperson, urging and, in some cases even writing laws in exchange for cash.

It's not that I believe Americans are stupid, I do think that modern life has become so complex, with so much hype and vested interest, that it is hard to tell who is telling the truth. Things are changing so rapidly, our children no longer belong to us, having money to pay your bills or pay your employees-- depends on being on top of unpredictable trends and active competitors.

Precisely when we need a populist uprising, and genuine protest, we have a Faux Tea Party insurrection, which, by massive corporate media amplifying it's tiny rallies, has become a real force.

If Democrats have failed, they have failed to take Change! momentum, atttack Republican ideology, build an equally powerful media empire, and frame what has happened to Americans in different terms.

Is that going to change? I hope Obama will be roused to show a bit more fire. I hope that the grassroots movements, from which real change comes, will get new energy, and the wonderful fresh idealism of young people, who are quietly building community networks, and living heartful lives, will be what constitutes real change.

Dysfunctional Us All Over Again

2009-12-21T11:24:00.015-06:00

Paul Krugman has said it. In his latest column, he argues that the U.S. has become "ominously" dysfunctional.

My sentiments, exactly.

He argues that we are becoming a nation "ungovernable". He documents how the filibuster, once rarely used as tool of extreme dissatisfaction, is common practice by Republicans determined to hold up, obstruct and stymie Obama's proposals.

It's not just the Republicans, the Blue Dog Democrats have certainly seized on the right's coattails for their own narrow purposes.

As Rush has blurted out, Republicans want Obama to fail. Democrats, as much as they distrusted Bush motives and policies, allowed him to lead the nation. Despite the conservative policies' role in the near financial collapse, the erroneous adventures in the Middle East, the disaster of the Katrina disaster---- in other words, everything that caused the public in the last election to throw them out, it has not humbled them. The culture wars are still going on, fiercer than ever.

Changing the filibuster rules is certainly worth pursuing. But it's the trunk of the elephant.

Congress is stymied, not by filibuster rules or Republicans per se, but by lobbyists, who have completely infiltrated the system, ghost write legislation, draft talking points, and reward their friends.

Joe Lieberman made a few million that way. Follow the money.

And the media, our Third Estate, has turned into a circus. Frank Rich opines this week about the theater of Tiger Woods, and meditates on how many heroes: multicultural golfer icons, trusted bankers, attractive politicians, righteous crusaders, have turned out to be frauds.

Really, how is anyone to know what to believe?

Extremism is happening because it works for the Republicans. In an era of complexity, with dark scenarios on the horizon, the loud squeal of righteous anger penetrates all the other noise. The right flings hyperbole, screams at the President, makes wild claims, the media pretends it's populism, and Democrats try to move forward by the usual compromises, which only encourages the snarling dogs. How do you respond to a rain of falsehoods?

How do you penetrate the noise with calmness? How do you defeat extremism with humility? That's Obama's problem. Having entranced the Democrats with a vision of red/blue reconciliation, and done his best to move in that direction, the right has chosen to counter by throwing out any pretense of moderation. What was his strength, is now Obama's weakness.

Krugman worries that, with big issues on the horizon, this kind of knock down drag em out politics threatens to paralyze the nation precisely when we need to act.

You bet, Krugman, that's the point of it.

Obama won over many undecideds with his quiet confidence, in the heart of the storm. I have some hope, still, that having tried the right door, and found it full of seething dittoheads, he may come up with a different tactic on the next round. What that will be, I'm not sure.

But yes, some kind of intervention is called for.

Enough

2009-11-18T13:25:00.016-06:00

I'm reading "Small is Beautiful", a book published in 1973. Largely forgotten, though Influential then, and much quoted, it fell off the charts about the time when the technology bubble, and the growing affluence of a few third world nations gave us that first flush of a giddy feeling again that big was not only possible, but righteous, and downright American. Many failed to see the looming shadow, or pondered the fleeting question if a such a spiraling growth rate was sustainable.

The near collapse of Wall Street, a year ago, with it's ironic moniker "too big to fail," brought me back to E.F. Schumacher's pages. I had never read "Small is Beautiful", and suddenly, he seemed germane.

Of course, so many of his ideas have circulated so thoroughly in the culture, by now, to read the book is almost redundant, and yet, dipping into the source, there's a surprising freshness.

Shumacher is an economist. He ought to be the Maynard Keynes of our generation, if the world ever wakes up. His book is subtitled Economics As if People Mattered. He was first to point out that the problem with measuring our success using the GNP is that it values economic activity regardless of whether it actually has human benefits, so, for example, if your population, hooked on corn syrup soft drinks and super sized portions, requires ever more drastic medical intervention and expensive drugs, or, if coffins have to be made bigger and people have to pay more for them, this is all growth, in an economic sense.

One of his many pithy arguments that strikes me freshly today, is when he points out that we have harnessed greed as an engine of economic achievement. In the long run, greed is, and can only be, ultimately corrosive to society. Part of the free market giddiness that has so overtaken our democratic institutions is that, yes, we can turn our swine's ears to purses. Reagan's jovial optimism still appeals to many--if you just unfetter it, the market will make us all rich. Unfortunately, what's happened is that it's made us all poorer, but the country appears to take that as just a slight set back. This kind of thinking, Reagan's laissez faire capitalism, has completely dominated any other economic philosophy over the last few decades. Now the bubble has burst, and the public is deeply sickened about "Wall Street socialism", with the spectacle of government fed banker's doling out ever bigger bonuses and profit, while our personal retirement accounts shrink, it's one of his many themes that seems prophetic.

Greed, while it carries us to dizzying heights of affluence, as a social engine, he argues, will ultimately rend the delicate fabric of relationships, of checks and balances, that society depends on. And looking around, that's what we have, a country in which "rouge" attitudes are championed, a government is evil if it attempts to curb anyone's "freedom", solutions to serious problems are either ignored or viciously rejected, and anxiety and anger rule our public life.

While his arguments are ever more perspicacious, some may consider his solutions too fuzzy. Would Americans, the ultimate Dreamers, ever settle for thinking small?

Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, Beyonce, the Whopper, J. Gatsby; those are our talismans.

I've still got half the book ahead of me, but instinctively, at this point in our history, the possibility and beauty of small actions, the butterfly wing that fans a revolution, is comforting. Buy local, create community in your neighborhood, tutor a child. In the face of overwhelming obstacles to our commonwealth, with media trumpeting nastiness that masquerades as news, and climate deniers still holding half the population in sway, with lobbyists assuming the roles of Congressional staffers, insurance companies squandering profits on ads to derail any real health reform, his advice encourages us not to be overwhelmed. Small actions matter.

I only wish he had used Christianity instead of Buddhism as his example of an alternative economy. Clearly he's deeply influence by Buddhist thought, and Buddhism does give some fairly straightforward prescriptions for happiness, the good that economics fails to consider. If you substituted Christianity for Buddhism every time it's used in Small is Beautiful, I think a lot more people would be taking him seriously in this country today.

Thirty years later we've seen vast societal changes via grassroots efforts; the pollution he is so concerned about almost, in this country anyway, barely an issue. Now we have a growing whole food movement, green consciousness, multiculturalism, micro-finance, and the empowerment of women, all these movements all started small.

Plant a tree, he would say. See where that takes you.

Somehow we need to convince the majority Americans that an Army of One is not an answer to our postmodern anxiety. I believe Schumacher is right, that our society's security really depends on doing more with less, in growing confidence, in a world of sufficient affluence, that every human being's basic needs can be met.

Given that, it's interesting to note that the Sarah Palin's of the right reserve most of their hatred for those who eat granola, drink lattes and drive Volvo's-- educated middle class Americans. Particularly, those who, this seems to be the crux of the matter, are able to make enlightened choices about what they consume.

There is an addictive quality to the race after money, status and celebrity that so much of mainstream America is driven to pursue. Maybe that's why the opposition is so desperate and ruthless.

Maybe we can't save the world by small actions, but we can save our individual lives. We can bring down the anxieties by being thankful for what we have, and saying to ourselves, every once in a while "Enough."

Peace and the Sore Loser Syndrome

2009-10-10T06:28:00.034-05:00

Somebody has to say it. It's more and more clear that the Republican party is in a dysfunctional state. Mind you, I'm a live and let live person, but things have gone too far.

This is full blown Sore Loser Syndrome.

People who stood passively by while a American President lied to us about weapons of mass destruction, ignored global warming, failed to respond to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, fired scientists who contributed unwanted facts, outed a CIA agent; one who set up a system of secret prisons and condoned torture, and, in so doing, revived Al Queda in the few Arab states that had previously resisted it, as well as gaining the censure of the world, they are already mad at Barack Obama.

And what has Obama done? Well, in the first nine months, he's tackled reforming a massive health care system that everyone agrees is a burden on both individuals and our economy, done much to restore some credibility and honor to our country abroad, belatedly steered the ship of state toward energy independence and serious consideration of climate change. In other words, he's boldly faced up to some of the real problems and threats of the twenty-first century.

And won a Nobel Prize.

And for this, the right wants to kill him.

Do you remember the ancient story of Hercules, shoveling out the Aegean stables? That's pretty much Obama's job these days.

Does he deserve it? The prize, I mean. A peacemaker, in my mind, is someone who, in the midst of a "culture war" inside his own country, tells those who have screamed at him in sessions of Congress, that his door is "still open".

When you've come to hate success, when you hope your own country will fail... seriously, Republicans, where is your head at?

Peace in this country would be a prize. And by peace I don't mean complacency, but respectful disagreement, willingness to work together to solve common problems, and the maturity to pay one's share toward those larger goals. Maturity to face the reality that the threats we face aren't partisan, and to accept the moral and ethical imperatives of being a citizen of this country, and of the world, at this time in history are great.

Kudos to the NYT moderate Republican David Brooks who recently called down the shock jocks, and Tim Pawlenty who, guardedly, chose to publicly congratulate Obama. "I think the appropriate response, or an appropriate response, is when anybody wins a Nobel Prize, you know, that is a very noteworthy development and designation and award, and I think the proper response is to say congratulations.”

There was a culture war that preceded civil rights, a culture war when women wanted the vote, a culture war over establishing the National Parks, (thanks, Ken Burns for remembering that), over ending the war in Vietnam.

God help U.S.

Yes, peace could be a prize for America, indeed.

Dysfunctional Us

2009-09-29T14:06:00.057-05:00

American conservatives have some serious anger management issues. We can no longer pretend that this is politics as usual.

The latest wrinkle in this ongoing circus of inappropriate behavior is a Facebook application hosting a poll on whether Obama should be assassinated. Or not.

I can easily see a college student making such a page, maybe just to test how crazy the crazies are. It's the logical extension of the screaming at McCain rallies, of "You lie!", of posters giving Obama a Hitler mustache, and any daily rant by Glen Beck, Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann.

Threats against our first black President's life are up by 800% over threats to the previous leader of the free world. Anyone who might reasonably argue that both sides have their wing nuts, or that this is a return to the more vigorous political theater of pre-WW II America, as Garrison Keillor recently argued, might want to contemplate that figure for a while.

While a certain amount of this righteous craziness is simply a cynical play for media attention, it goes beyond posing.

It is dysfunctional to engage in more and more extreme socially unacceptable behavior in order to get attention.

There is a lot of talk about race. I'm not convinced, however, that it'd be much different if it was Hillary or Gore or Kerry that had been elected, or any other Democrat in Barack's shoes.

Conservatives are in a dysfunctional endgame for a couple of reasons.

First of all, it's worked for them. What I've come to call "pit bull" politics are a pillar of the right's stategy; the smear campaigns, the willful ignorance, name-calling, a disdain for any kind of factual accuracy.

Psychological research undoubtedly underpins this. If you can successfully 'taint' a subject, people respond with a visceral rejection of that subject, an emotional reaction that isn't subject to logic or reason. That's what conservatives have come to depend on in the culture wars.

Second is the entertainment value. "Bad" behavior has always had a certain cachet. The wackier these people act, the more media attention they seem to draw these days.

With no more Fairness Doctrine, news outlets no long even have to pretend to be objective. We have whole channels devoted to disinformation rather than news. The Left is catching up to the right, in that regard, but I notice that, on our local cable, you got two channels of FOX free with your base rate, but have to pay a premium to get MSNBC.

Responsible media outlets have contributed by the 'scoop' pack mentality, but also by a desire to "balance" their stories. If you have 10,000 people at a Obama healthcare rally, as recently happened in Minneapolis, the reporter invariably does a story on the twenty people who are carrying anti-government signs.

The underlying game here is all about the American pocketbook. Anger, that the right depends on, is manipulated fear that a liberal government will make you pay more taxes, whether it's true or not. The right always campaigns on fiscal responsibility, and then borrows recklessly, leaving a bill which the Democrats are stuck having to pay. That what happened after Reagan, and now after Bush. This sabotages the usual cycle of reform, by bankrupting the reform party's ability to govern successfully.

So liberals and progressives end up as the responsible ones in a dysfunctional relationship, the family members who have to swallow the lies, and pick up the pieces, who are always reacting to some outrage, and feeling resentful. Even with a President in the White House and a majority in congress, we are on the defensive, rather than firmly grasping the ball and steering the conversation.

Smear campaigns, and sheer denial of the facts may work. Liberals reluctantly wonder if they should follow suit. I don't believe so. You can't argue with these people, but you can mock them. You can ask, as Katie Couric did, for the facts. Like Anderson Cooper, or Barney Frank, you can be engagingly incredulous.

Outrageous behavior is meant to be intimidating, but we cannot allow ourselves to be intimidated. Moderates appalled by this behavior, especially on the right, need to speak up. I believe, at some point, the pit bull will bite the hand that feeds it. Polls have shown that, even as Obama's popularity dips, when asked if they "trust" Republicans to govern, by large majorities, Americans say no. Obama's recent forceful but reasoned statements are on the right track, getting positive responses from the press and encouraging many.

Americans will eventually figure out who the adults in the room are. These rabid right wingers who want Obama to fail, risk that America, itself, will fail.

That's us. All of us.

Fargo

2008-12-30T15:17:00.010-06:00

When I went to the Elks Club annual ceremony for members that had passed away, the year they honored my father, the older M.C. there meditated, in his remarks, about the way the Jewish and non-Jewish businessmen went to war together, worked together, socialized, and created the rich cultural and social infrastructure of our town, together.

I had known that my Dad was close friends with Dick Goldberg, in particular, and socialized frequently with the Landfields, the Herbsts, the Levines, and the Sterns (who lived next door), but I didn't understand that the Elks Club, this fraternal organization, was the nexus of those relationships.

This is not to say our small city was an idyllic place, free from prejudice. As a child, growing up in the fifties and early sixties, I heard the whispers that "they killed Jesus," a shadowy accusation, like the N word, almost never stated outright. Jesus, of course, was all about loving ones enemies, and that if you thought at all about Him, you knew he would have considered that dead wrong.

My parents felt terrible about the Holocaust, especially my Dad, who, as a medic stationed in Germany, witnessed something of the opening of the concentration camps. It was not his unit that came upon them, as I remember it, but word spread quickly among the soldiers.

The horror of that experience caused many Americans to look more deeply into our own cultural shadows. And many had determined, in their own way, "Never again".

The Elks Club, the mixed dinner parties, the business lunches, in these ways a hand was extended to Jews across the whispers, in solidarity, in a very profound sense.

In sixth grade, I remember that Linda Kasdan invited us to a Hanukkah field trip to her temple.

That was extraordinary moment. Because it was not until I was inside the temple, and walked through some of the ceremonies and stories did I understand that "otherness" I had sensed, that the whispers secretly condemned. My friend participated in both a religion and a culture, strange and yet familiar, and that difference, which was invisible to me, up to that point, was profound.

It was a breathtaking act of courage for a sixth grader who was as anxious as anyone to be "popular", I knew. There was, indeed, a bit of "don't ask, don't tell" going on, as with the Japanese Americans, a pressure to get along, fit in, not be too ethnic. Of course this was also true for the Norwegians and Swedes, and I felt pressure about my own "difference", as the child of secular humanists in a culture of evangelical Lutherans. Assimilation was the unspoken mandate of the times.

But, in a sense, Linda broke that silence, and let us in on who she really was. Shared with us, this part of her, that was, in many ways, hidden.

That's how I learned, as I also understood, from my friendships with American Indian kids, that there is more than one way to know God. That many paths lead to the same place. And this is exactly what makes the world so interesting.

Too often people are short sighted and feel threatened, and attack with religion as their sword.

I know my life would be much less interesting and exciting and rich if the walls between various peoples in my small town had been higher and the emotions more divisive. And I would be smaller, my soul, my world view, my heart.

Peaceniks

2008-10-10T10:14:00.016-05:00

People love to hate hippies. The hip love to diss them because they aren't stylish, and conservatives, of course, are certain that America would go to hell in a handbasket if peace love and incense burning won the day.

I was fifteen in the streets of Washington D.C., during the "moratoriums", the major student protests against the Vietnam war. Sneaking out of my prep school with a few like minded friends, I experienced an adolescent thrill through standing with half a million other young people against a wall of flak jacketed riot police, for a cause you felt was just.

That is, uncannily, what it felt like to be in the streets of St. Paul recently during the "Unconvention", the protests against the RNC.

If everyone who disliked "pit bull" politics, felt America had gone down the wrong track, and wanted us out of Iraq, had gathered on Labor Day, then the city would have been jammed to the gills with protesters. But these days, it's only a handful of activists who are willing take their opinions to the street.

While peace activists have gotten more creative, using tactics of street theatre: paper mache puppets, masks, and visual puns to get across their views, local news during the RNC mostly showed images of windows smashing and police pinning "anarchists" to the ground amidst a background crowd of unshaved long hair kids. It looked, to mainstream America on the evening news, like trouble-makers had come to our town with their radical ideas and revolutionary bandanas.

These days Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn's 70's radicalism is being framed as "domestic" terrorism to paint 51% of Americans as "unAmerican".

In the early 70's, when the leaders of Vietnam protesters started to make explosives, arguing that violence would force change, I left their ranks.

We may never know exactly how much Cointelpro contributed to that escalation in bellicosity, but it was instantly clear to me and many others that war was no way to argue for peace, that two wrongs never add up to a right.

I can understand how Ayers and Dorhn may have gotten caught up in it. I, too, experienced the frustration and anger and sense of futility and injustice; it was the Zeitgeist of the moment. We simply didn't have the faith and patience to see that society was moving in our direction, in it's lumbering and reactionary way.

America knows now that when we took our troops out of Vietnam, there was no "defeat", there was no "domino" effect of countries falling into the Commmunist camp. We simply left, and in a few years the Polish workers of Solidarity, NOT Ronald Reagan, tore the Berlin Wall down.

There will be bloodshed if we leave Iraq, I have no doubt. But I hope Iraq has taught us that diplomacy is a better answer to conflict, that sanctions and inspections and continual pressure can contain a dictator and a rogue state.

I am still one of the Peaceniks. The "movement" wasn't just anti-something; anti-war, anti-establishment. The 60's and early 70's activists were FOR peace, and they saw how society needed to change to get us there. They gave us such an incredible wealth of ideas, idea that we've still hardly begun to explore. Ideas about community, about non-violence, about sustainable agriculture, multi-culturalism, about conservation, and ecology.

That dream did not die in the ashes of a New York tenement. Ayers turned his back on violence and took up teaching, he's now a respected university professor who advocates for children's education and won a Chicago "Citizen of the Year" award for his efforts.

The "movement" continues for millions of Americans, in ways big and small. It lives in the simple pleasures of knitting, in thrift store shopping, designing or redesigning your own clothes, it lives in our restored love of tea, of hanging out on the porch with friends playing the fiddle and banjo. It gave us yoga, homeopathic medicine, tantric sex. It lives in brilliant green architects and organic chefs, in user-friendly computer technology, and the simple wonder of cooking swiss chard grown in your own backyard.

That's where my hope is. That peace movement is alive and well in many progressive cities and neighborhoods, in many many minds and hearts.

I've done a series of portraits of peace activists from the recent protests in St. Paul. It's mostly about the women, an anti-Palin antidote, strong smart women- mostly either very old or very young.
I call it Peaceniks.

St. Paul Art Crawl, Lowertown Lofts. 255 E. Kellogg Blvd. #502
See you there!

Gender gaps

2008-04-23T15:02:00.017-05:00

Only a few months ago, myself, my sweetheart and his daughter sat around the table and discussed politics. Mike liked Edwards, Sonia took a stance for Hillary, and I was smitten by Obama.
All three were attractive, well spoken, and appeared to be grown-ups, unlike the Republicans, who were squabbling, quibbling and looking worse by the minute.
As a woman, and one of a certain age, I felt a twinge of guilt NOT to support Hillary Clinton.
In the thirty years since the feminist revolution, the balance of power is still, very much on the side of one gender. Pick up any newspaper or magazine, and scan through the names, whether it's writers or artists, administrators, or the Congressional Record, men will outnumber the woman by about four to one.
Shirley Chisholm once said "I have been far oftener discriminated against because I am a woman than because I am black."
Yesterday, on NPR, I heard "We won't be respected by other nations if we have a woman as a president."
A hundred years after suffrage-- after Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Ghandi-- it's a disturbing comment. For Sonia, such naked misogyny exposed a hidden seam in our culture. She was, at least in part, motivated for Hillary by the opposition against her.
The misbegotten "regime change" in Iraq is the issue that has been a deciding one for me.
In the run up to the war, only a handful of people had the perspicuity and the courage to buck that wave. Obama was one of them.
For me, that says a lot about judgement.
When a woman feels a need to start waving her association with guns around and wax bellicose about Iran, we've already lost the election. You may secure the Presidency, Hillary, but the right, who ought to be run out of Washington tarred and feathered, given their abysmal failures, are back in the cat seat, talking through your mouth.
I'd like to see a woman give compelling reasons to the American public to explain why violence doesn't work to combat violence.
To argue for responsible policies, so we might never again witness the crumpled bodies of students bleeding into the carpets of their college classrooms. Or burnt and blackened American bodies being strung up on telephone wires.
I can't support a woman who feels she has to act like a man to be respected. What we don't need, in this world, is more pissing contests.
We do need the energy and hope of a generation of young people who believe that they can make a difference.
We need a leader can discern and communicate the complexities of our world. Someone who can speak to the hearts and minds of Americans, and take us forward. That's why I believe in Obama.
I never thought I'd say this, but, in the end, it matters less what gender a President is. It matters more what decisions they make, what direction they take us.

Turn, Turn, Turn

2005-11-22T10:51:00.000-06:00

I am encouraged by the signs, lately. The worm has turned.
After the election, I said, well, the good news is that George Bush will have to wrestle with his own messes.
At the time, it didn't seem possible. Still, wars have a way of growing stinky. Ugly, messy, unkempt. Killing is just not all it's cracked up to be after the first adrenaline rush. There's bodies to be hauled away, bloodied children screaming, and the curses of distraught mothers to contend with.
Remember the U.N. inspectors? Sanctions, diplomacy, moral imperative. That was once, the world agreed, the way to deal with Saddam. It was also a little uncertain, a little risky. But much less so than war.
I am happy the worm has found a spine. Yet the taste of hindsight is bittersweet. America is finally waking up to the brutal realities of the Bush Administration, a ruthless cabal with a stage managed storefront. I just wish, like many people, the other shoe had dropped a year or two earlier.
When leaders lie to the public, manipulate and obfuscate, democracy doesn't stand a chance.
A million minds in healthy dispute are a powerful force in the pursuit of truth and happiness. Democracy is a kind of filter for ideas, and if it's slow or unwieldy, well, it gets results.
This is how we confronted slavery, built the interstate highway system and gave women the vote.
I believe now the gravest threat before us is not the war, not the Chinese, and not jihad, as others believe, nor diminishing oil supplies or our slipping competitiveness in a world economy.
It's global warming.
No one wants to talk about it. It's like we're resigned to the fact, already.
The poorest, of course, will take the brunt. Africans. Penguins.
Polar bears are starving, this winter. Until the sea freezes, they can't hunt seals. They're programmed to migrate south in the summer, but bridge back is gone. Their world is rapidly shrinking.
We humans may survive, we may turn away, but we'll be standing by watching poor people suffer and other species go extinct at a rate that will take your breath away.
And, somehow it's all the Democrats fault. For not voting with them and not voting against them.
I am encouraged that some Democrats are standing up and saying "No!'. I am encouraged that mollycoddling journalists are being nailed. I'm glad to see individual citizens making changes. If we build an environmental infrastructure, as the world wakes up, there'll be something to turn to.
Global warming is real. We've been on record saying all this since the 70's. Why haven't we been able to capture the imagination of the American people? How did a few Machiavellian people make the whole country cower and kowtow? How do we take the reins of leadership now in the post-Bush era?

Winds of Change

2005-07-01T10:53:00.000-05:00

A thunderstorm with a hundred mile an hour winds swept Central Minnesota a week ago, cutting a path from Wahpeton to Dent right through the yards of several of my friends. Despite losing half of a shade providing apple tree, one was upbeat. A passionate Green, she was excited by Thomas Friedman's new book "The World is Flat".
The premise of his book is there's a wealth of opportunities that come with change. The upside, he says, of outsourcing and internet connectivity is the growing economies in some of the poorest countries in the world, particularly India and southeast Asia.
I haven't read it, and probably won't. I get enough of Friedman perusing the "most e-mailed" articles in the NYT.
In politics- on both sides of the aisle- lip service is as common as kissing babies. During the Kerry campaign, the Democrats flogged outsourcing for a while.
"We don't need to build walls, we need to build bridges. We don't need protection, we need opportunity."
That's a quote, not from Friedman, but Brother Bill. The neo cons would squirm mightily at the thought, but Clinton was the presiding preacher of the free market revolution.
Choosing hope rather than fear (and ignoring for a moment the erosion in wages, benefits and pensions here in America, everything that leads to a comfortable margin of middle class prosperity...)
What's pleasingly surprising about the rapidly evolving globalization is the leveling of the playing field for many third world countries.
A rising tide floats all boats.
I grew up on fairy tales. Magic seeds and heavenly beanstalks. Seven league boots. Riches found at the end of rainbows.
It's appealing to believe that global poverty will disappear without any effort or sacrifice on our part, in the face of open markets, evolving technology, and the universal lust for a cell phone.
I am suspicious, however, of Friedman, whose last job was cheerleading for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. When the WMD scare wasn't enough, Friedman supplied the administration with a new rationale. It was Friedman who claimed that a silent majority in the Arab states were begging for democracy.
"We just adopted a baby called Baghdad," he wrote when the body bags started arriving , "and this is no time for the parents to get a divorce. Because raising that baby, in the neighborhood it lives in, is going to be a mammoth task."
Making the world safe for American exceptionalism is an old theme. Dictating the terms of a country's surrender isn't democracy, even though you've set up voting booths.
That's the fundamental fallacy behind Friedman's high flying rhetoric.
The world is shrinking. Outsourcing is inevitable. When the free market boon reaches into the slums of Calcutta, we can all rejoice.
What makes me uneasy about Friedman is that he makes neoconservative ideas palatable to many liberals. Idealism is his rabbit and optimism is his hat. But bunnies don't necessarily thrive in haberdasheries, when you take away the magic cloak.
Ireland, he says, in his column this week, hit the free market jackpot through a combination of free college tuition, and low corporate tax rates.
The End of the Rainbow
Progressives love the first part, free college, but you gotta buy that second part, the part that's bringing a smile to the lips of Grover Norquist.
And then, to my eyes, the math looks funny. Less taxes, free college? Somebody's paying the piper.

Feedback

2005-01-21T08:11:00.000-06:00

Lots of readers responded the idea of an Honor the Earth ribbon. If you make them, people said, I want one.
I looked into it, and discovered that the ribbons were originally produced by the owner of a chain of Christian bookstores in North Carolina. That company, Magnet America, now mails out thousands of magnets a month.
On their site, there is a page where you can order custom magnets, using whatever slogan you choose.
Being more of an anti-preneur, I went to the webpage of Northern Sun, whose progressive bumperstickers, pins and T-shirts, are sold nationally in the backpages of Mother Jones and other hip zines. They have a "submit ideas" button.
Here's what I wrote them, and their response.
"In response to the proliferating 'Support Our Troops' ribbons that bedeck the back ends of gas guzzling SUV's, that those of us frustrated with the current administrations priorities, entanglements, rejection of science, and lack of foresight, want to counter with ribbons on our cars that say 'Support the Planet'.
Among my friends, the disappointment with the election has lead to deep frustration. People are looking for a voice.
We need a way to say, I don't agree.
A simple symbol for the things we care about is the earth. Our children, our future, our hopes.
What difference does a magnetic ribbon on someone's car make? It takes one person's sense of urgency and makes it visible. It a gives a feeling of solidarity, a sense that you are joined by many many others.
As people contemplate the damage of the tsunami, wonder at the terrible power of nature, and our own vulnerability in the face of it, this is the time to send a message.
Those of us who want clean air and water, who care about our planet and the threats we've created to it ARE the majority. There are millions of us.
I hope you take this idea to your board. It's a simple thing to do, let's do it together."
Here's the response.
"Thanks Deb, We have gotten several requests for essentially the same thing
as you suggest, and we are working on it."
www.northernsun.com

Tsunami

2005-01-03T13:38:00.000-06:00

A huge wave reared up out of the ocean one Sunday afternoon, and an unimaginable possibility came to pass.
Human beings are not wired to recognize a distant threat. Every day we jump into our cars, though the odds are such that we've take a risk far greater than that of being struck by lightening or bombed with an airplane.
We live in an age of optimism. We send men to the moon, alter genetic destinies, put tiny robots into our bloodstream. Who wants the role of prophet of doom?
What was the initial reaction of people who detected the earthquake, which led to the tsunami, which led to so much disaster and inestimable destruction and grief?
It was disbelief. Minimization. Denial.
Does the tsunami have anything to do with global warming, with the environmental changes that human beings are effecting through the release of greenhouse gases?
Yes. It was predicted to happen. One year ago, a scientist even pinpointed the Indian Ocean. But very few people entertained the idea.
Those who detected the earthquake initially underestimated it. Those who were warned failed to recognize the consequences or imagine the magnitude of what was at hand.
A village of Thai fisherman, on the other hand, were saved from the tsunami by a proverb passed down by their elders. Intially, the sea was pulled off the beaches, a strange portent that many noticed but few understood. In this village, the elders heeded the signal.
What we are doing to our environment is also happening, but it's a disaster in slow motion.
As people contemplate the damage of the tsunami, wonder at the terrible power of nature, and our own vulnerability in the face of it, this is the time to wake up.
Counting the blessings of 2004, a few events jump out. We had three hurricanes in Florida, an enormous chunk of the arctic shelf fell off, and a tsunami hit half of Asia. What kind of signal do we need?
Cassandra was the goddess in Greek mythology cursed with a gift. She could see the future but could get no one to listen.
We find ourselves in the same position.
On the executive branch sits a trio of monkeys, one with his hands over his eyes, one with her hands over her ears, and one with his hands over his mouth.

Marvelous marble

2004-12-16T10:06:00.000-06:00

Every time I get on the freeway, I see, on the back ends of cars, a new crop of ribbons of Freedom. They are popping up everywhere. Often they are yellow, sometimes camouflage tan, or red white and blue. They say "Support Our Troops".
I'd like to see a campaign of bumper sticker ribbons that are brindled blue and green, and assert a different motto, "Support the Earth".
If you can't beat 'em, rip off their tactics. We need visible, positive symbols of resistance. Let's subvert that possessive loyalty that beats in the human breast from nationalism to worldism.
Reasons to be worldly:
Global warming is a greater threat to our children than terrorism.
Around the planet, 26 billion tons of topsoil are eroded each year from the world's farmland.
Deserts advance at a rate of nearly 15 million acres per year.
10 million acres of rain forest are destroyed annually.
There is a 6 million square mile hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica.
There are over 130,000 tons of known nuclear waste in the world, some of which will remain poisonous to the planet for another 100,000 years.
All those ribbons I see have a psychological impact.
The New York Times today has an article about the psychologically wounded, who are returning from this war. I heard on NPR that the fiscal debt we owe on the war by the end of next year will exceed 200 billion. Yet we can't keep our soldiers in flak jackets.
Humans are a herd animal. The Kerry lawn signs have come down, bumper stickers are scarcer, buttons are being passed on to antique dealers. We need to say to our neighbors- we're still here, and we count. Our values matter.
In millions of galaxies, in a vast emptiness of billions of miles of stellar space, one tiny speck is a shining citadel of burgeoning Life. Our planet's breathtaking beauty and complexity is a blazing psalm. We see God's work every day, in the flutter of little sparrows fluffing their feathers in the cold, in the great shining trove of Light that greets our eyes. This evident Miracle is greater than any one religion.
"Support the Earth" is not just about environmentalism, it's about diplomacy rather than pre-emptive war, about international cooperation as opposed to unbridled competition.
It's about every aspect of life on this marvelous marble.
In my own quixotic quest to be a voice in the maelstrom, I've used
Sticker Junkie, where you can type in your own pithy bit of political wit, try it out in a mock layout, and get 100 stickers for $25.
My current sticker is "Love a Liberal", which I pass out among my friends. I leave a stack in our local cafe, alongside the art postcards and the music scene leaflets. They fly off to parts unknown.
I'm not, by nature, political. I'd rather write poetry than invent slogans. I hate pulpits, and bullies, I recoil from using this blog to preach. But we have to act.
A couple alert readers recently sent me this essay, by Bill Moyers, which talks about apocalypse mongers.
Battlefield Earth
I keep thinking about Michael Moore's latest missive about a domestic violence counselor who argues that what the left is currently experiencing is intellectual and spiritual abuse.
It makes you think.
In millions of galaxies, we are the ones, the keepers of the Sacred Fire of Life.
Light a candle.
Use your voice.

Out of Africa

2004-12-10T13:13:00.000-06:00

I admit it. I had succumbed to post election retreat. In the face of what seems to me insanity- blood lust on the right combined with abject contrition by lily-livered Democrats, I'd retreated to Plato's cave. Today I received a wake-up call. It comes from Africa by way of Scandinavia. The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded for the first time to an African woman, Wangari Muta Maathai.
Ms. Maathai is the antidote to Bushism. You might call her the anti-Bush.
In the face of a multitude of overwhelming problems in her country, Kenya, Wangari took hold of one issue, deforestation. Then, like a magician, she used that corner to whisk off the whole tablecloth.
Her Green Belt movement began with the simple act of planting a tree. But this was no ordinary tree. She turned that tree into a symbol.
Here in the U.S., by aggrandizing a slim margin, Republicans have been joyriding on their victory, and criticize the left as a disorganized, (read "undisciplined") anti-democratic polyglot of special interests.
The left itself seems demoralized, dazed and confused.
In her acceptance speech, Wangari Maathai makes vital connections between the issues that concern us. She reclaims the power of democracy, welds with it the empowerment of women and sustainable environmental practices, and points us toward economic growth through individual and international accountability. It's a profoundly moral vision. I've pruned her speech a bit, (it's long) but here's most of what she said.

"In 1977, when we started the Green Belt Movement, I was partly responding to needs identified by rural women, namely lack of firewood....

Throughout Africa, women are the primary caretakers, holding significant responsibility for tilling the land and feeding their families. As a result, they are often the first to become aware of environmental damage as resources become scarce and incapable of sustaining their families...

Together, we have planted over 30 million trees that provide fuel, food, shelter, and income to support their children's education and household needs. The activity also creates employment and improves soils and watersheds. Through their involvement, women gain some degree of power over their lives, especially their social and economic position and relevance in the family.

...Initially, the work was difficult because historically our people have been persuaded to believe that because they are poor, they lack not only capital, but also knowledge and skills to address their challenges. Instead they are conditioned to believe that solutions to their problems must come from 'outside'. Further, women did not realize that meeting their needs depended on their environment being healthy and well managed. They were also unaware that a degraded environment leads to a scramble for scarce resources and may culminate in poverty and even conflict. They were also unaware of the injustices of international economic arrangements.

In order to assist communities to understand these linkages, we developed a citizen education program, during which people identify their problems, the causes and possible solutions. They then make connections between their own personal actions and the problems they witness in the environment and in society. They learn that our world is confronted with a litany of woes: corruption, violence against women and children, disruption and breakdown of families, and disintegration of cultures and communities.

In the process, the participants discover that they must be part of the solutions. They realize their hidden potential and are empowered to overcome inertia and take action. They come to recognize that they are the primary custodians and beneficiaries of the environment that sustains them.

...Entire communities also come to understand that while it is necessary to hold their governments accountable, it is equally important that in their own relationships with each other, they exemplify the leadership values they wish to see in their own leaders, namely justice, integrity and trust.

Although initially the Green Belt Movement's tree planting activities did not address issues of democracy and peace, it soon became clear that responsible governance of the environment was impossible without democratic space. Therefore, the tree became a symbol for the democratic struggle in Kenya. Citizens were mobilised to challenge widespread abuses of power, corruption and environmental mismanagement. In Nairobi's Uhuru Park, at Freedom Corner, and in many parts of the country, trees of peace were planted to demand the release of prisoners of conscience and a peaceful transition to democracy.

Through the Green Belt Movement, thousands of ordinary citizens were mobilized and empowered to take action and effect change. They learned to overcome fear and a sense of helplessness and moved to defend democratic rights.

In time, the tree also became a symbol for peace and conflict resolution, especially during ethnic conflicts in Kenya when the Green Belt Movement used peace trees to reconcile disputing communities. During the ongoing re-writing of the Kenyan constitution, similar trees of peace were planted in many parts of the country to promote a culture of peace. Using trees as a symbol of peace is in keeping with a widespread African tradition. For example, the elders of the Kikuyu carried a staff from the thigi tree that, when placed between two disputing sides, caused them to stop fighting and seek reconciliation. Many communities in Africa have these traditions.

Such practises are part of an extensive cultural heritage, which contributes both to the conservation of habitats and to cultures of peace. With the destruction of these cultures and the introduction of new values, local biodiversity is no longer valued or protected and as a result, it is quickly degraded and disappears. For this reason, The Green Belt Movement explores the concept of cultural biodiversity, especially with respect to indigenous seeds and medicinal plants.
As we progressively understood the causes of environmental degradation, we saw the need for good governance. Indeed, the state of any county's environment is a reflection of the kind of governance in place, and without good governance there can be no peace. Many countries, which have poor governance systems, are also likely to have conflicts and poor laws protecting the environment.
In 2002, the courage, resilience, patience and commitment of members of the Green Belt Movement, other civil society organizations, and the Kenyan public culminated in the peaceful transition to a democratic government and laid the foundation for a more stable society.

Excellencies, friends, ladies and gentlemen,

It is 30 years since we started this work. Activities that devastate the environment and societies continue unabated. Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own - indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process.

In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other.

That time is now.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has challenged the world to broaden the understanding of peace: there can be no peace without equitable development; and there can be no development without sustainable management of the environment in a democratic and peaceful space. This shift is an idea whose time has come.

I call on leaders, especially from Africa, to expand democratic space and build fair and just societies that allow the creativity and energy of their citizens to flourish. Those of us who have been privileged to receive education, skills, and experiences and even power must be role models for the next generation of leadership. In this regard, I would also like to appeal for the freedom of my fellow laureate Aung San Suu Kyi so that she can continue her work for peace and democracy for the people of Burma and the world at large.

Culture plays a central role in the political, economic and social life of communities. Indeed, culture may be the missing link in the development of Africa. Culture is dynamic and evolves over time, consciously discarding retrogressive traditions, like female genital mutilation (FGM), and embracing aspects that are good and useful.

Africans, especially, should re-discover positive aspects of their culture. In accepting them, they would give themselves a sense of belonging, identity and self-confidence.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

There is also need to galvanize civil society and grassroots movements to catalyse change. I call upon governments to recognize the role of these social movements in building a critical mass of responsible citizens, who help maintain checks and balances in society. On their part, civil society should embrace not only their rights but also their responsibilities.

Further, industry and global institutions must appreciate that ensuring economic justice, equity and ecological integrity are of greater value than profits at any cost. The extreme global inequities and prevailing consumption patterns continue at the expense of the environment and peaceful co-existence. The choice is ours.

I would like to call on young people to commit themselves to activities that contribute toward achieving their long-term dreams. They have the energy and creativity to shape a sustainable future. To the young people I say, you are a gift to your communities and indeed the world. You are our hope and our future.

The holistic approach to development, as exemplified by the Green Belt Movement, could be embraced and replicated in more parts of Africa and beyond. It is for this reason that I have established the Wangari Maathai Foundation to ensure the continuation and expansion of these activities. Although a lot has been achieved, much remains to be done.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

As I conclude I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs' eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents.

Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.

Honor the Veterans

2004-11-11T16:53:00.000-06:00

I honor the Vietnam veterans today. These were young men, who, at the behest of their country, picked up a gun and put their lives in the line of fire. Their courage and sacrifice is no less significant than that of any other generation.
Twenty years after the war was over, Vietnam veterans began to speak out. They were the first generation to break the silence, and tell the American people about war and how it affected them. They told us of the nightmares, of courage and fear, of the confusion of not knowing who the enemy was, of doubts about the war they were sent to fight.
They weren't the first generation to have these feelings. They were the first to speak up.
I was privileged to be around to hear those stories. In 1987 I produced a public television program about American Indian Vietnam veterans.
Here's a quote from Harold Barse, from my documentary Warriors

Indian people have recognized that war changes people. For centuries and centuries and centuries, they've known this. So when you send a person to war, something happens to him out there. But- they are not held in any low esteem. It's recognized that- these people did something that is completely against the law of the universe. They stepped into total turmoil, disruption. And they did this for their people.

I want to thank the Vietnam veterans for all they've survived. I want to thank them for putting themselves on the line for us. I want to thank them for teaching us what it truly means to be human.

Immoral Values

2004-11-10T15:52:00.000-06:00

The last election was not won by "moral values". It was won by propaganda.
Surely that's too extreme, you say. Both sides do it.
Here are a few basic propaganda devices, as identified by the Institute for Proganda Analysis.
See if you recognize them.
• Name calling
Name calling, or labeling, links a person or an idea to a negative interpretation.
Commie. Pinko. Fascist. Terrorist.
Adjectives or phrases are often added to provide more weight.
Bleeding heart. Tax and Spend. Social engineering.
• The Glittering Generality
Words are used that imply cherished virtues of significant emotion.
Democracy, Patriotism. Christianity. Family Values.
Name Calling is effective because it rejects and condemns without examining the evidence. The Glittering Generality works just the opposite. It seeks to make us approve and accept without examining the evidence.
• Transfer is when institutions or symbols that hold authority, prestige, and cultural sanction are attached to particular ideas.
The Flag. God. Science. Morality. Life.
Plain Folks is when a speaker identifies himself with "ordinary" people, and brands his opponent as being out of touch or elitist.
• Fear
Warnings are made of disastrous consequences if a particular course of action is not followed. Fear is a powerful way of manipulating the audience's emotion. The most effective fear campaigns also provide a remedy, a simple action to avert the disaster.
• Bandwagon
Here one evokes the fear we all have of being different or left behind, and works on our need to follow the crowd. Polls are one such method of influence, and why they are so popular.

"All of the artifices of flattery are used to harness the fears and hatreds, prejudices and biases, convictions and ideals common to a group. Thus is emotion made to push and pull us..."
-Institute for Propaganda Analysis

Much of the media has happily followed along without questioning the pundits and soothsayers. The media falls for a glittering generality like "moral values" and then hops into a bandwagon- rather than use it's power to deflate myths, inject some healthy skepticism, research the facts or refuse to pander to unanswerable speculations.
That's dangerous for democracy. Very very dangerous.
To keep sane, here's a few excellent articles, new links, and some actions you can take.
The inimitable Maureen Dowd,
A Moveable Feast of Terrorism
Jesse Jackson deconstructs Moral Values
No GOP Monopoly on God
Actions you can take today.
Petition to investigate the vote.
Petition the news media for balanced coverage of the Iraq war.

Don't Trust Your TV

2004-11-06T15:31:00.000-06:00

I don't have a mind for symbolic logic, but if you ask me, what we just saw, by the Bush campaign, was coup by logical fallacy. Fear mongering. Smears. Halos.
Left on the sidelines, once again, we end up screaming unfair, unfair, while the Republicans, who violate the rules at every turn, race the ball down the field.
Do we want to emulate their tactics? No. Can we capture moderates if we just learn to love guns, reference God more, and reject gays?
No.
First, we have to look at what we thought were the rules, and how that has changed.
Then we need to recapture the realm of values, but we need do it on our own terms, not theirs.
And thirdly we need to engage the media. That is the one place we need to follow the Republicans and take up the thirty year plan. You have to be able to broadcast your ideas.
It's very difficult to beat an incumbent president.
If there is one reason why John Kerry failed to do so, given Bush's execrable record, it's because the mainstream media has turned rightward. It treated Bush with kid gloves and consistently downplayed the challenger. Kerry talked about issues, Bush responded with personal attacks. The media treated those as equal. They are not. Kerry was cut into sound bites and boxed in with punditry.
If you doubt it, look at the debates. After the public got a chance to hear him, Kerry's stock shot up. Moderates, made uneasy by the flip flop and swift boat charges, were reassured. He continued to gain in the polls every day up till election day.
So how did Bush win?
First of all Americans feel uneasy turning against a President, especially in the midst of a war.
Secondly, the personal attacks left a mark. Failing with flip flop, the Bush campaign droned home with the weak-on-terror rant. Charges that are patently absurd or false, still have to be forcefully answered.
When Kerry spoke directly to the public, it worked. So too, did the personal testimony ads. Mothers who'd lost their sons. Educators. Ordinary people. Message that were simple, eloquent, powerful.
What do we do now?
First of all we need to make it clear to our elected Congress people that Bush has no mandate.
We need to tell Republicans as well as Democrats that we are here, we're not going away, and our vote counts.
We need to be strong, vocal, and make sure that our side has backbone. All this cringing, whinging, and tear jerking, is hardly likely to endear us to the American public.
We lost, but we aren't losers.
No Surrender
O.K. Get Back to Work
Here's a few things we can do.
Demand that the Democratic Party elevate good candidates in visible positions instead of simply following through with seniority or politics as usual.
Cultivate African American and young voters.
Here is am encouraging article about a Minnesota suburb, Edina. It's a promising signpost to things yet to come, if we pull ourselves together.
Kerry carries Edina, and Pigs Fly
Another intriquing sign is this one, about fault lines in the victory party.
"The President did not fare well in the election with moderates and independents. These voters may be further turned off if the GOP panders to the religious right." Deliver Unto Us
Action alert. According to New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh in a Q & A in the Washington Post:
"The Minority Leader should be Chris Dodd, who's bright, articulate and attractive, but Harry Reid of Nevada, no shining public light, will get it."
We can do something about that.
Write your Democratic Senator and tell them to draft Dodd. Tell them this is no time to play politics as usual, and the best candidate should get the job, not the one who's lobbied the hardest. And while you're at it, tell them.
Bush has no mandate.
Bush has no mandate.
Bush has no mandate.

Leading the Blind

2004-11-04T17:59:00.000-06:00

Tears came when I took the Kerry buttons off my jacket. I was dejected all day.
In the wee hours of that fateful morning, my beloved partner roused himself for a video residency teaching at a school for the blind.
Before we'd gone to bed, it looked bad, everywhere on TV were exultant Republicans.
"What am I going to do?" he said.
"You put the camera in their hands, let them feel the buttons, and point them in the direction of what you want them to see." I said.
For weeks I had to put aside the thought, which comes back to me now, of the Stygian stables Kerry would have inherited. Quagmires have a way of eating up Presidents, no matter who started the war. If it continued to go badly, Kerry, who was not that popular even among Democrats, would have been excoriated, day after day, by those same conservatives who defended Bush's lies.
So that, perhaps, is a blessing in disquise.
We put everything into winning, and it's Bush who is stuck with his catastrophic war and overwhelming deficits.
In Minnesota, in what's been called the largest registration drive in U.S. history, America Coming Together, together with other progressive organizations, brought 10,000 new voters to the polls.
What that meant, in my state, is, not only did our hard-won electoral votes go to Kerry, but a surprising upset and net increase of 13 Minnesota House seats reversed a conservative trend and has given the DFL new clout.
It took a decade for resistance to build an opposition to Vietnam. It took thirty years of suffrage to get women the vote. It took a hundred years before freed African Americans slaves were allowed to use a public drinking fountain designated for whites. We didn't win the presidency in the Vietnam era, either, but we stopped the war, and set the groundwork for Democratic control of Congress for the next thirty years.
I'm not with those who want to wallow in recriminations. Let those who support the war do soul searching.
We built an amazing grassroots network in lightening time. If we feel discouraged, individually- the organizations we've built are not. The National Resources Defense Council, one environmental group I subscribe to, has a million members.
At the Steelworkers Union, in Minneapolis, where I canvassed, our pep talk leader was thrilled with how coalition building has given his organization new ideas and new life.
Knowledge is power. The American people's decisions are only as good as the information they receive. The Republicans won because for the last thirty years they've been building a network of conservative think tanks and media outlets to broadcast their smear campaigns. They have captured AM radio, and now have a firm hold on TV. If you don't know what the Powell memo is, if you haven't seen the film Outfoxed, if you don't know the work of linguist George Lakoff...
Educate yourself.
Here's what we can each do during the next four years.
Join those online organizations that allow you to take action on the issues you care about.
Let your Congress people know that Bush has no mandate.
Turn off your TV. Be a squeaky wheel. Complain in writing, not to your friends, but to editors, company owners, advertisers.
Tune into Al Franken's radio show.
Get information. Hook up with other like minded people. Subscribe to progressive magazines like Mother Jones, Harper's, the Nation.
Start talking about values.
People have been regretting that we knocked off Howard Dean, who had momentmum, passion, and personality. Howard Dean hasn't let defeat stop him. He's full of energy. Read his book, You Have the Power.
And most of all, have fun. Garrison Keillor got it right in this essay. We live in an amazing society full of possibilities. Read poets. Hang out in art museums and little cafes. Go to Europe. Throw parties. Have intimate dinners with friends. Reach out to someone who is struggling. Teach someone to read. Laugh often.
We're flying blind now. I don't know where we are headed, exactly. Kierkegaard said that life can only be understood backwards, it has to be lived forwards. If we point ourselves in the direction of the things we love, those things will save us. Of that, I am certain.

Get Out the Vote

2004-11-02T06:50:00.000-06:00

My great great grandfather was imprisoned in Libbey Prison during the Civil War. My great aunt, inspired by the suffragette movement of her childhood, founded a school so that women could become educated and have the power to truly take their place as the equals of men.
I've been thinking about them because of a conversation I had with a young black mother who had just registered to vote. Her children's father is in prison. She is working part time, and the $10 an hour she is making is barely enough to make ends meet. She's attracted to the conservative idea of self sufficiency. To believe she can it on her own terms, through her own sweat and wits and determination, suits her character. But she understands economic oppression, she knows her sweat, her heart, her hands, are worth more than $10 an hour.
Self interest is a powerful force. What does it take to care, as passionately, about the common good?
My great grandfather put his own life on the line for a principle. My great aunt gave her life's work.
Why has America lost the sense of the common good? How do we get it back?
My first day out canvassing of my fellow canvassers came back from a house with her face shining. She said, incredulously, "They said they never voted, because they never been ASKED to vote."
What we are doing, in these working class neighborhoods, is helping people know that they are important. Their vote counts. We can't do it alone, but we can do it together.
That is what I am most proud of in this election. That we are drawing more people into the process. That we are working to make every American have a voice in the process.
Faith in America
The great spiritual traditions tell us we have to let go of the outcome, but never forget what it is we are fighting for.
Every vote counts.
V_O_T_E

Blue Green

2004-10-30T13:03:00.000-05:00

In the darkness last night, I awoke to a violent rainstorm. In my dreams, the drumming sounded ominous. Drops the size of tablespoons were falling, instead of the usual pattering cascade.
I walked to the window, and between the buildings, the sky flashed with outbreaks of lightning. Not lightning that branches down to the earth like a upended tree, but strange scribbles of lightning high in the air.
And then it all ended, suddenly.
Sometimes I have the feeling that earth is trying to purge itself with deluges of water.
Everyone seems to be opining that this election is most momentous of our lifetimes. It's the thrill of razor thin margins, and fluctuating polls. The constantly invoked specter of terrorism, the grim realities of an erupting Iraq, the energetic lies that the Bush administration continues to perpetuate, and the whispered references to Armageddon.
But the very fate of the earth may hang in the balance.
President Bush has chosen to entirely ignore the warnings about global warming. For a decade, right wing industry experts have exerted a relentless campaign to discredit what most climate scientists know to be true, that emissions from carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are changing the very equations on which life depends.
A new report on the Arctic commissioned by eight nations and conducted by over 300 scientists says we are "now experiencing some of the most rapid and severe climate change on Earth. Over the next 100 years, climate change is expected to accelerate, contributing to major physical, ecological, social and economic changes, many of which have already begun."
Arctic Perils Seen in Warming
The State Department, which reviewed the report, declined to comment.
On PBS, Bill Moyers delivered a searing indictment of Bush's misleadership. Moyers alone seems to have both the moral authority and the sheer courage to lay it on the line.
But for once, New York Times columnist Kristof comes close.
Taking Bush At His Word
We can change course. There's still time.

Shine

2004-10-28T12:36:00.000-05:00

I got my chance to see John Kerry in Rochester, MN. I rode down with two friends, Jeanne Qwan and Catherine Johnson.
There were buttons for sale at the Convention Center and one said "JFK". But after my first close-up glimpse of the candidate, if I had to draw a parallel, with Kerry, it would be Lincoln. Did Lincoln have palpable charisma? Was he the kind of buddy you'd want to have a beer with?
Not exactly.
What Lincoln had was a powerful moral compass. Lincoln understood that America had come to a turning point. He had the gravitas, a kind of steady courage, to part the red sea that was the Civil War, and lead America through it.

"He was acute rather than profound; and I am inclined to think that those who were nearest him during the last years of his life were impressed by the swiftness and the correctness of his intuitions, rather than by the originality or profundity of his reasoning."--Noah Brooks, Washington reporter and frequent White House visitor

I saw a John Kerry who is fully aware of the immense difficulties in front of him. Yet it doesn't phase him. He exudes immense confidence and energy. He looked youthful, and vigorous. He talked of rolling up his sleeves. In a humorous anecdote, he told of listening to Bush's repeated whine during the debate about hard work, and told us "I'd be happy to relieve you of all that, Mr. President."
Of all the tributes before he spoke, the most genuine came from one of his stepsons, who told us, how, after their father died, they were intensely opposed to this usurper who'd come courting their Mom.
It wasn't easy, but he won their trust. He was tough, his stepson said, and he listened.
Kerry is a port in a storm. He's calm as granite. He knows exactly what's in front of him, and he is not afraid.
In his presence, you get the feeling of the soldier he was, and understand why so many veterans have flocked to his side.
With great warmth, he told us of moment on the campaign trail where he turned around during a speech and heard someone call to him from the audience "I've got your back. Senator".
This is someone whose taken incredible fire, who's subject to the most vicious smear campaign in recent years, and it doesn't seem to concern him.
Why?
He understands the great danger we're in, not just from the terrorists outside our borders, but from those that would terrorize us from within.
"America, I've got your back." he said.
There's a great darkness around him, and in the shadows, millions of faces, both hopeful and anxious. He stands in the light. He focuses on his task. Alone in the spotlight, he shines.

Kerry rally, Rochester, MN

2004-10-27T09:14:00.000-05:00

Dances with Wolves

2004-10-23T11:24:00.000-05:00

Wolves as a metaphor for terrorism?
Bush used untruths, misleading statements and outright lies about the war in Iraq. And got away with it.
So, he's doing it again in attacks on John Kerry.
He told us repeatedly there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He said us Iraq had a fleet of unmanned aircraft "for missions targeting the United States". "Iraq" he claimed "has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases..."
False. False. False.
Those are just the bald faced lies. Then there's also a barrage of insinuations, misleading statements, phony intelligence, dubious science.
Who would believe this guy?
How could anyone possibly want him as President?
The Republicans have so filled the heads of Americans with fiction that 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD or a major program for developing them.
75% of Bush supporters believe Iraq was involved with Al Qaeda. 55% assume that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission.
Wrong, wrong wrong.
Take those beliefs, mix them with some footage of prowling wolves, and what do you get? An American public terrified of wolves with nuclear arms who will eat their babies.
When Cheney said that if Kerry was elected it would put the United States at risk of another terrorist attack, most commentators were appalled. But repetition breeds insensibility.
Kerry, on the other hand, suffers from an apparent overdose of sincerity. He stuck by his support of the president's Iraq attack, he won't stick to his prepared scripts.
Two men, a President who is inarticulate and impatient, unable to grasp complex issues, but who is tightly managed to appear resolute and powerful. The contender: articulate, extraordinarily principled, and capable, who burbles extemporaneously and can't seem to get enough traction.
Wolves are an apt metaphor, but not in the way the ads would intend.
Wolves in sheep's clothing. Foxes guarding the henhouse.
A village unprepared when the real wolf showed up.
In every possible way Bush has failed to perceive or confront the real threats that face us.
He ignored the warnings about Al Queda leading up to 9/11. He attacked the wrong country. He failed to stop the looting in Iraq, failed to restore the infrastructure, disbanded the army, was unprepared for insurgency. He's been diffident on homeland security, waffled on implementing the 9/11 commission's recommendations, and allowed the automatic weapons ban to expire.
This is the guy who says he'll make you safe?
On the other hand...
A real life action movie story that the press isn't telling you is how John Kerry went after a criminal network of CIA supported financiers who were funneling money to narco-traffickers, terrorists, and Osama Bin Laden. With ties to, who else? The Bush administration.
The Case That Kerry Cracked.
Yeats warned us when evil spirals "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity".
Some of the best do have passionate intensity. Others are just well organized, well read, and well prepared.

Whirled Peas

2004-10-22T17:05:00.000-05:00

Last night I went to an Artists for Kerry rally, hosted by Garrison Keillor. The evening started out with a haunting mandolin solo, and ended with a poem by Hafiz.
"If the world does not turn to your whims these few days,
Cosmic cycles are preparing to change, don't despair, walk on."
On the eve of the invasion of Iraq, as the government was packing up gun ships and outfitting soldiers, Colman Barks and Robert Bly were frantically translating Persian poets. In a letter Barks sent to President Bush while the bombers were being outfitted, he offered an army of culture seekers, good will ambassadors, 60's hippies, painters and jugglers. Flooding the country with well meaning tourists, he suggested, would be better than body bags in convincing the Middle East that we weren't infidels.
After the bombers, the toppled statues, the tanks, the banners, we've only succeeded in catastrophe.
Anti-Americanism Runs High

With ten days to the election, the Minnesota ACT office is humming with activity.
This warren of little inter-connected rooms, littered with empty coffee cups, is command central for my sense of hope these days. Teams of canvassers are trained in to the background clatter of keystrokes. A graphic artist works on ID cards for scores of incoming staff. There's Hispanics and Somali's, Green/Blue Alliance, Human Rights Coalition people and Moms Opposing Bush.
The African American team is on the phone recruiting church space. Two volunteer coordinators are recruiting Election Day massage therapists. They've come up with a slogan for their flyer. "The future of Democracy is in Your Hands." An image of cupped hands holding a swirling earth appeals to one, but not the other. "It should really be America" grumbles the more literal minded designer.
If the world does not turn to your whims, do not despair.
Bush's vision, drilled daily into the public mind with lectern pounding lectures, is that it's U.S. against the rest of the world. Everyone else must be Americanized so we can be safe. Kerry strives to rattle his sabers even more vigorously than Bush, as if suburban moms aren't sufficiently terrified and titillated. This bunker mentality only leads to increased conflict and militarism.
Much can be resolved by diplomacy, intelligence, negotiation, international cooperation. It turns out that the tedium of reading reports, holding summits, talking to one's enemies, is more dangerous, difficult, and uncertain, but it's the route of peace.
Three things would greatly reduce the threat of terror. One is to divest from Saudi Arabia, pull our bases out, and condemn the corrupt royal regime. The second is to reduce our dependence on oil; immediately, through voluntary conservation and relying more existing alternative fuels, and by developing sustainable alternatives. The third is to put our moral authority behind the Middle East Peace process and stand behind Sharon in his plan to return the Gaza strip.
The world is in our hands, all of our hands. We are in the world's hands.

Free

2004-10-20T12:47:00.000-05:00

To the first twenty people who ask, and e-mail me their address, this timely sticker from Buffalo Nickel.

Dear NYT

2004-10-18T08:27:00.000-05:00

You must be a liberal newspaper because only a liberal newspaper would soul search, critique itself and entertain doubt about whether it had a bias.
Political Bias at the Times? Two Counter-Arguments
Do you see Fox or the New York Post or the Washington Times worrying about having a conservative bias? No, they put out a banner claiming to be fair and balanced, and go on pursuing their chosen political agenda.
It's not enough to be objective or strive for balance in the current climate. Conservative critics would be happy to claim that water had a liberal bias, if it meant that would move things in their direction. A man is considered as black if he has one drop of African blood- but in order to be considered white, he has to be lily white. Remember that old saw, 'politically correct'. The right aren't looking for fairness or balance, or the 'truth'- if it doesn't suit their agenda.
They will push the whole paradigm until 'liberal' is a synonym for 'radical', instead of a description of the outlook of fifty or more per cent of the American public.
Americans, I think, are naive, and way too trusting, when it comes to what's happening to the media.
On August 23, 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce distributed the Powell Memorandum to its national membership of leading executives, businesses, and trade associations.
The Powell Memorandum was the first drumbeat signaling what the right calls the 'culture wars'. In the 70's, when liberal critics were denouncing the growing power of big business, big business struck back. Amongst other recommendations, The Powell Memorandum advised conservatives to buy up media outlets, and start up think tanks to fund journalists and writers that were amenable to their views.

"For two decades, since the installation of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the radical right has run a tightly coordinated campaign to seal its hold on the organs of power, ranging from the highest law courts to the largest corporations, from the White House to Capitol Hill, from television tubes to editorial pages, and across college campuses.
They have constructed a well-paid activist apparatus of idea merchants and marketeers -- scholars, writers, journalists, publishers, and critics. They have intimidated the mainstream media, and filled the vacuum with editors, columnists, talk-show hosts, and pundits who have turned conservatism into a career tool. They have waged a culture war to reduce the rich social heritage of liberalism to a pejorative."

The Powell Manifesto: How a Prominent Lawyers Attack Memo Changed America.
How many major media companies are owned by ultra-conservatives and how does that affect their reporting? What does it mean for freedom of the press? Should someone like the Sinclair Broadcasting Group be allowed to broadcast a faux "documentary" on the eve of the elections, and evade federal requirements of equal time by calling it news? What does it mean for the concept of an independent press when a media company, like Sinclair, looking for favorable decisions by government officials, gives overwhelming financial support to one candidate, then chooses to broadcast a program damaging to his opponent? What happens to democracy if the "information" that the public gets is cherry-picked by the media's owners, as seen in the news room memos that were collected by the producers of the documentary "OutFoxed"?
Those are the questions we ought to be investigating.
If the Times is, indeed, liberal in it's outlook, it may end up as one of the few beacons of light in a sea of media that have no loyalty to the ethics of journalism, or the concepts of objectivity, or the need for balance.

Wish List

2004-10-16T00:39:00.000-05:00

My astute neighbor, (the boy next door), with whom I watched the latest debate, noted that the contenders had on the same outfit: blue suits, white shirts and even the same gold flecks on their red tie. (Kerry's was a little darker).
Scary.
Meanwhile the commentators praised the clear choices that the candidates offered the voter.
Say what?
Here's what we get. Two men studying the same studies of what will appeal to the voters.
Some butterflies camouflage themselves to look like toxic species because it's one way to prevent themselves from being eaten.
Other species camouflage themselves as compassionate to attract undecided females.
And then there's the macho butterflies, ("I will track them down and kill them") which battle on both fronts- to keep from being gobbled up by talk show hosts, as well as attract the Nascar undecideds.
We all have our wishes.
Here's a few of mine. What I wish Kerry would say...
(When being called the most liberal senator...)
"I'm proud to be a liberal. Americans are the most tolerant and generous and open hearted people in the world. We have worked together to create this incredible, multicultural, open minded society and I will do my best to insure the public that it stays that way. It's a tribute to the decent good heartedness of liberal Americans that you, Mr. Bush, have to pretend to be compassionate."
"I will defend the environment from the of unregulated greed of corporations. One in every six women of childbearing age has elevated levels of mercury in her system, creating the risk of severe neurological and developmental problems in her future children. The Bush administration has delayed court-ordered regulation of this poison in it's efforts (among others) to undermine our environmental and public health protections."
"I will withdraw our troops from Iraq and give the decision making power over the fate of Iraq back to the Iraqi people as quickly as possible while doing our best to ensue their safety."
"Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals. I will withdraw our military forces and support from Saudi Arabia and ask that other countries cease supporting this corrupt regime."
"What's this I hear? You're going to borrow money from the retirement plan for civil servants to keep the federal government afloat for the next few weeks so you don't have the embarrassment of asking Congress again to raise the debt ceiling right before the election? Maybe we could start up a new label, the 'spend, spend, spend without end' conservatives."
If wishes were butterflies, we'd all wear gold flecks on our ties.
And finally, the "Switch Horses or Drown Award" goes to Bush's hometown newspaper, The Lonestar Iconoclast, which has decided to endorse John Kerry for President.
Read all about it.

Freedom

2004-10-13T04:39:00.000-05:00

Just because you wear grown-up clothes and pepper in your hair, it doesn't make you a grown-up.
"While chronological age is progressive, emotional age is a layering of maturity over earlier coping styles." says psychiatrist Judith Sills.
Here's a quick emotional intelligence quiz.
When faced with conflict, what's your usual response?
1) If I don't get what I want, I often feel upset or pout about it
2) When I want something, I go out and get it.
3) If I don't do anything, the problem will go away.
4) Conflict can be resolved through communication and compromise.
We've seen Bush exhibit one and two. The right would like you to believe that Kerry is stuck at number three.
New York Times columnistDavid Brooks calls the conflict between Bush and Kerry's foreign policies one between two values, freedom and internationalism. A neutral word choice would have given us individualism and internationalism. Instead we get Bush's emotion laden word "freedom."
Maturity comes with the recognition that personal freedom, our own rights, can infringe the rights of another.
"When Bush talks about the world he hopes to create, he talks first about spreading freedom." Brooks says. "What he's really talking about is a decentralized world. Individuals would be free to live as they chose, in their own nations, carving out their own destinies."
Saddam Hussein would happily agree to that.
In a free for all society, the biggest guy gets to make the rules. If you happen to be the biggest guy, you have all the freedom.
Democracy, on the other hand, depends on the rule of law. It is rule, not by the sword, or by an elite, but by consensus.
Answer number four.
"Internationalism" (which Brooks opposes to freedom) is the concept of democracy applied to nations. When Kerry said, in the first Presidential debate, "We have to pass the global test", he meant that we take our grievances to a congress of the world's nations. If it is just, we can trust that the world will recognize our cause.
Bush rejects international law. The Kyoto treaty, the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice.
In doing so, he encourages terrorists and other rogue nations.
International economic sanctions and inspections have proven to be successful in containing Saddam's nuclear ambitions. The U.N. peacekeeping force was able to resolve conflicts in Eastern Europe, and Somalia, and is working in Sudan, Iran and Korea.
Kerry is arguing for the use of diplomacy, before force, and the use of international consensus, over the playground logic of might equals right.
Bush would impose democracy on the Middle East, and impose a Christian conservative agenda on America.
That's the so-called freedom of the right wing. It doesn't mean freedom of religion, the separation of church and state. Or individual freedom, the right marry whomever one chooses. Or freedom of speech, the right to protest. Or freedom of choice, couples making their own moral decisions about their future.
Compromise, in the Bush vocabulary, equals weakness.
Freedom and responsibility, Albert Camus, wrote, are bound together.

Mask Slips

2004-10-12T15:24:00.000-05:00

What I find the most frightening about the current administration is the misinformation, disinformation and outright lies they use to manipulate the American public.
There's little doubt now that the Bush Administration used our fear after 9/11 to terrorize us into Iraq. The invasion was planned as soon as they entered the White House over three years ago, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told CBS news on 60 minutes.
"Weapons of mass destruction", the administration's catch phrase of terror-mongering, is likely to be invoked again in the debate tommorrow.
The psychological tactic in play here is, if you meet with objection, keep repeating your message, and don't give an inch. This is what store clerks and telephone marketers rely on in dealing with "difficult customers". The Bush team is hoping to stonewall it's way into the next four years.
Paul Krugman gives us a pre-emptive list of lies we might expect to hear in tommorrow's debate.
Eight Lies You'll Hear
Along with the lies, we can expect more Freudian slips.
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." George W. Bush, Aug. 5, 2004
The Administration's "terror alert" tactics have mercifully fallen by the wayside, thanks to an increasingly skeptical public.
On the Today show last month, Bush said, about the often-invoked war on terror, "I don't think you can win it." The United States, he said, can "create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world". This rare glimpse of the bureauocrat within the flight suit spawned a massive control effort among the Bush handlers and hawks to make up for the Commander in Chief's fall from message.
Are they so nervous about the naked Bush that they would rig him up with a wireless transmitter?
Bush's Mystery Bulge
Although the Bush team continues to rely on the darkest cast of a war on terror as a between good and evil to get re-elected, the rhetoric may be wearing thin.
"It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life,'' says Kerry in this week's New York Times Magazine. It's best to skim the first five pages of bending-over-backwards Bush boot-licking, but you will find out more in this article about Kerry's forward-looking philosophy to contain the threats we face.
Kerry's Undeclared War
Despite his own terror slip, the Bush campaign is already trying to spin the quotes in this article in the hopes of making Kerry look "weak" on terror. But Kerry's ideas will resonate with many Americans, for whom it's beginning to sink in that the war in Iraq is a complete failure and a new approach is needed. This is a post-debate public that has seen Kerry's calm presence and thoughtful demeanor, in the face of Bush's peevish bullheadedness.
Osama is counting on inflaming our terror to recruit more young Arabs to the cause. Bush and Cheney are counting on inflaming our terror for their re-election.
Now the question is....will the people continue to swallow the lies?

Civil Dialogue

2004-10-09T09:11:00.000-05:00

I respect Republicans. My father was a Republican. He once said, rather humorously, he would vote for a Republican even if it was a poodle.
He said it when Ronald Reagan was up for re-election. As a free-thinker and a secular humanist, he wasn't enthusiastic about the increasing influence of fundamentalists on the Grand Old Party.
The old Republican guard thought of themselves as the party of Lincoln, for whom my father had the greatest admiration. He also admired Teddy Roosevelt and, like others of his generation who fought in WW II, Eisenhower.
He startled me by saying to me one time that all men are not created equal. It's the law, he said, our Constitution, that makes us equal.
I was born in the fifties. I was a child in the sixties.
The civil rights movement casts the longest shadow in my life. Kennedy picked up Lincoln's torch and passed it to the Democrats in the early sixties. Whatever his sins, despite social chaos and the Southern contingent, when the moment arrived to stand up for the Constitution, Kennedy did. He answered Martin Luther King's challenge.
I was in fourth grade when Kennedy was killed. Too young then to understand it all, it is Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch who stands for Kennedy in my memory.
My mother, who practised radical kindness, who was strict about bedtime and set limits on television, pulled us out of bed and parked us in front of the TV one night, to watch "To Kill a Mockingbird" on CBS's Saturday night movie. The lesson of Harper Lee's luminous classic is, whatever the personal dangers, even when the opposition comes from your friends and neighbors- when it comes to justice, it's simple- you do as Spike Lee might say, "the right thing".
I had a moment of hope during the exchange between Edwards and Cheney, that the congeniality of those comments about Cheney's daughter might put a rest to the issue of gay marriage which has been used to "energize" the Republican base. It's despicable, in my opinion, to court the worst instincts of the most prejudiced and ignorant to win an election.
History fell squarely on the side of African Americans in the sixties. It is falling on the side of gays, today. What is marriage, if not to ask the blessing of God on the union of people who love one another?
But that's not the only burning civil rights issue facing us. The issue of voting rights is back just like in the sixties. Some unscrupulous Republicans supporters are doing everything they can to prevent black voters from going to polls.
Unbelievable? Yes. But it's happening. Because black voters tend to vote Democratic.
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (which is released in DVD this week) is a "must see", if only for the vivid segment showing how the African American vote was disenfranchised in the last election.
Once again this year, partisan Florida election officials came up with a list of so-called "felons", thousands of whom turn out to be legitimate African American voters. Black civil rights workers doing voter registration have been harassed in Florida, leaflets with misinformation have appeared in minority communities in Louisiana, American Indians in South Dakota were been turned away from the polls after being asked to show ID's when none are required.
Bob Herbert, of the New York Times, has written most extensively about it. This week the Times has a searing editorial on the subject.
The Poll Tax, Updated
I've been volunteering forAmerica Coming Together, which is doing voter registration in African American, immigrant, Latino and working class communities, and among young people.
Only 52% of eligible adults voted in the last election.
Michael Moore is in trouble with Michigan prosecutors for bribing slackers with briefs. He's handing out clean underwear, in the hopes that he can get the skateboard generation to change more often (every third day- turn them inside out, he advises) and change bigger things.
Every vote counts.

Speak Your Mind

2004-10-08T23:31:00.000-05:00

Here's a litany of what's we've lost since 9/11. We came across this act of outrage last August near Backus, MN.

Oil Slick

2004-10-07T08:15:00.000-05:00

Thomas Friedman has written a blistering editorial on how Bush administration's energy policy supports terrorism.
The Battle of the Pump
I hope the Kerry campaign is listening.
In the 70's, after the anti-war movement, we could see more was at stake in that cultural upheaval than tie-die and free love. It was my first year of college at Simon's Rock.
Simon's Rock is an 'early' college, a mecca for creative misfits; students who were brilliant and bored, rebels and artists.
One of my friends rigged up a radio station and broadcast from his dorm room, another dreamed of an organic farm. There was a motorcycle babe, and her roomate who designed ethereal costumes for our theatre in a barn.
What was most exciting to us was the idea of energy independence.
The OPEC embargo, now known as the 'world oil shock', in October of 1973, had served as our wake-up call. A coalition of Arab countries, during the Yom Kippur war, citing many of the same resentments and discontents percolating in the Middle East today, decided to hold out on us. Oil prices instantly quadrupled.
The United States responded to the oil crisis with gas rationing. It deeply impressed me, because I'd just started to drive. You could only buy gas on even or odd days according to arcane equations involving your license plates, leap years, and how many days there were in the month. A paperback or your knitting was kept in the glove compartment. At the gas station, lines were long.
Our struggles with Iraq war have deep roots. Hard-liners in the Pentagon at that time drew the conclusion then that the U.S. needed to exert military control in Middle East, and began writing secret memorandums and building military bases.
The Thirty Year Itch
The hippies in the farmhouses of Western Massachusetts, on the other hand, were dreaming of spinning electricity from the wind and sun. They drew up plans for houses insulated by earth, with stones used as flooring, coming up with concepts like passive heating and renewable energy. All kinds of wild new ideas began to circulate in journals and magazines illustrated with pen and ink cartoons.
When best and brightest minds of my generation looked into the future, sustainability was the magic word, the alpha and omega of lasting peace, the key to our cities.
It was clear to us, then, that the supply of oil was finite, and could easily be dominated by the most powerful nations.
The End of Oil
What breaks my heart, sometimes, is that, thirty years and several wars later, after untold violence, blood spilled, tundra swans suffocated in oil slicks, after suicide bombers, be-headings and car bombings, later, we are just starting to get it.
If we'd put that $119 billion into alternative energy, on the day after 9/11, how much different the world would be. If we'd put it into alternative energy, in 1973, there might not have been any 9/11.
Energy from the sun and wind. Cars that drive on leftover oil from McDonald's french fries.
Multiply the cost of the Iraq war by thirty years and tell me I'm a dreamer.
After Baghdad was bombed, there was a Bill Moyers special on the Kyoto Treaty. He was talking to a circle of women from India and Africa, in various flowing tribal garments. A poignant moment for me was when one took the microphone, looked into the camera and begged us, the First World, to develop alternative energy. They didn't have the resources to do it, she said. They could barely feed people. But she saw their governments heading down our path, whose environmental policies and economic consequences have reaped such terrible harvest.
Every village in the world could have it's own wind generator. Every house could have a solar panel.
Imagine.

Street Beat

2004-10-04T12:10:00.000-05:00

Seven hundred thousand doors in Minnesota. That's what ACT (America Coming Together) figures it needs to turn out enough voters to put Minnesota electoral votes safely in the blue state stack.
I've knocked on about a hundred.
At that rate, it would take me 3 years.
Luckily, I'm not alone. Volunteers are flocking in from all over the Twin Cities.
I had gotten to the point where I felt, I can't sit on the sidelines, and twiddle. I can't keep preaching to the choir.
I had an old German violin, in a green velvet case. It had belonged to my mother, who passed it on to me. Like any beginner on the violin, the sounds coming out of my instrument were not unlike like a tom cat shrieking in a windstorm.
Lies and deception, especially, were getting to me. My gut would start to twist reading conservative commentators in the New York Times. Every time I got on the freeway, I'd find myself muscled aside by another tax-free Dodge Ram pickup.
The bullies and the hard liners, and the my!me!mine! people were everywhere, it seemed.
I had been excited about my playing my mother's violin, attempting to stroke my caterwauls into velvet peals, when it hit me. Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
In A.D. 64, it turns out the Emperor Nero couldn't have fiddled while Rome burned. because the violin wasn't invented until the 1500's. But never mind. That image was my wake up call.
I signed up online. I liked America Coming Together, which is a progressive organization, not directly affiliated with the Kerry campaign, doing canvassing and get-out-the-vote actions. I got my assignment, a block or two in a black and Hmong neighborhood near the Minnesota capital, and my partner, a grass roots organizer named Betty in a staw hat with a huge flower in the front. She was one of those women who'd wear purple to an undertaker's convention. Tough as a dandelion root, a heart bigger than her handbag. We set out with our clipboard and our scripts.
We were coached to ask two questions. What issues are important to you? If the election was tomorrow, who would you vote for? If they were for Kerry, or leaning that way, we'd find out if they were registered, and encourage them to vote.
The people, it turned out, have a lot to say.
That day I managed to do three registrations, my personal record. One was a elderly couple. Another was a woman who'd moved in to care for her mother. She was upset with Randy Kelly, our Democratic St. Paul mayor who was stumping for Bush.
Another 50-something dad, hosting a block barbecue in his driveway, took several minutes away from his friends to talk to me. He was concerned about his sons, who were draft age.
That experience gave me a high. I'd had beginner's luck. Since then, I've stumbled down crooked steps, been baffled by people's lack of doorbells, had a few Bush supporters give me the brush off, but all in all, my experiences have been encouraging.
My canvassing buddy last weekend was there with her fired-up twenty year old son, who'd recruited five kids from the local community college in addition to his mom. We were assigned a working class white neighborhood, and I had a lot of "not- homes", so I finished my packet fairly quickly, while she was lingered on the first block. In three consecutive houses, the person she talked to had been recently laid off.
Voter registration is dramatically up in swing states.
As Deadlines Hit, Rolls of Voters Show Big Surge
Much of the gains are in areas with minority and low income populations.
That cheers me up immensely.
Hope is in the numbers.
That's 700,000 doors in Minnesota.

Presidential

2004-10-01T03:38:00.000-05:00

When the scripts and spin doctors are taken away and each man stands alone, to be judged only on his own merits, the people finally have a chance to see what kind of person they are dealing with. John Kerry was outstanding. He was firm, he was gutsy, he was polite but forceful. Bush clearly planned to take the offense, was knocked off balance and put on the defensive. He was flustered, and furious. So much for body language.
What Kerry did tonight, is show that he can be presidential. He also did the American public a favor by laying out real issues out on the table, hard questions for the public to face, and that the Administration to answer.
Yet his ending address was direct, warm, sincere, and heartfelt. He bantered with Bush about his daughters. The difference I saw tonight between the candidates is maturity. That difference is experience.
Americans feel very uneasy that we were mislead into a strategically unwise war in Iraq, and yet, at the same time, we have to follow through and secure peace there. President Bush doesn't seem to have that reality at hand. He continues to conflate the issues of 9/11 and Iraq. His whole argument for his presidency is riding on that. When Kerry called him on it, he was pressed to say he knows the difference between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, yet continued to talk as if weapons of mass destruction had been in Iraq, and as if that issue had anything to do with Al Queda.
Kerry steered the conversation like a swift boat into the difficult territories: nuclear proliferation, what to do about Korea, Iran- Russia- Sudan, whether our military is overextended- issues the American public has yet to hear aired in the hothouse climate of entertainment where gossips and disinformation pass for news.
I think this debate gives Americans a clear picture of the candidates and sheds any doubt John Kerry is prepared and capable of taking on the job. He is both forceful and reasoned, and knows how to deal within the new world order.
Kerry's most powerful quote was when he addressed the issue of flip flopping. "It's one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and be wrong. It's another to ... then learn new facts and take those new facts and put them to use in order to change and get your policy right. "
Bush, for all his flip flopping rhetoric, has had to do some of that. The tough guy stance continues, but he's also had to go back to the U.N. and ask for help. He's learned something about alliances and not offending your allies.
Kerry, on the other hand, is stuck with the awkward position of having to argue his way out of Bush's mistakes. We broke it, we bought it. That's the bad news. Bush's most potent attack on Kerry, apparently, is that Kerry supported him.
But Kerry showed us tonight that he has the mettle to stay the course in Iraq, pick up the pieces and get us back on track in the world as a leader with principles who can be counted on in the rough. That gets my vote.
If you liked what Kerry had to say, here's an opportunity to do your part and let the media know.
Media Links

Our Savior

2004-09-30T08:47:00.000-05:00

A new documentary, timed to compete with the release of Fahrenheit 9/11, presents George to the faithful as a warrior of God.
FrankRich: The Passion of the Bush
We've had inklings of this. There was that "crusade" slip. Then the equation with the election of Kerry with the forces of evil.
Underneath all of it is a very scary scenario.
Armageddon and the Christian Right
Bush is not Jesus's man in the White House. Here's how I (a secular humanist and Sunday school drop-out) figured it out.
"...Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. "(Matthew 5:38-44)
The Bible is full of contradictions. Stories, parables, ambiguity. But a few statements stand out.
Thou shalt not kill, for example. Doing good to those that hate you. Not exactly a Bush philosophy.
I got a bit of internet humor from a friend in North Carolina that starts out:
"Things you have to believe to be a Republican today:
1. Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad
guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when
Cheney did business with him, and a bad guy when Bush
needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.
2. Jesus loves you but shares your hatred of
homosexuals and Hillary Clinton."
If conservatives would put their agenda out on the table, then the American people would have a chance to decide.
Is $200 billion (and counting) and over 1000 American lives preferable to economic sanctions in dealing with one of the world's dictators?
Shall we push for Armageddon in the Middle East?
Shall we cut down all the remaining old growth forests?
Do we want industry to set our standards for clean air?
Stealth and secrecy are used by this Administration to impose ideas that the public has consistently rejected. To open up huge areas to unrestricted logging, title your bill "The Healthy Forest Initiative". To secure the supply of oil in the Middle East, shake your fist and reiterate "Weapons of Mass Destruction." To force the agenda of charter schools advocates, you create a standard of failure and call it "No Child Left Behind".
That's what's wrong here. It's not just their ideas, it's way they go about it. It's the the arrogance of assuming they are above the law, that they know what's better for the American people than we ourselves do.
That's what's so scary about Bush's Jesus complex.
So where's the hope? I like Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's Daily Show. He was on Charlie Rose last night. He's the one who responded to the idea that the best guy to be president was the most fun guy to have a beer with, "I want to go with the designated driver". Last night he said (in my paraphrase) "When the Bush administration hands the American people a glass of toxic waste, they don't look to the polls to see if they want it, they look at the polls to figure out what else they can call it."
I believe in the American people. "Fool 'em once", to misquote Bush's misquote, but we won't be fooled again.

The "L" word

2004-09-28T16:12:00.001-05:00

I notice how anchors on TV swerve to avoid it. The Republicans have so successfully given it a bad name, that one is supposed to tip toe, stutter and blush before we say it.
Liberal.
How did this happen? How, in an equally divided country, did so many Americans become so disenfranchised?
Edward Galeano, Uruguyan poet put it this way in his prose poem "The Culture of Terror".
"Blatant colonialism mutilates you without pretense: it forbids you to talk, it forbids you to act, it forbids you to exist. Invisible colonialism, however, convinces you that serfdom is your destiny and impotence is your nature: it convinces you that it's not possible to speak. not possible to act, not possible to exist."
No longer. We're starting to challenge the naysayers, the righteous right. Last night I watched Howard Dean on Charlie Rose. Dean rode a tsunami of discontent on a Wellstone catch phrase "I'm from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party". A unapologetic call to arms that resonated with millions of young people, it shifted the course of the campaign. Dean is riding on his new book "You Have the Power".
Dean wants to to reclaim the "l" word. Dean wants to remind the public that "liberal" rhymes with fiscal responsibility. "Bill Clinton was the first president in 33 years to balance the budget".
Bush's frat boy charm wears off quick- even for Republicans- when you point out how happy he is to spend other people's money. His spending exceeds even the previous record holders, Ronald Reagan and George the First. After Clinton left the White House, budget analysts were predicting a 5.6 trillion surplus. Last week, the Congressional Budget Office projected a $3.6 trillion deficit over the next 10 years.
Deceptions that got us into Iraq have been followed by fudged budgets and repeated dippings into the till for special appropriations. Now that they hold the pursestrings, the neocons are reckless spenders. Combined with their anti-tax convictions, it casts a long economic shadow. That's a thorn in the side of the RINO's (Republicans in Name Only), the neocons have alienated, who are also uneasy about faked intelligence, constitutional oversight in the bedroom, interventionist foreign policy.
Fiscal responsibility is a strong image that fits in well with a sense of ethics and principle that the left represents. This is a perfect moment to hammer the righteous right with their no-end-in-sight spending, put to rest the ghost of "tax and spend" for once and for all.
Reclaiming the word "liberal", on the other hand, requires another strategy, in my view. The roots of the word in Old English to the idea of generosity. Webster calls this "open-handed."
Is it possible to be both generous and responsible? To say yes and to say no? Every day, each one of us struggles with that dilemma.
Liberals are inclined to err on the side of generosity to those who are hurt or struggling. At the same time want firm limits set on the powerful.
One of my favorite bits of bumper-sticker poetry is:
"It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber."
What are our core values? What does it mean to be a liberal? I hear over and over that the Democrats have no vision. Those of us on the democratic wing of the democratic party are clear about our vision, and have been for a long time. What we need to do is speak out.