Atlanta flyover

Flying over Atlanta as I have done all too frequently in recent weeks, one is struck by the vast urban sprawl down below that used to be peculiar to places like Los Angeles. You can observe how the woods are being gobbled up acre by acre, as the construction of yet more suburban split-levels guns the engine of growth, delights the Home Depot stockholders and sucks in droves of Mexican laborers--or did until the recent housing debacle.

How appropriate, then, that the area should be facing a severe drought that ought to put the whole development scheme in serious doubt. While Georgia’s builders and planners (or anti-planners, more exactly) bulldozed forward to add their quota of tonnage to greenhouse gases, they have also harvested the result of this ill-advised strategy in the form of a globally-warmed water shortage. Gov. Sonny Perdue called upon the Lord recently in a prayer vigil on the statehouse steps, but unless something changes pretty soon, he’s going to need more than a good drenching from Jaysus to save the lifestyle he’s encouraged his constituents to expect as their due.

The optimistic news out of Bali about the eleventh-hour agreement on global warming forced upon Washington is welcome, of course. But it is hard to see this translating into a radical reshaping of the ‘facts on the ground’ that places like Atlanta have created. The new, planet-friendly city, if it does indeed come into being, will have to be far more dense with far less vehicular traffic than anything we’ve seen so far. Will we survive long enough to see the vast square mileage of suburban tracts named “Leafy Acres” and “Golden Meadow” turned into ghost towns of urban kitsch, right next to the pink flamingoes?

The Bible tells me so

I don’t see what all the fuss is about if Mike Huckabee wants to know whether the Latter Day Saints believe Jesus and the devil are brothers. It’s seems like a valid question to me if you’re going to base public policy on the Voice of God trumpeted either through Pat Robertson or a huddle of Mormon prophets.

The early centuries of Christianity were replete with wars over whether JC was human, divine or a little of both. Huckabee got pulled into exactly that terrain with his not-so-innocent query, and if true, it’s one of the least bizarre Mormon beliefs out there. In Paradise Lost Milton placed Lucifer in heaven as a top angel who got thrown out for rebelliousness. I’m sure theologians can work out whether that makes JC and Old Scratch siblings or second cousins, once removed.

Now that the Bible-thumpers have had their day in the halls of state stretching over the last 25 years, we can now view the effects of forcing theology down the throat of the body politic. I think it’s just grand that Romney has to throw himself naked onto the floor before the assembled elders and parse his spiritual well-being for them—that’s what you get for pushing our polity towards theocratic rule.

The spectacle is exactly what the founding fathers tried to spare us when they decided to separate church and state and keep dangerously potent religious beliefs as far from the business of state as possible.

I sometimes perversely hope that the injection of religious sects (like Baptists) into politics deepens and undermines religious belief entirely. Our evangelicals ought to pay some attention to what has happened in Iran after three decades of clerical rule where political and religious dissidence are officially equivalent because the mullahs are the tax collectors and vice versa. Iranian youth are fed up with religion and increasingly secularized. We should live so long.

Morituri te salutant

If the popularity of professional wrestling is any guide, the steroid scandal will have little effect on major league baseball, which is not so much a commentary on the sport itself as on the audience for it. The narrative of the ‘home’ team will go forward, and those who enjoy a good story won’t care much if it is based on a pack of lies. It also says a lot about the public disinterest in the mere playing of a good game. If you don’t win, you don’t exist.

I’m not the first person to notice that this phenomenon parallels the one surrounding our ongoing nation-at-war myth in which the reasons for starting it and the benchmarks for ending it all shift like a sand dune, but the meaning of continuing it trumps everything, at least for a sizeable chunk of the public. In both cases the obvious lies fail to overcome the eagerness for believing in a good tale and enjoying the narcotic thrill of triumph.

No doubt after some public breast-beating with downcast eyes and mumbled confessions of ‘poor judgment,’ the sport will get around to the business of pillorying those who dared to spill the beans. I am reminded of the wonderful Robert Redford-produced movie, Quiz Show, based on the true story of the rigged 1950s program ‘Twenty-One’, in which the contestants who finally admitted to the scam were tossed onto the trash heap while the network execs who covered it up for their bosses went on to greater and more glorious spectacles.

It’s ironic in the midst of so much concern about health and fitness that the vast professional sporting apparatus should be built on a system that feeds athletes into its destructive maw like logs into a wood chipper. If the steroid business doesn’t cost baseball plenty, no talented kid will have a chance for a pro career in any sport if he doesn’t sacrifice his body on the pyre of first-place standings. We look back at the Romans with a shudder, but we seem to be headed for a gladiator system of our own with the unforgiving TV viewer as the new emperor. ‘We who are about to juice, salute you.’

Thugs and Consiglieres

The Bushite torturers will get theirs some day, and I hope I’m alive to see it. However, there is something particularly oily and nauseating about the faux criticism from people who knew what was happening all along and abetted the crimes willingly. Our homegrown star collaborator is Nancy Pelosi who, turns out, was one of the few in Washington privy to the official crimes, which she faithfully kept secret.

The particular twisted spin Pelosi and others use to get themselves off the hook is that they swore to uphold national security secrets. Here’s NP herself on the topic [all quotes cribbed from a Ray McGovern post on CommonDreams.org]:

When the administration notifies Congress in this manner, it is not seeking approval. There is a clear expectation that the information will be shared by no one, including other members of the intelligence committees.

How convenient for everyone! The crimes are committed; four screened and vetted legislators of the 535-member Congress get the skinny, thus fulfilling the ‘consultation’ requirement; no one can breathe a word of any of it, assuring that the oversight is meaningless; and when the poo-poo flies, no one is responsible.

Even the apparently decent Dick Durbin of Illinois got seduced into this abandonment of his legislative, not to mention moral, mandate:

We’re duty-bound once we enter that room to respect classified information. Everything you hear is supposed to stay in the room…I certainly had enough to know that the statements that were made about mushroom clouds were not the conclusions of someone in the administration who was really being honest about the full debate. But you really know, walking in the room, what the rules of the game will be.

Well, Dick, maybe you shouldn’t be playing along by them! Perhaps it isn’t so important to be one of the big players getting to hear all the cool secrets if the cost is betraying your public trust.

I am old enough to remember the exact same weaselly bobbing and dodging among the pious Democrats during the carnage of the Vietnam war when they proved again and again, with extremely scarce exceptions, that they cared more about their pathetic sinecures than another million or so human lives. I am not surprised, only depressed, to see it all once again.

CIA porn

A lot of the hand-wringing about the destruction of the torture tapes seems to me to miss the point. People talk about the false evidence used to arrest Jose Padilla or to condemn the accused in Guantanamo based on phony confessions produced by waterboarding. But the hue and cry about what was or wasn’t on those videos presumes that people care about fairness to individuals. I don’t see the evidence of that.

The argument in favor of torture from the beginning—and that seduced many so-called liberals who eagerly debated how many angels should be tortured on the head of pin—was that no matter who got hurt, saving innocent Americans was more important. That’s the standard retort to any claim that something is going wrong with the interrogation/secret prison/beat-em-to-a-pulp system. Are you willing to risk thousands of dead Americans by restraining us? That is, who cares if the guy's innocent? We might find a guilty one.

Obviously, most people prefer their own safety to the civil rights of others and are willing to sacrifice the historic protections from tyranny built up over centuries to make sure that no 9/11s ever happen again. I would add my own personal belief that there is a strong whiff of vengeance involved as well as people sit back and contemplate or refuse to contemplate torture because they are pissed off about what happened and want someone to pay. It works in criminal justice all the time—bring in someone and accuse them whether they did it or not—so why not in world politics?

I thought that Rumsfeld would be toast 48 hours after the Abu Ghraib photos came out, and instead he lasted for years. Why does anyone think the torture videos would have changed the debate significantly? The moral rot oozing from the centers of power here has only begun to emit its penetrating scent. We have a lot longer to wait before the stench becomes overwhelming. But that day will come, and one piece of evidence more or less won’t make all that much difference. Underneath is a collective, national crime whose poison runs far too deep.

Faulty & Fallacious Assumptions

Now that the dust is partially settled from the unbombshell dropped by the intelligence agencies over the Iranian nukes, I wonder if anyone makes the connection with the intelligence that buried hundreds of guys in the Guantánamo dungeons (one of whom just tried to commit suicide by cutting his own throat with a fingernail). The reasons given for them to be held there is that they are ‘terrorists’ and ‘very bad people,’ in the words of a guard.

But if our intelligence can be so faulty on Iran, could it also be the case that some of the men imprisoned at Guantánamo are in fact innocent? Does it matter to anyone?

It certainly doesn’t seem to matter much to the American people—otherwise, someone among the Democratic contenders might be insisting on raising the issue. They’d be trashed as wacko-lovers who hate America, but at least they’d be able to defend their behavior to their grandchildren, something damn few of us can claim these days.

As for the sudden release of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program, that huge, stinking turdette dropped onto the desk of a certain oval-shaped office bears the stamp of a resurgent spyboy coalition flexing some long-unused muscle. I would also guess, based on the commentaries and subtle hints in the news coverage, that some top-level military guys also weighed in and said, Stop these lunatics! And it looks as though the famous Cheney machinery that could have detoured that document into the trash-heap four years ago is now good and well checked, if not checkmated. We still have a year to go before these demented elements will leave the stage en route to the fetid caves that history will assign them. But it certainly seems that major adventurism is getting pushed gingerly off the table, let’s hope for good. Perhaps we can even start thinking about how to repair the damage over the next few decades that these creeps have done.

Attending to duties

I'm traveling, conferencing, free-lancing with deadlines and generally staying up way too late, so I can't offer anything amusing from this end until Wednesday.

However, I can't resist noting this genius headline from AP: "Violence Hampers Iraqi Security Forces." Thank you for sharing that! Who would have known?