top C.O.N.T.R.O.L. recruit quitting to return to home planet

[click image]

How dare he!

This is a betrayal the size of Jupiter!

[BB2! Take me with you!}

bodhisattva

California State Senator Kuehl has made sure we can all appreciate just how dedicated Michael Moore is to us. I implore you, click on his picture here. It will take you to Senator Kuehl's YouTube page, where you can watch and hear him address our state government on Universal Health Care. Please. Wherever you are, you can't ignore this.

Six videos here of the introduction by Speaker Núñez and Q&A after the Sacramento screening of Sicko.

Can we please have our country back now?
I SWEAR... I WOULD DIE FOR MICHAEL MOORE.

beam them up, dammit!

They're trying to drive me mad!

update

# # # # # # # # # # # # U P D A T E # # # # # # # # # # # #

Yesterday I was digging through the entire goddammit-all-to-hell net for this -- there was, of course, more, but this is the crux of the matter -- and today it shows up on PoliticsTV. Bloggers being the media. Think of the millions of oblivious couch potatoes who don't even own a computer, and the millions who do own one but use it only to trade jokes with everyone they know. This was the testimony that made me actually miss Ashcroft.

the blame game

After watching the video in the post directly before this one, and reading this piece, step back, lean back, go back in your mind and see if you can really believe the Democrats were or are helpless to do anything about this stuff. If they are not hostages forced to act as accomplices, they are just plain accomplices. I reiterate: either way, they are as traitorous as this administration, every bit as treasonous as the entire Republican party, and all this liberal vs. conservative crap is a monstrous mind fuck designed to use The People for obscene liberal and conservative profits.

Uncle Sam Wants You to Try Revolution.

[Rather more time-consuming version of this is crossposted at Lair of the Blue Bear.]

well, stuff comes in the email

And, even though I think Obama is trying to do a meta-version of Hillary's, and the entire Republican Party's, 1984, this is a really good point. NB: Hillary is not having a conversation; she is telling us she's having a conversation. It's precisely like looting the treasury while telling us you're protecting us from terrorists. Precisely. It's precisely like Victoria Toensing telling the world that Valerie Plame Wilson was not covert. Precisely. It's injecting what you want people to believe into their consciousnesses. They catch that sound byte and shortly it turns into something they believe to be a fact; when it has nothing to do with fact. Precisely. It's precisely like continuing to insist Iran is a nuclear threat when it is not. Precisely. Even very smart people are extremely soft-headed when it comes to this stuff. The cognitive dissonance is too much to endure. We may be forced to listen to them, but it is their action that speaks the truth. See my posts about Cynthia McKinney for clarification on this concept. It could literally save the world.

einsteins

It occurred to me last night, while doing some editing for Agent BB2, that the reason there is such a disconnect between the use of depleted uranium munitions and tank armor, the gifts that just keep on killing, and our ability to get it through our bone heads that it is in use, notwithstanding our abhorrence of radiation poisoning, is because the Einsteins who cleared it for such uses only measured its gamma decay. Woops. If only they had measured its alpha decay before they started making all the munitions with it, and plating all the Bradleys with it, they'd have known it was going to kill the soldiers who used these things, and keep killing the creatures who will inhale the particles of it that are now blowing in the atmosphere for millions of years to come.... Or... did they know it and count on us not to be willing or able to figure it out? We could ask Alexander Litvinenko about the hazards of alpha radiation. Oh. No. Oops! Sorry. He's dead.

tilting dust bunnies

On a recent housecleaning adventure day at my house I used this picture to give an idea of my vexation over the mishaps along the way. Some people thought I meant my house was this much of a mess. No. It really needed dusting and wiping and scrubbing, but it's not very messy. My mind fills with this stuff just as the excellent Don Quixote's did in the Cervantes novel. I've always loved this Gustave Doré for its depiction of the gallant madman's psyche. I feel like a gallant madwoman all the time, tilting dust bunnies, duelling vacuum cleaner, bellowing leftist invective at the toilet bowl.

The deal is: I stew about the world while cleaning. Wild scenarios dance in my head as vividly as Don Quixote's. There would be more bodiless -- formerly talking -- heads lying around. As I clear my desk of a hundred framed photographs to give it a good cleaning, I can opt to leave it bare, or fill it with other things, but I'm imagining hauling a hundred senators out of the Capitol as I'm doing it. And it's as easy to do in my mind as clearing my desk. The toilet they've made of the White House as easy to sanitize as this one. Headless arms dealers stacked like cordwood. Defense contractors filed neatly away in metal cabinets, if you get my drift. When I set to house-cleaning, I am like Don Quixote making himself and the world fit for the fair Dulcinea. My mind is ablaze with victories on the field of honor.

You can't know how many times I've been swinging from the earlobes of one person or another, only to have them ask what windmill I'd like them to tilt for me next. The deal is: I'm not hallucinating. They might have a point about the uselessness of some of the attempts to improve things I think up, but they surely won't improve if we do nothing. I'M NOT HALLUCINATING! If you can't bring yourself to try something vivid and real where it will yank people out of this filthy cycle, YOU ARE.

It's this bad.

you gotta speak their language

China has very recently seen fit to shoot one of their own weather satellites out of orbit, and the more I think about it, the better I like it. I like it even more because I'm certain it has bunched the undies of our military/industrial complex, and the government officials who serve them. It tickles me to finally find evidence of a language * and Vice-Fuhrer Darth Fudd can understand.

So many times I have been hopping around with fists full of my own hair, exclaiming to the walls about how in the living hell can these pigs not grasp the English language. How can they take perfectly clearly written law and turn it into so much Silly Putty, pronounce upon it in ways that would make the most shameless ambulance chaser blush? They do it over and over and over again, and every time I am horrified that anyone listens, that anyone lets it pass. I become convinced that all our judges and legislators must have relatives being held hostage at Gitmo. I can't figure another explanation for it. I really do fret myself silly about how to overcome this, dreaming up noise machines that can blast their foul articulations back into their filthy criminal minds, back past that into the anti-universe of perversity, where their multifarious evil concepts and acts do U-turns. In fact, all day I have been obsessing on U-turns for all acts of aggression.

Tonight I found out that China spoke.

What a relief.

No matter what kind of hissies they're pitching out there about this, no matter how intensely they may try to vilify China for this, I say it was bodhisattva work. They finally just came out and put it in terms the greedheads understand. Yanked their attention right off their juggernaut of destruction for fun and profit. As of now, * and the gang -- and don't forget the psychopathic Mr. Olmert -- can no longer feel certain of anything they try to do on the world stage.

Oh. Darn.

storm clouds

Man, this weight just doesn't drop, no matter how hard it rains. I want to find the biggest font in the galaxy to write NO MORE WAR! No. Maybe just STOP!!! It has to stop. This is completely antithetical to anything we were ever brought up to believe. People say Congress cannot stop * in his filthy war-presidenting -- only defund it and watch him find the money other ways. I don't think that's right. He was given authorization to use force, based on information of imminent danger from weapons of mass destruction. That's been proven false. It no longer applies. It never applied. Forget hassling over making that lie merely a mistake. There is no more even imaginary basis for that authorization.

REVOKE IT!!!

We are starstuff, all, identical. A drop of seawater. A fleck of Oberon dust. A whisp of Saturn ring. Any human. How much having makes up for the agony inflicted, the fathers, snapped, shrieking in the streets for just a moment's respite from fear?

God. It's so much worse when it is fathers, too. Mothers and children wailing are generic heartbreak, aren't they? A man gone mad with the incessant murder and torture and rape he must stave off to get food for his family, the inability to relax through so much as one little thump from something dropped by a neighbor, endured 24/7/365 for how many years now? And what did he ever do to us? He's living twelve hours ahead of me and he is a spirit hanging on my heart. Some kind of millions of him hanging on my chest because my shopping countrymen can't be turned from their own concerns.

We have a new Congress. I think we have to drive them mad now. And you should bookmark John Dean. He keeps coming up with ways to help get rid of the culprits. Maybe if they will not listen to me, they will listen to him. Maybe if they will not listen to him, they will listen to all of us shrieking in the streets.

I'm writing across the galaxy: I WANT YOU TO GET MAD!!!

a coincidence theorists' guide to real paranoia

Making a department out of homeland security may well be the final victory of stupid criminality over intelligent probity. In the ongoing battle between mainstream coincidence theorists and us nutty conspiracy theorists, it's time to up the ante. We literally have nothing to lose and everything to gain by copping this attitude, and John Dean leads the way.

On why impeachment is off the table:

With forty-nine senators of the 110th Congress members in good standing with the Republican Party, and most of them rock-ribbed conservatives, even if the House produced evidence of Cheney personally water-boarding "Gitmo" detainees in the basement of his home at the Naval Observatory, with Bush looking on approvingly, there are more than thirty-three GOP Senators who still would not vote to convict. (Senate Republicans who have no problem with torture, or with removing the right to habeas corpus, and who refused to exercise any oversight whatsoever of Bush or Cheney, are hardly going to remove these men for actions in which they too are complicit.)

And so he proposes, with attitude, that we impeach cabinet members instead. His argument is airtight. Let's start with Chertoff, and replace him with someone who will help Congress dismantle this travesty of an administrative department.

Our sensibilities have been smacked upside our own heads like two-by-fours so many times in the last six years that it's become dull. There is no movement. No progress. No rising from it. Things are too dull in this cruel world, so I'm just gonna start rocking out, free associating, venting miscellany from under my heavy-duty tinfoil hat. So should you. The uncivilized realities of Third Millennium life in these United States need to be met with real creativity and powerful allegiance to decency. We're bogged down, and we need to give air to our hearts and minds.

Somebody at the ABA please reinstate John Dean. He has more than made up for his youthful mistakes.

My eyeballs have turned into raisins over the past few days in the process of fathoming a particularly agonizing PDF in the matter of the House of Death case. I'm working toward exposition of the vexing performance of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), an arm of this technologically advanced and devolved-to-outright-stupid new government department -- which somehow, and alarmingly, manages to solve some people's problems in elegantly evil ways, despite the hallmark doltishness of those who people its ranks. As you may already know, I can't research this stuff without experiencing it right here at my desk. So my mind is still riddled with the souls offended in the House of Death case, while boxing my way out of this outrage-overload induced stupor.

And I want to keep snooping, but I only find out The Engineer, a ranking stone cold murderating drug cartel henchman against whom ICE had entirely too much evidence, cops a plea for generally skunkish mayhem and gets 25 years, without leaving us access to the particulars of his crimes and connections. One stand-up kind of skunk. And Lalo, he of many names, turns out to be implicating Vicente Fox in this apocalyptic mess while fighting deportation for having been The Engineer's associate murderating skunk/snitch.

Dear friend to our administration, Vicente Fox! Great!

Which begins to make me crazy all over again. Which makes me -- still at least half fly on Sandy's (Sandalio Gonzalez) wall -- start freaking about how many people have been dying, and how many of my coworkers have been scared out of their wits on top of risking their lives to stop this action. Splits my personality in two. Harks up all the years I spent defending cops in the vast array of truly idiotic and frequently frightening picklements in which they do regularly find themselves. Is pitted against an antipathy formed by hearing of old hippies who were trying to put their kids through college with their dope patches being held at gunpoint while those college educations were being ripped out of the ground. It happens to me every time I turn around. In recent years I have found myself forgiving the CIA all its sins -- lost in the righteousness of Valerie Plame Wilson and her White Knight husband -- only to start suspecting it of more egregious ones. Same with the FBI. One minute they are helping me foil tree murdering banking fraud artists, and the next they're messing with Sibel Edmonds, and our country, in a big way. Same with the increasing nazification of my beloved California peace officers. Sometimes I'm just desperate to get up and knock all their blocks off, but the truth seems to be that there are seriously dedicated, honest patriots in all these organizations. KAOS has ripped the control from CONTROL is all. We gotta Get Smart here pretty soon or we're just toast.

No, really! Read John Dean's latest. It's a shot in the arm for all of us, after we get over the agony of knowing we must swallow our revenge lust in favor of applying wisdom with alacrity. Just do it. Get it behind you so attitude will out.

I'm asking myself how come The Engineer just goes to prison, but Lalo is having to fight deportation. Could it be that decent people within the alphabet soup didn't want Lalo being locked up with no way to trace what the heck he did and knew and could tell us about? Someone in law enforcement got a gander at how neatly The Engineer had been tucked away without leaving tracks for the prosecution of a dazzling array of criminals large and small? Is there a damn tug-of-war going on within our government for decency to somehow prevail over all this filth that has, clearly, been holding the day for entirely exasperatingly much longer than even the nitwit coincidence theorists among us can even stand? John Dean's piece begins to look prettier by the minute.

I'm reeling from finding out that US Customs, along with the Border Patrol and INS, have been folded into DHS, AND they have emerged in this new skin as CBP (Customs and Border Protection) and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), along with a bunch of other things that need to operate smoothly and competently, and don't just now. Of course they don't! The whole department was set up by criminals through the offices of a sub-intellectual drunk sociopath who is holding Barney hostage in the White House. Feast your eyes on it. Read it and weep. Oh. My. God. It's as if they're taking everything upon which they want tight control, turning all of the agencies into enforcement and intelligence and examination and investigation offices (E-I-E-I-O's). Old MacDonald has bought the farm.

It's been creeping me out for quite a while that the Secret Service was moved there. The protection of presidents and former presidents, et cetera, has been moved from the long-entrenched safety of the Treasury Department. The service with extremely high and exacting standards, once thought inviolable, has been put into the service of criminals. Do I have to spell out what that means? Only one feature of this is that a bungler can really easily be made to seem as if he's an evil genius, or vice versa. Any American with benefit of a grade school civics lesson under their belt will not have any idea how to separate one from the other, and can be relied upon to default to the idea that bungling is what's holding the day. Perfect.

No, really! Read John Dean.

A glance at ICE's public face seems to tell one that there is very little they do not cover. If it seems to be missing, they probably just haven't gotten to it yet. And, don't worry, it's somewhere else under the DHS umbrella anyway. ICE's specialty seems to be: Doing whatever the administration tells them. What do you call those? Henchmen? What if Lalo, who had been recruited as a US Customs informant before it became ICE under the umbrella of DHS, was aiding in the currently fashionable practice of manufacturing threats to thwart, being allowed to conduct his drug trafficking operations unmolested in exchange for setting up patsies to make ICE agents look righteous? DHS wants to seem indispensable, not omitting trampling all over other agencies in furtherance of this goal. What if Lalo's gig has been throwing felons with whom Mexican drug traffickers are fed up to ICE? What if he was a gift to us from a foxy someone whose unimpeded War-on-Drugs-profiteering must not ever be impeded? ICE would be acting like ICE has been acting for certain then.

Is anybody getting my drift? No, really! Read John Dean. Set aside the inescapable fact that we are bound by the Constitution to impeach these fiends in the White House, and have been for years and years, because it has been set aside for years and years. If there will be no way to induce them to do their duty in this respect, John Dean has a positive plan that could help a lot.

It's a way whistle-blowers get heard.

It's a way to get ice off the wire.

john and cynthia

Cynthia McKinney risked her life for her country today, and it hasn't even been the first time. Upholding her oath of office, she introduced a bill of impeachment against those filthy madmen traitors in the White House on this, the twenty-sixth anniversary of John's death, and her last day in the House of Representatives. It's hero day at my house. So I want to mention her here where I'm remembering a hero, who died for us as surely as Christ ever did, because she officially is a hero now too. Not just an American hero, a world hero. Make no mistake about it. The world depends on passing her bill.

Will the next Congress really can her bill? Can we let them? No. Too many have died, have consciously risked and given their lives, for the love of freedom and peace -- for us -- for us to turn away now.

Imagine.

And then act.

And don't stop till we have saved the world.

The Accidental Feminist

There’s been a problem here my whole life. Somehow I wasn’t conditioned properly, or just innately impervious. Something. I’m always getting in trouble with other women. They take umbrage and mention stuff that seems unworthy of complaint to me. They used to burn their bras, and whine for me to join them. I did not own a bra. And they did not see the hypocrisy of my buying one expressly to burn. That women have had to fight so hard for equal rights I do not dispute, but it has always seemed more than a little ludicrous to me. I’m forever wanting to clap my hand over a sister’s mouth so I can drag her off to rethink.

All humanity is a seething ball of sisters and brothers, but my sisters so often seem so alien that I’m likeliest to seek refuge with my brothers... when refuge with others is in order, that is. And I can’t seem to fall down on one side or the other on just when that is, and why, either. Solitude/company? What is solitude and what is company? How peopled and unpeopled can you get one or the other of these to stay? Who is the right company? Who is peopled solitude? Why, really, would I spend my money and my lunch break on burning optional underwear? I’d so much rather spend my life growing into myself, coming equal to the real. What does that have to do with gender?

It’s just never seemed viable to me to ignore the differences in strengths and weaknesses between men and women. I’m still appalled that any women would be interested in military service. We should be able to count on women being above that particular human frailty, and yet this point is subsumed in the fake equality imperative of our times. No wonder history never stops repeating.

Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of Abu Ghraib, and scapegoated for the abuses there, still fumes over General Sanchez’s unwillingness to treat her as a real general, his slights having something, in her mind, to do with her failures there. I’m pretty sure she would have performed much better if given the support she needed, but that is also true for the male commanders there. So. That nuance is lost on me. And I don’t want to see it come up in Germany’s prosecution of Rumsfeld, et al. for war crimes, where she will be a star witness. Bad enough the war crimes, without dragging battlefield sexism into it. Bad enough the warring, without such bickering serving to dignify it through the back door, through the servants’ entrance.

But I digress. It can’t have been any later than fourth grade when I learned that we use the masculine form when referring to people in the generic sense. “Mankind” is not exclusively male. Yet bra burning seems to have trained my spellchecker not to balk at terms like, say, “Congressperson” and “chairperson”. Sheesh. Unwieldy. And worse. It seems retroactively to have made the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States, into documentation of male supremacy -- white, owner-class, male supremacy -- and I do not think that was exactly the intent of the framers. It was maybe a mental default of theirs, but not their intent. Language is too slippery. And I think it was better when everyone was lumped into the term “man”.

It really is self-evident that all men are created equal. It seems not to be self-evident to many that “equal” does not mean “same”. If we are to wrest a livable world out of this mess we have created for ourselves, egalitarianism in its every nuance needs to be explored fully. While women, ultimately, can be vastly more formidable enemies than men, that does not make them fit for military duty. Military duty is not a fit occupation for anyone, but there really is too often a need for warriors. Strength and stamina are essential in warriors. Most women lack them to the degree needed, even when buff, but few of us shrink from the violence essential to preservation of life when it is on the line. Modern weaponry has equalized things somewhat for military service, but this only leads us further from the true equality of men and women, of all humans, of all sentient beings, not closer.

No, girls. Neither victimhood, nor imitation confers the equality not missing from the jump. Acknowledging the problem is the first step in solving it, not the entire life of the point of contention. I’m sure I would have been killed by the time I was thirteen if I’d been born somewhere else, but the truth of equality lies in the living of it, despite conditions. I happen to think it is worth dying for, and so certainly worth living outside the box for. Most people seem to think it’s something popular opinion can resolve. Pfeh! If it is so, and it is, what in the hell does opinion have to do with it? Why are people out there role-playing it into submission? It isn’t submitting! It’s just amplifying the problems of patriarchy... which... oh, brother... don’t need any more help.

Lest anyone wrongly conclude I favor matriarchy over patriarchy, I better press on with my rant... see if we can see it through... see if we can start seeing all the way through to the heart of real causes of human suffering.

When I read of female police officers having cows about pin-ups in evidence at the station, I could just scream. Get over it! Deal with it! You’re going to make them deal with your maternity leave, and stopping to powder your nose before entering the interrogation room. So what, so what, so what if men objectify babes? Women objectify alpha males, and mercilessly scar for life beta males. We humiliate the living snot out of ninety-eight-pound weaklings. We want the he-men to protect us, or support us, or as trophy husbands, as impervious to their human needs as any men are to those of the women they objectify. What the fuck is the difference?

Is, say, Hillary Clinton as Commander In Chief in this filthy aggression of the strong toward the weak any better than her husband in the same role? No. Dammit. No. It actually is worse. Just as it was worse with Meir and Thatcher and Indira. Add the motherly instincts to the heightened sense of entitlement that never ceases to be conferred with the office, and war and oppression and murder are strengthened in their usefulness to injustice itself. The chance of the feminine hauling the masculine back into a living balance is squandered. The abounding weakness of human resort to such squalid matters of State is obfuscated the more by womanly application. Even minus the problems inhering womanly vanity put up next to male egos -- women emulating men in positions of power, perhaps particularly when they are completely unaware of it, when they actually believe it is womanhood at work -- minus all that -- the mere entrance of women into this kind of men’s club is fundamentally more dangerous.

The pollsters asking me if I think it is time for a woman president drive me wild. Beside knowing they’re asking for Hillary or for those wanting to oppose her, it has never not been time for a woman president. We just need to put one up for the job who isn’t going to fall for “presidenting” American style. Who would that be? Not Hillary. Probably not any prominent women politicians we have. Maybe Cynthia McKinney. It would be a lot safer if we got serious about identifying the real problems with feminism, with sexism, before we go another step. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could stop, put everything on hold, while we get clear on what is self-evident and what is completely contrived?

It’s going to be particularly galling to Wasichu, but, er, there were in fact Native American civilizations that had this one licked before Europeans landed in the New World. Chiefs were conscripted without regard to gender, but your willingness to lead was seen as something that might disqualify you for the job. It was seen that the ambition for such a position was a bad attribute in leaders. And, in these very same civilizations, able-bodied husbands saw to it that widows and spinsters were protected and fed. No pity. No patronizing. A basic human need handled. Europeans seemed to think these people savage because their manner of dress was, shall we say, strippier. Odd how people not given to bathing, but given to scrupulous adornment would look down on scrupulous bathers who saw no need for restrictive clothing. Their term for the President of the United States, The Great White Father, is still seen as a form of supplication, recognition of white supremacy, when it translates simply into “leader of the white people”. A certain crucial kind of clarity was trying to communicate, and it still has not penetrated. I think the path to the realization we lack, and they did not, lies behind the door of the true meaning of egalitarianism, of equality, of self-evident truths beclouded by endless games of dress-ups going on in our heads as well as on our bodies.

Ms. Jeans and Sneakers, here, recently was bowled over by a picture of a dress for the first time in at least thirty years. So much so that it occurred to me that I would even wear heels if I could just have it. I might even buy a bra to wear under it. I might even need two of it so that one could be at the cleaners while I wore the other twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five. Helen Mirren in a red gown that is utterly modern, but Victorian or even Elizabethan in form. Everyone saw it in the New Yorker. I can’t get over it. It’s a work of art that suits me in a rare sense, appeals to me where I am completely me. Yipes! That dress rocks. Maybe will have to find a frame for the picture if this keeps up. A dress for my pulchritude has not so much as crossed my mind in a hypothetical in decades, and here it is, about to get framed if it can’t frame me. Friends ask me where the heck I have to wear such a thing. Everywhere. Nowhere. Where is wearable art appropriate in my view? The grocery store. The doctor’s office. At my desk in the Oval Office. At the breakfast table. I don’t think my indian grandmothers would have seen it any differently, though my European grandmothers would have been outright appalled.

Where we choose to attach significance makes all the difference. In this case, the head trips about appropriate attire are seen to be completely contrived, and lethally consequential, whereas wanting to wear something for the sake of art is completely uncontrived and of no consequence beyond esthetic. A Great White Father could be red and clad in one dress for her whole term of office and yet be wiser than one in a suit, performing the function as well, or even better. We also glimpse how our conditioning by our own contrivances can prevent our ability to even fathom what is being said to us, and even who is saying it. The content of our heads -- victims and oppressors alike -- conceals what is in front of our noses. Our confusion about equality, about true egalitarianism, about how to bring into being a world fit for all beings, is so dangerous in action because crucial distinctions remain utterly unexamined inside our heads. What causes humans, all with so much more in common than not, to be at such odds, to be so fragmented in purpose, to remain unmoved against so much evil for so long? Could it be our unexamined resort to affectation in place of actualization? Our preference for victimhood over risking our lives? Our ideas about proscribing differences rather than prescribing for each other’s survival?

Has it not got the most to do with our fundamental inability to see all the way into one of the great truths we only suppose we hold to be self-evident?

the thumpin' we gave

I live in a very small town. It's mostly dairies and flower farms and redwoods around here, more cows than people. And a lot of those people think dressing like a hippie is a great Halloween costume. We're talkin' Basic Small Town America. If you don't even own a tv, you can get pretty lonely for the public square around here.

Sure, there's Greater Blogistan, and silence is my very favorite music, but, accidentally, I found out how nice it can be to just sit down and listen to real humans talking about real things. Remember when we were filibustering for a filibuster of the Alito confirmation? When thousands and thousands of us stayed up for days, nuking the phone lines and inboxes of all our senators to stop that entirely too far Wrong Wing appointment? One of the radio hosts who came in to spell The Young Turks, give them a few hours for some shut-eye, sounded so genuine to me, so mowed-down over the chance to be part of such a patriotic endeavor, that I decided I wanted to listen to his internet radio show a time or two.

Suddenly I was transported to the "hills and hollers" of West Virginia, netcasting liberal talk radio, brought to me by a local union. When was that? February? So many offenses have raced by in the raging waters under the bridge that maybe I only think it was February. Maybe March? Back then, anyway. I was just floored to hear all these stone hillbillies talking progressive politics, using twangy but intricate syllabicity, and they even seemed to understand the meanings of the words they used... mostly. Hot dang! Another stereotype bites the dust. Still, it had to be a mistake, so I tuned in quite a few more times.

I got to know the callers pretty well, and I had my favorites. I think my biggest favorite was Wesley. He works for the union that sponsors the network. Probably I like him the best because he reminds me of my earliest childhood, when my dad was in a union, and it was explained to me that workers vote Democratic, because Republicans are against workers, and always take away all the overtime. My dad worked seven days a week back then. Forty hours at straight pay. Twenty at time and a half. Eight at double time. Two at double time and a half. And eight at triple time. We know about hard work around these parts. Wesley has been working like that for the union, for the Democratic Party, and against all the people who have been hollering for us to just dump them and vote third party. Every time people started screaming too hard about those spineless so-and-so's, Wesley would get on the line and explain about how the Democratic Party just needs fixing, not replacing, that it is vital to get control of Congress, at least the House, so we can put a stop to the criminality running our country into the ground. To use a term that just became popular, Wesley took a thumpin' a number of times for his position on how to fix our country. People have been damn fed-up.

He was always careful to explain that he wanted Democrats elected and then we could hold their feet to the fire. If they wouldn't do the right things, then we could replace them with people who would. He never slacked. He maintained that position through every bump in the road, every screaming fit about the lame Democratic response to the endless ugliness we’re supposed to call "legislation" in recent times. Wesley was only shaken by the Military Commissions Act. He did not mention electing Democrats to office then, and he was outraged by every one who voted for it, including thirteen Democrats. He's not a religious man, but he got on the phone to all the church organizations he could think of and asked them if Jesus would condone this, and if not, why weren't they speaking out against this heinous bill? And he was asking everybody listening to the show to do the same.

Wesley started out feeling like home and stayed that way.

In the days leading up to Election 2006 I know most of us were having a very hard time swallowing back the mounting terror. Gore Vidal came out on video to say it was the most important election in his very long life. Others have been saying very similar things. I have been bellowing to anyone who will listen that it is the end, the very last chance to turn this around, to get our country back. The urge to hysteria had been mounting in my breast for a week. On Monday the 6th, my voice raised at the checkout counter at the store about how I hoped everyone was voting on Tuesday. Heads turned from every corner of the store. Bring cameras! We can't let 'em steal this one! Bring cameras! Cameras and pitchforks! America! America! America! They can't have our country!

Funny. When the impossible happened, when we got the House, and almost certainly the Senate too, I still couldn't feel relief. Kept refreshing the New York Times results map page to count the dark blue patches. In the moment I heard that Allen was conceding in Virginia, it finally started feeling true. As it finally sank in, my very first thought was for Wesley, a man I've never met, who lives three thousand miles away, but I had come to love through the miracle of cyberspace. Even though I haven't listened to that show very much in months, I know I can always pull them up in the archives at the White Rose Society, catch up on them that way.

Full of relief and love for the world, I pulled up the latest show I could find. Sure enough. There was Wesley, saying:

Okay. Now we gotta hold their feet to the fire!

[Update: This post has been altered slightly to take out some particulars, and in the months since the Democrats took office, Wesley has been making excuses for them, not holding their feet to the fire. --99]

So You Think You Can Tell Heaven From Hell?

…Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?


Dodos were daffy-looking flightless birds of the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. They were wiped out in the late sixteen hundreds by British sailors. Something larger than turkeys, about fifty pounds, they had token wings and a little swatch of feathers on behind. They were bluish, with black bills, big red W.C. Fields bulb hooks on the tips. They had short necks, short legs and strong feet. Evidently, they made a good meal for camping clutches of hale and hearty mates. They didn't have to shoot them, or even have to chase them. It was just like pulling up to the drive-up window at McDonald's. The sailors would come ashore, and dodos would waddle out to greet them. Meals in love with their consumers. Trust venturing forth to embrace sloth and vanity and greed. Pure, guiltless, guileless being on its way to isn't-this-great! bottomless entitlement. Dodos have become synonymous with stupidity, and maybe you can see why, but I don't think virtue has ever been stupid. It has never been stupid.

An extinct bird, one that may well be the very epitome of undignity, symbolizes extreme dignity, where it is real, where the air is hollow. Untaintable trust is beautiful -- even if on a practical level it is ill-advised. This should have been a world where a dodo gamboled its way to a sailor and was met with a loving embrace -- which, of course, was what the dodos, to a bird, were trying to elicit from the sailors so unfailingly and so tragically. The dodos weren't stupid in their endeavors; the sailors were in theirs. Posterity ought really to have the decency to get that straight. Even though the dodos were failures, in a Darwinian sense, we compound our failures by maligning them so mercilessly, right up to this day.

There are wizened pieces -- a head here, a foot there, the odd bodiless beak -- of dodos stashed away in museums. In other words, what few parts those porcine ancient mariners left uneaten. I think someone ought to try reviving some dodo DNA. The greatest possible use for cloning would be to bring back to life those who died of our stupidity. Think of the heroes who'd walk the sweet earth again! Think of the oceans full of whales! Think of the loving dodos cooing in our gardens! If the dodos had succeeded, I'd have moved to Mauritius as soon as my parents couldn't stop me, and there'd be a completely different world to share with you now.

Wish you were here….

[Heart tip to Pink Floyd, lyrics by Roger Waters, as sung by David Gilmour for Syd Barrett. ©1975]