A Declaration of Independents

I've written on this theme before, and now seems like a good time to reconsider it. I was actually reminded of it yesterday by a newcomer to our land, a very warm-hearted and intelligent young man named Majo.

Majo is from India, and has recently come to settle here in America. He works beside me at the office where we each earn our bread. On Friday afternoon, as we were leaving for the holiday weekend, he smiled and wished me a "Happy Independence Day."

I'm wondering now if the wording of this simple wish might take you as much by surprise as it did me. No one calls it that: it's merely "the Fourth of July." But as I thought about it, that word, independence, rang through me with a strangely unsettling reverberation—like nervous laughter at a funeral.

This should be the most joyful and holy day on our calendar—more than Christmas, Easter, Memorial Day, and Thanksgiving combined—because it is a celebration of Independence. That is, a celebration of personal freedom. This is not the Bush notion of Independence as the freedom to occupy, destroy, and despoil foreign nations, while raping the environment of our only planet and looking down one's nose at those who dare question the validity or morality of such freedom-to-debase-everyone-not-in-my-ingroup. This is not the freedom of Rovespeak to manipulate a once-free press and to brand as a liberal terrorist-lover anyone who speaks out against torture, extreme rendition, or a war built upon a nest of lies.

No: the independence that Majo reminded me of is all about the freedom to follow the unique and never-before-charted course of one's individual destiny in life. In a document that many of us (and even more of our children) have either mostly forgotten or never known, this is specifically described as one of the "inalienable rights" that human beings have been given by a beneficent Creator (whether that Creator is Jesus' Dad, Yahweh, Allah, Tao, Brahma, or another with no particular name is wisely left unconsidered—though there is a reference to Laws of Nature and God, as of a single Force, in support of the premise that the nations of the world should be "separate and equal"). Perhaps it would help us to look at a little more of this interesting document, and see what it might have to teach us—and what we might have to teach it.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

These are some truly amazing statements—especially today. Governments are instituted among people of equal status before God and Nature, with the purpose of securing and furthering Life, Liberty, Safety, and Happiness (we're going to update that reference to "men", and I doubt that even many Conservatives would quarrel with that) . Wow.

But all is not as it seems. Even for those of us who pretend to be familiar with this document, our ability to quote it ends with that famous paragraph. The really interesting parts come after these familiar but still astonishing statements; for it is there that we find that "all men" did not (and still does not) include "all men."

In his epochal A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn points out the inconsistencies. In the subsequent listing of offenses noted by the Declaration's author (Thomas Jefferson), which comprise the substance of the complaint against British rule, we find the following:

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

So those "merciless Indian Savages" do not rate for inclusion among "all men." Nor, it seems, did blacks: for even though Jefferson had written a clause into the original document denouncing the practice and trade of slavery (I am drawing again on Zinn's remarkable research), the Congress deleted that section from the final form of the Declaration. And since Jefferson himself was a slaveowner, there may have been some ambivalence on his part once push came to shove.

Nevertheless, this Declaration of Independence seems to be a document that could still guide us today, but only if we will allow that it needs to be updated and revised on some very serious points (the same goes for our Constitution as well). Aside from the explicit and implicit prejudice against women, minorities, and the Native population of America, we could justifiably ask whether this document's stated grievances were truly a justification for the grueling and bloody war that ensued.

One fairly clear answer to this last question that we could give today is, "the American war of independence was no more justified then than the war in Iraq is justified today." Even Jefferson himself had this to say about the causus belli of 1776: "so inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants." (I found this quoted in an amazing new book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, called Freakonomics).

As a matter of fact, a far clearer answer would be, "King George was a petty tyrant who ruled our people; Saddam Hussein was a petty tyrant who had zero influence, threat, or power over us except what he could exact via manipulation of his oil reserves." In other words, and to the highly questionable extent that any war can be said to be justified, the American war of independence was a far worthier cause than this morass in Iraq.

And this takes us back to that document from which our American nation was born. What, in fact, were the stated complaints against the King and England, that started all this? How would they apply, if at all, among nations today—maybe even our nation?

Frankly, it even starts off scary—and it gets worse from there. Here's the beginning, which I'll present without comment:

The history of the present King is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

I will swear on a stack of Bibles, Korans, and other holy books, that the only words I've taken out of the above statement are "of Great Britain." Incidentally, though, the King's name was George; so let's see what happens when "facts are submitted to a candid world." (click the table to enlarge it)



Now Jefferson was careful to warn us that "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes."

Such as, for example, getting a blow job from an intern at the Oval Office. But once again, "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

Now if you don't think we've quite reached the point of "absolute Despotism," maybe you should talk to some of the mothers, fathers, widows, widowers, and children of the 1,744 Americans killed in combat in Iraq, or many of the 13,074 wounded.

I have already formed my own conclusions about this; now it is time for you to come to yours. If you agree that it is time to "alter or to abolish, and to institute new Government", then let Congress hear about it; and let your local media outlets hear you, too. It is time.

Angels and Virgins: The Faces of Fundamentalism

Truth is, or should be, a fairly simple matter: if it is personal, flexible, open, receptive, and continually growing, then it is truth, and it is alive. If it is fixed and written into the stone tablets of an exclusive monumentalism, then it is falsehood, and it is dead. Fundamentalism, in all its forms, is a violent ideology of death.

On a simmering afternoon of this early summer, I happened to be at Coney Island amid a thick and diverse throng of visitors. As I was waiting for my daughter to finish a turn in the bumper cars, a fellow in a bright yellow shirt passed me. I looked at the back of the shirt, which was decorated with a figure in a black fireman’s outfit who was being carried by two winged female characters on either side of him.

These women were portrayed as...well, one can only call them babes. They had voluptuous figures, long flowing blonde hair, and model’s faces with full red lips. Below the painting read the shirt’s message: “FDNY: IN THE ARMS OF ANGELS”.

I was reminded of the painting, reproduced here, which I had found in Jeff Sharlet’s essay for the May issue of Harper’s Magazine. It’s a painting by Thomas Blackshear, called The Vessel, and it hangs in the World Prayer Center of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, one of the epicenters of the evangelical fundamentalist Christian movement. The painting speaks for itself, but Sharlet’s observations on it are worth repeating:

[The Vessel is] a tall, vertical panel of two nude, ample-breasted, white female angels team-pouring an urn of honey onto the shaved head of a naked, olive-skinned man below. The honey drips down over his slab-like pecs and his six-pack abs into the eponymous vessel, which he holds in front of his crotch. But the vessel can’t handle that much honey, so the sweetness oozes over the edges and spills down yet another level, presumably onto our heads, drenching us in golden, godly love. Part of what makes Blackshear’s work so compelling is precisely its unabashed eroticism; it aims to turn you on, and then to turn that passion toward Jesus.

Of course, there’s no mention in any Biblical text that I’m aware of that gets into such erotic detail (though the Song of Solomon might qualify); and even the Koran—contrary to many Westerners’ assumptions—has nothing to say about the “72 Virgins” that we’ve all heard about since 9/11/01: the supposed reward that is given to any who achieve martyrdom in the service and violent practice of jihad.

The Koran, however, does wax sensuously on the topic of angelic virgins (without numbering them), much in the same vein as the Blackshear painting and the fellow’s T-shirt at Coney Island. Here is what one translation has to say about the Islamic paradise:

They shall recline on jewelled couches face to face, and there shall wait on them immortal youths with bowls and ewers and a cup of purest wine (that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason); with fruits of their own choice and flesh of fowls that they relish. And theirs shall be the dark-eyed houris, chaste as hidden pearls: a guerdon for their deeds... We created the houris and made them virgins, loving companions for those on the right hand..."

To anyone who has read the ecstatic writing of Rumi, these kinds of images will seem both familiar and comfortable in a deeply spiritual—that is, a bodily—sense.

So where does fundamentalism come into this picture? Perhaps we can come to some point of perspective here by first remembering that Rumi was no more an exclusively Islamic poet than Blake was a Christian one. Then it will help to recall Sharlet’s impression of the Blackshear painting—how it is meant to turn you on, and then to turn you away.

Away, that is, from yourself—from your body and its inviolable connection with Nature. Thus, in fundamentalism, the eroticism is a passing expedient, meant to arouse energy toward a violent ideology of the Exclusive—a picture of a world in which the adherents of a narrow system of belief and behavior will be rewarded according to the same organic terms that Nature had already placed within them, before the birth of any religious creed.

This is how fundamentalism works: by deflecting the energy of our body’s sexual currents—the regenerative and universal quantum field of Love— and twisting it toward the demands of something inherently unnatural—the rigid self-images of what I have elsewhere called “cosmic racism.”

We will have more to say about fundamentalism in future entries here. However, you can learn all you need about discovering the way beyond fundamentalism by simply looking perseveringly within yourself.

As Rumi would say to all adherents of fundamentalism today:

There is no “other world.” I only know what I’ve experienced. You must be hallucinating.”
—translated by Coleman Barks, from Stephen Mitchell's anthology, The Enlightened Mind (HarperCollins, 1991).

A Picture of Arrogance

Our President (joined in chorus by his partners-in-crime, Cheney and Rumsfeld) has called the Amnesty International report on human rights "absurd" in its exposure of the American government's criminal abuses in Gitmo, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib. I'm sorry, Dubya, but it seems as if your halo is getting a little tight around the cranium.

And I'm not talking about the use of the word "disassemble" for "dissemble" (and then delivering the wrong meaning)—that's just another in the catalog of Bushspeak that we would really love you for if you weren't such a heinous, deceitful, ignoble, and arrogant coward otherwise.

No, I'm referring to the utter vapidity of the notion that the American people (let alone everyone else around the world) are going to continue to accept denial and insolence as forms of truth. Your game's about up, Tex: the cover's coming off your can of Karl Rove whitewash.

So let's assume that AI, the Red Cross, and other independent global organizations, observers, and journalists, are all wrong about the details. Let's figure the FBI screwed up again in coming to the conclusion that abuses and violations of the Geneva Convention have occurred in abundance on your watch. Sweep all that evidence off the table (or, as you would have it, under the rug), and let's see what remains.

Actually—come to think of it—that's what AI allowed in its measured response to Bush's insane charges:

At Guantánamo, the US has operated an isolated prison camp in which people are confined arbitrarily, held virtually incommunicado, without charge, trial or access to due process. Not a single Guantánamo detainee has had the legality of their detention reviewed by a court, despite the Supreme Court ruling of last year.

In other words, no matter how gently you treat them and their Koran, no matter how much they "disassemble" before you, no matter how great a threat they present, they must be granted due process of law. This is the United States of America: that's what we do here.

Well, it's what we say we do; what our Constitution says we must do, anyway. The reality—both in Gitmo, Iraq, and here at home—is another story altogether. And it's only getting worse.

What Can REALLY Make You Go Blind

Now comes word about reports of visual loss among users of Viagra and Cialis (see story here). I'm sure this news is getting a real workout on the late night comedy circuit, so I'll avoid the obvious jokes.

It's the less obvious, and somewhat grimmer joke that I hear in such reports. By a curious coincidence, I happened to write a little piece on Friday night for The Noyse Magazine, an online opinion and entertainment journal (make a note to visit their site on Wednesday, June 1, during their "hit-a-thon" to benefit "The One Campaign"). At the time I was writing it, I had not heard anything about the Viagra-blindness report (and I'm still astonished that these pharm companies continue to get off with nothing more painful than a label notation in consequence of their drugs' "unintended side effects"). I was actually writing about a certain well-known hamburger commercial that's recently hit the airwarves. But a mere glance at the title of this piece will help you to see the serendipity of a discussion of masturbation. Here it is—I called it Masturbation, Paris Hilton, and the Cult of Purity:


I really like to masturbate: it’s a great way to unwind, release tension, and get to know one’s own body. It’s good, healthy, relaxing fun, and it doesn’t cost a dime. In fact, I recommend it, although it seems I don’t have to.

Check this out: Dr. James Dobson (who in the name of the Devil and Dick Cheney gave him a degree?)—the same guy who is trying to help the right-wing neocon hegemony stack the courts of this land with wage-freezing, Bible-beating, union-busting, gay-hating, privacy-invading demagogues—is a friend of masturbation! I found the following comments at his “Focus on the Family” website (I just typed “masturbation” into his search engine):

We can say without fear of contradiction that there is no scientific evidence to indicate that this act is harmful to the body. Despite terrifying warnings given to young people historically, it does not cause blindness, weakness, mental retardation, or any other physical problem....Between 95 and 98 percent of all boys engage in this practice -- and the rest have been known to lie. It is as close to being a universal behavior as is likely to occur.

Very cool, Dr. D.: so why do you have such a problem with Paris Hilton doing it on a Bentley with a hamburger? But you’ve got a “Citizen Link Action Alert” out on your site, encouraging your followers to move heaven and earth to stop Carl Jr.’s from running an ad showing a blond in a swimsuit simulating the same kind of activity that you otherwise call “as close to being a universal behavior as is likely to occur.” (But thanks anyway for letting us know about the extended length version of the ad, viewable here).

“The ad is filled with enough innuendo to make Freud blush,” complains your hilarious excuse for a news report on the Paris ad. Then comes the great revelation, courtesy of Brent Bozell of the Parents Television Council: “This blatant, sexually charged ad has no place on the public airwaves, and especially when children are in the audience.”

Ah, now we understand: kids (some of them—gasp—girls) are going to see this ad on TV, and then what? Daniel Weiss, a media analyst at Focus on the Family, explains what: “recent studies [have] found [that] children who view sexual content on television are twice as likely to act out sexually as those who do not.”

Oh—you mean...they’re going to masturbate? While eating a cheeseburger? In the name of God and Janet Jackson’s right tit, somebody call the police! Thank heaven we can just change the channel over to good old FOX and watch “Stacked” with that gentle ivory-girl slice of cheesecake, Pam Anderson; or a wholesome episode of “Trading Spouses”!

But wouldn’t that leave me open to the charge of moral hypocrisy? As in, enjoying the spectacle of wife-swapping in Kansas or tit-swinging at a bookstore while at the same time I condemn an ad showing a woman fondling herself with a garden hose? Never mind—I’m going with Dr. Dobson’s original suggestion: I’m turning off the TV set entirely, going to my room, and then I’m gonna beat the bishop, shake hands with the general, massage Mr. One-Eye, pump my pomegranate, handle my hamburger.

I only wish I had a Bentley to do it on.

Bushies Unleash Pit Bull in Washington

When you play the role of global enforcer and personal agent of God on earth, sometimes people will call your bluff, and you just have to deal with it. The Senate neocon cronies of the Bush administration found this out today, when their demand that Mr. George Galloway of Great Britain appear before them was brusquely satisfied.

It would appear that Mr. Galloway, a member of Pariliament in his home country, either didn't get the memo on how to behave oneself before the powerful leaders of the GOP-dominated U.S. Congress; or he got it and ignored it. Galloway's remarks during his appearance before the august American Senatorial inquisition (which had demanded his presence to answer to charges that he was involved in siphoning oil profits during the Saddam era in Iraq) comprise some of the most delightfully potent rhetoric to be heard from Washington since the Clinton administration. The video and sound files of the Galloway testimony are here; and here's some text of Mr. Galloway's comments:

“I am not now nor have I ever been an oil trader and neither has anyone on my behalf. I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and American governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas...I gave my heart and soul to stop you from committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq...And I told the world that the case for war was a pack of lies...You have my name on lists provided to you by the Dopher inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber and fraudster and con man Ahmed Chalabi, who many people, to their credit, in your country now realize played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq...In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Air Base, in Guantanamo Bay -- including, if I may say, British citizens being held in those places -- I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances...I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer, you're remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice...On the very first page of your document about me, you assert that I have had many meetings with Saddam Hussein. This is false. I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as many meetings. In fact I’ve met him exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns...Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong, and 100,000 people have paid with their lives — 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies...Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth. Have a look at the real scandal, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee that the biggest sanctions busters were not me, or Russian politicians or French politicians, the real sanction busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own government."

If I should ever find myself—either physically or metaphorically—in a foxhole, I think I'd opt for George Galloway of Great Britain as my partner. Incidentally, it appears that Galloway so unnerved his accusers with his feisty self-defense that all Norm Coleman, the Minnesota senator who led this inquisition, could say afterward was, "Mr Galloway's credibility is certainly suspect and if in fact he lied to this committee then there will have to be consequences to that." He seemed to have made no particular mention of specific evidence against Galloway. But as we all know, evidence doesn't mean much in American politics anymore.

Nevertheless, it would seem that Mr. George Galloway is not exactly intimidated by the might of the U.S. Neocon Senate. I guess they don't make their liberals as mealy-mouthed and sedate in Scotland as they do in Washington. Fortunately, the few Texas liberals we have left are just as pugnacious as Galloway—I am thinking specifically of Bill Moyers, Jim Hightower, and Molly Ivins.

But note one thing that Galloway and Moyers have in common in their respectively bold but perfectly-targeted keelhaulings of the Bush/Neocon Empire, which Barbara Boxer and other left-wing politicians could learn from: the relative absence of the word "fight." Moyers used it but once in his recent speech to the National Press Club, to describe the deleterious effect of a government propaganda machine on a people's will to defend itself—contrast this with statements from the likes of Boxer and Harry Reid, who talk, rather vainly, of fighting in every other sentence.

But George Galloway didn't talk about his "fight" against the Neocon march to war: instead, he described himself as having given "my heart and soul" to stop the evil that was concocted under deceitful pretenses at the White House and No. 10 Downing St. We can learn a lot by listening to people like George Galloway, who even in a highly emotional moment and under extreme pressure, retreated from the use of power-rhetoric and spoke instead from the depths of his heart. Thus also did Lao Tzu, some 2,600 years ago, advise us to speak and act:

For there is no greater error
Than looking outward for enemies.
To look outward for enemies
Is to estrange your only true self.

This is why two sides opposed
Will fight to a bloody draw,
Where sorrow is the only victor.