For some reason, I am having an atypical response

Friends, relatives, colleagues, and occasional readers (does that cover everyone? don't tell me, I don't want to know), as I may have mentioned, I am heavily depressed. Between the losses of loved ones in 2010 and 2011, the stress put upon Lydia (about which I could do nothing, and which has now been confirmed as effectively reducing her lifespan by 3 to 5 years), the various long-term effects of the Cheney-Bush recession upon our financial stability and income, and a whole list of things which, taken in sum don't really add a lot to the equation, but one or more of which could have been the fabled final straw ............... 2012 has a lot of responsibility in terms of being better.

I rejoice that some of the people who were equally injured in the past two years are starting to make recoveries and move into the next phase of their lives.I wish I had been able to do this when I was younger. Mostly, my track record is to cocoon up, suppress as much as I can, and then make a whole series of very bad, yet virtually irrevocable, decisions.

So this time, I have spent a lot of time sharing my feelings with very kind people (I truly do have a wealth of friends -- some of whom are also relatives), and mapping out a small list of things I want to accomplish over the next year. Even if all of these fall apart, nothing is going to banjax what time I have left. Possibly this is a sign of maturity. More likely, I'm just choosing a slightly diverging path, but it might be enough to work.

Adventures in magic

Arthur C. Clarke is quoted/paraphrased as suggesting that any sufficiently advanced science is, to the average person, indistinguishable from magic. For most of this year, I have been directly involved with machines that aim radiation at various parts of my body, follow existing pathways (and carving some where none have heretofore existed) to find and (mostly) repair various faults, and a whole host of otherwise normal people who understand all of this stuff.

Personally, the "simple" act of pushing a needle into an arm or elsewhere, placing the point in the middle of an unseen blood vessel, and removing, replacing, or augmenting extant fluids seems more than a little magical. I can't explain it, it strikes me as entirely counter-intuitive, but when the practitioners do it, it works.

I know people who fear anything they can't explain. They are either so bright that they grasp some negative intent missed by the rest of thus, or they have been "educated" in a system where the purpose is to narrow the students' horizons and reinforce the prejudices of their parents/religion/community. Like the machines and most of modern medicine, I don't understand how they work. About all I can summon up is a great pity for them and a greater pity for their children

Well, isn't this just too ironic for words?

For the past few years, I've been having a series of what for a better term, I'll call digestive problems. Mostly difficulties in swallowing and a variety of intestinal pains and malfunctions. I have had most of these symptoms before (albeit in ones and twos), and they had been attributed to stress, so I was just as happy to make the same attribution and try to press on. My productivity levels declined, as did my concentration, but I had dealt with depression before, and there were some similarities, so.....

A couple of months ago, Lydia was not doing too well, so I put the work on Mom's house to the side and came home for a while. Lydia improved, and is well into remission. Her ability to diagnose symptoms also improved, and I was no longer able to lay off my various symptoms on stress. So, a series of tests ensued, and I was sitting in my doctor's office looking at pictures of two different kinds of cancers. With luck, successful treatment, and the Grace of  what Powers there be, we should be able to get them far enough down to be operable.

We do get the occasional comment (meant well) such as:
      Aren't you too taking this togetherness thing too far?
      Look, competition is all well and good, but...........

But it is more than a little ironic. Maybe Spider Robinson is right: if somebody who practices gluttony is a glutton, then G-d spends a lot of time being an iron. Just to make things more fun, we've been sharing one of these "cough until your stomach knots up" viral thingie since two days after Christmas. Thought we were getting better, made plans to see the grandchildren this past weekend, and had to cancel for fear of carrying this to any of them.

Courage and Lonliness

For years, I have assumed the bravest classifications of people were atheists and agnostics.

I have not the slightest difficulty in understanding how one can develop a set of ethics and morals, and how one can live by them, without any level of belief in a Higher Being. I know a number of people who have managed this. Where my agreement rises to the level of deep and abiding admiration is their ability to cope with stress and tragedy in a world where they assume they are, to one extent or another, alone.

In my own, admittedly complex, set of religious/ethical/behavioral assumptions and beliefs, there is this reasonably simple underlying assumption:

There is a higher power or force of some sort, whose faith in humanity is so great that we are given free will, yet whose compassion is so great that we are given  the courage to live with the occasionally tragic results our use of that freedom and a measure of solace (and, sometimes, assistance) when our courage fails.

It may not work for everyone, but a faith/belief structure is possibly the only thoroughly personal thing one has. It works for me. I will be happy to stipulate that you believe whatever you tell me you believe, as long as you are willing to accept the my beliefs are (a) probably different in one or more respects, (b) just as valid for me as yours are for you.

An atheist goes through life without that level of backup. This is an exceedingly brave thing. You don't need a G-d image in the back of your head to develop a set of ethical or moral standards, but there is a level of surety I find useful, and, at some infantile level, comforting. In the past few years, I have fallen back on what one of my friends calls "The Big Daddy in the Sky" force more, possibly, than I should have, but I don't think that's a particularly weak coping mechanism. It works for me.

I have spent the better part of four years caring for my mother, a Stage IV cancer patient. Earlier this year, she died. During that same four years, my wife's chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia progressed faster than we thought it was going to, despite multiple chemotherapy treatments with a variety of meds. She is doing well on the latest medications. The joy of this is somewhat leavened by the doctor's lack of specificity to the usual "what happens if this doesn't work?" question. There is also the problem that, like many chemotherapy mixes, it is essential she avoid excess stress. Unfortunately, we have a couple of relatives who delight in doing everything they can to raise her stress levels. The countervailing force that seems to protect Lydia just when the stress approaches critical is her unfailing faith in a benevolent G-d. Her spiritual journey, from a rural Christian Church in N.E. Washington through Unity Church of Christ in various locations, has always been illuminated by an acceptance of the beliefs of others (or, at a minimum, a sincere attempt to understand those beliefs).

My faith is not in Lydia's league, but I would not want to face life without what measure I do possess.

"Suddenly, they were in control"

Watching the people who gathered in Washington, D.C., ostensibly to protest lowering the number of people who die every year from lack of adequate health care was instructive. The proliferation of signs like "We came unarmed ..... This Time" and "If Brown can't kill the bill, a Browning can" (complete with the outline of a pistol) and "Bury the bill with Obama" etc., says a lot.

Steele, Boehner, and their crowd claim that the people who gathered to throw stones and spit and use words that most of us would like to think we've outgrown are somehow Patriots. But Patriotism is the love of one's nation. How can you claim to love a country where you clearly hate half its population? How can you claim to love a country when you are unwilling to accept the result of its open elections? How can you claim to love a country when you are happy to condemn a third of its people to an early death in order to save yourself a few pennies on the dollar? How can you claim to love a country when you have spent a year spreading libelous and scandalous lies about its leadership even though you know better?

When I lived in Germany and Italy, I had the opportunity to talk with people who were young adults when the Nazis and the Fascists came to power. I also spent a lot of time in Austria, in similar conversations. Unanimously, these people remembered the appeals to patriotism, to nationalism, to traditional values. They remembered the way "the foreigners among us" were made scapegoats. They remembered how the national flags at rallies gradually gave way to party flags and flags from the nation's past. "Nobody told us Mussolini would lead us into a war. We heard the speeches about restoring our greatness. We heard the speeches about rooting out the people who would make us a weak nation."

"Hitler and his party didn't talk about war, or about the Gypsies or the Catholics, or the Jews: not at first. They talked about the glories of Germany that had been destroyed by the Socialists and the Communists, and the Anarchists, and the Marxists. They 'proved' to us these people were not trying to make us all equal -- they were trying to drag true, patriotic Germans down to their level. And we nodded, and we thought they might have a point, and suddenly, they were in control."

I've spent time over the past few days downloading Some of Lani Riefenstahl's films. Triumph of the Will is the most obvious, particularly the part where Hitler calls for "One country, One people, One language, One Spirit." But there are others that evoke the same zeitgeist. Frankly, some of the images would fit right in to the Glenn Beck view of "restoring our shared values."

The members of the Republic Party are not Nazis, neither are the Teabaggers who gather to scream and tell the same tales to each other, and repeat the same, discredited charges about the President, and the Congress, and the Constitution. But their tactics are quite similar. When Republic Party Representatives wave those banners from the terrace of the Capitol Building, and cheer as abusive, potentially violent demonstrators are led from the House Gallery, they are giving approval an legitimacy to the thugs. And there is a point beyond which the thugs are beyond control. There is a point where bricks through office windows and screaming abuse, and spitting turn into something more violent.

There was no real tradition of massive public violence in many of the countries where this kind of movement has taken hold. As the United States is arguably the most violent nation in the world, the distance from shouting "Kill the Bill and the Kenyan, Too" to making a serious attempt is very short.

We have had the foreign conservative group Al Qaeda attack buildings with bombs and aircraft. We have had native-born individuals who espouse conservative principles attack buildings with bombs and guns and trucks, and, most recently, with aircraft.

 Conservative leaders tell people not to participate in something as innocuous as a census because it is an evil plot. They evoke the treatment of Asian-Americans in the U.S. during WW II and claim it had something with the preceding census. They even have the gall to drag out their favorite word: Unconstitutional. The census is, in point of fact MANDATED by the Constitution (Article I, Section 2). It has been more than a simple head count since the start of the Twentieth Century. But Michelle Bachmann says it's unconstitutional, and  Rush Limbaugh says it's unconstitutional, and Glenn Beck says it's part of a plot to take over America. So census offices in three states have been vandalized and trashed. Census workers over the past 12 months have been killed or beaten for being part of that particular "Government Plot." And the people who do these things are Patriots?

Goebbles said "Tell a lie big enough, often enough, and it becomes the truth." We have had elected officials and the unelected leaders of American Conservatism "warn" about death panels, and unlimited funding for abortion, and cuts in Medicare/Medicaid services for months, and these obvious lies have become such a part of the discussion that they are included in debate as "common knowledge."

Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into convincing a minority of the American people that they are, and of a right ought to be, the keepers of The Truth. As such, they have the right and obligation to use all means necessary to inflict their will upon the majority. But what happens when the cause of the moment goes away? Not health care, not any of the "birther" or "deather" or "truther" talking points. Anybody who looks at the signs, hears the speeches, talks to the people knows it's all about xenophobia.

They have been told their President is an outsider: someone not of our tribe. We have had Presidents who were drunks, thieves, womanizers, and (to be diplomatic) not very bright. All of them had their supporters, and surprisingly few detractors. The Tea Baggers seem to revere the worst of them. But the man who put his hand on the Bible and swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution has a strange name, dark skin, parents of different ethnicities, is a Constitutional scholar of obvious intelligence and erudition, and, oh yeah, did I mention his skin?

So these people, who set a record for threats against The President and The First Family back before the election, will be with us as long as this man and his family are in the White House. If their power keeps increasing on the Conservative side of the political spectrum, the next election is likely to be even more acrimonious, even more divisive than the last. And then?

It's too late to make this long posting short, so let me finish with a film reference. In "Cabaret", the male leads are sitting in a beer garden when a group of clean-cut young people come in and start into a song: "Tomorrow Belongs to Me." The camera stays tight on the face and shoulders of the lead singer, cutting to smiling and nodding patrons. The first verse is something like:

The sun on the meadow is summery warm
The stag in the forest runs free
But gathered together to greet the storm
Tomorrow belongs to me
Tomorrow belongs to me

[The song goes on for a couple more verses, then, as the shot expands to include the singer's Hitler Youth uniform, he sings:]

Now Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign
Your children have waited to see
The morning will come when the world is mine
Tomorrow belongs to me
Tomorrow belongs to me

[He raises his arm in the salute as the patrons join in the song, and then in the salute]

Tomorrow belongs
Tomorrow belongs
Tomorrow belongs to me!

One lead turns to the other and asks: "Do you still think you can control them?"

Elections and Definitions

When I was young, my father asked me to define myself. I talked about the various things I was against: bigotry, intolerance, over-orchestrated versions of folk music, and (in my admittedly faulty memory) a brilliantly constructed statement of everything that was wrong with the world.

My father sat through it all, nodding occasionally, then asked one of his "guaranteed to drive me up the wall" questions. "Where's the other half?"

I sputtered my way through some form of "If you were listening, you would have heard it" response, then realized he had that "teachable moment" smile on.

"It's easy to define yourself in terms of what you're against. Any idiot can do that. What happens if all those things go away? Are you just going to sit there and wait for whatever's next? What replaces them? If you don't have an answer to that one, you haven't thought it through."

It's worth noting that my father used "You haven't thought it through" as a euphemism for something between "You're being deliberately stupid" and "That's a crock!!" OK, there's another possibility at the high end of the spectrum, but I try not to use it.

Over the years, I have noted that people who define themselves in terms of negatives are, by and large, nobody you'd want to have over for dinner. Once they run down on their favorite things that are going to "Ruin the country [or the party, or the world, or whatever]" they've got nothing. Granted, you can have fun trying to get at what they're TRULY against: whatever lies at the bottom of this bundle of negativity. That can take some time, and the basic "Evil thing" is usually something you'd wish you never knew about that person. 

I recall a friend who turned every "problems of the world" conversation (these sort of things were fairly common on late night duty cycles and/or while driving long distances while on staff assistance visits) into "the evils of international treaties and alliances."  Over time (and it helped having a team chief who did his post-grad degree in applied psych) it all boiled down to a conviction that an obscure French Socialist/Internationalist splinter party had been running vast portions of the world for some time and was trying to get the full set. Apparently, they were tied up with Freemasons, who were (according to this guy) part of the International Jewish Conspiracy. So in the time it took to drive from Lago di Guarda to Civitavecchia and a long evening in the bar on the ferry to Olbia, we learned that his endless tirade against foreign entanglements came down to fear of the French with a nasty streak of antisemitism. As I said, something I'd rather not known about somebody I was going to have to work with for some time (the antisemitism, not the Francophobia ... most people have that), but at least it established some context.  

By virtue of my temporary residence in Southern California, I have learned very little about the Republic Party's candidates for the nomination for Governor. This might be surprising when I tell you that very few commercial breaks on the television or radio go by without one or two spots for each of them. I know that Meg Whitman claims she can rescue California by cutting taxes, reducing expenditures and improving education. She can do this because she was once CEO of eBay, knows how to run businesses, is not a "professional politician", and is a True Republican, unlike Steve Poizner. Mr Poizner, according to the Whitman "why you can't trust Steve Poizner" adverts, is unfit to lead California because he wanted some sorts of limitations to Proposition 13, and, in so doing, allied himself with  Liberal Unions, Democrats, and the Al Gore campaign. 

Mr. Poizner, from his own ads, is not a Liberal like Meg Whitman. He is apparently going to save California by cutting taxes, eliminating the billions of dollars spent annually on benefits for Illegal Aliens, cutting taxes, deporting illegal (and, it would appear, legal) aliens arrested for a crime, cutting taxes, and not being Meg Whitman (the closet Liberal). 

Since none of their "what I'm going to do" information (what there is of it) makes a blind bit of sense, all we know is what they are against. In the first 60 days of the campaign ( and remember, his is just for the nomination), just over 30 million USD have been expended in this educational process. Breakdown: 3 million by Poizner, 27.8 by Whitman. 

According to the local NPR station, Whitman leads Poizner by 40 points. Clearly, the electorate has not thought this out .... so far.

And this while Obama is a Socialist thing?

If we had a socialist government, or a liberal democrat government, or even (on track record) a constitutional monarchy/parliament government, we would have national standards for education, banking, and medicine. We would have fewer infant deaths this year than last. We would be in contention for Top Ten in academic achievement. We would have an established system that balanced rights with responsibilities.

We have none of these things, and we get farther away from them each year.

"Less of an Oligarchy" or "Less of a Plutocracy" does not equate to "More of Socialism."

What is going on with DoJ??

The Department of Justice is floating balloons about backing off using Federal Courts to try terrorists. Apparently, we are going to back off a course of action that was justifiable on legal, ethical, and historical grounds in order to placate the Right Wing. This kind of "Do good to those who hate you" behavior is doing nothing good for the Republic. The people who are being placated certainly don't follow the teachings presented in the Synoptic Gospels, and seem to accept every White House attempt at civility as a sign of weakness.


Being a self-declared nation of "Laws, not Men" has its problems. It demands we follow the law. That is not always popular. People talk about Justice, and mean "doing what I think should be done." But the law has little to do with what I may think is right, or what you may think is right. The law has to do with what is written down. The law, when applied properly, is an objective standard before which all stand as equals. Nothing unique nor original in that idea. I'm drawing freely upon writings from Marshal to Douglas.

Blow up a building without a permit and you're a criminal. There is a dispensation if you are in the uniform of a nation currently at war with the place where you're blowing up the structure, but even that is limited. No uniform, no nation, no declaration of war, no excuses. It's a criminal act.

The only reason for these custom-designed (i. e.: make it up as you go along) military tribunals seems to have as much to do with national ego as national security.  We couldn't just let the police or the international law enforcement community deal with the people who flew aircraft into our buildings. We had to have a response that was as dramatic as the events of 9/11 itself. We had to declare war. On a crime. Nothing too new there. We have declared war on inflation, smoking, poverty, hatred, and drugs. Even the highly intelligent President Carter couldn't refrain from calling energy independence "the moral equivalent of war." And how did all these other wars work out? Funny you should ask. We lost, or we are losing and can't find a way to get out without admitting defeat.

Argument by history is always slippery, and subject to the current interpretation of past events, but Baader-Meinhof, Brigade Rossi, Tim McVeigh, the people who carried out the first attack on the World Trade Canter, even the Provisional IRA and the paramilitary arm of the Ulster Unionists were not brought down by military action. Nobody seriously advocated bombing Germany, Italy, Oklahoma, or Northern Ireland. We did bomb Al Qaida training camps in retaliation for the first WTC and the USS Cole, but we did it outside any pretext that these people were anything other than terrorists (a specific kind of criminal). And it worked.

But even the "bomb the training locations " option was out of the question after 9/11. The perpetrators trained in Florida and Arizona, with planning taking place in Germany, England, and Saudi Arabia. So the Administration brought out two "war we can win" locations, sold them to a nation anxious to punish SOMEBODY, and waited for the Falklands Effect to kick in. Didn't happen. Not going to happen.

The majority of Guantanamo prisoners were released during the Bush II administration. Sent back to their homelands or wherever we could find a host. We had no case, we knew we had no case, and, in some instances, we had let various governments use us to get rid of their troublemakers. So what we have left is a military prison, where only the guards are military, being used to house a population roughly divided into people who should be brought to trial for criminal actions, and people who probably should be brought to trial, but the government had messed up the investigation so badly that there is no way to get a clean conviction.

Exactly none of the above justifies treating criminals as if they were military. So why is the Administration apparently looking for a way to walk the whole "criminal trial for a criminal" thing back? Politics. The echo chamber that it the Conservative Party has managed to scare the population enough that even people with three digits in their I.Q. are buying into the idea that these people are just too dangerous to deal with anywhere but Guantanamo. Possibly because of the lightning bolts they can shoot from their fingertips. Or because a flotilla of silent helicopters would drop ninja frogmen into the courtroom.Makes no sense, but neither did the "Death Panel" idiocy that substituted for discourse when the Insurance Industry was ensuring that we kept our health care system at the "pay the most, get the least" level.

At one time, we were a nation of laws. These days, the law seems to take second place to public opinion. Fortunately, that is a recent  phenomenon. It doesn't take a Constitutional Law scholar to list the major legislation that would never have made it if we had given a vocal minority the final vote.