A Compendium of Sanity

Let's celebrate, for a moment, the voices of sanity that still exist in our media, art, and politics.

We begin with Krugman & Herbert, the rock 'em-sock 'em writing tandem of each Monday's New York Times op-ed, who delivered again yesterday—this time trading hats, with Herbert doing the economic piece (on the beyond-appalling abyss that widens between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else) and Krugman taking on Bush's troop surge. If you don't have Times Select yet, and have the smallest appreciation for lucid social and political commentary, these two guys alone are worth the $50 a year.

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, makes a point about the hanging of Saddam that I have made every time I've talked about capital punishment. Here's an excerpt:

Kill Hitler? You would have to be mad to do so. Yet that is undoubtedly what we would have done if he hadn't killed himself in 1945. Hussein is not in the same league as Hitler, but, nevertheless, in a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data.

He should have been locked up, by all means. Kept him in jail for the rest of his life, to be sure. But to execute him was irresponsible. Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran-Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the invasion. Uniquely privileged evidence on the American government's enthusiastic arming of Hussein in the 1980s is now snuffed out at the tug of a rope (no doubt to the relief of Donald Rumsfeld and other guilty parties; it is surely no accident that the trial of Hussein neglected those of his crimes that might — no, would — have implicated them).

I haven't read any of Dawkins' books yet, though I intend to; yet every time I see or hear him in the blogosphere, his voice resonates. Whatever your feelings about religion and Dawkins' views about it, there can be hardly any dispute that this guy is a ringing voice of sanity in the midst of an increasingly insane world.

We have written a lot here about the utter depravity of the Catholic Church—or specifically, its leadership and its clergy. Now come more revelations: some of their heavy hitters were stooges for the KGB and their ilk. But by God, if we let that Madonna woman climb onto one more cross in a concert or let Dan Brown write one more novel about Jesus' sex life, why all hell will break loose...But in case you haven't been visiting here lately, we featured a BBC video a while back that clearly exposed the perversions and deceit of the Catholic hierarchy.

Finally, let's join Code Pink in letting Congress know what we voted for back in November; and it sure as hell wasn't troop surge.

Monday with McKenna: Where's the Outrage?

The overall mission of DR is to expose fundamentalism and corporatism in our social and governmental institutions, so our focus tends to be on the national and the global. But occasionally we go local, and since both of us live and work in the New York City area, that means taking a perspective on events here, as we did in 2005 with the NYC transit workers' strike or the racist drivel of Assemblyman Dov Hikind.

About six weeks ago, an incident occurred that had people asking some old questions: are cops racist thugs, trained to target minorities in a program of intimidation and murder? Or are they the angelic heroes of 9/11, constantly sacrificing themselves like blue-clad Christs for God, City, and Humanity? As Terry McKenna reveals in his post today, the answer is, "neither of the above."

This week I wanted to write about the Sean Bell police slaying in New York City. If you aren't familiar with it, click the link at the graphic above, and here’s a synopsis (full text here).

Bell was supposed to be married last Saturday to his high school sweetheart. But hours before the wedding ceremony, he was killed when five undercover police officers fired 50 shots at a car carrying him and two friends. They had just left his bachelors party at a club in Queens. Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield survived the shooting but remain hospitalized. None of the victims were armed.

The police officers have been widely criticized - even by Mayor Michael Bloomberg - of using excessive force. The Rev. Jesse Jackson said of the shooting, "this is a symbol, not an aberration. Our criminal justice system has broken down for black Americans and young black males."

Mr. Bell was just another in a series of unarmed black men who have come to our attention only after they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the typical scenario, the police shoot dozens of bullets in a matter of seconds and only after the shooting ends do they discover that their victim was unarmed. Invariably, local black leaders express outrage, and sometimes segments of the black community march in protest. Whites invariably ARE NOT swept up in the outrage. New York City Mayor Bloomberg did his best to quickly express horror, but nonetheless, the question remains – where is white outrage? This was just the concern of local journalist, Brian Lehrer. His eloquent commentary was delivered to the WNYC community.

If you don’t know of Brian Lehrer’s work, he hosts what is probably the best talk show on either radio or TV today. His daily program mixes his own excellent knowledge base with a style of questioning which allows the guest to answer at length without having to endure a barrage of petty arguments. Naturally, his show is on public radio.

I wanted to answer Mr. Lehrer’s question, but I wanted to do it from a perspective that also admits that the police may lie. Most suburbanites have only the rarest interactions with the police. We call them when there is trouble, and they come. (We recently had a minor burglary at my house. The cops actually caught the guy and returned the stolen camera! That’s not a story you would encounter in most cities.)

Here is a short story from my past that concerns my one adverse police experience: I was driving to work one early Saturday morning, maybe 4:15 AM or so. The road I was on was a county road – so it had a centerline and posted speed limits. The street was wet, and it appeared that a building fire had just been put out. An unattended fire hose went across both traffic lanes and a police car was blocking the side of the road opposite mine, but the driver was not there. I didn’t want to drive over the hose, but I didn’t know what to do. After a few moments of confusion, I moved on, drove over the hose, and continued on past the strip mall. Suddenly, a police car was behind me and I pulled over. An angry young cop began his interrogation. Then he inspected every square inch of my car from the floor around the back seats, to the trunk. As far as I can tell, he did a full criminal background check on me. After finding nothing at all, he ticketed me for reckless driving.

In a rare moment of bravado, I fought the ticket, and it is here where I found out more than I ever wanted to know about police testimony. At the time, my car was an old low slung Buick Regal. It had sloppy suspension, and bottomed out on bumpy roads. The cop went first in telling his story; all the while referring to a little notebook. He described how I drove past two cops stationed to hold traffic back; how I weaved around him, and wildly drove over warning flares placed in my path; the story sounded like a rehearsed script. It occurred to me that I would have to cross-examine him – so I did. I confronted him about the flares that I supposedly drove over. I asked why his account didn’t include some mention of the flares being stuck in my exhaust pipe, or in my wheel wells. The cop had nothing to say - the judge ruled in my favor, assessing only minimal court costs.

So… do cops lie? In my tale above, it’s clear that I think they do. But what is more important is that cops are trained witnesses, and over time, I believe they learn a perfected story for each and every sort of event that they encounter during their workday. Thus, when the cop above gave his story, it was rich with detail and sounded convincing – even to me. Fortunately, he was tripped up with the flares and I got off. But the bottom line is that for cops (as for ALL professional witnesses) their testimony is already partially written even before the event they are describing occurs.

Partially written? Scripts? Well – think virtual scripts. Let’s imagine an event such as a congressional hearing. There have been a number of them over the past few years where a series of colonels and generals described a war in Iraq that surely was getting better. Unlike the cop in my story, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the various officers were sure they were telling at least a brand of truth. But when your job is to defend your enterprise over and over, whether your enterprise is the police force, or a drug company, or the US Army, your well-crafted story may have a life of its own.

Thus it is with Sean Bell. The details of each cop’s testimony have been crafted from descriptions that have been honed and shaped over time. And in the matter of Sean Bell, the events were very complicated – much more like what occurred in the Kennedy Assassination than with my simple reckless driving story. There were several cops involved. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that ALL of them believed that whatever they testified to was true.

I’ll ask again – did the cops lie? As I’ve demonstrated, we know cops DO lie. But we may never know the real truth in the Sean Bell case. The black community remains outraged and convinced of police perfidy.

But what about the silent “white community”? In the U.S., most whites live in suburban enclaves. In my home county, an ethnic minority is typically Asian or Hispanic (in my son’s high school, the most important language besides English was Mandarin). When we see urban black America, it is via movies, or tragedies like the one that took Sean Bell.

I am not a New Yorker. The city that I know best is Newark. Tremendously poor, its poverty is almost as if by design. If 90% of adults in my county have a high school diploma, only half of Newark’s residents have them – and only 9% are college graduates. Is it any wonder that Newarkers are poor? Or that most of Newark’s many jobs are held by non-residents? Newark is a scary place with a murder rate 5 times the national average, the rate for stolen cars is 4 times the average. Large employers typically provide door-to-door van service from work to the commuter train in order to encourage squeamish suburbanites to accept a Newark assignment. (New York City does not have to do this). The rare bit of news that comes from Newark is as often as not another report of the death of a black man, woman or child.

So the death of Sean Bell took place in a world that is as remote to white Americans as is Iraq. Such ignorance is, of course, sad. But we will not improve matters until we are willing to acknowledge that this is how it is.

—T. McKenna

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Site Note: Next week at DR, we'll be featuring a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd's Animals. We'll have sound files, interview segments from a generally forgotten radio program featuring the band members themselves, and perspectives on PF from myself and other writers. Watch for it.

Friday Reflection: A Prayer for Maturity

Before we get to the Friday Reflection, time for some good news:

Keith Olbermann is still on TV: Click the graphic, watch, and listen. It's about sacrifice.

No more New Jersey jokes: They're actually looking down the path of abolishing the death penalty in NJ. These people have looked carefully at the statistics, consulted their common sense, and taken some excellent first steps toward a new policy of wisdom and justice. For a really great piece on the death penalty, with some marvelous reflections on the Saddam case, check out Eric Francis' piece, "The Hanged Man."

New York has a new governor: And he just might be a good one. In his first state address, Eliot Spitzer called for publicly financed elections to remove the influence of big money and special interests from campaigns. It's a cause worth taking up, and thanks to the folks at Public Campaign Action Fund, you can write your local legislators and let them know you're with the new Governor of New York on this one.

A Shopping Holiday (or holiday from shopping): These folks tried something that most of us wouldn't dare to dream of, and they found that it was not only easier than they'd thought it would be; it was illuminating. Could you try it? No shopping for a year (thanks to Nearly Redmond Nick for the link).

The 110th Congress starts cleaning House—its own: The Blue Congress took over today, and promptly took one baby step toward clean government. They've got a long way to go, so we'll have to keep an eye on them; but this is encouraging indeed.

Life Beyond Thought: And finally, a reminder that in a world of corporate demigods and the tyranny of intellect, true greatness is achieved in and by the ordinary, beyond the narrow space of calculation. If you haven't heard about it already, read the story of Mr. Wesley Autrey.

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Friday Reflection: Beyond Ignorance and Violence

What is worse, ignorance or violence? They are probably related—and intimately at that—perhaps as cause and effect, respectively. We grow in life by finding both within ourselves, and exterminating them. Find ignorance, and then disperse it, and you will have peace. Do not attempt to tame or disguise your violent emotions; but examine them: trace them to their source, and take back the energy that feeds them. Then you will be free from fear. All it takes is effort, and trust in the currents of the universal consciousness, and your deep connection with them.

Bush, Cheney, and all the spoon-fed rich ideologues of this world have never learned this simple lesson. That is because they were never allowed to. And so they resort to what every unloved and undisciplined child will turn to: a program of shrill fear-mongering fed by the passive-aggressive delusion. As the Zen poet of the Rinzai Roku said:

Though gold dust is precious,
When it gets into the eyes
It clouds the vision.

What the fools and demagogues of Washington lack is not intellect—there are many smart people among them—but maturity. We are being governed, in short, by children; or more precisely, by spoiled brats who never learned the lessons of maturity, and thus never grew out of the pit of ignorance and violence.

There is teaching in this for all of us who survive the depredations of these urchin kings, and our capacity to understand that teaching will help to influence the course of the next generation, and the one after. Think of this the next time you are moved to act aggressively or in hatred, whether at work or among your family. You can torture a man with weapons, or whip him with ignorance; it is torture just the same.

This is why some of the more illuminated psychological and spiritual traditions of the world have emphasized maturity. In the Bodhisattva's Vow, which is repeated thousands of times per day by Buddhists all around the Earth, the closing verse reads as follows:

May we extend This mind over the whole universe
So that we and all beings together
May attain maturity in Buddha's Wisdom.

Why, you may ask, do these people not ask for peace or universal brotherhood or the resurrection and the life of their God or Prophet? Because they know that maturity means all these other things, and so much more. They know that maturity is the path to freedom and liberation from the round of ignorance and violence; they know that illumination is not a glorified or ideal state achieved only by arhats or gods, but that it is an ordinary state of mind that arises in every mature thought, word, and act. They recognize that maturity is the secret of evolution, and that all the renewals and bloodless revolutions of society begin with a transformation within the self.

Evolution happens neither through the design of a god nor the theoretical conceptualizations of a biologist. It happens through the choice of each individual who lives his or her life in the open awareness that extends the mind across the universe toward the realization of maturity—not in a distant Heaven or Nirvana or Utopia—but in the living presence of every relationship, within every moment.

The Corporate Cold Shoulder

Maybe if you work for a company in corporate America, you'll understand what I'm talking about here: so often, workers will peel the skins off their backs to keep the company treadmill moving and productivity at least apparitionally positive. In return, they will be browbeaten, burdened with threats and suspicion, shafted at payday, bonus time, and the annual review, but most of all simply ignored.

If this sounds familiar to you, then you'll not be shocked to find that you are being treated exactly the same as a citizen of the United States of Corporate America. Tony Snow says that you and the remaining two-thirds of the American electorate are "out of touch" with the reality in Iraq. So it's time for a troop surge, some ten weeks after the American people had told this government, in the clearest possible terms, that they've had enough of this war and its endless escalation; and less than two weeks after our own nation's death toll had reached 3,000.

Next week will mark another milestone, the fifth anniversary of the opening of Camp Gitmo, Dick Cheney's personal torture laboratory, where all the other aberrations of justice and humanity that have marked this administration took root. The FBI has now released a horrifying report of what has gone on at Gitmo; and it resounds fairly exactly with what AI, HRW, the IRC, and other international NGOs have been telling us for years. Here's part of what our government did there, and repeated at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and uncounted other places around the world:

Captives at Guantánamo Bay were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor for 18 hours or more, urinating and defecating on themselves, an FBI report has revealed...Besides being shackled to the floor, detainees were subjected to extremes of temperature. One witness said he saw a barefoot detainee shaking with cold because the air conditioning had bought the temperature close to freezing.

This is what our government has been doing, even as it sent young men and women of our own to the most violent and horrible deaths and disfigurements imaginable; and as it prepares to continue to do tomorrow and next week, until we stop it. This is why I rise to disagree with all the Democrats who are saying that impeachment is the wrong direction to go. In fact, I don't see any other direction that will preserve this nation before its bespattered dignity is thoroughly corrupted and lost before the entire world.

In fact, our corporate analogy weakens only in the matter of the degree of the depravity involved. We corporate citizens have been treated worse than the lowest schlub in the company mailroom. We have been lied to, sneered at, taken for granted, economically stripped, driven, and most of all, ignored.

Will the new Congress change all that? Not unless we are all over them on it. Here are some options for making that happen:

Amnesty International's human rights pledge

Gold Star Families for Peace and the Walk for Change (today)

Code Pink's letter to Congress: Impeach Now

UFPJ's March (January 27)

If you know of anything else that's happening in your part of the world, by all means add it to the comments and I'll post it prominently here. The time to tear away the veil of corporate ignorance must be now.

21st Century Journalism (and Geek Wednesday)

Next week, Gitmo turns five, and AI has some ideas on how this infamous anniversary might be observed.

Before we get to Geek Wednesday, how about this bizarre statement for our quote of the week: “we said we thought it would be better if they delayed until after Id, and use the delay to resolve the legal issues.”

That's an American government official explaining why certain unnamed American policy geeks were encouraging Iraqi PM Maliki to postpone the Saddam necktie party until after a Sunni holiday known as Id. Does anyone else besides me hear Freud shouting in vindication through that cloud of cigar smoke rising from the underworld?

Well, I'm not listening to any pundit's take on the probable consequences of this until I hear Baghdad Bob break his silence...

And here's a parallel reality news moment of the week: I was at the deli next door and heard this over the TV set there, and I swear I'm not making up a word of it. It was the ABC News show, and a reporter in Texas was wrapping up a piece on some violent storms there that had caused the Secret Service to take the Bush family, dogs and all, off to an underground shelter near the Crawford ranch. They cut back to the studio, where Gibson mused how it reminded him of Dorothy scooping up Toto as the tornado approached. He then blandly concluded the story with the news that the President and his family, including the dogs, are now safe. 21st century journalism.

Geek Wednesday

I'm writing this within Blogger on Firefox/Windows in Parallels Desktop in a Win XP window on my MacBook. XP is set to use 256MB of the 1GB of RAM I have on the machine, and oddly, it seems to run just fine on that (with the help of the Intel Core Duo 2 processor, of course). What is even stranger is that it seems to hurt the Appleware more: I'm getting this situation now where all my open Mac applications won't minimize: the yellow button becomes disabled and double-clicking the window title (on a Mac, that minimizes; on a Windows app, it toggles the full screen setting) does nothing. Like I said, strange.

So unless you're on a network sharing files between Mac and Windows, I don't see the point of having a Parallels installation running on an Intel Mac. The Parallels software itself takes up 200MB of RAM, and for this Macophile, it's just too weird. Anyway on to the geek news of the week...

A Small Victory: Geeks and all the rest of us who support Net Neutrality have won a tentative victory this week in the concessions made by AT&T as part of its deal for the $85B BellSouth takeover (er, excuse me, merger). Frankly, I'd leave the cork in the Moet on this one, but yes, it is the same sort of victory as the Kansas City Chiefs won over the weekend (it's known as backing in: for the Chiefs, five teams had to lose so that they could go on to the playoffs--which indeed happened). But for anyone who's imagining that this is a final win for Net Neutrality, I have two words: Mission Accomplished.

Our theme today is 21st century journalism, so it's a good moment to insert a link to this article that our buddy Nearly Redmond Nick sent over. It's by John Pallatto of eWeek, and presents the case for treating bloggers as journalists (real journalists, that is, not the ABC variety discussed above). Believe me, sometimes I wish I had the problem that Pallatto mentions, but no one's ever offered me a thing to write about their product, and I never even knew there was such a thing as a Ferrari laptop until I read this.

Now, on to a little Google bashing. What's gotten into Blogger's brain these days? I know I've mentioned this before, but their blog is now toasting all kinds of features in the new Blogger that I personally can't find: drag and drop template editing (huh? where?); expanded RSS functionality (I still don't see anything more than the usual atom feeds); and accelerated publishing (kids, it's as slow as ever). What I am seeing is plenty of this: MS-style unknown-problem reports.

I'm also getting some inexplicable failures with image uploads in Blogger. Fortunately, I have a licensed copy of Graphics Converter for Mac, one of the great software bargains of them all, from one of the greatest geeks out there, Thorsten Lemke. If you have a Mac and do anything with images—whether it's keeping the family photo album in order or doing sophisticated image editing for the web—you will never regret spending $30 to get this fabulous program, which contains roughly 80% of the functionality of Photoshop and all of the convenience and ease of use of the Mac platform. Lemke has just released a Universal Binary version for those of us in the Intel Mac camp, and it won't cost a dime if you have a licensed copy. Certain other software purveyors—most notably, Softpress Freeway, which forces users of its web editor to spend on an upgrade to UB—could stand to spend some time at Lemke's feet on the subject of customer service and product support.

Finally today, I found an accessory for the new MacBook that I think every laptop computer owner should consider. It's from Targus and is called the ChillHub. It's a platform containing two fans and four USB ports. You put your laptop on this unit, plug it in, and the fans start up, drawing heat out and away. Once you've attached the unit's USB connector to an open port on your computer, you can plug your printer, keyboard, mouse, and whatever else into the available USB ports. The ChillHub keeps my MacBook comfortable when I'm using it as a desktop, and that's very cool. When I'm ready to roll, all I have to do is to disconnect my ethernet cable, AC adapter, and the ChillHub's USB connector, shut the lid and fly. For $50, this seems to me a must-have accessory for anyone who uses a laptop as a combination desktop and mobile computer.

That's all for now: next week, we'll have stories and perspectives on the fallout of Macworld, now that Al Gore has buttressed Steve's Job in the wake of the ongoing Apple stock dating scandal. Don't worry, Steve: even if you do wind up doing some Martha time, we'll send you a MacBook Pro with a file inside.