Public policy, social issues, gender politics, religion, civitas, and other taboo topics fall under the hammer of Shava's iconoclasmic force of natural philosophy.
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Nader's raiders -- come home!
Friday, December 12, 2003
5:17 PM
[modified from a post I made 8/17/03 to a list I'm on -- brought to mind by Nader's exploratory committee, who posted a survey asking people if they thought he should run, and what they'd do for him if they support him. I answered the survey asking him PLEASE not to run.]
I love you all, and [friend] is opinionated, but it's hard not to be frustrated. I have been working on this post for three days now...
First thing I have to say is that we have one group that we should be primarily blaming for the Bush victory -- and that is the 48.whatever% of the electorate that voted for Bush. Without them, it never would have been a close enough race for any controversy.
The second thing I have to say is that the DLC is largely to blame for Gore's defeat. Gore is a liberal pragmatic smart man, who was assigned handlers who told him to say "me too" a lot, so as not to "lose the center." He lost the left and that's essentially why he lost.
Frankly, I had my own reservations then about having Lieberman one bullet away from the presidency, not because he's Jewish but because he's a Zionist chauvinist hawk and a republican in drag.
So, that said...if you feel it would make you offended to hear why I think the Greens as a party are engaging in denial and magical thinking, or why so many Dems are so passionately anti-Greeen, hit delete now. But I intend to list a bunch of events and stats with my own analysis and experience of events mixed in.
I don't think it's useful to be mad at individual Greens, except when they are idiots. But that maps pretty well to my feelings about individual Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Socialists, or whatever.
I had bad feelings about the Nader campaign early. I was really disturbed that he was so obviously setting up a campaign that was playing to win, when what he should have been doing was playing for 5%+. If anyone cares, I'll elaborate on that, but it would have been the pragmatic thing to do in a first major Green entry into the presidential race. That he was talking like he meant to win, vs. building his party, indicated both egotism and possible malice to the Dems to me. One thing Joseph's father taught me is that unconscious ill deeds and malice with intent are both things you want to avoid, and so far as it is possible, you should remove yourself from situations where you *can't* tell them apart.
I couldn't tell it apart in Nader's case. I found his campaign to seem intentionally highly manipulative of what seems to me still to be a profoundly politically naive constituency. That's not a condemnation of the Greens, any more than saying someone is ignorant of the facts implies that they are idiots. The Greens, as a whole, do not have the savvy to make local elections, far less a national campaign, and that's just a natural issue of their nascent state.
In outcome...Jim, at least, will remember my conflict over the Nader campaign -- in that I thought it was wrong to diss the Green's platform or enthusiasm or a strong third party, but I thought that the campaign had potential for disaster in key states.
At 01:28 AM 8/16/2003, [same friend] wrote:
The "there's no difference between the two
parties" argument never held any water with me.
I think part of what most Greens don't understand is that this is the heart of the matter to many of us Democrats, and the prime cause of the vitriol over the loss in 2000, and a lot of our ongoing troubles. But let's address the vote thing first.
I do believe that Nader split the vote enough to lose the election. If you take it state by state, he changed the electoral college enough to make the difference. Gore *WON* the popular vote. That doesn't count for crap. Only the electoral college counts, winner takes all, state by state.
But you don't have to prove that he changed the electoral vote anywhere but Florida to show that he spoiled the election. People will claim NH and FL were clearly spoiled, but I won't even waste my time on the NH case. Only Florida is necessary of itself.
Some of that record has clearly been unnecessarily exaggerated.
Read this: http://www.fairvote.org/plurality/nader.htm Particularly the bit at the bottom, below the stats:
If no third party existed and one makes assumption ALL GRN vote D, ALL REF/LBT vote R (a convenient, not a valid, assumption) then Gore wins FL and NH, bringing his electoral vote total to a winning of 295. GRN is thus the primary spoiler affecting outcome.
However, IF GRN exists, but REF/LBT do not and ALL REF/LBT vote R, Bush picks up IA, NM, OR, and WI for a total of 301 electoral votes. REF and LBT did not change the outcome of the election, but did influence the electoral vote.
Greens reject this argument, and rightly so.
It's questionable that all Greens would have voted Democrat. However, the rejection of this speculative argument is often taken, by Greens, as a way of claiming that the Nader spoiler vote is a myth.
That's not true either.
According to the Supreme Court, if only 548 of the 97,488 of the Green votes in Florida had voted for Gore, Gore would have won and avoided an incredibly corrupted process that did lasting damage to our credibility among our own people, and overseas.
Florida's voter registration fraud and the Supremes were to blame for a lot. (read a bit of http://www.gregpalast.com for more info).
But if one percent of the green votes in Florida had gone to Gore, it's just clear that Gore would have won the election. The numbers just don't lie. They did everything they could in Florida to ensure a Bush victory, and barely squeaked by on the basis of 550 votes. Now to give you an idea of how many people that is, that's the average attendance of two Episcopal church services in SW Florida, not that the Episcopalians are a huge church in SW Florida.
We wouldn't be in Iraq today, I swear to Goddess, if there were a Democrat in the White House. Maybe not even if Gore had been shot, because Lieberman would have understood the potential mire of reconstruction.
548 out of 97,488 votes. That's .005621% of the Florida votes for Nader.
That sucks. That is the sort of thing that campaign workers still, no doubt, wake up in cold sweats over in the middle of the night to this day.
So, all us Democrats have a hard case of PTSD when it comes to Nader and a Green candidate of any sort.
On the other hand, there's more pervasive and subtle damage. I believe that the Greens (and specifically Nader, or his strategists) made it the *heart* of their campaign to drive a wedge between Democrats and independent progressive voters. They made it a perfect accepted truth, common wisdom, and FASHION to believe that there is no difference -- zip -- between the dems and the republicans.
This wasn't a NEW idea. But no one on the left had ever worked so successfully to make it so fashionable, so permanent. Those of us dems who protested sounded shrill (to borrow a term from feminism...).
Now, personally, I hate the DLC (the smug centrist neoliberal forces in the Dems) with a passion, but the DLC is a passing fad in the history of Democratic politics. Every 20 years, there's some new flavor of sure-fire snake-oil strategy that the Democratic Party elevates to infallability, and then as they ossify and as the years pass, they leave their cake out in the rain, and some new flavor rises.
Centrism isn't permanent, but it's got the DP cowed pretty bad at the moment. Because, you know, the last election convinced them that they have lost the left entirely.
Greens and progressives and various whiny independent liberals don't vote, traditionally. They tend to be more postmodernly cynical about the system. They tend to be younger, hipper, and too cool to play the games the system requires. Or too damned ignorant. And I genuinely believe that those nonvoters were the majority of the green votes in most states.
So these neogreenies look at the funding situation, and they say, "Republicrats!" and they vote with their feet. Or they don't vote. Or they vote for a third party. It never occurs to them to subvert from within -- which is what democracies are designed for.
They vilify folks who are trying to turn things around pragmatically, and would have called us collaborators and quislings if they'd studied any political history. But instead folks like me got accused of being "not really left" "posers" "sell-outs" and a number of things I can't recall because I don't like holding on to really distasteful memories. Including, at least once, just being *hissed* at and stonewalled in the middle of a restaurant, in the middle of dinner, with six friends. I was NEVER as rude to a Green before the election as any number of Greens were rude to me. They consistently hip-ly and coolly and cynically opined that there's no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats -- and that made me the enemy.
I still staunchly believe that taking over the Democrats with traditional Democratic values has more potential than forming a third party. But I defend these guys' right to form a new party and run with it.
People who really participate in the political game see it as just that -- a competitive, sometimes ikky game among often unpredictable forces, using tools that are often more art than science. It's incredibly complex, and folks like Jim and Viv and Julie/Jim and me in my spare time...we're working the system with a depth of knowledge that has scars to go with every lesson learned. Sometimes the cost of a mistake in the political world really *is* that people die, even if it's because you feel you failed to save them. It takes guts, and literacy in history/law/strategy/tactics/..., and a huge understanding of the human condition.
If forming a new party and just fixing everything overnight were possible, by god we would have done it a long time ago if we could have figured it out. And I don't think the Greens have anything new to offer in that context.
So these folks emerge from nowhere, often enough, and decide to participate and do something new. Because it has to be new or else it won't work, or would have already worked...
So when they finally decide to participate, they don't stage a popular insurgency and revitalize their local Democrats, because that would sully their values. No. They are too cool. They are too idealistic, and think that if people only had a choice that was radically different, that somehow that would build a third party, magically, from 3% up. Unlike people like me, they will not sell out. They will not compromise. They don't have to make deals with anyone.
Or do they?
Here is a clue. We do not live in a parliamentary system. The only way a new political party has ever risen in the US was by displacing a party that was falling apart.
Here's a piece of history for you:
http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/aae/side/bullmoos.html
That's what happened to the Progressive Party (a splinter of the Republicans, btw).
For more perspective, try this more lengthy piece:
http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/nbk/side/polparty.html
which says in part
Unlike many other countries, the United States has a two-party system. Third parties have developed, but a balance of more than two strong parties has never lasted.... And the Green Party has formed as an outgrowth of the environmental movement. Like earlier third parties, these groups have helped focus attention on important social and political issues.
Now, if the Greens had been satisfied to split off 5% the vote and raise issues for the Dems and Republicans to have to react to, that would have been lovely. But to my mind, the thing they did that was worst was to sour an already suspicious American public to the democratic process entirely.
By stating that:
......(a) Republicrats. No differences.
......(b) We can't win, we can't place, but we can sure enough show.
...the Greens left a lot of progressives with this message: The Democratic Party are a monolithic bunch of neoliberals from root to leaf, and you shouldn't even try to talk to them. However, if we yell loud enough, the world will get better by magic.
The reason the Greens were often not invited to debates was because the established parties saw that they had no stake in the system, and therefore no restraint on their attacks. Face it, if a Republican savages a Democrat too badly, his or her party is going to face just a bit more uphill the next time they need something from the other side of the aisle. The Greens had no stake, and therefore were almost guaranteed to be less civilized, even, than traditional negative campaigning would lead one to expect.
Nader did not disappoint in this aspect. He oversimplified complex issues, and knew he'd never have to worry about implementation of any of his glib proposals. Of course he looked like Alexander with a Damoclean wit coming down on a snarl in DC like a fury. And of course, his solutions seemed so much more acceptable to a naive and unseasoned left.
I believe he used the political naivety of the previously unparticipating left, every bit as manipulatively as Bush jerks the Christian Right.
Daydream: If the voters who the Greens claim had never voted who came out for Nader had walked into their local DP central committees and said, "We care about leftist issues, and we're willing to work for change, and screw the centrists. We can get the traditional progressive base to register and get them to VOTE."
Well, then it would have been an insurgency, of a sort which the party is designed to absorb and internalize. And all politics is local. You change the city councils and you change the state legislatures. And you learn about real politics that involves compromises and deals and finding liveable middle ground. But every year you elect a few more real goddam progressive green-minded people to the dominant party of the left. And you turn out more and more voters who'll vote for these more left people. And you start moving the party left.
That's what I would have loved to have seen.
But you know what? It's ALWAYS going to be easier to bitch about the system from the outside, and then complain that you're disenfranchised. It's always going to be easier to organize a semi-spontaneous march via indymedia than it is to organize all the complicated aspects of Hempfest, or to elect a pro-medical-MJ legislator.
And you know what? It's always going to be of less effect and less lasting benefit, doing the easy thing. Sad to say, if time is money, a peace march's energy is like stacking up a million dollars of passionate time, and burning it. It might make us feel warm, and like we found a place for our passion, but it probably doesn't change much of anything outside of the immediate reach of the flames. Maybe the smoke smells sweet to some gods somewhere up there, and they will grant us peace.
It does expend a lot of energy, and it does give people the impression that they are working for change. So then, they don't do something else. It plays into the Republicans' hands.
Oh, sure, it raises a few issues. Like Nader. He educated a lot of folks in the Green Party about the threats of globalization and various things. But you know what? He'll never get to do anything about it now.
And Gore, for all his acquiescing to his handlers and pandering to funders, would have done something about some subset of issues that W has blown to shit entirely.
And Gore wouldn't have sent us to Iraq.
In the Clinton years, our reputation improved dramatically overseas. The neoliberals may have been capitalist pigs, but they are not imperialists on the battlefield. They believe in cultural coups, and are admittedly not shy enough from exploitation. But they're reluctant to intervene militarily, and they're a bit lighter on covert ops too.
Just to remind y'all, Clinton's second administration was marked by two active areas of military engagement. He moved in a bit late to stem the genocide in the former Yugoslavia, and he flew patrols in the no-fly zone over Iraq.
http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/08/01/clinton.defense/
In defense of Clinton adminstration funding levels, which have dropped significantly in terms of gross domestic product, Bacon said, "Our spending now is a little less than $300 billion a year. It's.. as I say, there are always ways to spend more money, or to spend it faster. There are always demands to modernize."
"It's required sharp increases in pay and benefits, and I think those have been appropriate, particularly in light of the recruiting problems that we were having a year ago, and the quality of life problems that have been eliminated. And I think that we've worked -- that Secretary (William) Cohen and President Clinton have worked very hard to increase defense investment, as I said, by 40 percent, from $43 billion to $60 billion a year", Bacon said. "That, also, has been justified, and will help us be as strong and dominant in the 21st century as we are now."
During W's administration, we're spending $3.9B every MONTH on just trying to keep the Iraqis from killing us too quickly. So, that means since 3/20, when we first started bombing, we've spent twice as much money just in Iraq than Clinton spent in a full year of military spending at home and overseas.
But no, there's no difference because when he was spending probably less than 25% of W's military budget a year, we still weren't funding schools.
But wait! Not only are we not funding schools, but we're DIVERTING funding from education to testing programs of questionable value.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/0817sun1-17.html
But wait! Let's talk about jobs. No, let's not. It's too depressing. Oh, let's let the UAW talk about it: http://www.uaw.org/atissue/atstory.cfm?atId=18
But wait! Let's talk about the Patriot Act. Does anyone here believe for a moment, as much trouble as you might have seen from Janet Reno (http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/131/forfeiturebill.shtml for example) can you really compare her to Ashcroft?
Skim through these six pages of article abstracts on Ashcroft's records on civil liberties, just from the Village Voice, and tell me Janet Reno would have even conceived of this crap, even after 9/11:
http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/civil_liberties/
Tack onto that any prospect of health care reform, significant labor issue improvement, and so on.
NAFTA? Globalization? Listen, there isn't even any *dialog* in DC about these issues anymore.
When I look at tripe like this:
http://www.therealdifference.com/issues2.html
I just boil. It compares Nader's opinions -- a man who never held elected office in his life, or had to work out a compromise in committee -- with the theoretically monolithic opinions of the Republicans and Democrats. Now, let me tell you, when you are a party of one, it's easy to have consistent positions on issues. But not even all the Republicans views match the views listed for them. The Democrats are far more divided. And even the Greens, if you go to individuals, are divided on some of these issues.
And the issues are simplified or distorted. For example:
Clinton and Gore deleted plans for universal health care from the Democratic platform.
Um. Alrighty then. Who was it that was the only standing US president to nearly have his first term sabotaged by the reaction to his standing up for gay rights and universal health care? And what party was it that threw that monkey wrench? Could it have been because progressive voters were staying away from the polls in droves during Congressional elections that there wasn't enough support in DC to get the Clintons' health care plan passed in the first place?
You know what? In DC, you can't get SHIT done if you piss off either party. They are just looking for weaknesses, and it's vicious. So you work on winnable issues.
Or, alternatively, you could decide we need a revolution. Like the Eugene BCAYs, perhaps you believe that utopia will naturally rise from the ashes...looking a lot like Lenin.
I'm committed to changing the system from within. I'm pretty left, and pretty progressive. But I'm a polite witty debater of centrists, and I show every sign of confidence that my views belong in the Democratic Party. And everyone else there seems to think so too. I'm a precinct worker and -- much to my shock -- up for district leader (a role that, in Massachusetts, someone would have to be buried for me to get, and then only after 20 years of party work...;).
I'm going to continue to work for Dean, and continue to pray that he wakes up the progressive majority in this country -- to work together. The people who believe in good schools, and sane foreign policy, and policies that create and keep good jobs, and programs that reduce suffering. The people who won't just vote for less taxes if they know that someone with guts will go to bat to make their life better in other ways that won't cost them more than what we all gain.
People like you. And a lot of people who don't vote, or don't vote where it counts.
If you want to change the direction of the ship of state, *please* start working where it counts. The Democratic Party is no greater than the sum of its parts, really. On an ultimate basis, shoe leather and committee time matter fully as much as money -- but people don't put time in. Like a battleship, the turning radius is enormous -- it can take years.
So, that means we have to start working on this problem four years ago, at least.
Ooops.
The best thing -- perhaps the only good thing -- about W? It's that he's gone so far over the edge that he's made it clear that for all their faults, even the centrist Democrats aren't fucking fascist fundie lunatics bent on emmanatizing the echaton (bringing on Judgement Day -- but I just *love* that phrase...;).
I am not a Republicrat. If you think you aren't a Democrat, maybe you aren't liberal enough in your thinking. ;) Getting rid of Bush won't save us. He's a puppet to the neoconservative cabal. We need to accept being ashamed of so many of our government's deeds, and then understand that this is, still, a government of the people, and that we can change it to something to be proud of.
We need to wake folks up. We need to teach folks to be self organizing. We need to, each one of us, work to take our country back. Because only cultural change will get rid of a good slice of that 48% who voted for Bush last time.
If you want to work for change, if you want to work for peace, then identify yourself as a Democrat and get active in the party and start changing the party, your local government, our country, and the world.
If every one of us goddam old hippies walked into the Dems and said, "I'm here to work." Well, we'd have a green and truly liberal Democratic Party in about three election cycles.
Best time to start would be today. I invite every one of the Greens to work with us in this election cycle, and I'll set every bit of my frustration aside, and pull with you as hard as I can.
After all, the most important thing is to work together for our common goals, and right now that has got to be to remove the neoconservatives from power in order to salvage our constitutional rights.
And when we have your help, and we can get all the Dems to understand that from here on the Green-minded people control a significant swing vote (which is, most places, how you build a third party, guys...) we'll have to let you influence mainstream party decisions in Congress and in the executive branch, because we know that your ideals control a significant slice of voters.
And that, I believe, is the best bet to integrate the Green ideals into our political system. So please, try selling out, and if we don't do good by you, then tell me how full of shit I am in January 2005...
Thanks for listening...
Can Dean catch Saddam and/or Osama?
Monday, November 17, 2003
9:04 PM
At 04:05 PM 11/17/2003, someone on a Vermont Dean list wrote:
> Do you think that Howard Dean will be able to catch Osamo or Saddam?
I may be the only Vermonter ex-pat (now in Oregon) with a serious background in central Asia, so let me take a personal take on this question -- or two questions...
"Can Dean catch Osama Bin Laden?"
Part one, implied: "Will catching Osama Bin Laden cripple Al-Qaeda?"
If you think getting rid of Bin Laden cripples Al-Qaeda in any way, I suspect you are mistaken. Americans seem fixated on the idea that Al-Qaeda is a top-down hierarchy, which is about as ridiculous as saying that the Religious Right in this country is top down. You could take out Pat Robertson and it would not cripple the Religious Right -- in fact, it would probably bring more people to join them and work harder for them. Al-Qaeda is an anarchist front with various groups that talk to each other a lot. It's a lot like the bomb throwing anarchist types of the previous turn of the century period. The more things change, the more they remain the same, and the fewer people show any historical memory.
Part two: "Will Dean be able to catch Osama Bin Laden?"
Osama Bin Laden is the creation of two influences: Saudi oil money, and Republican cold war idiocy. http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html Groups which overlap with Al-Qaeda is reportedly still spying for the CIA in certain parts of the globe, so we can't expect the CIA under Bush and maybe even under Dean to catch Bin Laden. Under Bush, they have no incentive. Even under Dean, they would have a disincentive, because they'd be sacrificing some significant assets.
For Bush, the war against terrorism is a useful perpetual war. For Dean, I think it would be an obstacle to global prosperity and peace. So, I believe that it is more in Dean's interest to see that the people who are terrorists are minimally supported by the US, and that terrorist operations are neutralized where that is possible.
"Can Dean catch Saddam?"
Frankly, I half suspect that Saddam will be back in power within the year. It saddens me to see that as the best hope toward deposing Bush, because whatever you think about the Iraq War, SH is not a good man.
This is a terribly ignorant war, a war based on absolutely no understanding on the ground of central Asian politics or culture. Saddam will lie low and fight a war of attrition against the US forces in Iraq, and on our allies such as the Italians, until we are without support abroad or at home. And then he will step in, mobilize the hearts and minds of the country to support him again, and get the trains running on time a lot faster than Halliburton will.
So, will Dean catch Saddam?
Not if SH's the head of state of Iraq at the time, no. It would hardly be proper. It is not in the interest of the end of terrorism in the world to assassinate heads of state of countries we do not like.
Besides, SH has nothing to do with Al-Qaeda, and it's amazing that we haven't supported him more considering he's the only secularist in a very strategic region of the world. Al-Qaeda despises him, yet most of the people in the US seem unable to absorb that, despite the media's amazement at the many polls where Bush's big lie about SH sheltering Al-Qaeda resurface again and again. The hijackers were Saudis. Bin Laden is a Saudi. Why are we in Iraq rather than in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? I wish more people would ask that louder and more often...
If SH is not the head of state of Iraq, then our best bet is to leave this duty to the State Department rather than to the military or CIA. The State Department can encourage other groups in the middle east and central Asia to discover and retain Saddam for us. However, the military will likely *NEVER* find him -- it's not really their job to assassinate heads of occupied states, and they've never been any good at it. The CIA might be able to do it, but they could do it for Dean as easily if not more easily than for Bush.
Asking if a president can "catch" anyone is absurd. Unless you are talking about Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps...;)
Shoe leather season
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
1:45 PM
Posted on aether, Michael Stein's blog, where he's been posting about how his recent minitour on the Dean Campaign shows that the online community is peaking, and may dissolve into contentiousness at any moment.
I wrote in a comment:
I've been working with the Dean folks for about six months, and I started on the net in 1981. I was an activist in the free-net movement for about a decade, and a digital divide activist, before life interfered.
But I grew up in an incredibly political family. I'm a district leader in Portland Oregon for the Democrats. I'm running a civic engagement nonprofit. I have a few dozen issue campaigns and a handful of candidate campaigns under my belt.
What I can tell you is that the view of the campaign you'll get from touring with Dean is very different from the view on the ground in Portland.
We are converting Dean campaigners into the backbone of a county party badly in need of revitalization. The new blood has really gotten us old political hands out putting together training and mentorships.
The same thing is happening at least in Georgia.
The online community is great, but it's the GOTV (get out the vote) activism on the ground that will win this election, and build and maintain Dean's general reputation with voters.
In Dean's declaration speech he said that this campaign runs on "mouse pads, shoe leather, and hope."
Forget the shoe leather at your peril.
What *I* see is that the online community has become a stable infrastructure to support real life organizing on the ground. It's ripe.
We've set up phone trees so that one person with net access has a few people without to keep informed.
There's a toll free number for unwired folks to find out what's current.
More an more meetings beyond meetups are appearing in communities all over the US. In Portland, we are meeting-challenged -- there are too many things for everyone to go too. This week we have meetups,
half a dozen events to table at, sign waving on the highways, Dean's visit on the 11th and house parties for his birthday on the 15th, and several letter writing parties -- not to mention the smaller coordinating committee meeting to set subcommittee agendas for the next month (finance, tabling, media, multimedia, training, Democratic Party liaison,...), and then the subcommittee stuff which is mostly transacted online.
I'm on five local groups (portland for dean, oregon for dean, portland meetup hosts, portland supercommittee, and out for dean), and monitor a couple national lists, in addition to my local democratic party lists.
But these lists are largely the communications infrastructure of an emerging traditional organizing effort.
Don't say the online efforts are peaking. Say that they're becoming ripe and bearing fruit.
Give 'em hell Howard! ;)
Shava Nerad
shava@efn.org
40-somethings for Dean
/* I don't think it really exists, and I don't have time for another blog...;) */
Will the Senator from Utah please take the stand?
Monday, October 27, 2003
9:36 AM
Today, a friend of mine who collects quotes and threads from current news sent me this:
"I will not stand for it. ... Anything that has to do with 9/11, we have to see it —- anything. There are a lot of theories about 9/11, and as long as there is any document out there that bears on any of those theories, we're going to leave questions unanswered. And we cannot leave questions unanswered."
- Thomas Kean, chairman of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 2001 attacks, about the White House continuing to withhold key documents from the investigation, and that they will be forced to issue subpoenas to obtain them. Lest you think this is a partisan publicity stunt, Kean is the former Republican governor of New Jersey.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/national/26KEAN.html
When Bush signed the legislation establishing the commission, he said that the "investigation should carefully examine all the evidence and follow all the facts, wherever they lead."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/11/20021127-1.html
According to Larry Klayman, chairman of the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch "This Administration is the most secretive of our lifetime, even more secretive than the Nixon Administration. They don't believe the American people or Congress have any right to information."
http://www.misleader.com/daily_mislead/Read.asp?fn=df10272003.html
Well, this all makes me very aggravated...
In all these 9/11 investigations, why don't they just call Orrin Hatch to tell what he knows? It was Hatch who first tipped the DC press that Bin Laden and his network were responsible for the 9/11 plane hijackings -- within a few hours of the first plane hitting the WTC.
In this MSNBC article written in 1998 soon after the Al-Qaeda bombings of the African embassies, Hatch is quoted:
Indeed, to this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said.
“Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union,” he said.
With Senator Hatch so intimate with the affair that it was he who cued us in to his boy-gone-bad's involvement, why don't we just put the man under oath and ask him what he knows?
UN Resolutions of Mass Deception
Thursday, October 16, 2003
10:19 PM
Mr. Secretary General, members of the Security Council, I would like to speak today about the recent UN resolution 1511 concerning international support for the stabilization of Iraq...
I have to say I have reservations. In the United States, we see a country whose delivery of social services -- education, support for the poor, even the maintenance of infrastructure such as the electrical grid and public transportation -- has been in decline. Yet we expect that they will assume the leadership in rebuilding Iraq, when all major contracts are going to their own corporations, in blatant disregard for local custom and standards. The money to rebuild Iraq would be more wisely managed by nearly any country in the world except perhaps Argentina.
Yet the competence of the obese and bloated corporatists of the American occupation crony capitalists is hardly coming into question in this world forum.
We have not only tolerated their occupation of Iraqi territory, but we have agreed to aid them in cleaning up their mess, to their profit.
It is in the spirit of prior UN Resolutions that I call into question our willingness to give humanitarian aid to an aggressive power who will only use that aid to free up funding for their own military interests in the region. I believe that the current dictator in Iraq (since the US has taken control of affairs, and there is no real democracy) is being treated with extraordinary courtesy compared to the prior dictator in Iraq.
Iraq is one of the largest sources of petroleum in the world. But the US, as a nation of consumers, is the largest source of commerce of any country in the world. Is it because we can not afford to turn away the dollar from our borders that we are caving to the empire-building interests of the bully of the West?
I say this with great respect for the American people, who seem unable to evict a neoconservative junta from their capital, despite election standards that would have voided diplomatic and trade relations with any country of the global south. I see the people of the United States as the victims, but perhaps too much the co-operating victims, in their own country's fall from respect in the greater world.
How shall we, the many peoples of the many nations, view this late acquiescence to a bad measure? What was it that transpired this week that caused the members of the security council to turn 180 degrees around on this question?
There are people all over the world who are waiting to see the next cascade of bad developments in this affair. We only pray for the best to come from it.
living an open life
Sunday, October 12, 2003
11:44 AM
A friend of mine was a little shocked that I'd have a map to my house online -- admittedly listed by another organization.
She wrote:
> Shava
> do you really want this to come up in a Google search!?!
>
> http://www.porsfis.org/altmtg/shava.html
Actually, I point to that page for people trying to find the house all the time. You can also find my name (in full) and address in the phone book, on online resumes, and various places. (although interestingly googling "shava nerad portland oregon" comes up with my info from 2001 before I moved to this house...) It would be hard to hide it! Why spend time worrying about it?
I don't think this is what Socrates meant when he said the unexamined life is not worth living -- but the life spent evading examination is a life spent in fear. Won't worry about it, as a matter of principle. If I ever do something good enough that someone wants to come hurt me, they will find me anyway. "Locks are made for honest men."
====
I find that people spend a lot of time concerned about their privacy, and I consider huge swaths of this concern to be "locking the barn door when the horse is gone."
I grew up in a small town as a minister's daughter. My privacy was compromised from the day I was born. Most people in public life have their privacy compromised constantly. To many this is a huge disincentive to participating in the civic sphere.
I find that I like my privacy on a moment to moment basis -- but my reaction to being self-actualized is to be secure in my own belief that the way I am living is beyond others' judgement. I don't worry that someone will dig up something from my past or whatever for my sake, though I sometimes am concerned for my mother's or my son's sensibilities.
People should not be shy to live publically regardless of how they choose to live. I am not ashamed -- as the person I am today -- of any action I've taken in the past. Those that I had reason to be ashamed of at the time, I've made peace with them. And none of them are so bad.
When my father died, I said at his funeral, "My father is my hero. He taught me that you can be flawed, and a role model, and accomplish great good." We need to stop making heros of anti-heros, and stop declining to venerate human, imperfect, effective good people.
Part of that is for those of us who wish to do good in the world to live our lives openly, courageously, and with confidence.
Joseph C. Wilson IV -- it goes deeper than you think...
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
7:19 PM
In July, when Wilson's accusations about the "yellow cake" first emerged, I was overcome with questions.
If the State of the Union speech (SOTUS) was in January, why did Wilson wait until July to talk?
I easily found some very interesting information.
This chat transcript from the Washington Post on April 3, 2003 asks Wilson -- in his capacity as our last diplomatic representative to Iraq before the first Iraq war -- his opinions on the new war.
They introduce him:
====
Joseph C. Wilson was Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad from 1988 to 1991. During "Desert Shield" he was acting ambassador and was responsbile [sic] for the freeing of several hundred American hostages. He was the last official American to meet with Saddam Hussein before "Desert Storm."
====
In that chat, he mentions:
It will be different from Vietnam in that there will not be an active war once we mop up but rather an active resistance that will emerge. Assymetric warfare on their turf....
We will run the country for awhile and return it to Iraq piece by piece. Think of the occupation in terms of ten years. And then only in the most positive conditions. If there is resistance it will test our political will....
As to liberation, we will see a year from now if the Iraqis feel they are liberated. That will help determine victory in this conflict....
...if [Saddam] can disappear possibly some general will surrender while Saddam tries to mount a guerilla campaign. He is getting a bit long in the tooth to play Che Guevara but he is a survivor.
Somehow, it makes sense to me that he might wait from January to July to fling his "j'accuse" at Bush.
By July, it should have been obvious that many of Wilson's worst fears about Iraq were being realized.
This was made poignantly manifest by the increasing casualties from occupation resistance, including a ramp up in casualties immediately before and after Bush's 7/2/03 "Bring them on!" gaffe.
While it is tempting to see this purely as an upwelling of diplomatic and patriotic disgust with our GI George figurine commander-in-chief, it's also canny politics.
Wilson had previously worked as a research fellow in Senator Al Gore's office, and for Speaker of the House Tom Foley -- both prominent Democrats. As a diplomat he might not have had any officially, but he might be a Democratic partisan.
This only gives the administration more traditional reasons to engage in dirty tricks against the man.
And ruining his wife's career -- and possibly threatening her life -- with a single phone call... Well, I can see how that might be too much of a temptation to a hot tempered, hot-blooded Republican neoconservative of the disposition of, say, Karl Rove.
The great thing about this is that, as Pelosi calls for a special prosecutor, the investigation will likely be pressured to move beyond the leak to an independent inquiry into the original 16 words in the SOTUS.
Although Ashcroft is empowered to appoint a special prosecutor, he is going to be under pressure to appoint someone of impeccable neutrality. He's in a no win position.
My father said that professional sports existed for two reasons: to condition young men for military service, and to distract citizens from realizing how fun it would be to use those statistical and strategic braincells for political engagement.
QED ;)
Cuz every girl crazy for a sharp-dressed man...
Thursday, August 28, 2003
12:34 PM
This article makes me realize I live on the edge of a genderfucked ghetto, and kind of like it that way... Metrosexuals count as gender bent? Um. I suppose.
And I suppose kids who pay designer prices for "pre-stressed" pseudopunk fashions, and comb-in-shampoo-out hair color gel count as punks, too...
This article is amusing and/or appalling in blurring of issues surrounding fashion/image, social expectations, sexual orientation, social status/class, and stereotypes!
No one in marketing seems to have noticed that being well groomed, well outfitted, and wearing cologne was a norm before the 60's in certain circles. This is the natural reaction to the erosion of "GQ Man" due to casual Fridays and laid back west coast business manners, not a gender liberation movement.
MARKETING FOCUS
Gender Blending
By Thomas Mucha
http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,,51920,00.html
If sex sells, then so does metrosex. This summer's hottest
marketing buzzword, "metrosexual" defines any urban,
well-educated, affluent man who is in touch with his femininity.
Your average metrosexual wears Bruno Magli, reads Details
magazine, uses hair care products -- and is straight as an arrow.
"Metrosexuals are finding the courage to enter the female domain
without fear of losing their status as 'real' men," explains
Marian Salzman, chief strategy officer at Euro RSCG Worldwide, a
communications firm that just released a voluminous marketing
study on the trend. The implications are huge, although no one
can assess the nascent market's value. "There is room for a
metrosexual voice in every [product] classification pitching men
under 50," Salzman claims.
The signs are everywhere. Conde Nast Publications is launching a
shopping magazine for men. Axe deodorant body spray, which is
essentially male perfume disguised as deodorant, now rivals
uber-masculine Old Spice in market share. A variety of products
and trends -- Diesel Jeans, Mini Cooper, Vespa, even yoga and
wine bars -- thrive on the refined tastes and habits of
metrosexuals. And according to marketing consultant Cheryl
Swanson of Toniq, three highly successful products and brands --
Apple's iMac, the Volkswagen Beetle, and Nike's ubiquitous swoosh
-- work so well precisely because their elegant, curvaceous
designs appeal to softer sensibilities. "It's not masculine or
feminine," she argues. "It's a human aesthetic." (In fact,
Swanson prefers the broader term "gender blending" to describe
the trend.)
Read the whole thing, giggle and weep...!
To a friend quitting smoking
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
11:25 PM
First, I think folks should be proud of trying. Nicotine is fully as addictive as opiates, for some of the same reasons -- yet we don't make quitting smoking the heroic thing that kicking heroine would be. Jon you are a hero. You are moving mountains in your personal reality, and of course it's hard, but we know you can do it, and those of us who've been through it feel for you because it SUUUUUCKS! ;)
I started smoking in my early 20's, when my group at work would be in design meetings in a literally smoke-filled room for six hours a day. It was starting to make me insane. My best friend suggested that I buy a pack of cloves, light one up, and just leave it burning in the ashtray. Since most people don't like the smell, they'd have to either stop smoking, or put up with it.
I started just lighting it up, and then started to take a pull or two (second hand smoke is easier when you are smoking too). I only ever got up to about two cigs a day.
But then I realized I was addicted, and the bad things about cloves started coming out in the presses. I decided to quit.
Now, to me, nicotine urges are visceral. They are just as strong as real hunger, or real lust. So I said to myself, "Self, you have a pretty healthy libido. And in the spring when the boys come out with their spandex bike shorts and their bikes, you could just melt. Hell, you could just jump one of those puppies and wrestle him to the grass. But you don't. And it's all social conditioning. It's all personal discipline. So if you don't have to jump the next cute boy, you don't have to light up this next cancer stick. It's as simple as that."
And every time I feel like lighting up, I remember it's no more powerful that the urge for sex. I'm just nicotine celibate.
For years, because I knew I am still addicted, and I know I can (LITERALLY) stop any time, I would smoke every so often just socially when I was with other smokers. Or every so often when I was REALLY REALLY TENSE -- because Barb's right, its comforting, it goes straight to the limbic center in the brain.
But since my dad died last year of emphysema (essentially...) Joseph has asked me to please never smoke again. And I've promised him and stuck to it.
Good luck!
Ashcroft or McCarthy -- you decide...
Wednesday, August 20, 2003
2:17 AM
(Modified from this article on Ashcroft for illustrative purposes.)
Senator Joe McCarthy delivered a clarion defense of the McCarran Act (The Internal Security Act of 1950), calling the embattled law instrumental in fighting communism.
"While our job is not finished, we have used the tools provided in the McCarran Act to fulfill our first responsibility to protect the American people," McCarthy said in a speech that kicked off an effort to counter opposition to the law amid signs such opposition is gaining traction.
"We have used these tools to prevent communists from unleashing death and destruction on our soil. We have used these tools to save American lives. We have used these tools to provide the security that ensures liberty."
McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator, gave several examples of how he said the law had helped law enforcement officials prevent communist attacks in the United States.
He noted that the recently released congressional report on the Russian activities pointed to several problems in the country's anti-communist efforts, such as lack of cooperation and communication between intelligence and law enforcement agencies. He said the McCarran Act corrected the problems.
The law has also ensured that modern technology, such precise fingerprint matching, can be used to combat communism, McCarthy said.
"To abandon these tools would senselessly imperil American lives and American liberty, and ignore the lessons of the advances of the communist threat," Ashcroft said.
The law, hurriedly and overwhelmingly passed by Congress, has come under increasing criticism from those across the political spectrum who say it infringes on Americans' civil liberties and could hurt innocent people.
"The problem is this government has decided to allow the FBI to search our homes without telling us, to seize our library records even when it's not remotely related to criminal activity," said Roger Baldwin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington office.
As long as McCarthy "surrounds himself with the horror and tragedy of the Russian bomb, and soldiers dying for liberty, he feels he insulates himself from legitimate criticism," Baldwin said.
McCarthy’s effort to defend the law will include similar speeches during a nationwide tour over the next several weeks. The Justice Department has asked all U.S. Attorneys to hold public meetings and write opinion pieces for local newspapers explaining why the law is necessary. And the Department unveiled a new pamphlet series designed to highlight the law's successes.
"We welcome the debate," said J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director. "But we want to make sure the American people....have all the facts. This is just to set the record straight."
In his speech, McCarthy said a recent poll showed Americans believe by a 2 to 1 majority that the McCarran Act is "a necessary and effective tool that protects liberty, because it targets communists." And, McCarthy said, the poll showed 91 percent of Americans say the law has not affected their civil rights or those of their families.
Nevertheless, the law appears to be losing support in Congress and across the country.
The House last month voted not to fund a portion of the McCarran Act that would have allowed federal agents to delay notification of searches of peoples' homes. In the Senate earlier this year, an effort by California Senator Richard Nixon to extend some provisions of the law set to expire in 1955 failed.
Several pieces of legislation are pending in Congress, with support from members of both parties, to roll back or limit aspects of the law. More than 150 communities, including three states, have passed resolutions decrying the McCarran Act.
Several prominent Democrats have condemned McCarthy and the McCarran Act, and Tuesday's speech added to their fodder.
Senator Adlai Stephenson said "(McCarthy) must not be allowed to compromise our freedoms any further" and called for a rollback of "anti-communist tactics that go far beyond protecting our country and erode the rights of average Americans."
Dean Acheson said McCarthy’s work with the House Un-American Activities Committee "has rolled over our rights for the last two years."
Concern about the law isn't limited to Democrats. Several conservative groups, including the Eagle Forum and the American Conservative Union, also have registered opposition to elements of the law, on civil liberties grounds. Vermont Senator Ralph Flanders, a Republican, told the Associated Press last week "there may come a time, and it may be next year, when we need to pull it back."
Hoover -- wearing a white tie that said "Freedom" in red letters across it -- dismissed criticism of the McCarran Act as the work of "a small, vocal minority" spreading misinformation.
McCarthy delivered his speech in a conference room at the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington think tank that is the intellectual home of much Eisenhower administration policy. He spoke before a blue backdrop bearing the words "Preserving Life and Liberty." He grounded the speech in key historical themes, quoting several times from President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and seeking throughout to tie anti-communism and the cold war to the grand battles of American history.
McCarthy ended the speech with an echo of the Gettysburg Address, saying "as long as there is an America, liberty must not, will not, shall not perish from the earth."
(for more historical comparisons see
http://huac.tripod.com/
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAacheson.htm
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/mccarran-act-intro.html
http://www.multied.com/documents/McCarran.html )
Just a little too scary how easy that was to do...
Civitas: Remembering Dr. King
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
10:16 AM
It's been since May, when I got pneumonia, that I've posted here. Live has been interesting and very very busy, and somewhat of a struggle -- more on that later.
But right now, I'm engaged in a project called Portland Civitas, which is aimed to give us a nonviolent alternative (in the full satyagraha sense) to confronting the security cordon at Bush's appearance here on 8/21.
In putting this together, I went back and formally reviewed Dr. King's adaptation of satyagraha into his principles of nonviolence and nonviolent action (taken from the King Center's glossary).
SIX PRINCIPLES OF NONVIOLENCE - Fundamental tenets of Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolence described in his first book, Stride Toward Freedom. The six principles include: (1.) Nonviolence is not passive, but requires courage; (2.) Nonviolence seeks reconciliation, not defeat of an adversary; (3.) Nonviolent action is directed at eliminating evil, not destroying an evil-doer; (4.) A willingness to accept suffering for the cause, if necessary, but never to inflict it; (5.) A rejection of hatred, animosity or violence of the spirit, as well as refusal to commit physical violence; and (6.) Faith that justice will prevail.
SIX STEPS OF NONVIOLENT SOCIAL CHANGE - A sequential process of nonviolent conflict-resolution and social change based on Dr. King’s teachings. The Six Steps of Nonviolence developed by The King Center include: (1.) Information gathering and research to get the facts straight; (2.) Education of adversaries and the public about the facts of the dispute; (3.) Personal Commitment to nonviolent attitudes and action; (4.) Negotiation with adversary in a spirit of goodwill to correct injustice; (5.)Nonviolent direct action, such as marches, boycotts, mass demonstrations, picketing, sit-ins etc., to help persuade or compel adversary to work toward dispute-resolution; (6.) Reconciliation of adversaries in a win-win outcome in establishing a sense of community.
I am struck at how many of the nonviolent demonstrations I have attended have lost many of these principles. Reconciliation, not defeat. Negotiation. Rejection of hatred and animosity. These are lost even in the peace movement today.
So, I'm not complaining about the weather. I'm going to do something about it. On 8/21, when George Bush comes to town, I expect that he is going to be happy to have heads cracked at the site of his visit, because "Little Beirut" (as the DC security folks call Portland) is a good example to make for the rest of the country to show how he needs security and how awful these "liberal radicals" are.
I hope to produce a peaceful event, far from the site of the visit, where we can teach, build community, and register several thousand new voters. I think that's more confrontational in a nonviolent sort of way.
Right now, we've got the buy in from the Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, and Socialists in Multnomah County. I had a committee of Dems and Socialists at my house last night (the Green and Libertarian leadership couldn't make it this week, but maybe next). I'm even planning on inviting the local GOP folks to register voters and teach-in if they wish. Reconciliation. When have we seen this kind of cooperation among parties here for a political event?
I'm going to the city council next week with a bunch of moms and kids to appeal to the city to give us financial support on the basis that positive nonviolent action reduces the load on the city's obligation to provide a security cordon around Bush. Negotiation. Ideally we'll come out of that with an endorsement and funding, and some excellent site set aside for us.
The biggest problem we have is getting credibility with the press. Getting publicity and coverage for this is going to be the most interesting, low-lead-time spin I may have ever done in my life.
Wish me luck!
Inverted Totalitarianism
Friday, May 02, 2003
8:51 AM
The Nation does it again. A wonderfully awfully thought provoking article.
Purification rituals and Unitarian Universalists
Saturday, April 19, 2003
8:53 AM
A friend on a local UU list asks:
How to understand folks like these? I can't imagine the UU equivalent.
[story on Christians nailing themselves to crosses]
BTW, the arabnews coverage is very evenhanded on this item.
/* in which Dave and I prove that we both tend to J in our Myers-Briggs profiles -- love you Dave! ;) */
Our entire culture is based around insulating ourselves from disease, pain, old age, death. Other cultures embrace these as part of life -- even play with the ideas. They are confronted, but not denied or fought against.
It is far more productive for a person to "die" ritually, and have a reason to live again, than for a person to descend into a living hell of (say) addiction because his or her culture gives no way for a person to make him or herself clean without experiencing true death.
Want to imagine a UU version of this? We tend to do it more symbolically, more rarified than Chod (see below). We tend to flirt with the idea of ego death coyly, rather than try to induce extreme spiritual experiences. Back in the day, some of us played with drugs to this end, rather than nails and crosses...;)
These things are often described as mysteries (quite different from secrets!), because if they are revealed to people who don't understand the experience, people make fun of them. Rather like pre-teens giggling about kissy stuff.
So you don't talk about stuff that's really heavy and transformative (near death experiences, sex, initiations) because, if things are spoken about in front of folks who don't understand, the sacred nature will get profaned in a split second.
For those truly curious about the psychology and spirituality of things like this in more classical traditions, I invite you to search for "kavadi" in your favorite search engine (try to find the native tradition rather than the american wannabes). Or if you want to dig a little more, try the more symbolic but no less intense "dzogchen chod ritual."
For the North American equivalent, look into the history of the Sun Dance.
If you have a truly open mind and a strong stomach, read this: (found searching for sun dance references): article on ritual suspension from hooks I really can't recommend surfing around the rest of this site, but the essay in relevant and compelling.
And now for something completely different...
Here's a lightweight symbolic ritual for letting go of ego and conditions I did at a CUUPs retreat once:
The exercise is advertised as an initiation ritual through maskmaking. There are little plastic craft masks, and oodles of materials (clay plaster beads feathers paints, found objects,...)
First, you ask everyone to introduce themselves in a sentence or two. You explain that we are going to make five masks over the course of the afternoon, so people should work quickly, without judging the art quality and so on, to work to free creative impulses and expression.
The first mask, you tell them, should represent the most important aspect of themselves. For one person, it might be as-parent, for another as-professional, and so on.
When the masks are finished, go around a circle and have each person talk about how the mask represents them, and then each person sets their first mask on a special place set up for only their masks.
Second mask: a bit less time is allotted to make the second-most important aspec of self. By this time, people are usually tossing materials back and forth and chatting animatedly. Again, but keep it moving, discuss the masks in a circle, and set them aside in the special little mask nooks or altars.
Third mask: Just about the same thing, faster.
break.
Fourth mask: Make a mask of what you most desire to be. Same general process.
Fifth mask: break into pairs. Make plain white masks of plaster of paris over the person's face -- life masks. set these aside on a canvas to dry.
Go outside, and build a fire, which we will sit around until the plaster masks are dry. When the fire is going well, everyone go inside and bring out their four masks -- three roles and one desire each.
Inform folks that these roles that they take on are, in fact, just masks. They are not the self. They are not existentially attached to the person who they are. Our purpose now, is to cast the masks into the fire -- all four masks, each person.
It's very rare to see someone just shrug and throw the masks in. People freak slightly. Not only do these represent precious ideas to them, but they worked hard on them and put materials into them. Why should they burn them? I've had people walk out at this point -- and that's fine. Usually one person will toss a mask in first, and then others will start doing so also. Some people throw all their masks in at once. Some throw them each in in turn, thoughtfully. Some throw them in as though giving something up. Some throw them in as though getting rid of something.
When all the masks have burned that are going into the fire, go back inside. Talk about ego and desire. Talk about the freedom of understanding how the ego is not the self -- that our roles and purposes are not *who* we are, they are what we do. They are masks we make for ourselves, and/or that others make for us.
Ground. Have dinner together. Talk.
Send people home with the blank white lifemasks. Tell them it's their choice to keep them or not, decorate them or not. Thank them for the privilege of working with them.
Part friends.
This is an exceptionally watered down, intellectual version of Chod. No one has any threatening illusion of being sliced into pieces and consumed, then reborn -- but the effect might just (then or eventually) be similar. People might or might not have a feeling of being able to let go of old disappointments, old mistakes, old bad images of self, and so on. They might feel free to evaluate future actions clearly.
But they do not have an overwhelming sensory/emotional experience to get them so completely out of their heads that their memory, their thoughts, their rational self, isn't shut up for the few seconds even that they might need to come out completely clean.
It's not generally our style, as UUs, to truly get out of our heads ever.
But all of us have our dark nights of the soul. Sometimes we repress or hide them. Often we are ashamed of them, and never speak of them. We just rarely induce them on purpose, nor do we often understand how to use them as a traditional form of spiritual technology. We have traded in the Chapel Perilous for Starbucks.
Of all these hale blithe idiots who wear yuppie sportswear with "No Fear" on it, I sometimes fantasize that a few of them actually know what they're saying.
Justice for All -- as the prison population in the US reaches 2,000,000
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
4:06 PM
If you asked me, there are three causes for our large percentage incarcerated.
One obvious cause is the war on drugs -- and I'd leave it as an exercise for the reader why we have such excessive issues with addiction and intoxicant over-use in this country -- a question which should be addressed before we can truly debate legalization of whatever, IMNSHO.
Another cause is the breakdown of that civil society formula I proposed:
o...Everyone has something to win.
o...Everyone has something to lose.
o...Everyone has some faith in the system to preserve the first two.
How many of those incarcerated are felons by dint of a total loss of faith in civil society, and what can we do to change that?
And last (and this is my particular bailiwick) we have a Jeffersonian democracy without a well educated and informed electorate. Ask most any 20 year old what input he or she has into the system, and s/he will tell you "I have one bullshit vote that isn't worth making." Our current system seems to go out of the way to keep people from understanding how to influence their own democracy.
My crusade is to educate the members of our democracy in civics. It sounds very simple. But no children in public school learn real civics, and I rarely meet a person my own age (44) who understands the mechanisms by which s/he can influence the system.
About five years ago, I was brainstorming with a PoliSci professor, as to how people don't teach real civics, and he speculated that some of his grad students don't really understand "the system," because it's complex systems theory. I was skeptical, because my son Joseph was about five at the time, and he was really internalizing the ecological model. Ecology is, essentially, a metaphor of complex systems theory that is introduced so early now as to be a basic part of our cultural myths.
My goal is to write a curriculum which explains the real workings and inter-relationships of all the players: media, bureaucracy, elected officials, NGOs, trade/business association, voters, and so on. A curriculum that explains how to get access to each of these players, and how to test the results of your efforts. Creating organizing plans, and media plans. Volunteer coordination for grassroots groups.
I see so many young people now who are being told that they need to vote to get a voice -- and they (rightly) know BS when they smell it! To bring up a new generation of involved citizens who can do more than march in the streets and raise hell, we need to reinstill civitas by empowering these folks.
Without an empowered citizenship, the erosion of civil society, loss of rights, and rise of fascistic practices in this country is nearly assured.
Gratitude
Monday, April 14, 2003
8:43 PM
Well, I'm down with pneumonia, out of sick time, and just weak as a kitten, and my body has fallen a bit out from under me. I'm fine, though, on a relative scale.
I told Joseph, when I ended up in the hospital on Thursday:
We need to be grateful. I don't have SARS, which might have killed me. We live four blocks from a very good hospital. It has good water, power, medicines, equipment, good personnel, and isn't overwhelmed with people in far worse shape than I am.
In Iraq, folks, I would be dead today, and it would never be counted as collateral damage.
And you know, it's funny, it really gave Joseph courage and confidence that I'd be alright, to hear how much better off we are here. To know that in this time and place, bacterial pneumonia is an easy thing to fix, caught early.
Thank God for Good Sam, is all I can say. The doctor told me I nailed it perfectly, arriving with a rising temperature of 103F on extra strength Tylenol, and that if I'd gone to sleep without going to the hospital, I'd be far worse off.
But I'm home, and I'll be alright, insh'allah.
Wah. What a week...
When I got home from the hospital...
8:42 PM
I wrote to my friends at the UU church in Eugene:
Well, I'm down with pneumonia, out of sick time, and just weak as a kitten, and my body has fallen a bit out from under me. I'm fine, though, on a relative scale.
I told Joseph, when I ended up in the hospital on Thursday:
We need to be grateful. I don't have SARS, which might have killed me. We live four blocks from a very good hospital. It has good water, power, medicines, equipment, good personnel, and isn't overwhelmed with people in far worse shape than I am.
In Iraq, folks, I would be dead today, and it would never be counted as collateral damage.
And you know, it's funny, it really gave Joseph courage and confidence that I'd be alright, to hear how much better off we are here. To know that in this time and place, bacterial pneumonia is an easy thing to fix, caught early.
Thank God for Good Sam, is all I can say. The doctor told me I nailed it perfectly, arriving with a rising temperature of 103F on extra strength Tylenol, and that if I'd gone to sleep without going to the hospital, I'd be far worse off.
But I'm home, and I'll be alright, insh'allah.
Wah. What a week...
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Sunday, April 13, 2003
11:49 AM
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11:45 AM
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9:14 AM
On the 260th anniversary of Jefferson's birth, I can't help thinking about President's Day. We honor the two most prominent standing commanders-in-chief of our nation with a bank holiday in February. But do we honor the man whose name becomes synonymous with the birth of American democracy in the rest of the world? How many people know that April 13 is Jefferson's birthday? How many Americans could respond to the term "Jeffersonian democracy" with some idea of what it especially means?
In this time of war I find myself wondering: why do we honor the war presidents, but not the presidents such as Adams or Jefferson, or even economic saints such as Hamilton (who by foreign birth -- and probably by his mixed race -- was not a candidate for the presidency) for their birthdays?
Frankly, I want to create a category of Federal working holiday -- today, let us all work for democracy, and to improve society, for the remembrance of Thomas Jefferson.
And heck, let's give Hamilton and Greenspan bank holidays. It would only be appropriate.
McGovern tells it like he sees it!
Friday, April 04, 2003
4:41 PM
From The Nation:
The Reason Why
by George McGovern
Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's true greatness. Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.
Oh. My. God. And it gets more intense from there.
Must read! This is like a shot across the bow to the Bush Administration!
Spirited Away
Sunday, March 30, 2003
11:58 PM
[this is a review I wrote on 9/30/02, dug up for a friend now that the film's won a well-deserved Oscar]
Speak harshly to your little boy, and beat him when he sneezes!
He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases!
,,,,,,,,,,,[Waaah! Waaah! Waaah!]
..................................... -- "lewis carroll" Alice in Wonderland
Isn't it a pity that many children will never be creeped out and really
fascinated and engaged in Alice in Wonderland, because they only ever saw
it on a screen?
I just returned from seeing Spirited Away (subtitled version) at the Loew's
Theatre in Times Square. From my hotel, if you cut through the McDonald's,
between the backdoor at 41st St and the front door at 42nd St, then wait
for the light at the crosswalk halfway down the block between Broadway and
"Fashion" Avenues, it's just about right there. I came 3000 miles today to
see this film, and had to commit to going on a four day insane business
trip to get to do it.
When we got a DVD player recently (finally), I asked Joseph what he wanted
the first DVD we bought to be, and he picked Princess Mononoke. Good
taste! There is real magick in Miyazaki's work, and when I heard that
Spirited Away (http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/sen/) had become the
highest grossing film in Japan ever, outstripping Titanic, I began to wait
with bated breath for the film to come to the states.
Living in Portland, Oregon, I might never see the subtitled version there,
though we'd likely get the dub. But as soon as I settled in at my hotel, I
got the first possible ticket.
I held my breath and crossed the bridge...
Miyazaki's film is more than breathtakingly beautiful -- that amazing
melange of focus that epitomizes anime, with the 2d figures passing in
front of landscapes and background elements that obviously outstrip the
foreground characters. This film creates a reality that is a welter of
fear, wonder, terror, love, beauty, devotion, callousness, and cuteness --
with an Alice-like sense of the absurd.
Here's the difference -- for those of you who are familiar with "hot and
cold media" in McLuhan, Alice's rabbit hole is "hot." Carroll shoves you
into loosely veiled absurdities that represent the realities of his Oxford
life, and with a Pythonesque (or is that backwards? ;) "wink wink nod nod,"
he makes you laugh at his silly translations.
Spirited Away is "cool." It presents you with action, and compels the
minds eye to create a completely novel reality around the scraps of
patterns of light, reflected on the floor, painting dragons in the motes of
dust in a sunbeam. It's mimetic jazz. I am swept up in that sense of
wonder I remember from childhood as I tried to figure out what all this
reality *was* flowing around me.
Alice, translated to film, loses content. Spirited Away creates content
within the viewer. Everything about it calls up half remembered things you
may never have seen before. In the spirit of the thing itself, I won't
review a bit of the movie itself -- the medium is the message.
Experience the medium. Go see this. In the subtitled version, if
possible, assuming the dub is as trashy as Mononoke's (sorry Billy Bob!).
May your dreams be rich!
The thin red, white and blue line
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
12:11 AM
In the late 1700's, a superpower in global trade was brought to failure by a small force of colonialists, under-armed and hardly trained, who had ideas. The power of these ideas were mostly about setting aside the conventional ideas of an old order. Some of these ideas were about freedom -- but some were about warfare.
Warfare in Europe was still run by the conventions that pre-dated the gun. The idea of the "thin red line" -- the broad advance of infantry, even into the face of artillery and small arms fire -- had never been completely overthrown in tactics. But the colonists had learned a new sort of warfare from the natives of the new world. They had learned guerilla warfare -- to hide in cover and fire from cover, to evade and run and then strike again. To know the territory better than the invader. To strike at ungentlemanly times, unannounced and in raids rather than battles.
There were many reasons for the defeat of the British -- long supply lines, instability at home, whatever -- but one of the major reasons for the high cost of the war to the British crown was the humiliating defeats suffered at the hands of inferior forces due to a new way of fighting a war.
The new nation of the United States reaped the whirlwind in less than a century in their own civil war.
But today, the US is facing an inferior power. Like George III (no, not W, third after his father and Washington, but the King of England) we are laughing at the prospects of this under-equipped lesser force resisting us.
But like the British Crown, we may be falsely underestimating a canny foe.
We've advanced to Baghdad. Tonight I hear we are 80 clicks from the city.
Saddam is a clever man, and ruthless. He sounds confident. He has allowed the coalition forces to over-run his homeland. How could he expect to succeed?
There are, I believe, only two things that could allow him to win. One is controlling the sympathy of the largest possible sphere of influence. The other is to lean on the terrorism we accuse him of fostering, the weapons of mass destruction.
What if the new detente is that we must abandon Iraq or face the release of WMD on our own cities? We've already proven that we can not totally secure our borders. What if we can't find Saddam's weapons of mass destruction -- because they are here?
So, what happens then? We advance on Baghdad. We cause enough damage against the Iraqis' minor -- but brave -- resistance so as to garner sympathy for the Iraqis in the Arab world, in the middle east and central Asia, in all the places where Americans are less well loved such as Malaysia or perhaps any of the dozens of other countries we've bombed in the last century...
And Saddam tells us that if we go any further, he releases another whirlwind on us. How would we test it? How would we disprove it? How, strategically, or tactically, could we possibly react?
If we destroy Baghdad, we don't disarm the weapons in our own cities. If we withdraw, at what consequence to international politics? To me, this seems like the hugest problem to speculate on. What would we do? What are the contingencies? How likely is this nightmare scenario?
We say that after 9/11, everything changed, and yet we are heading into war with the same old strategy and tactics. Why could Saddam be so confident, and why might he not be a fool?
He would be insane to try this -- but what else could he realistically do, to fend us off? We've already called him a dictator, a madman, and a terrorist. What has he to lose? And how could anyone really, really blame him? To threaten us with harm to our far away noncoms, when he faces us down in his capital full of civilians?
In another recent essay (not published here) I described the necessaries of maintaining civil society:
o everyone must have something to gain
o everyone must have something to lose
o there must be reliable mechanisms which at least appear to support this economy of gains and losses
The threat of American Hegemony appears to destabilize this equation. If we believe that today's world is truly a global society, then to survive it must be a truly global civil society, or we all stand to lose.
We call it the War on Terrorism, yet we may not be fully embracing the risks.
What to do?
Tuesday, March 18, 2003
7:54 AM
I couldn't say it better myself. There really is no reason being given to the free people of the world. There are no checks and balances. I hope enough people strike and resign to put Blair out of business. But what can we do in the US?
Thoughts about posting "Just shoot him!"
Friday, March 14, 2003
12:35 AM
Someone reading a humor piece where I advocate shooting men who leave their wives and kids might think I was some kind of fringe radical feminist yahoo who hated men. Or at least, some fed-up old prune who had given up on them.
Mind you, I am not against men. In fact, I rather like rubbing up against one now and again, and it's been a long drought... Most of the real friends I've had in my life have been men. I find men more honest and reliable (at the same time) than women, in general.
Women are very good at finding reasons to cut you, and they are much more competitive with other women -- which, alas, they identify me as freely. And I am not a woman who respects, blindly, the feminine institutions. I have a pretty face and good skin, so when I am not trying to broadcast "trust signals" to a corporate sort or I am not playing with image (going out and being a chameleon at some music club), I won't wear makeup. I don't think about clothes the way most women do, because I see clothes as a symbolic vocabulary. I clean up well, but none of these things matter to me *existentially*.
This makes me a pariah to much of female company, even at 44... The stylish ones can't believe I don't take it seriously, and the geeky ones can't believe I'd cave into the patriarchal or uncomfortable mainstream. So with so many women, I am doomed.
Most men, I explain this and they say, "Well, ok. Cool." Regardless of their opinion of fashion.
So, to me, men seem to have, if not more *sense*, at least more ability to let me be who I am, so long as I don't ask much.
So I am not against men at all. I like men.
I am against faithless men. I am not jealous, and I am not particularly monogamous by nature, but I do abide by the covenants of a relationship, and I am fiercely loyal. And beyond all rational likelihood, my last two husbands have left me for:
younger women
named Melissa
from North Carolina (tho one was *living* in Portland at the time)
called "Missy" as children
magnolias
predatory
My life is, in fact, stranger than fiction. Shortly after we moved to Portland from Eugene (so visitation could be even slightly sane), we were at a potluck. Joseph had found a woman who really new how to deal with smart kids on a respectful, fun, and engaging level. After a bit, he asked her, "What's your name, anyway?" She said, "My name is Melissa."
Joseph was sitting back-to-back with me on a bench. I could feel him slump. He apologized, "I'm sorry, I don't think I can be friends with you. My mother has bad luck with Melissas."
I grew up in a culture where the woman should be ashamed to be left on her own with the children, regardless of the blame. It's sometimes very hard for me. But I am determined that the next committed relationship I get into -- if ever -- will be with a man who understands loyalty.
Unfortunately, in addition, he has to be able to put up with me, and have a very high level of ch'i, brilliant, socially conscious, liberal but not empty headed, spiritual and mystical but not new agey, non-puritanical, intellectual, internationally minded, and be single and within a decade-ish in age. But alas, I think I am looking to find a chimera.
I suspect advocating shooting the guy who's going to leave me doesn't increase my prospects. But, I am a slave to the muse...;)
Just shoot him! (a modest proposal)
Thursday, March 13, 2003
11:43 PM
Folks who know me know that I am as sweet and nonviolent a person as could be in real life. My father once described himself as a Militant Pacifist: “People who believe in solving problems with guns,” he declared, “should be shot. And if it would solve the paradox, I’d volunteer to be the first one.”
I’m not quite that self-sacrificing, but I’m not one to advocate violence outside of extreme circumstances.
That said, let me send this message to American women facing single parenthood: JUST SHOOT HIM.
Better yet, be clever and get someone else to do it for you, such that it will never be traced.
You see, there are so many problems with having an ex-husband. They tend to have less scruples with their lawyers. They tend to pay child support late, when they pay at all. If, gods help you, you end up on welfare, you’ll be punished by the harshest public policy outside the prison system in order to pay your rent and feed your kids.
If your man has been a wastrel, no good job history, paid under the table – you may be out of luck.
But by all means, if he’s a decent hardworking soul, and a productive and faithful member of capitalist American society -- just shoot him.
You see, getting child support and custody is a terrible hassle. And you haven’t faced hell until you’ve been thrown into the safety net, such as it is.
But widows are sealed and approved by the US government as virtuous women. If he dies, you get support for you and your kids until the kids are twenty. No questions asked (unless you get caught on murder charges).
It’s obvious where the public policy morality falls on this one – a woman on welfare is a whore. God alone knows what she did to deserve being thrown on public support. Maybe (and this was me a few years back) her husband was the only person in the family with a job currently, and he’s found another woman to run off with two weeks before rent’s due, and leaves her with half a month of rent in the bank. Maybe he’s just disappeared. Maybe she’s taken the children and fled to a new location because of abuse.
Regardless, it’s generally not the man who is punished. Charges of adultery? Unlikely. Chase him down for child support? It’s amazing how indigent some men can look on paper. It’s truly amazing what threats of legal (or illegal) action can intimidate a woman in an uncertain situation.
Just shoot him. Heck, even if you shoot him in bed with his mistress, you’ll get off scot free in most states. And then, you’ll get social security survivor benefits for a long time, and never have to deal with his sorry face again.
All right, this is an immodest proposal. I don’t mean it for a second that a woman should consider shooting her to-be-ex. In fact, I still consider my recent ex to be a fine human being – and I hope, a friend, even after he reads this!
Public policy still stands – a widow deserves support for herself and her children. A woman scorned deserves scorn. There’s no other way to explain the public policy we’ve got.
We made divorce simple and easy, forgetting that barriers to divorce also protect the family, even though bad marriages hurt it. Ugly divorce courts never came between a man and his passions. The less he cares about his kids, the easier it is to consider divorce, and the harsher the tactics. But the ease of marriage probably dissolves some unions that could have been made solid, with a bit more patience and incentive to avoid the judgement of the courts.
Now, I’m not proposing that we cut off the widows. That would be a pity and a shame, and against the Masonic principles of our Founding Fathers. Like all political pundits, I channel the will of the FFs directly, so you can take it from me.
But perhaps, Mr. Bush, as you consider protecting families through making welfare more onerous, before encouraging marriage by giving women the option of marrying to get off welfare in a hurry (I can see that now – MSW’s as yentas -- “Six weeks, guaranteed, we find you a husband, or your money back. Of course, we cut of benefits at eight weeks, and we can’t promise he’ll be any better than the last one…”), maybe you should consider the inequities to the mothers (and it is mostly mothers) who head up 30% of the households with children today in this country...
Can we get a Republican administration to give single mothers and their children a break?
On second thought, just shoot him.
civic boddhisattvas
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
10:19 AM
What this country needs is a whole set of civic boddhisattvas -- people who put the enlightenment of their community ahead of personal material goals. I really enjoyed Mark Morford's article on sfgate today. Bush says to be patriotic we must consume. Morford says to be patriotic (or, at least, to discombobulate the greyface right) we must live deeply and exercise kindness (boddhicitta!).
Far out, Mark! ;)
Buddy can you spare...
Saturday, March 08, 2003
12:31 AM
The Guardian is speculating that the federal funds rate may be taken down to one percent in the light of our recent miserable employment numbers here in the states. And that number seemed so dramatic, so I decided to dig a bit.
The Federal Reserve Board only has historical numbers for the federal funds and prime rates going back to the middle fifties, which I find questionable. But it's been since the middle 50's that either rate has been so low.
This isn't looking like the time back in the 70's when those numbers were high, even in the midst of recession. Perhaps I'm looking at the wrong trend.
The last time the prime rate passed 4.25 on the way down was in 1929. Wonder why I have to go to some random page at the FRB in St. Louis to go that far back?
I'm feeling down along with the economy. Maybe singing a bit of white blues will make me feel better...
They used to tell me I was building a dream
And so I followed the mob.
When there was a dot to com or chips to make,
I was always there right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory and tech.
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for a check?
Once I built out fiber, made my mark,
Paid my payroll on time.
Once I built out fiber, now it's dark.
Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once we had two towers up to the sun,
Steel and glass in its prime.
Once we built two towers, now they're gone.
Brother, can you spare a dime?
Soon in khaki suits, gee we'll look swell,
Full of that Yankee-Doodly-dumb.
Ninety-five billion bucks shot to hell,
And I was the kid with the drum.
Say, don't you remember, they called me "Al"
It was "Al" all the time.
Why don't you remember, I'm your pal?
Say buddy, can you spare a dime?
Or, maybe not..
Let sleeping dogs (and fox news) lie!
Friday, March 07, 2003
11:30 PM
Referring to this article.
At 07:07 PM 3/6/2003, another friend wrote:
The ruling basically declares it is technically not against any
law, rule, or regulation to deliberately lie or distort the news on a
television broadcast.
Thank god it's not criminal for the media to lie.
It never has been, except when the lying is damaging to the reputation of persons. (libel, slander)
There are two issues here, one is ethical and one is legal.
Ethically, it is against all the professional codes of journalistic conduct for a journalist to deliberately lie (including editors and publishers instructing their journalists to lie).
You can check out the US journalistic professional ethics that the plaintiffs kept to, and their management did not. And here's an index to international standards.
However, the moment the law enters into deciding the truth in journalism, you are sunk. You may as well say goodbye to freedom of the press. It should absolutely not be illegal for media to lie, even if you don't like the case in point.
What would happen in the courts if every time a journalist reported that global warming was effecting climate, that the oil companies could take them to court for distorting the news? That would only be civil damages. What if every time a journalist said Ashcroft's policies were leading us into a loss of personal freedoms -- s/he could be put in jail?
If you think journalists shouldn't be allowed to lie -- who gets to decide, in court, what is the truth?
This is a terrible slippery slope issue, and the courts were perfectly justified.
What scares me is Fox saying that the court ruling "totally vindicated" them. If the woman's allegations were correct, then they were guilty of egregious misconduct according to journalistic ethics, and should be smacked by every other press outlet in the country.
But they won't be, because then there would be this huge pissing war, and the media companies don't want to get into which ones of them is less close to the code of ethics...
Personally, I expect that the reporter at the Sierra Times was thinking, "Shocked! I am shocked I tell you, to find ethical breaches among journalists!" Like the gendarme in Casablanca. Yah.
Speaking of journalistic standards, the Sierra Times isn't the height of journalism, and I have doubts about a journalist who can't spell Rupert Murdoch's name right in a story that is about Fox News...???
The backgrounder for the original story is here. I trust this more, and it links to source documents.
By my reading, the original trial was not a criminal trial, but a civil suit for wrongful termination, with a jury awarding damages. Akre was awarded $425K+ for her wrongful termination, and the verdict was overturned on appeal on the basis that Akre had gotten damages under the whistle blower's clause, which can be invoked when an employee blows the whistle on an employer for illegal conduct. Lying to the public, as a news organization, is not illegal.
Although there is an FCC policy against distorting the news and such, it has to do with the broadcast license renewal process. This is to say, it is the policy of the FCC to not renew the broadcast license of a media entity using the common airways *if* complaints are entered by the public when the license comes up for renewal.
That means that it isn't *illegal* for Fox to lie, but it does mean that the station could get their license yanked later on. That is the recourse via the FCC for individuals if they find that media is lying to them.
The error was on the part of Akre's representation, who should not have muddied the waters by bringing in the whistle-blower's clause. As it is, if the award was made on invalid terms in any part, the judge is justified in overturning the entire decision and award.
This is why you hire a good lawyer.
It's also why you should read the news critically...;)
I'm a sociological entrepreneur!
Tuesday, March 04, 2003
11:52 PM
Tonight I was delighted to go to a presentation of a taped lecture by Lester Thurow, who addressed the MIT Enterprise Forum on "Entrepreneurship in a Global Economy." http://web.mit.edu/entforum/www/SBS/18thurow.htm
He gave me this great tool to describe what we're doing. Entrepreneurship only arises in times of disequilibrium (chaos/opportunity). In times of stability, the big company just always wins. He presented a taxonomy of entrepreneurs for three kinds of disequilibrium:
Technology entrepreneurs (the obvious default)
Geographical entrepreneurs
Take a process and move it from California to Taiwan,
from Taiwan to the PRC, gain economies, make a mint.
Sociological entrepreneurs
Identify or create a sociological demand, exploit it
This last is who I am. Prof. Thurow's example was Starbucks.
What eMarket does is we've more identified than created a demand. Pop culture is our new mythology. It's the teaching story, the heroics, the myth cycle of modernism. What we do, at root, is we sell the material culture of modernism.
It's not about geeky fans. It's about affinity groups, deep cultural symbols, fashion, and self-expression.
You see a slip of a girl in a hiphop club in a black babydoll t-shirt with a supergirl logo on it, framed in tattoo/bodyart style flames. http://www.emerchandise.com/product/TSSUG0004/
Chances are she doesn't read comic books.
You see a husky guy strutting down the street in Kuala Lampur wearing a t-shirt with a raging Tazmanian Devil doing martial arts, flanked with dragons.
http://www.emerchandise.com/product/TSLOO0169/
Chances are he doesn't spend his Saturday mornings watching cartoons.
I'm wearing my Central Perk "No More Decaf!" shirt in line at the supermarket. A woman does a double take. She hesitates. Then she *has* to come up to me, and ask, "That's not a real coffee shop is it? I mean, that's the coffee shop from Friends right?"
http://www.emerchandise.com/product/TSFRI0028/
In a world where no one talks to strangers, I've made an instant friend, if I want to pursue it.
We're selling affinity, fashion, self-identification, style-tribes, insider jokes, self-expression.
Right now, we get more of our money by serving the pent up demand of folks who go to http://www.hbo.com/, and didn't know that there was all this cool stuff to be had for The Sopranos at http://store.hbo.com/hbo_sopranos/ -- and so on for a couple dozen other sites.
But eventually, as this stuff becomes more and more recognized as pop culture fashion casual, we'll be the Starbucks of pop culture swag.
We sell the altar furnishings of the post-modern home. We sell the saint's medallions of pop culture. We transcend national and language boundaries.
My main ethical goal is to start serving all the pop culture diasporas (bollywood, Mexican soaps, europop, anime/manga, chop socky HK/PRC cinema,...) so that the various cultures' pop vocabulary and iconography get equal time.
http://store.viz.com/ -- here's the first step.
On the other hand, I often wonder why the *HELL* I'm spending my time selling t-shirts. My hope is that eventually, I'll make enough money that I can be independently modest, so that I can risk trying to get paid to write.
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