R.P. Barr

A Word about Honor

We often hear the word “honor” in connection with the military. To be sure honor can be used to describe the behavior of a great many service men and women. But, honor is not looking sharp in a uniform, and it doesn’t come from being shot at, or killing the enemy. Honor involves performing the mission with respect toward others, doing what needs to be done without betraying the ideals one is protecting--especially when it is hard to do. The honor of the U.S. Military as an institution was tarnished with the verdicts against the Marines who massacred 24 civilians in Haditha. A roadside bomb blew up a Humvee. Tragic. Did the bombers live in the nearby houses? There is no reason to believe that they did—or didn’t. It is unlikely that the bombers would try to drive past the Marines in a taxi in the aftermath. Perhaps passersby needed to be searched for weapons. That is prudent. Murder is not. Five students and the driver were summarily shot to death. This was not in the heat of battle, and it served no military purpose other than to inspire recruits for the other side. The Marines claim there was small arms fire from the neighborhood. No Marines were hit, so one wonders who the target was. The squad “cleared” the houses by throwing in grenades and spraying the rooms with machine gun fire. Many of the dead: old men, women and children, were shot in the chest and head. Wounds—from what I read--not likely to have been incurred by indiscriminate fire. There was no honor in those murders, even though we can all understand the feelings that motivated them. On the other hand, the cowardice of the reviewing officers who released the killers without charges is inexcusable.

The desecration of fallen enemies has a long, dishonorable history. Severed heads were once posted on pikes. Crucified bodies left where they died as warnings. Vlad the Impaler skewered an entire army on upright stakes and left them as symbols of his wrath. On a more personal level, fingers, ears, noses, tongues etc. have been cut from the dead. Recently, corpses have been dragged through the streets. Urinating on the dead is rather tame by comparison, but still dishonorable.

Men in combat have more in common with the people shooting at them than they do with their own families and neighbors back home. Respect for the enemy does not mean granting them leniency, it means acknowledging the hardship and grit and fear that are involved in battle. And, if you think of Afghanistan, consider that the Taliban and their friends do not have air cover, or med-evac capability or body armor. If you think that roadside bombs are sneaky and cowardly, weigh them against bombs that fall out of the sky. The Taliban regime was as evil and destructive of basic human rights as any in history, but their fighters walk miles over desolate terrane, hide in caves, and attack troops who have them out-numbered and out-gunned. —Well, they may have to be shot, but their bodies deserve a minimal level of respect. That’s honorable.

 

Putting the Republic at Risk

The first coal in my stocking this Yule was the vote on granting the government power to detain anyone anywhere, including the U.S., on mere suspicion of aiding terrorists.  The first vote on this provision was overwhelmingly in favor.  This bill was the worst threat to the the United States since the British burned Washington in 1814.  It’s been watered down, but hasn’t been killed completely or universally denounced.  

 It is appalling that any Americans would think that our justice system is incapable of dealing with terrorists.  In 1862, the Sioux in Minnesota massacred some 800 settlers.  303 Sioux were arrested, tried and sentenced to hang.  Abraham Lincoln reviewed the sentences and commuted all but 39, which is still the largest mass execution in American history.  Southern sympathizers murdered Lincoln, but the system was trusted to try and condemn 8 conspirators.  In 1920 two men were murdered by anarchist bank robbers. Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were tried and executed.  When communists stole secrets of the atomic bomb, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested, tried, and executed.  I could go on.  Some of the cases are still controversial—and the rules of civilian trials were not always followed--but the point is that none of the suspected terrorists walked away free.  Our record of catching the bad guys is excellent.  We have more people in prison than any other country.  (The pros and cons of executions can be saved for another time.) We don’t need to broaden our detention rules.

 Besides that, we have a reputation (somewhat tarnished now), of being fair.  Our enemies tell their recruits that we are cruel and barbarous.  Reinforcing that prejudice is not helpful to our cause.    Americans like to think of ourselves as the good guys, and our men and women in uniform have proven that to be true in combat zones all over the planet.  The exceptions to that practice have been, in fact, exceptions.  We cannot allow a bunch of millionaire dilettantes in Congress to endanger our troops and diplomats by throwing out the Bill of Rights in an effort to appear tougher than the men and women who actually go into harm’s way.

 Of course it is really less about terrorism than it is an attempt to shut down debate and the free exchange of ideas.  If someone disagrees with a government policy, he is, by definition, an enemy of the state who is giving comfort to the foreign powers who hate us, and should be locked away.  That can be any one of us, depending on who is in office at the time.  And, detention without trial means that you or I don’t even have to disagree with the government.  If I object to the charges on my credit card statement and make a stink about it, the bank manager could make a call, and I disappear.  Take away the matter of credit cards, and that is how some detainees wound up in Guantanamo and spent years trying to fight evidence held in secret.  We must give our enemies benefit of our Constitution in order to protect ourselves.

 

The War Between the States

Maybe you have seen the ad: “5 Myths About the Civil War.”  I seem to see it all the time.  It takes you to a Washinton Post site--or maybe it's just my cookies that do that. Anyway, the author’s main point—which occupies two myths entirely and most of the other three—is that the war was all about slavery and nothing but.

 To say that anything as complex as a civil war is all about any one thing is absurd.  Fights between husband and wife are never about one thing.  There’s the stated issue, and all the baggage brought up with it.

If I remember my high school history, the first experiment with forced labor in the American colonies was with indentured servants—temporary slavery for Europeans who were promised a mule and a piece of land at the end.  It didn’t work out because the demand was greater than the supply, and because the fields in the American South were brutally hot in the summer compared to the cooler temperatures in Europe, and, as we know now, it takes at least two years to acclimatize.

 Meanwhile, slavery was already commonplace in tropical Africa.  It had been there for centuries before Europeans ever saw it and exists there today.  When sugar growing was where fortunes were to be made, Caribbean growers bought slaves from willing African sellers.  This trade—the sheer volume of it--distorted the African practice of slavery, which was a sort of social safety net—although not always benevolent.  The development of the entire continent was stunted.

 Slavery was not the end, it was the means.

 On these shores, slavery was practiced in all the colonies, but the North was not suited to large agricultural operations, and the welfare state of slavery was inefficient.  The greater influx of immigrants to the North who could be worked until they dropped and then discarded was much more attractive to factory owners.  There was none of that feeding and clothing of spouses, children and the elderly.  If a worker became sick, he was out of a job and replaced.  Slaves represented an investment that had to be nursed back to health.

 If that sounds like I think slavery was a good deal, I don’t—and it wasn’t, not for anyone.  The problem was finding people to work the cotton and tobacco plantations, to do back breaking work in blistering heat and not break down or look for alternative employment. 

 Again, there was money to be made—lots of it.  In 1860, there were 25,000,000 people living in the Northern states.  Northern factories demanded Southern raw materials and wanted them as cheaply as they want foreign products today.  The South had fewer than 10,000,000 people and 3,500,000 of them were slaves.  No wonder they felt intimidated.  The two sections of the country were quite different in culture and attitude.  Many in the South were opposed to slavery—Washington and Jefferson, for instance—although they both felt trapped in the economics of the plantation system.

There were many sources of friction, but the most glaring difference was the source of labor.  Since the North did not need slaves, it was easy to condemn the immoral South.  For their part, the South believed that their way of life depended on forced labor.

 As history would show, in 1888 Brazil became the last country in the Americas to officially ban slavery.  It’s not unreasonable to believe that the South would have found the weight of slavery to be unsustainable by that time as well.

Lincoln said that he would permit slavery if he could preserve the Union by doing so.  When Fort Sumter was fired upon, Lincoln could have withdrawn Union forces and established a smaller nation, one free of the taint of slavery.  Let the South be damned.  That’s what the Southern radicals believed would happen.

The war was fought to preserve the nation as one entity.  That was Mr. Lincoln’s War.  The South fought to preserve the system that had made them wealthy—those who were.  That system was slavery-based, but if free labor had been in abundance, slavery in and of itself would not have been a reason to fight.

 Did prejudice and arrogance and religious justification play their parts in the defence of slavery?  Damn right they did.  But, very few social practices endure if they are not also economicaly beneficial.  Saying it is otherwise is another myth. 

 

FLASHBACK – The Assasination of Charles the Good

Back in the time when royalty meant something, when Europe was littered with kings and counts, at the dawning of the 12^th Century, King Canute IV of Denmark was murdered.  The king had married Adela of Flanders.  The new widow took her son Charles and returned to Flanders.

 Why does this matter?  Well, history was about to be changed, and like every time history made a turning point, it contributed to who we are and the situation in which we find ourselves today.

Young Charles grew up and through the twists and turns of life found himself Count of Flanders at the age of 32, only a year after his own marriage.  He managed to uphold existing treaties and maintain the peace.  He reformed the laws to make them more fair and walked barefoot to mass each day to demonstrate his humility.  When the economy took a dive and there was widespread famine, Charles I distributed bread to the poor.  He also discovered that some wealthy landowners were hoarding grain in order to sell it later at exhorbitant prices. The most notable of these speculators was the Erembald family.  Charles the Good, as he came to be known, turned his official wrath on them and broke the wealthy family down to the status of serfs.

The rich do not go down easy, however, and a priest in the family concocted a conspriacy to murder the good count.  On the morning of March 2, 1127, a group of knights beholden to the Erembalds caught Charles at prayer in Fr. Erembald’s church and hacked him to pieces with their broadswords.  (In those days, they had to make do with swords because they did not have the internet and Fox News, but they may have charged the count with being born outside the country to a foreign father.)

 The citizenry was outraged, and the Erembald family was tortured and exterminated.  King Louis VI of France had supported the revolt and then appointed his own man as the next Count of Flanders.

 The Church later beatified the slain count and made him St. Charles.

 What can we learn from this medieval tragedy? That the greedy and powerful will employ terrible weapons to stop charity and justice.  Also, that hoarders and speculators are never remembered as “--the Good.”

 

Linking killers

The shooting in Tucson brought back memories of past shootings.  So, I dug up my posts about the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007.  I made recommendations then.  Not that anybody listens, but nothing was done to prevent Tucson.  And, nothing is being done to prevent the next one.  If you didn't read my 2007 posts, then here they are again.

Virginia Tech Revisited [August 18, 2007]

CNN reports that the students are returning to Virginia Tech for the fall semester and discusses the new policies that the university has put into place since the shooting last April 16. Two days afterwards, I wrote the following essay, but no one wanted to print it. Fortunately, this blog usually accepts what I write, and it still seems timely. See what you think.

Just about the only question remaining in the discussions of the Virginia Tech shootings is “why?”. Since I am remote from the scene and only know what the news has reported, I feel as qualified as any to speculate.

First, there were prescription medications found in Cho Seung-Hui’s dorm room. My guess is that the autopsy will reveal that he was off his meds at the time of the shooting. It is also possible that the prescriptions were inappropriate for his condition, but let’s give the medical establishment the benefit of the doubt. While working for the Veterans Administration, I heard over and over that drugs intended to relieve violent tendencies had unwelcome side effects. Patients would take the drugs until they felt the side effects were no longer bearable, and then they would quit.

The problem with going off the meds is that the nightmarish world perceived by the patient seems to be normal. If one feels insignificant and threatened, going back on the medication will only hinder one’s ability to defend against the terrors of the “real” world. Depression and alienation are self-reinforcing.

Mr. Cho purchased the 9mm Glock months before the shooting. I don’t believe that he bought it with the idea of becoming a mass murderer. He felt threatened and ignored. Carrying a gun in his backpack or under his shirt gave him a sense of power and importance. It may be that he felt impatience that none of his perceived threats gave him reason to unleash this power that would make the world aware of his strength. The benefits of being secretly armed would decrease with time.

His roommates say that Mr. Cho stalked young women. That is probably what led him to the West Ambler Johnston Hall dormitory and Emily Hilscher. The intervention of RA Ryan Clark probably led to the shooting. Based on the little information available, I don’t think that the shooting was premeditated. He had a gun that he was anxious to use, and opposition that served as an excuse.

While the police pursued their domestic violence leads, Mr. Cho probably returned to his dormitory to contemplate what he had just done. He may have taken that opportunity to write the rambling letter that was found later. He also collected his previous works to send to ABC and establish his legacy. This was necessary because having been already doomed by two murders, he decided to go out in a blaze of glory, destroying all those seemingly happy people who embraced each other and made him feel rejected.

Until facts prove different, that is my scenario of why the shootings occurred.

Among the measures that can be taken to prevent future occurrences is a rethinking of psychiatric pharmacology. Returning potentially dangerous people to “normal” should not be the goal, especially when the patient must endure unpleasant side effects. I recommend drugs that induce euphoria and are highly addictive. Give them reasons to keep taking the drugs that render them safe and all are benefited.

My second proposal is one that separates liberals from conservatives. Where crime is concerned, liberals prefer to control things, like drugs and guns, while conservatives prefer to control behavior. On the issue of preventing mass murder, I come down on the conservative side. Long before Mr. Cho purchased his weapon, he was recognized as being seriously disturbed. Unfortunately, while there is help for those who seek it, there is no provision in law or educational practice to seek out and intervene preemptively. There is a sizeable population of people who need to be involuntarily institutionalized for their own safety—and for ours. Of course, conservatives would disagree with that solution because it is expensive, and liberals will decry the loss of civil liberties. Besides, it was tried before. And, the practice needed reform. But were we safer then, or now?

More gun control is a feel good idea, but not a solution. Mr. Cho might have been stopped by his inclusion in the gun control database, or not. Look at how many house and apartment fires are set by jilted lovers and ex-spouses who don’t have handguns. Browse the internet and see how easy it is to mix up explosive and incendiary devices. The Columbine shooters preferred the immediacy of their guns, but also had pipe bombs in their backpacks. Our goal should be to reduce violence, not change the causes of death.

That brings us to something that the schools can do. Not the universities, I mean the kindergartens. Break up the play groups that kids form by excluding others. Build social inclusion into the earliest grades and continue to push it all the way through high school. Mr. Cho came to the U.S. when he was 8, and probably did not speak unaccented English until several formative years later, and then he was still an Asian in Virginia. He felt excluded and relegated to associations with other immigrants. The high school my kids attended even had special clubs for immigrants so they could band together apart from the mainstream. Some kids take this discrimination in stride and move past it, some are permanently affected. Cliques cannot be tolerated in schools. They are destructive in ways far beyond motivating the occasional psychopath.

We can’t revive the victims at Virgina Tech and we can’t guarantee that similar incidents will not occur in the future, but there are steps that can be taken. Better notification and evacuation plans may or may not reduce the body count next time around. We should try to prevent the next time from happening at all.

 

Ballad of the Serial Killer – It’s an old song [September 4, 2007]

 We have now heard the recommendations from the Virginia Tech shooting inquiry.  It is no surprise that they did not adopt any of my suggestions [Virginia Tech revisited 8/18/07].  The reason I bring up the subject is because I just saw a 1952 movie on TCM called "The Sniper."  Adolph Menjou played San Francisco Police Lt. Frank Kafka in pursuit of a deranged gunman.  As the police psychiatrist, a young Richard Kiley delivered an impassioned plan to prevent serial killings.  He said that their unknown suspect would have committed a string of violent actions starting years before the shooting spree and would probably have a police record.   He said that it was too late to help this killer (in 1952), but there should be a law that would detain violent offenders the first time they attacked, providing therapy or permanent involuntary commitment.

 

There have been many studies in the 55 years since that B-movie (and probably before, too).  We know now that most serial killers began by torturing animals as children, and that the punishment received by these budding psychopaths was no deterrent.  Whatever programs are in place to help pre-violent offenders are underfunded and take no pains to pursue those who drop out.  The result is that we are periodically shocked by a bloody rampage, and look for better ways to catch the killers that we ignored until they became killers.

 

In the movie, the local power brokers told Richard Kiley's character that his plan would cost money.  Who's going to pay for it?  You?  They advised him that his time would be better spent trying to catch the current shooter. 

I was a Military Policeman at Presidio San Francisco during the Zodiac murders, lived in New York City during the Son of Sam killings and worked in Washington, DC during the sniper rampage there.  I've seen how serial killers can create a panic, and noted the elaborate (and expensive) investigations that occurred.  Even in cases like Virginia Tech where the killer takes his own life, the expenses don't end when the bodies are buried.  And, I haven't even mentioned the human cost:  the survivors who will require years of therapy, the families who will always suffer from the absence of someone they loved, the lost potential of the victims.  Someone needs to tote up the costs of not catching and treating young violent offenders.  If the money had been spent 55 years ago on an aggressive early intervention program, wouldn't we all be better for it today?

 

Plantation Politics

When the economy in the southern United States was plantation-based, slavery was widespread and defended.  Slavery was only incidentally racist.  Color was a handy way to distinguish one group from the other.  The primary reason for slavery was that the agricultural based economy of those times needed a lot of cheap labor, and recruiting volunteers was too slow to be practical, especially with a continent of unexplored land to run away to. 

When mostly-northern abolitionists began attacking the southern economic model, it led to a civil war that still holds the record for this country’s bloodiest conflict.  What is interesting is that very few of the Confederate soldiers were slave owners.  They fought, suffered maiming and loss of limbs, and died by the thousands to protect a system which did not benefit them. Why was that?

 It had to do with the percieved fluidity of the American class system.  Every poor working southerner could see a day when he might have enough land to require field hands and a house big enough to benefit from house servants.  The fact that only the barest handful of them ever stood a chance of achieving wealth did not affect the potential of the dream.  Isn't there an element of that today when working people defend the "freedom" of the rich to exploit them?

 Employing that delusion,  thousands of paycheck-to-paycheck workers defend the ability of $200 million a year CEO’s to profit at their expense.   Look at what they’re selling us: if you want more money, don’t look for a pay increase—even though executive boards gives themselves raise after raise.  Instead, what you need is to pay lower taxes.  That is the only way to enhance your income.

 The game began when company leaders transitioned from those who were product-orient to those who are money-oriented.  The roots of growth and progress moved from innovation and product enhancement to reducing costs and producing profits by decreasing payroll and benefit expense.  A new product was a gamble, especially when it was the brainchild of an underling, whereas the figures on a balance sheet were clearly understood. 

 There are hundreds of examples of corporate leaders holding fast to the policies of the past—even the failed policies--rather than risk change.   Look at the saga of New United Motor  Manufaturing, Incorporated (NUMMI).  If that doesn’t sound familiar, think General Motors  in Fremont, California.  GM’s Fremont plant was the worst in the nation at one time, plagued with every sort of manufacturing nightmare known to management.  In came Toyota.  GM wanted small car capability, Toyota wanted a foothold in California, hence NUMMI.  The Japanese took Fremont employees on tour to Japan to learn the Toyota way.  In GM plants, for example, the production line was never stopped.  Vehicles would continue mindlessly to the end of the line where quality control workers were supposed to find and repair defects.  In contrast, Toyota plants had kill switches everywhere and anyone could stop the line to fix defects where they occurred.  The workers came back enthused with a new vision.  Unions were seen as partners with management instead of adversaries.  Practically overnight they turned the NUMMI plant into the most efficient in the GM system and even exceeded some in the Toyota system.  What was the reaction of upper GM management?  They took another decade and a half to introduce NUMMI innovations to the rest of the corporation, and even then half-heartedly.  Sales were declining, and eventually,  GM declared bankruptcy.  [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125229157]

Now, it is easy to blame our economic woes on short-sighted CEO’s, and, to be sure, they deserve the lion’s share.  However, bankers or builders, business leaders are caught up in a mad race to keep profits and stock prices high.  It is hard to tell them to act in concert or to act individually to benefit the nation and posterity.  It is also difficult to tell politicians not to pass a lot of corporate welfare legislation when corporate donors are where they get the money to run for office.

We have to stop being foot soldiers for the plantation owners.  The old systems are faltering.  Other countries are leading the way in energy alternatives, consumer electronics and many other industries.  We have to take the money out of politics.  We have to stop rewarding self-destructive behavior like moving jobs overseas and expanding the gap between the rich and the middleclass.  You might recall that when that slavery thing finally came to a head, it didn’t end well.

 

Election expectations

I wanted to post these two links before this, and before the election, but that’s another story. I especially like the story from The Onion because even though it is satire, it describes perfectly how the Democrats threw away their accomplishments and let the Republicans set the agenda.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101018/ap_on_bi_ge/us_prolific_congress

http://www.theonion.com/articles/democrats-if-were-gonna-lose-lets-go-down-running,18333/?utm_souce=popbox

Of course it’s more than that. People are dissatisfied. The problem is that they believe the media and pundits who claim that it is the fault of the current guys in power--in government power.

Let me throw another link at you.

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/11/04/pm-income-inequality-pushes-us-down-in-wellbeing-ranking/

The United Nations just issued its Human Development Index. When they created this index in 1980 to determine how nations ranked on well-being, the U.S. was number one. This year we’re down to number four. The main reason for the lower ranking is the reduction of the middle class and the widening gap between rich and everybody else.

And, it’s not just one scale. When I was a kid, the U.S. was number one in just about every category: education, wealth, the size of the middle class, etc. For two centuries, parents could say with some assurance that their children would have better lives than they had. We have slipped from that position, and that is the root cause of American dissatisfaction.  It's hard to find a category where we are still on top.  Nuclear weapons maybe.

Obama won because he promised change. He took some major steps toward shifting the direction of the United States, but when folks looked around, they didn’t see it. Everything looked the same, and the scary sense of losing was still there.

The joke of the election is that in 2012, it will still look that way. The Republicans will not have an effect that will be felt the way people want. Even the budget. The 2011 budget will be passed next month. The new Congress will pass the 2012 budget next year, and half way through 2012, they will have to start campaigning. There will be a lot of noise and unemployment will still be too high.  Homes will still be going into foreclosure.  Medical costs will continue to rise.  Will that work in Obama’s favor? It could if Democrats ever learn not to shoot themselves in the foot.

9/11 and the future of Islam

Today marks not only the ninth anniversary of the al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, but also Eid ul-Ftir, which is the biggest holiday on the Islamic calendar.  Eid is a three-day celebration at the end of Ramadan when Muslims fast all day, every day for a month.  The holiday moves every year, sometimes it coincides with Christmas, sometimes with Easter, and at everyplace in between.  This year the holiday concludes on 9/11.  This is unfortunate, because it has forced many American mosques to cut back on their festivities out of fear that some non-Muslims would accuse them of celebrating the 2001 tragedy.

Despite George W. Bush’s repeated insistence at the time that Islam as a religion was not to blame for the attacks, he made the grievous—some would say calculated—error of treating the mass murder like an act of war.  Only nations can engage in war, and al-Qaeda did not have that standing,  The attack was a criminal act, and should have been labeled as such.  It was wrong to elevate a band of terrorists to nation-equivilance.  Now, here we are.

 With misunderstanding poisoning the air already, I thought this might be a good time to speculate on the future. 

 The first hard fact is that Muslim populations are growing.  Western populations are stabilizing or falling.  The amount of potable fresh water in the world is declining.  People who live in places that are historically dry are already migrating to places with more rainfall and fresh water resources--not to mention jobs and political freedom.

 The Middle East, the land of Arabs, Persians and Turks, was once the scientific center of the world.  There was also a vast Ottoman Empire the stretched from Caspian Sea to the Horn of Africa, from Hungary to Algeria.  Islam was embraced by people from China to Spain.  Then came the crusades, with the lesson that education is less important than religious solidarity and military might.  The empire deteriorated and the momentum of scientific achievement moved across the Mediterranean to Europe.

There are those in the Muslim world, al-Qaeda among them, who would like to see their empire rise again.  Waves of babies and immigrants will cause a number of changes, but they are not going to bring about a new empire to counterbalance the West.

 To create a pan-Islamic empire, first, Muslims have to stop killing each other.  In the old empire, everything was ruled by a Sultan who was also Caliph.  As sultan, he managed secular affairs, and as caliph, he was the leader of the faith.  With todays hardened sects, who would lead Islam? A Sunni or a Shiite or something else?  Until the warring parties can unite and declare that all Muslims are Muslims, there will not be an empire.

 They will also have to stop killing their women and their children.  Oppression of half the population is an incredible waste of human resources.  Independence of thought and action is not incompatible with Islam, but it is essential to modernization and the economic independence from the West. Education must be more secular than religious, including science, history and advanced mathmatics.  Muslims in the United States, Canada and Europe have proven that these goals can be achieved without destroying the faith.  Now, the Middle East must learn the same thing.

If these changes occur before the oil runs out, then a new Islamic empire can arise—if that’s what they really want.  Personally, I don’t see it happening.  Therefore, we had better learn to live together.

Waiting for Reality to Blink

I am old enough to remember a time when liberals were pie-in-the-sky delusional and conservatives staunch realists.  Remember world peace and flower power versus stay-in-school and the work ethic.  The positions on the reality scale have now reversed.  Who’d have thunk it?

One example is from NPR [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129305280], a little microcosm of the larger economy.  Modoc County, California has only one hospital, and it is on economic life support.  If the hospital doesn’t get an infusion of cash, it may have to close its doors.  The nearest alternative is hours away—that's in the summer time when the roads are clear.  There are a number of elderly in the area who depend on the hospital for their very survival.  In addition, the hospital is the largest employer in the county.  If it closes, so will a lot of other things.  Property values will fall, and the consequent further drop in county revenues will cause other cutbacks to services.  The only apparent solution is a property tax increase to save the hospital.  It is opposed by at least one man who is funding the anti-tax-increase movement.  The problem with preaching fiscal responsibilty at this point is that there may be no-one left to hear the lesson.  What's more important, your point or your life?

There is a similar psychology at work regarding Islamic mosques.  The anti-mosque legion in New York does not want a place where Moslems can peacefully gather and engage in recreational activities as well as sometimes pray.  Remember a few months ago when these same people (probably), did not want to try and punish Muslem terrorists in lower Manhatten either?  And, if a few blocks from the place where New Yorkers cannot even erect a memorial in nine years time, is too close, then what is the reason for objecting to a mosque in Tennessee where they allow church members to handle poisonous snakes?  Or in California where enemas are given for entertainment and getting high passes for a religious experience?

This anti-Islamic sentiment is not only bigoted, it is delusional and dangerous.  

Look at the guy who went around stabbing and slashing African-Americans (and a few who resembled African-Americans).  We know what kind of person does that.  We know the profile.  --Except this guy was from Israel.  Okay, new profile.  We've read about the settlers who attack Palestinian children on their way to school.  He just couldn’t find any Palestinians.  -–Wait a minute, he was an Israeli Arab, not a Jew.  That’s easier.  We know about Hamas and that bunch.  Maybe he was trying to start a race war in the U.S.  --Except that he wasn’t Moslem.  He was an Israeli Arab Christian.  Stuff that in your profile and smoke it.

Then there were the killers who escaped from prison in Arizona.  A nasty trio, illegal immigrants from south of the border, right?  Nope.  Good ol’ American white boys.

 9/11 was a bad thing, but in spite of the horrific death toll, it was only one attack.  We lose more Americans to drunk drivers on a regular basis.  And, most Moslems don’t drink.

 Our economy is in the crapper thanks to a bunch of mostly white Christians and Jews who pushed us off a cliff for a quick profit.  You've got to look at who your real enemies are.

 There are a couple million Moslems in the United States, and they are nearly all here legally, unlike the devout Roman Catholics that are flocking over the border.  The other thing about American Moslems is that they are not trying to kill us.  Even with a few radicalized young men, they are not nearly as dangerous as the ethnic organized crime groups who are also nearly exclusively Christian.

 Worldwide, there are 1.5 billion Moslems who may not like us very much—although many do—but are not trying to kill us.  A handful of them are using their religion to manipulate the ignorant.  They are practicing the lessons of Machiavelli.  If you are unhappy with your lot in life, blame the other, the outsider.  People will put up with the failures of their leaders if they feel threatened.

 In this country, there are some who have read The Prince, but I see a stronger influence by a more modern political thinker: Joseph Goebbels who was proponent and perfector of the “big lie.”  In case you’ve forgotten, the theory was that if you tell a big lie boldly enough and often enough, the masses will come to believe it.  Call a social liberal both a Nazi and a communist; say that he is foreign born despite all evidence to the contrary, and that he is a Moslem only a year or two after attacking him for going to his choice of churches—say those things often enough and loud enough and they will gain traction.  Goebblels would be so proud.

Nobody said change was easy

With spies and terrorists, oil spills and hurricane season, job loss and banking failures, there are many who question the value of an overseeing government.

 Since this is not a simple issue, please bear with me.

I think back to my childhood in the 1950's and early 60's.  My parents were small town middle-class and I had all the advantages of that status.  It was a good, but not idyllic life--mainly because I was not an idyllic kid.  It helped that the poor were kept out of sight.  For good reason.  How could people live like that?  It was depressing.  The foreign poor were only seen in travelogues.  How colorful that people walked barefoot everywhere, cooked over fires fueled by dung, and ate fried crickets.

The world has become much more intimate since then, and there is no going back.  Science fiction of the mid-20th Century had all white spaceship crews.  Star Trek added some minorities, but really, won't the crews of the 22^nd Century be mostly mixed race?  Like Spock except more so.

For example, I have been told that my lineage is German, Welsh, Moravian and Bohemian (the last two are now considered "Czech.") When I visited the Czech village that was the seat of one line of my ancestry, the people there had never heard of the family name.  They suggested that my forefathers must have immigrated there from somewhere else, before leaving altogether.  That was the result of resettlement when travel was on foot or by horse-drawn vehicles.  Today, people hop across the globe like grasshoppers in a garden, and very little blood is single malt.

Some scientists believe that people with natural red hair will disappear by the end of the century. Of course, that is not entirely true as people with the recessive gene will mate here and there to produce the odd redhead.

My rambling point is that the world is in flux, and beyond local control. It always has been, but the pace is accelerating. Those who want to stop or roll back change are going to be trampled by the march.  The best we can hope for is to guide the tide. And, who is going to do that?

It is either going to be big government—ours or somebody else's—or big business, or leave it to chaos. Personally, I prefer government of, by, and for the people over multi-national corporations that are of, by and for profit.  There are those who prefer chaos—every man for himself. They see survival of the fittest as freedom, I see it as tyranny.  Societies are judged by how they treat the weakest members.

In Tales of the South Pacific, James Michener tells the fictionalized story of a WWII pilot who crashed into the ocean near a Japanese held island and of the repeated heroic attempts to save him despite heavy enemy fire.  Enormous amounts of manpower, machines, and time were expended on saving a single life.  Government does that.  The big oil companies, on the other hand, have shown Congress that they have no capacity to stop a deep water leak like BP's, but will go to court to overturn a modest moratorium against drilling.  Banks will plead for bailouts, and then refuse to restructure the bad loans that could ruin them.

Remember that Republican President Hoover did not stimulate the economy after the stock market crash in 1929. The Great Depression was the result.  After mid-term elections during Roosevelt's tenure, Republicans gained the strength to roll back government spending, which plunged the country even deeper into the depression.  Who knows where the spiral would have ended if the war had not pulled us out.  Well, there are no more Hitlers to save us.  We’re going to have to do it ourselves, and like everything else people do without a manual, it’s going to be sloppy and inefficient.

I think of government operations as being like a football game.  Or at least I have since reading that a coach pointed out to his players that a one-hour (on the clock) football game has only two minutes of actual scoring.  If conservative theory operated on the gridiron, we would cut the length of games back to two minutes because the rest is waste.  Clearing up the mess left behind by Bush administration looting is going to take awhile, and there is no instruction manual.  Gluing a vase back together takes longer than breaking one.  Shouldn’t we be glad there is somebody trying to do it?