State of the Union Scorecard

I’m posting this by Bob Wicks, who is a friend’s sister’s high school English teacher down in Southern California in a dim and distant past. Bob is welcome to guest-blog here any time.

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Many of you have misplaced your State of the Union Scorecards, so I am providing an updated copy to make your watching more productive tomorrow night [tonight—ed.]. You may remember that Bush scored an unprecedented 80 points in 2001 due to a fluke in the scoring system that year where an unlimited number of self-satisfied smirks were allowed. His smirk score alone that year was 42, and it prompted a rules change so that subsequent to 2002, no more than five points could be garnered for smirking. The rules for this year are essentially unchanged from last. The chart below will make your scoring easy and convenient. Remember that questionable calls are to be recorded in the president’s favor.

Action Points

Any self-satisfied smirk is good for one point to a maximum of five points.

Any sentence with the words bi-partisan or co-operation, one point.

Any sentence with the meaning that we will stand down when the Iraqis stand up, one point.

Reference to Iraqi combatants as killers or murderers, two points.

Call for support of troop build-up in Iraq, one point.

Warning to Osama Bin Laden that his time is about up, five points.

Reference to Iran’s nuclear program destabilizing the area, one point.

Any use of the word “brave” in describing our troops, one point to a maximum of five points.

Camera panning to members of the armed forces in the audience, one point. Marines in dress uniforms count two points.

Reference to parents of dead servicemen, one point.

Letter from little girl in Kansas supporting our troops, one point.

Asserting that the Iraq war keeps terrorists away from our country, one point.

Mention that the world is better off without Saddam, one point.

Acknowledgment that global warming is real, one point.

Suggesting government help to corporations developing alternate fuels, one point.

Noting the advance of the Dow Jones Average to record highs, one point.

Promising to reduce deficits at some future time, one point.

Noting that the Bush administration has added over three trillion dollars to the national debt, 100 points.

Proposing that wealthy people should get a tax deduction for their health insurance premiums, two points.

Calling for continuation of “No Child Left Behind,” one point.

Mention that the world has changed because of 9-11, one point.

Any joke about Nancy Pelosi, five points.

There you have it. Keep this scorecard handy as you listen to the speech. A score of 35-40 is considered average. It is very unlikely that we will ever see the 80 points of 2001 surpassed. There is very little for Bush to smirk about these days, self-satisfied or not.

Another Long Walk Through the Desert to the Mountains

On September 11, 1973, the first democratically elected Marxist president in the world, Salvador Allende, was killed. Augusto Pinochet’s U.S.-supported coup ushered in one of the most violently repressive regimes the world has ever shuddered to see (so it mostly shut its eyes. For this, we will pay a price, I think, as we will pay a price for Darfur, and Rwanda, for Bosnia, for Auschwitz).

When I worked at the Latin American Centre in Cambridge in the early 1980s, I often met Chilean refugees. They were respectful, intelligent, torn apart by what was happening at home. Mostly they didn’t talk about it. There was an international network of people who worked hard to find them somewhere to land, to have a safe place, maybe even to find meaningful work (difficult, though, in Thatcher’s Britain). They made empanadas to bring to potlucks. A pocket of potatoes, a pocket of Andes. Who knows what they had escaped; who knows what they lost, away from home. Not even they will ever know, probably.

Various attempts have been made to bring Pinochet to justice in the past ten years. They have all failed. Now, he’s dead.

In the vein of “L’enfer c’est les autres,” I hope the “autres” encountered by Pinochet on his final journey through the desert of black sand are those who will call him to account. Like Milosevic, he has escaped sentencing in this life…

Minority Party

As in “the Republicans are the minority party.” What a sweet sound that has. We had champagne last night, and apple-cranberry sparkly this evening, to celebrate. And Charlie joined in the celebration by breaking into an unopened bag of cat food and having a bit of a feast.

Here in California, two victories were especially significant and gratifying. First, Congressman Richard Pombo, who was in my mind the most vile member of Congress from the environmental point of view — having taken it on as his mission to eviscerate the most important environmental laws of the last half-century — was defeated in an upset by Democrat Jerry McNerney. McNerney’s victory was basically a grass-roots effort, for which we thank a large number of Bay Area activists who travelled over the hills to canvass for him.

The second was the defeat of California’s Proposition 90, which was something of a libertarian stealth bomb that received relatively little attention. It was marketed as a measure to limit the eminent domain rights of government, but it contained provisions that would have effectively made it impossible to do any land use planning in California. The measure didn’t lose by that much (47% to 53%), and California definitely dodged a bullet.

Let us hope this week’s victories really are the turning of the tide.

Paging the Ghost of George Washington

The United States is now officially a tyranny. You might not have heard—at least our local rag had no mention of the final debate—but the Senate today passed the torture and detention bill (or whatever it was officially called) 65-34. The torture bit is horrible enough, but the suspension of habeas corpus rights is the real kicker. Congress has just given the President the right to detain anyone anywhere indefinitely without any right to judicial oversight or trial by jury if they are an ‘unlawful enemy combatant’. And who gets to decide who is an unlawful enemy combatant? That’s right—the executive branch. It doesn’t matter if you’re a U.S. citizen or not. And if Bush were to declare that some group—let’s say left-wing bloggers—were in fact ‘enemy combatants’ , oops, into the gulags they go.

Glenn Greenwald sums up today’s cravenness perhaps best of all:

During the debate on his amendment, Arlen Specter said that the bill sends us back 900 years because it denies habeas corpus rights and allows the President to detain people indefinitely. He also said the bill violates core Constitutional protections. Then he voted for it.

The bill is probably quite unconstitutional, even to the eyes of today’s Supreme Court, but why will it ever see review? If you’ve been disappeared, how are you ever going to bring the case forward in the courts?

Didn’t we once fight a revolution against such tyranny? To quote Thomas Jefferson (thanks again, Glenn Greenwald): “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”

There’s not a whole lot of checks and balances left in the system. Unless of course the ghost of George Washington himself were to summon the spectres of the soldiers at Valley Forge to a march on the Capitol to rout this adminstration and their despicable enabling crony congresscritters from the nation, in a scene straight out of Lord of the Rings.

Landscapes Of Moral Rot

Two institutions of higher learning and several lifetimes ago, a progressive colleague of mine recommended the book The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, by Andrew Bard Schmookler, saying that it was brilliant. I read it and concurred, gleaning from it the idea that the vast majority of evils result from layers upon layers of acts of power across successive civilizations, not from anything innate in our nature. Moving on to the present, I just discovered that Mr. Schmookler has a website and blog. The site is his response to the amorality and fascistic impulses of the present administration.

But his premise is that this moral crisis is the result of the failings of both liberals and conservatives. In the introduction to the site, he writes:

Many Americans feel a sense of alarm about the moral condition of American society today.

Many in the liberal half of America worry that the political right has been taken over by amoral forces that only pretend to be righteous while they indulge their lust for power and wealth. Many in the conservative half of America fear that America’s moral integrity has been eroded by an “anything goes” culture abetted by the moral permissiveness of contemporary liberalism.

Both these worries are well-founded.

His critique of liberalism is of particular interest:

First, unable to recognize the truth in the old idea that the battle between good and evil is a central part of the human drama, liberalism has been unable to recognize the nature of the forces it’s up against. It is this inability to see these forces for what they are that has rendered liberalism impotent to make an effective stand against them.

And, second, unwilling to take seriously the distinction between right desire and wrong desire, liberalism has been complicit in the emergence of a trash culture that undermines standards and ideals and that cultivates what is base and degrading. This moral decadence, in turn, has created among many Americans a kind of moral anxiety that has historically provided fascistic forces an opening to exploit in their quest for power.

In one post on his blog, he asks his readers for “vignettes of ‘moral rot’ in America”. He cites as an example the routine nastiness in the media, even in in his favorite television show that is at times prophetic and brilliant.

Violence and nastiness in the media are clear examples of moral rot, but what I am curious about is finding instances of cultural degradation in our landscapes. Does the way we create landscape have a moral component to it? And concomitantly, doesn’t inhabiting a degraded landscape lead to moral decline in other aspects of culture?

I believe this is the case. Trying to define a “landscape of moral rot” I come up with the following—a landscape where the forces of greed or lack of respect for personal or collective space predominates.

What are examples? At the small-scale level of individual action, graffiti is clearly one. At the opposite end of the scale would be the the result from the act of drilling for oil in ANWAR. (One perspective on the Republican fixation on ANWAR is that once the taboo on tearing into that last pristine landscape is broken, all other acts of environmental destruction would be simple.)

Closer to home, don’t we see an expression of moral rot in our current housing slump, one that I predict will be long-lasting and deep? It’s sheer greed upon the landscape. People buy huge houses they can’t afford which leads to developers building vast tracts of huge, ugly, and shoddily-constructed things until the system collapses of its economic contradictions.

The antidote to such landscapes is cultivating a sense of aesthetics in our built environment. Of course this means doing something that is completely academically uncool and counter-postmodern—making moral judgments about aesthetics in cultural production, claiming a role for high culture, asserting the primacy of social order, and so on.

Some landscapes just are ugly—let’s cultivate!

The Loser Democrats, or My New Wheelbarrow?

I can hardly bear to think about politics these days. I’m outraged in all kinds of ways about the administration, of course. But I’m so despondent about what is the only presented alternative.

I got a phone call from the Democratic party the other day. At work. I’m at work, I said. Oh, they said, well can you just send us some money to counteract all the negative publicity the Republicans are throwing our way, to the tune of millions of dollars?

For what? I said. I don’t know what the Democrats’ program is. I don’t know what they stand for. It seems to be a wimpy version of what the Repos are doing. That’s what they want you to think, said my telephone volunteer.

I felt blackmailed. I’m outraged at both of them. And, yes, the Repos are probably rubbing their hands about people like me. In a year when the war in Iraq is an obvious slam dunk for the Democrats, they’ve decided to run mid-term elections on the economy.

So I bought a new wheelbarrow, in which I plan to transport many hundreds of pounds of Republican manure from across the road onto next year’s summer garden.

Soul Of A Nation

This past week the Senate debated whether to redefine torture as something other than the gentle practices of waterboarding and inducing hypothermia. The fact that we’re having a political debate about torture, that such actions are just not universally condemned by everyone, right and left, is truly astonishing. Something has shifted in this country over a generation or so, a shift that goes far deeper than electoral politics, a shift of spirit and soul.

Spirit and soul. The archetypal psychologist James Hillman distinguishes between these two notions in a way I think is illuminating:

Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is water to the spirit’s fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury—to use an image from St. Augustine—a confusion and richness, both. Whereas spirit chooses the better part and seeks to make all One. Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior…Spirit is after ultimates and it travels by means of a via negativa...The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.

– James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology, 1975.

We retreat to little things. Sketching. Gardening. But these are things that create soul, as the Romantics well understood.

A Way of Being in the World

I co-taught a class yesterday on Culturally Inclusive and Non-violent Language as part of the Diversity Awareness Series here at UC Davis (and also the Communications Series).

It’s the third time Karen and I have taught this together, and every time we get a new surprise. It’s very powerful to have a group of people brainstorm a huge list of expressions that are loaded in some way but that are such a part of everyday speech we rarely question them or even, in some cases, know what they meant originally (a good example here is “rule of thumb,” which refers to the girth of a stick with which it used to be permissible to beat one’s wife—if it was thicker than a thumb, presumably a man’s, it was illegal).

To raise our awareness of how our speech affects others and transforms the world is one of the things addressed in a post by Rana over at Frogs and Ravens. She draws the distinction between Political and political. It’s a good post. Please read it.

Torture "Lite"?

Last night we went to hear Amy Goodman of Democracy Now host a panel on Guantánamo. Her guests were Michael Ratner, a human rights lawyer and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights; James Yee, a muslim former army chaplain who was arrested for espionage after serving at Guantanamo and later released; and Alfred McCoy, a professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

From McCoy we learned that far from being an aberration, the Abu Ghraib photos show that the methods of torture that have been perfected by the United States since 1951 are still being routinely used in the interrogation of prisoners. They consist of three kinds: sensory deprivation (hence the hooding scenes); self-inflicted pain (such as a prisoner being forced to hold his or her arms out for days at a time, crucifixion-style); and exploiting cultural or personal phobias (in the case of muslim prisoners, using dogs, using women for sexual humiliation, and desecrating the Koran would all fall into this category).

Psychological torture has been shown to be by far the hardest to treat. John McCain has said repeatedly he would much rather have been beaten than have to face the mock executions that characterized his time as a POW in Vietnam. It’s also the hardest to prove because it leaves no physical traces.

There have been no new prisoners brought to Guantanamo since 2004. Where, then, are they being taken? To secret CIA “black sites” around the world, outside the jurisdiction of any U.S. court, away from cameras and journalists and protesters and politicians.

This isn’t just a Bush-Cheney thing. A treaty signed by Clinton essentially excludes mental torture from the activities the U.S. commits itself to avoiding when questioning prisoners. Howard Dean, president of the Democratic National Congress, admitted there was no “position” by the Democratic Party on Guantánamo or on torture.

I felt so sick about this I couldn’t write about it last night. I still feel sick about it. I knew we had been lied to, of course. But I had no idea that this had been such a routine part of U.S. policy for over 50 years.

I feel sick.

Blog Against Disablism Day

Thanks to Diary of a Goldfish for hosting this.

I had a lot of ideas for what to say for this post… to talk about what it was like suddenly to have an injury that required me to navigate the world on crutches, the instant appreciation for the path that is taken not just for two or three months but a lifetime of a lot of people. About how with this same injury, if I had been born in the sixteenth century, it would have become my own lot for a lifetime.

I wanted to talk about my friend Donna who insists that disabled students, if supported, face the same likelihood of success or failure as other students based on their socioeconomic backgrounds. Their disability is not their limiting factor: it’s our ignorance and stupidity.

I wanted to talk about the first time I ever saw a man ski with only one arm. It was in Spain. He was obviously not Spanish. It was a strong contrast to the message of the signs on the metro reserving seats “para mutilados de guerra.” (Not for anyone with a disability, just one acquired on the winning or losing side of a civil war.)

I wanted to enter into a conversation with Jenny and my own relatives who have worked so hard on this issue.

I’m at the end of a day that began yesterday for Jenny and other antipodeans; most bloggers have already said their bit on this. What can I add?

This, I think: owning up to our own disablism is even more unlikely than owning up to our racism, because it’s so plausibly in all our futures. So I’m thankful for everyone who works on this: to stop discriminatory policies, to advocate for equal access to buildings and public transport services, to design better and more ingenious gadgets that seem trivial until you realize that for someone, it can make the difference between browsing the web—this blog, for instance—or having to ask someone to do it for you.