ARTpiece 3

TODAY's WORD is C-I-V-I-L-I-T-Y

Elections are nice; a distraction really. The hard questions are not on the ballot. `Our problems remain the same and we have the same personnel in charge of solving them.

In order to discuss what "we the people" can do to affect the future of our planet, we all must digest the same kind of information available to our leaders. At the moment, with one-party power in the USA, we have no other oversight.

The opaque nature of our RepubliCon government means that we have to guess at the reasons why our government takes the positions that it does. Let us pause here for a moment. Why would anyone say, for instance, that Al Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Towers because,"...they are jealous of our freedoms." I may be being generous, but I have always assumed that at the inner core of our defense establishment someone
actually knows what is happening. It is only the fear of sounding politically incorrect" that prevents these notions from ever being discussed publicly. So, the public has to guess what its own government is really doing. Funny?Huh?

Well, all good empires that are run by autocrats behave similarly. The Third Reich never explained the final solution to the German volk, because Uncle Adolf thought they were too sensitive and would probably oppose his plan, if they knew. Instead, the world got Goebbels, the Godfather of the Great Lie.

Let us not, then, rely on "official" reasons in order to understand our Nation's actions. Usually, these "official" reasons are themselves part of these actions. But, when you are working on the 27th reason for doing something,you can not help but sound like a moron, or a felon.

So, what to do? Easy. Stop listening and just watch. If you can just plug up your ears, and concentrate, then what is happening is fairly obvious.

We are a big nation. We feed a great deal of people. We use a lot of stuff. Some of it comes from far away. For a long time we have gathered our resources abroad through trade, i.e., "peaceful exploitation", but we have now run into problems. Among these are the smartening up of our trade partners,and the mutual awareness that there is not enough resources (water, food,energy etc.) for everyone who would want some.

(For factoid nerds: I have gotten almost through this entire analysis without using the words thermodynamics, entropy or Malthusian. You have to know I love you. But let me give you some Math that suggests, well, that the magma dome is about to blow: 1. We are using renewable resources today at a rate 20% greater than they can be regenerated. Try doing that for the next 10 years! 2. The max. population of Earth = 9 billion. The max. pop.at American level of consumption = 2.1 billion. The current pop. of Earth= 6.1 billion. 3. Permuting our profligate energy using culture into an Earthsaving culture or the destruction of life and order on our planet is "immanent".4, The pop. of the Earth has doubled in the past thirty years. Since I promised not to use any big words, for those who care, stir all the above facts together in one brain and see what you come up with. Whatever you come up with, your response should contain the warning: FOR IMMEDIATE ACTION!

Remember that what is tarnished, may be polished, but first you have to get your hands on it. As for our chief executive, I do not know how many times you may have to underline these problems with a bold red marker before a memo, possibly titled, "The World is About To Catastrophically Implode.Something Must Be Done!!! NOW!!", is actually read. Much less, thought about.)

Whether anyone in our government can actually understand this crap, all governments have their advisers and think tanks full of smart people who play with these ideas. Our civilization, as currently constituted, requires air, water, food, fuel and the means to gather, store, protect and move around these things. As our Empire insists not only that it get its share, but that it gets all it wants (while lifting its middle finger to the rest of the world), (and winks at the White Christian men who constitute over 72% of the RepubliCon base), it increasingly isolates us and causes us to consider the entire non-American world (both within and without America) as our enemy: They want to eat and we want to eat; therefore, we take what we want and are willing to kill anyone who opposes us! Yes, we are planting our army wherever it is geo-politically necessary to control our energy supply and trade routes. Osama bin Laden just as surely hopes that if only one side gets to eat then it should be his side. Standard imperial problems given standard imperial solutions.

Like Mr. Hitler, Mr. Bush believes that we are doing what we have to do...or, we will die. This is why we were planning to invade Iraq since 1998, at least, but the Bush administration was waiting for a fig leaf to cover what history will only show to be naked aggression born of imperial pretensions. They hoped Saddam would shoot down one of our planes, or restart his banned weapons programs. But he was slick enough not to do these things. We then got blitzed by Osama bin Laden and a whole lot of stupid people thought,"Let's say Saddam and Osama were in cahoots. By the time anyone figures out they hated one another, we will already have our replacement for the Prince SULTAN base in Saudi Arabia, in the western Iraq desert." There are many reasons that this did not work out quite the way the neocons imagined (seeARTpiece 2 at ARTpieces.blogspot.com). For openers, the threat of war is a lot more powerful than actually fighting on the ground which is messy and hurts both sides.

Other than that, our defense department's assumptions were quite loopy. Most egregiously, too few troops on the ground. Let us think this one through for a minute. If there were "overwhelming" troop strength as our generals proposed, there would have been a fortified gun emplacement on every corner of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. There would be few assaults on police stations and few roadside bombs or rocket attacks on the Green Zone. There would be no place to assemble such weapons or safely gather for an attack. They may wish to attack the invading army but there would be no place for them to have a meeting or pick up armaments. They would be under constant surveillance.This would have severely hampered the ability of unhappy Iraqis to resist our occupation. If our soldiers were then nice to everyone (even though with overwhelming troop superiority we would not have had to be) and we indicated by our actions that we did not want to just steal their oil (which is exactly how we acted), then, this invasion might have gone better; maybe, even well.But instead, our civilian rulers trumped our own specialists and Rumsfeld wanted to go into Iraq with only 40,000 troops, i.e., about 5,000 fighting folk and their support groups! If this does not tell you that we cared more for the Iraqi oil (and land) than for the Iraqi people, then you are hopelessly deluded.

Everything Old Rummy has said since this war unfolded has shown his contempt for the Iraqi people. The American incursion, if left to Rumsfeld to explain, rather than Powell, might have come out like, "Hello, Iraq. We are here to steal your oil and park a rapid deployment force in your western desert.You can stay if you want to, but you will have to behave yourselves." This,of course, would have been politically incorrect to say. It is not nice,and you see it takes a lot of words to explain. It is not short and catchy like the phrases: WMD or Saddam=Osama. But it is what we intended to do;that is, if you are a neocon.

But what if you are not? For a democracy to work, the facts must be all out on the table, and all options for a solution should be considered by the people and their representatives and their smart people. But our government has morphed into a one-party autocracy. There are no longer any meetings between Republicrats and Democans: It is the RepubliCon way or the highway. Their way, unenlightened by the brisk exchange of ideas, is the only guidance our country will have before it must act in our honor. Without serious checks and balances, a senile cabinet officer can trump the inherited wisdom of West Point and Sandhurst, and lead us all into destruction. . .and he may get to do it over and over again until he gets it right, because they believe that we believe, God has given them a mandate.

If instead, we are engaged as a country and are presented with the facts, we get to decide: Should we send our sons and daughters out to get what our government tells us we need, or should we try to make over our energy profligate country into a more survival friendly place? Should we kill everyone else in the world and steal their booty or cooperate with everyone else in order to save our planet? Our government is not letting us in on making these important decisions.

End of lesson. I am beginning to sound bitter. I am angry that I lived my whole life hoping to be successful enough to become a Republican. Now,I am old but there is no longer a Republican party. I believed all that crap they lay on you in the 5th grade social studies class. That summer our family drove to D.C. and I remember walking through the Archives and feeling "wow!". To me the Declaration of Independence could have been a rock star. I believed in America. Later on, in High School, they let you in on some of the early in-fighting between Jefferson and Hamilton about how a constitution can be made to work. Jefferson, the pie-in-the-
sky idealist, thought everyone should vote and the idiots will cancel each other out. (This past election should easily disprove that notion.) Hamilton thought that only those with a stake in the system should vote on the board. (These can easily become entrenched parties, i.e., unions of oligarchs who have more in common with each other than the rest of us. Kind of like Nader's rap.)

So our country became a whole bunch of checks and balances. Legislation had to fly with both locally elected populist representatives and state-wide elected Patrician senators. It had to pass muster with nine (eventually)non-partisan old wise men. (I love stories like Douglas was appointed to the High Court because of his reliable conservative bent.) It would be managed by an independent executive, sort of. It was the worst system of government imaginable, except for all others. It was a way to determine public policy without needing to resort to arms. Which brings us all to the present moment.

America now has a RepubliCon President, a RepubliCon House and Senate and a RepubliCon Judiciary. There is the appearance of a RepubliCon conspiracy to manipulate elections which festers because our dominant oligarchy is secretive and nasty. I always wondered how one-party governments, like the old Soviet Union, used our constitution as a model. Well, we have just become a one-party state and we still have our constitution. Sort of.

It should rapidly assume all of the natural ills which accrue to such a government unless it learns the basic lesson of democracy: It survivesas to the civility of its actors.

In other words, when one party can arrest or hang the other side, it does not. One agrees to compromise or put it to a vote. . .and abide by the result of that vote. One plays by the rules because one has agreed to play by the rules and one knows that the game quickly falls apart if one does not play fair. (If you try to cheat too many calls in the playground, the other guy just takes his ball and goes home.) Therefore, Andrew Johnson was not convicted of his impeachment because his main opponent in the Senate thought better of it. If the Congress, he had reasoned, could get rid of any President because they did not like his politics, we would never have a strong executive. So, he voted against his cause (more carpetbaggers/ politically incorrect) and voted for the American people. This was the civil thing to do. It was a principle that seemed to stick; at least, till that Clinton thing.

For what happens when civility breaks down, I give you the example of Colombia. After WWII, they got together a nice little government with two primary political parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals. They quickly discovered that their country was evenly split between between them. So they agreed that every five years the parties would alternate choosing the President. It worked till 1974. In that year, the Conservatives thought they could keep the Presidency in an election and they cancelled the agreement. Since then,the Liberals retreated into the South of their country and have been fighting a Civil War for their true representation in a truly democratic national government. (Rapprochement has been difficult with the USA on both sides of the "drug war" trying to secure its oil drilling operations.)

The word of the day must needs be C-I-V-I-L-I-T-Y. It is the mortar which keeps democracy structurally strong. It is why it is called civil society and why we have civilizations. It is why road rage is so undesirable.

But if an American President wants to squander our capital on his own personal agenda, and Senators threaten to marginalize their opposition if they will not simply roll over for them and promising no job for you in America if you have ever worked for someone they do not like or who refuses to sign a loyalty oath. . .

Everyone should take a deep breath. The breakdown of Civil Society is how one trips over into Civil War. No one, I believe plots their own Civil War; but it is just what happens when the plan to avoid one stops working.

ss
Let us pray,
Brother Artemis

P.S. By the way, John Lindsay is the only Republican I actually voted for.

s

ARTpiece 2

OUR LOOMING WAR WITH IRAQ---AND WITH ISLAM

Let us summarize this past election as succinctly as we possibly can. The American people, with a great sigh, have resigned themselves to the historical imperative of the next Great War. Our enemy is the great oppressed Muslim majority in the world---The OUTs. These people are ostensibly one polity (e.g., "Me against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin; my cousin and I against the rest of the world." To Islamists, and faux-Islamists like Osama bin Laden, WE---the infidels--- are the rest of the world.)

All the Muslims lack to unite them into an inexorable army is only a common center, or a leader with trans-cultural appeal. The template has always been out there. Succeed and they will become the INs. Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Muslims across the world have been chopped apart into innumerable impotent polities. Since then, all attempts to fuse and focus Muslim polities have been opposed (naturally, one might add) by everyone else, like us.

Oil might seem the excuse that fills in the blanks that otherwise make our Iraq policy sound cartoonish (even if chillingly so!). But the only overarching truth is that ANYONE (i.e., the Mahdi, Nasser, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, et al) who tries to forge this Billion-Man polity into a force to reshape the world is a natural-born enemy of the Oligarchy that has co-opted and controls the defense of the present group of INs.

In the best of all possible worlds, Muslims would force their overly zealous madmen to challenge our overly zealous madmen to a soccer match on a deserted island. Win or lose, both sides get to stay there after the match for the rest of their lives.

There are, however, a few complications. On the Muslim side, this is well exemplified by an experience I had myself, in Morocco. My house was broken into and everything was taken. The owner of the house, with whom I was not particularly friendly, asked me what I would want back in order not to make a big fuss.

"Perhaps," he said, he could "negotiate with the thief." Otherwise, the implication was, you could go to the police and you will get nowhere. I gave him a list that included my wife’s passport and checkbook and eight notebooks, which represented my life’s work. The next morning these items and one broken child’s toy were found in front of my door. Two weeks later, items (like my spare eyeglasses) began showing up in the local pawnshops.

On my own, I found out the name of the thief. When I asked my best friend Hamu, a Moroccan, if he knew who this Ibrahim was, he quickly replied:
"Oh, Ibrahim, Absalom’s brother, the thief!"
In fact, from that day forward, every Moroccan I knew referred to this miscreant as "Ibrahim, Absalom’s brother, the thief."

When I asked Hamu, "What gives?" This is how he explained it to me:
"Ibrahim may be a thief, but he is our thief. When we see him coming, we put everything small and valuable in our pockets because we know. When he steals from a stranger, he embarrasses us. He has violated our sense of hospitality. It is up to us to chasten him, though. You are an outsider. He may be the lowest man in our society, but you are not even from our society. Therefore, the thief is worthy of our contempt, but we would never betray him to an outsider.

"Remember! My cousin and I against the rest of the world!"

Therefore, unless Muslims believe that Saddam Hussein must go and that they must stop him themselves, our war with Saddam will probably unite 90 per cent of the world’s Muslims against us. (Many of the world’s Muslims find it hard to respond similarly to Osama bin Laden. He has already proven himself capable of acting in a manner in which Muslims and Innocents--i.e., children---are randomly killed along with the supposed Infidels. "Collateral damage" is a pretty lame excuse for any educated Muslim to rationalize. But how many Muslims are that well educated?)

On our side, the oligarchs have lousy speechwriters. It would be utterly laughable, were it not so tragic, that our not too bright President is given a lame line like, "… these people [took out the Twin Towers] because they were jealous of our Freedoms and Way of Life."

Forget it. Look at a map. If Saddam Hussein were the Emperor of Nowhere, would we be going to war? But we will, inevitably, go to war in Iraq because the ruler of Iraq is trying to unite the Arab World---which is to say the Muslim world---into the major force all self-respecting Muslims believe they are.

The fact that the Imperial Bush-whackers are oil men means that we will never choose alternative energy sources as a way of avoiding, or at least postponing, the looming confrontation. There will be no postponements. Not when the White House dreams of chapters in future history books with titles like Bush II The Bold Saves the Western Hegemony. And not when such easy and provocative tools are available, such as the Tonkin Gulf big lie that one of our naval ships was attacked---Lyndon Johnson’s excuse for entering the Vietnam War.

It would be stupid to believe then that the Muslim street ever could be on our side. Especially when our public rhetoric reveals to all how incredibly naïve or uninformed (i.e., unlikely to prevail in the end) we are. Or, perhaps what dark, manipulative lying sons-of-bitches, the spokesmen for our ruling oligarchy indubitably are.

Originally published Jan. 1, 2003, The Blacklisted Journalist

ARTpiece 1

NEEDED: THE PERFECT GIULIE

Approximately 100,000 homeless people pass through the streets of New York City every day, maybe not so many as you would be forced (or care) to notice. Not just yet. Now, I have no quick fix for the poor nor do I plan to become one. But I do have a suggestion that might help them. And help me as well as you.

As an anthropologist and a scientist, I do not know why the establishment has ignored this problem for so long. But, I do not believe it can be ignored for much longer without New York's already suspect atmosphere smelling much like sections of Marseille. (Perhaps you should continue reading this only after a sensible period of time has elapsed since your last meal.)

A street informant explains that there are only four bathrooms available to all homeless persons in New York City between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.
"There certainly aren't more than a few hundred homeless persons who can be accommodated in those rare facilities," this informant tells me.

The homeless are not soon about to disappear. They and their bodies continue to function. Some squat in quiet dark corners on newspapers or in old supermarket bags and then carefully deposit their detritus in a litter basket. But it is getting more noticeable that most do not.

We need a solution, a fact, if it is not already blatantly obvious, which can be underscored by the experience of the average middle class person in this great city. The average everyman or everywoman can dump at home, at work or in some (ugh!) "public toilet" (if he or she is a customer in a restaurant or looks like a customer in a department store or at a---double ugh!---gas station). Even the rich, walking down Fifth Avenue, have few places to park their tushies. But the homeless have neither home nor office; neither can they afford to spend money in your average restaurant. Nor can they be reasonably passed off as customers in department stores, gas stations or anywhere!

But the homeless have not stopped relieving themselves and before we step in it, I propose the following solution: Port-a-potties for the homeless.

We have addressed this problem for our dogs; how can we ignore it for our however distant and however alienated fellow humans, the homeless? What I propose is that the city sponsor a design contest in order to discover the best, the least expensive, the easiest to operate and the most portable port-a-potty for distribution to the poor. A whole new bureaucracy could be established at the Department for Human Resources. Wouldn't a city bureaucracy that thrives on bakshish (as New York's does) just love the idea.

Such a plan should not only guarantee the support of the civil service employees, but bakshish-loving politicians can be expected to revel instantly in the plan's plum-ability. And because our Mayor has already demonstrated his fervor for improving the quality of life in the city, I think we should call the winning design, "The Giulie," in His Honor's honor. Not only would "Giulies" improve the quality of life of the homeless, but also the quality of life of the Mayor and of all of us who frequent this Big decomposing Apple. After all, our mayor, who would rather put $600 trash cans at street corners and a multi-billion-dollar baseball stadium on the West Side than rebuild the city's crumbling, slum-like schools, must surely appreciate this civilizing, tourist-friendly idea. Only misguided pinkos think His Honor has so cheap, simplistic and puerile a vision of our great city that they've taken to calling it "New Omaha-on-the-Hudson."

I suggest that all who have ideas for the design of the Giulie should send them to the Mayor at City Hall. Not only will Giulies help the homeless, but, in the hands of the homeless, Giulies can come in handy for all of us. How often have you wished you had a Giulie? Or will wish you had one in the future?

And wouldn't a homeless person be more than happy to rent you his or hers?

I visualize a collapsible design which, when assembled, would form a narrow, three-legged teepee wrapped in semi-opaque shower curtains. There would be a pull-down metal seat to which a burst-proof plastic bag would attach. After use, the bag would be tied shut. Then, presumably, some still more penniless homeless person could be tipped to drop the bag in especially lined brown waste baskets which could be placed next to the $600 litter baskets on designated city streets in so-called "purple" areas. Use of Giulies would be permitted in these areas only.
Giulies would save the city's new $600 litter baskets the indignity of having to be stunk up by homeless detritus wrapped in newspapers. Giulies could do for New York City what its many public bathrooms that were so long ago padlocked no longer do. Just as the homeless have turned to recycling soda pop cans to earn the nickel deposits, a new cottageless industry could be born to support these cottageless people. Instead of collecting cans to claim nickel deposits, the homeless can collect the methane-producing deposits in the burst-proof bags to sell to recycling plants for use in generating electricity.

That would help give us all a jolt.

Originally published October 1, 1998, The Blacklisted Journalist