Op-Ed
One faction of the Tea Party will gather on the mall in Washington, D.C., this week on Tax Day. They will rail against big government, intrusive regulations, taxes and spending.
On Monday, people across the country observed a moment of silence for the tragic loss of 29 lives at the Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, W.Va. The nation's worst mining disaster in over four decades took place at a mine that had been cited for literally hundreds of violations over the last year, including many serious ones.
Will we ever learn? Mining is an inherently dangerous occupation. According to the United Mine Workers of America, in the last century more than 100,000 miners were killed due to mine disasters. More than 100,000 died from black lung disease by breathing coal dust. Even today, a coal miner dies every six hours from black lung disease, and these numbers are rising again.
On Monday, people across the country observed a moment of silence for the tragic loss of 29 lives at the Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, W.Va. The nation's worst mining disaster in over four decades took place at a mine that had been cited for literally hundreds of violations over the last year, including many serious ones.
Will we ever learn? Mining is an inherently dangerous occupation. According to the United Mine Workers of America, in the last century more than 100,000 miners were killed due to mine disasters. More than 100,000 died from black lung disease by breathing coal dust. Even today, a coal miner dies every six hours from black lung disease, and these numbers are rising again.
Here's a popular "Letter to America" and a new reply from America below.
You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.
You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.
You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.
You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.
You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.
You didn't get mad when we spent over 600 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.
You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.
You didn't get mad when you saw the Abu Grahib photos.
You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.
You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.
You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden.
You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.
You didn't get mad when we let a major US city drown.
You didn't get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.
You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.
You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.
You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.
You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.
You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.
You didn't get mad when we spent over 600 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.
You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.
You didn't get mad when you saw the Abu Grahib photos.
You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.
You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.
You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden.
You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.
You didn't get mad when we let a major US city drown.
You didn't get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.
James Gilligan published a book 13 years ago called "Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic," in which he diagnosed the root cause of violence as deep shame and humiliation, a desperate need for respect and status (and, fundamentally love and care) so intense that only killing (oneself and/or others) could ease the pain -- or, rather, the lack of feeling. When a person becomes so ashamed of his needs (and of being ashamed), Gilligan writes, and when he sees no nonviolent solutions, and when he lacks the ability to feel love or guilt or fear, the result can be violence.
The choice to engage in violence is not a rational one, and often involves magical thinking, as Gilligan explains by analyzing the meaning of crimes in which murderers have mutilated their victims' bodies or their own.
The choice to engage in violence is not a rational one, and often involves magical thinking, as Gilligan explains by analyzing the meaning of crimes in which murderers have mutilated their victims' bodies or their own.
The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression has given out its 2010 Muzzle awards for those blocking freedom of speech, and the awards are all for particular petty instances of censorship. Stanley Fish muses in the New York Times about the conflict between valuing free speech and valuing democracy. What these two thoughtful, well-intended endeavors -- the awards and the op-ed -- seem to miss is that the greatest threat to free speech is the monopolization of speech by some vociferous defenders of free speech. The Supreme Court that ruled on "Citizens United vs. FEC" should not have gone without a Muzzle.
I've been reading about the history of torture, including John T. Parry's new book "Understanding Torture: Law, Violence, and Political Identity." Parry gives a history of torture in Europe and the United States through the twentieth century, establishing its pervasiveness, and the repetitiveness of the excuses and legalistic machinations used to allow it. Parry sees torture as an absolutely normal activity in our society, but an activity that at least until now was always treated as an aberration, no matter how systemic. Parry even tries to suggest at times that torture is required, necessary, or "essential" for western democracies.
Debra Sweet, the national director of World Can't Wait, stepped forward to face me in close range, fixing her eyes on mine the entire time, as we spoke at the most recent anti-war protest in Washington, D.C.
“It's seven years since (the US military tactic of ) 'shock and awe.' With a new administration, I think a lot of people have had their minds changed that somehow that was not a completely aggressive, preemptive, illegal, illegitimate, unjust, and immoral war. And it still is.
“ We know that more than a million Iraqis died, 4.5 million displaced from their homes, civil society completely destroyed. Torture is part of this occupation at Abu Ghraib and other places, spreading to Guantanamo, and under the banner of the so-called global war on terror of the Bush regime, it spread across the world in our names seven years ago.
“It's seven years since (the US military tactic of ) 'shock and awe.' With a new administration, I think a lot of people have had their minds changed that somehow that was not a completely aggressive, preemptive, illegal, illegitimate, unjust, and immoral war. And it still is.
“ We know that more than a million Iraqis died, 4.5 million displaced from their homes, civil society completely destroyed. Torture is part of this occupation at Abu Ghraib and other places, spreading to Guantanamo, and under the banner of the so-called global war on terror of the Bush regime, it spread across the world in our names seven years ago.
President Obama has taken a further plunge into the kind of war abyss that consumed predecessors named Johnson, Nixon and Bush.
On Sunday, during his first presidential trip to Afghanistan, Obama stood before thousands of American troops to proclaim the sanctity of the war effort. He played the role deftly -- a commander in chief, rallying the troops -- while wearing a bomber jacket.
There was something candidly macabre about the decision to wear that leather jacket, adorned with an American Eagle and the words “Air Force One.” The man in the bomber jacket doesn’t press the buttons that fire the missiles and drop the warheads, but he gives the orders that make it all possible.
One way or another, we’re used to seeing presidents display such tacit accouterments of carnage.
And the president’s words were also eerily familiar: with their cadence and confidence in the efficacy of mass violence, when provided by the Pentagon and meted out by a military so technologically supreme that dissociation can masquerade as ultimate erudition -- so powerful and so sophisticated that orders stay light years away from human consequences.
On Sunday, during his first presidential trip to Afghanistan, Obama stood before thousands of American troops to proclaim the sanctity of the war effort. He played the role deftly -- a commander in chief, rallying the troops -- while wearing a bomber jacket.
There was something candidly macabre about the decision to wear that leather jacket, adorned with an American Eagle and the words “Air Force One.” The man in the bomber jacket doesn’t press the buttons that fire the missiles and drop the warheads, but he gives the orders that make it all possible.
One way or another, we’re used to seeing presidents display such tacit accouterments of carnage.
And the president’s words were also eerily familiar: with their cadence and confidence in the efficacy of mass violence, when provided by the Pentagon and meted out by a military so technologically supreme that dissociation can masquerade as ultimate erudition -- so powerful and so sophisticated that orders stay light years away from human consequences.
Eighty-five percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Republicans tell pollsters when asked that they oppose the Supreme Court's decision in "Citizens United" which lifted limits on corporate political spending. I'm willing to bet that at least those same percentages would tell you the decision violates the U.S. Constitution. And I would bet that if you explained to people that the CU decision was based on the ideas that spending money on elections is speech and that corporations claim the First Amendment right to free speech which was meant for people, the numbers would increase.
Two observations. First, people, Congress, the White House, state governments, corporations, media outlets, and the Federal Elections Commission are, by and large, treating an unpopular and unconstitutional ruling as the law of the land, even though the ruling itself and others like it make amending the Constitution to fall in line with either the popular will or the obvious meaning of the existing Constitution more difficult -- yet still doable and desirable.
Two observations. First, people, Congress, the White House, state governments, corporations, media outlets, and the Federal Elections Commission are, by and large, treating an unpopular and unconstitutional ruling as the law of the land, even though the ruling itself and others like it make amending the Constitution to fall in line with either the popular will or the obvious meaning of the existing Constitution more difficult -- yet still doable and desirable.
“Everything feels obscene,” a friend said seven years ago, when we carpet-bombed Baghdad, launching the invasion. It still does, but in a dull, chronic, “used to it” way — outrage mixed, these last few years, with “hope,” smearing the war effort with a thick, national ambivalence.
Is it still going on? Well, yeah, with a grinding pointlessness that’s not worth talking about or even debating anymore. The smorgasbord of justifications has been permanently shut down: the 9/11 tie-in, the WMD, “another Munich,” democracy for the Middle East. No one’s hawking Freedom Fries anymore. The war in Iraq simply continues because a war in motion, especially when it’s not really a war, when there isn’t an enemy with whom to negotiate, is incapable of just, you know, stopping. When we don’t really have a mission, completing it is difficult indeed.
So I find myself witnessing the seven-year anniversary in a state of private grief, chewing bitterly on the limits of politics. Whatever slow, cautious change President Obama believes in at the deepest level of his political soul, he can only attempt to conjure it out of politics as usual.
Is it still going on? Well, yeah, with a grinding pointlessness that’s not worth talking about or even debating anymore. The smorgasbord of justifications has been permanently shut down: the 9/11 tie-in, the WMD, “another Munich,” democracy for the Middle East. No one’s hawking Freedom Fries anymore. The war in Iraq simply continues because a war in motion, especially when it’s not really a war, when there isn’t an enemy with whom to negotiate, is incapable of just, you know, stopping. When we don’t really have a mission, completing it is difficult indeed.
So I find myself witnessing the seven-year anniversary in a state of private grief, chewing bitterly on the limits of politics. Whatever slow, cautious change President Obama believes in at the deepest level of his political soul, he can only attempt to conjure it out of politics as usual.
ACORN is shutting down because of a fraudulent video pimped by the corporate media. U.S. forces in Afghanistan have heroically laid seige to and conquered a fictional city, helping build the case for further escalation. A cable news channel has created a right-wing mass movement by pretending it already existed. Congressman Dennis Kucinich voted for a health insurance bill he believed would deprive more people of healthcare (and wealth and homes), because fraudulent reports had convinced his constituents of the opposite. The peace movement was defunded in November 2008, because of a fraudulent presidential election campaign. 71% of Americans believe Iran has nuclear weapons. 41% of Americans think the quality of the environment is improving. Has the power of the corporate media to overwhelm all before it begun to sink in yet?