A Lot of Change, Not Much Difference

The broadcast media's portrait of the 2006 elections as a referendum on the Iraq War has turned out to be not only meaningless, but also an utterly disposable bit of wall-to-wall fanfare and tongue-wagging. There's no reason to suppose that the media's portrait of these 2010 elections as a referendum on the Democrats or the Obama Administration's economic policies will prove to be any more meaningful.

Like the Progressive Democrats who voted for Obama in 2008, last week, many citizens were coerced into voting against their own interests, but won't be told about it, and don't have the tools to figure it out. Tea Party supporters who voted for Republican candidates would have their cake and eat it too: they make a lot of noise, but don't have the courage to vote for a real third party. They might present a good argument for the efficacy of an instant runoff voting system, but in the mean time, will likely serve as live bait for Neocon operatives.

When I tune in the Jesus channel on my TV set, the evangelicals claim ownership of the Tea Party movement (the Jesus channel truly is the lunatic fringe: a few years ago Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez -- other than radical Muslim clerics, what type of religious leader calls for the assassination of a foreign head of state?). When I turn in to Fox News radio, they claim ownership of the Tea Party too. Despite the pride the movement takes in claiming to be leaderless, I think NPR is probably right to align them with the Republican Party -- given that the Tea Party has exclusively elected Republicans (maybe that's just a statement about correlation rather than causation, but let's leave SCIENCE OUT of things, OK?).

When backers of Tea Party candidates express fears about the GOP co-opting the movement, those fears are really about the big-government, big-deficit, war-mongering, anti-civil-liberties Neocon GOP contingent that has for the past few decades dominated the GOP. They won't admit it, because criticizing anything about the Republican Party might embolden some Democrat somewhere, but the Tea Party is not just pissed off at Big Government -- a lot of them are also pissed off that they were duped for two terms of George W. Bush. I expect the revisionists will soon take care of that -- otherwise the Tea Party may realize that the Neocons pose a greater threat to their movement than the Democrats do. In 2008 Ron Paul was excluded from presidential debates by both Fox News and the GOP -- that Fox and the Republicans now seem to embrace the movement Ron Paul kicked off should be cause for concern.

Even though George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Alberto Gonzales left office when Barack Obama moved into the White House, President Obama's Administration is very much a continuation of the Bush era's Neocon agenda. The Democrats won't talk about it, because then some Republican somewhere might accuse them of harping on the past rather than moving forward and taking action. It would be nice if they'd talk about it, because it could as easily be the result of corruption, psychopathy, or simply not being left many options by the previous Administration (which itself may have been corrupt, psychopathic, or inept).

Democrats are not by definition "liberal." Barack Obama is no "liberal" -- and in many ways the Republican party is far more radical than anything found in the Democratic party. Barack Obama is definitely not Malcolm X. He's not Al Sharpton either. I don't care how heart-wrenching it was for the Independent Voters on TV in 2008, wringing their hands over whether or not to vote for a black man. Obama acts more like a Neocon than a liberal, and the media is still dominated by liars. The health care reforms he proposed were perfectly compatible with classical 20th Century free market thinking, and what Congress eventually passed was quite favorable to Big Business.

In the 1940's, the influential free market thinker Friedrich Hayek wrote: "there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody… Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for the common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance -- where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks -- the case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong."

The basic logic behind state-run healthcare in a free market economy is this (according to the Grand-Daddy of the Chicago School of Economics that was so influential during Bush II's Administration): industrialization has destroyed the intergenerational knowledge necessary for an individual to successfully live life as a farmer; most workers therefore have no choice but to work in the industrial system; because workers must work for the industrial state, the industrial state has an obligation to provide workers with social insurance systems that ensure that workers can work. Hayek was by no means a socialist: he strongly believed that free markets were among the most profound inventions ever devised for the promotion of individual liberty. In his support of individual liberty, he was equally suspicious of coercive pressures originating from states as from corporations.

Some years before George Orwell, Hayek wrote: "Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed." Although Hayek was a proponent of free markets, he called his platform "liberalism." So did his predecessors for the prior 200 years. In 2010 AD, Hayek's views are more commonly called "conservatism."

Despite what might be called two years of "liberal" or Democrat rule, the Department of Homeland Security has continued a Neocon agenda of chipping away at civil liberties, most recently increasing the scrutiny given to routine financial transactions, and habituating citizens to livestock-like inspections prior to boarding airplanes. The Neocon wars continue: our unnecessary war in Iraq, in Afghanistan with new fervor, on Drugs here and with NORTHCOM through Plan Mexico, on Secular Humanism, and on Terror. Almost everything about the War on Terror is preposterous: more Americans DIE EVERY MONTH in auto accidents than died from highjacked planes on September 11, but we subsidize roads like mad, and bail out auto manufacturers, and hand out cash for clunkers to insure that America keeps on rolling. As of 2010 AD, the federal gas tax was last raised by a nickel in 1993, and currently stands at 18¢ per gallon. For the Federal Interstate System to be fiscally solvent, the Federal Gas Tax needs to be over 56¢ per gallon. Without hyperbole: roads are heavily subsidized. That's FACT.

President Obama has followed through with his promise to expand America's military conflicts into Pakistan, and is following former Republican Presidential nominee John McCain's position that stricter sanctions should be imposed against Iran. The Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility remains in operation, the CIA is targeting US citizens for extrajudicial execution, the telecommunications industry's retroactive immunity for surveilling US citizens remains unchallenged, Predator drones conduct illegal targeted assassinations abroad, the militarization of the Mexican border continues, and the militarization of the Canadian border is underway unabated. Globalists took the lead in engineering and managing the "bailout" of the financial industry through a series of coordinated government actions here and throughout Europe. Nebulous threats to "security" are guiding the coordination and militarization of police tactics among the various nations through intelligence sharing agreements, contractor outsourcing, and with support from secondary markets that supply contractors. Instead of soldiers in Iraq, we have private contractors importing logistical support from third-world nations. As US troops withdraw from Iraq, the number of mercenaries is expected to double. War is a business proposition, not the solemn duty the TV says it is. That's why the US Constitution authorizes a Navy to protect trade routes but prohibits standing armies (which tend to bankrupt nation-states).

Whether through bribery, indoctrination, or blackmail, media complicity with Neocon objectives continues as well: reporters like Judith Miller and Juan Williams are part of a growing pattern of politicized public figures rewarded with lush Fox News contracts after suicide-bombing their former careers and scuttling clear of the fallout. If history is any guide, the CIA is lurking in the shadows somewhere, dedicated to promoting violence and strife on the airwaves and in the desert while marketing a veneer of professional foreign conduct. In secret they're committed to human sacrifice.

Citizens who thought the Iraq invasion smelled fishy from the start -- and who spoke up at the time -- have had many of their fears borne out. Fears of a protracted or perpetual conflict, of the erosion of civil liberties, of budgetary nightmares (Bill Clinton ELIMINATED deficit spending) -- these citizens have been ignored far longer than even the most vocal Tea Party voters, despite being correct in many of their politicized beliefs. Can you imagine a time in the future when the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act is no longer needed, when The Emergency is passed, when Senators feel FREE to vote AGAINST increasing security at airports? We hear about the sacrifices of soldiers much more than we hear about how the Iraq invasion was based on a convenient lie. We crack jokes about the size of SUV's as though the Energy Crisis of the 1970's never happened -- or nearly put the US auto industry out of business with compact Japanese cars. THERE IS NO "liberal" media -- even PBS parrots the Neocon line, they're just not militant or angry like Fox.

Anti-globalism protesters who have been demonstrating at G8 summits for over a decade have seen many of their fears come to fruition, but when global bank bailouts transfer huge sums of money from average citizens to the wealthiest, The News features Officials and Pundits who talk about uncomfortable economic necessities; the police state is overlooked, the security contractors are only mentioned in the most carefully delineated contexts, and the use of global communications intercepts for state-sponsored industrial espionage is nearly inconceivable.

Climate change activists in Copenhagen were kept away from the international leadership conference by military barricades. The activists were upset about decades of government inaction in response to our rapidly deteriorating and increasingly polluted ecosystem. When, at the end of the highly publicized conference, governments failed to act, the news media did not then report that the protesters were correct in their positions and accusations -- that governments not only had failed to act, but had furthermore failed to consider a large number of reasonable solutions presented to them free of cost by reputable citizens and researchers over the course of several decades -- rather, the news just "changed the subject." If The Activists can't be portrayed as anarchist rioters, they're either represented in the mainstream media as inarticulate hippies or else they are utterly ignored.

While the so-called "liberal media" dotes over the Tea Party, and takes care to contrast their interests with those of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, Libertarians, Evangelicals, Reaganites, Moderates, Centrists, and the "far right," the Democrats remain roughly synonymous with "liberals" and "the left" even when they support the Neocon status quo. The "liberal media" devotes more time to discussing "conservative" views than "liberal" views, and discusses "conservative" views with far more nuance and subtlety.

If you are a member of the Tea Party, and have read this far, I'd like to share with YOU a few things about my experience voting for third-party candidate Ralph Nader in the 2000 elections. In the year 2000, Nader wasn't trying to win the Presidency, but was trying to earn 5% of the popular vote in order to qualify FUTURE Green Party electoral campaigns for federal matching funds. In those less polarized times, this was a reasonable strategy: just a few years earlier, Ross Perot earned nearly 20% of the popular vote.

In 2002, I got off a city bus one day and encountered a group of protestors upset about rumors of war in Iraq. I verbally sympathized with one of them, who was also hustling for some Democrat candidate. He tried to give me some literature about his candidate, and I told him I wasn't interested, and that I voted for Nader in 2000. He then got angry and told me that I was the reason George W. Bush was in office.

The rhetoric among "liberals" in early November 2000 AD incited a lot of Nader supporters to vote for Al Gore instead, and after early November, indicted Nader supporters for spoiling the election for Al Gore. Nobody on the TV or the radio appealed to Reason. Nobody said this rhetoric was foolish, since the Supreme Court settled the election anyway. Nobody said it was foolish to call Nader a spoiler because Nader didn't earn any votes in the electoral college. This guy I encountered at the bus stop, who was blaming me for ruining American Democracy, was infected by a type of delusion common among Broadcast news consumers on "the left" as well as "the right."

If you suppose that the GOP wants to co-opt the Tea Party, beware: the media, the Evangelical Church, and the PR industry want to do the same. There is no "liberal media" to speak of -- just opportunists in control of huge corporations looking to write the history that will benefit them in the future. If you suppose that it's natural and healthy for different media outlets to push "competing narratives" of historical events, your conception of history as the product of conflict is probably Marxist (even if you think you're a "conservative"). If you've noticed that most broadcast media outlets pick the same "top stories" every day -- day after day, week after week -- you might suspect that competition doesn't really play the role in our society that major media outlets say it does.

Sympathy for the Details of Wall Street's Bailout

These are difficult times and many of our leaders have a difficult job ahead of them.

While Congress is busy summoning the proper demons required to purchase the souls of the 13 Republican holdouts in the House, please don't mock United States of Homeland Security Chairman Henry Paulson. Political theatre, like black magic, is difficult work.

In these difficult times, it is your duty as a consumer to represent your leaders to the best of your ability.

As you await the consummation of the appropriate Satanic Congressional rituals, please help save the economy by flying to Las Vegas and gambling away your life savings so that your remaining wealth can trickle up to Wall Street.

Should you have neither life savings nor the time to fly to Las Vegas, expect that any contributions you would have made to Democracy will be extorted from your children by the full force of the US legal machinery.

Thank you for your continued patience during this difficult time of engineered wealth redistribution.

Reacting to an Epidemic Violence

The reporting around the horrific events at Northwestern Illinois University has, as in past school shootings, focused on the grief of families, biographical details about the suicide shooter, and the tangental issues of gun control, emergency safety procedures, and how society should perceive those with mental illness. It is certainly reasonable enough that reporting should cover these topics, but there are other issues just as much in the public interest.

Many of the shootings that become national events are not presented in a national context, despite commanding national attention. With over 20,000 gun homicides annually in the United States, there are certainly scores of similarly grieving families who do not get a national audience for their suffering, nor a national discussion of the conditions surrounding their personal tragedies.

How does the media choose which events to make into a national spectacle? The answer is not clear, but I think it's reasonable to suppose the decision-making bears a strong relation to what news management thinks consumers and advertisers want to hear about, and what sorts of lessons journalists and officials want to teach.

The narrative is that our society is changing in disturbing and dramatic ways, and that these events are evidence that, among other things, radical security measures are in order.

In this most recent instance, we are told the shooter recently discontinued his psychiatric medication. It is unlikely that discussion of this fact will touch upon why we decide certain thoughts and behaviors indicate a mental illness, or why we should not be at liberty to determine our own brain chemistries (even though corporations can patent our genes).

Perhaps these events are more likely to grab our attention when a shooter ends a rampage with a suicide. There are a number of reasons this should be especially startling to Americans: the perpetrator escapes judicial retribution; the shooter doesn't care about heroism -- however deluded such a conception of heroism might be -- and doesn't appear to be motivated by anything resembling a clear ideology (except perhaps the most brooding, escapist sort of nihilism -- although this shooter seems to have been dedicated to working for public welfare programs). Many people passionately believe suicide is a sin. And there's a frightening -- if not subconsciously-perceived -- similarity to the suicide attacks that we hear about in Iraq.

What could promote those feelings of helplessness here in America which one might otherwise presume to find among suicide bombers over there in Iraq, where citizens have been brutalized for decades by dictatorship, sanctions, war, and occupation? We live in a first-world nation, not a war zone.

To me, it is frighteningly indicative of what despairs such a shooter might have felt when I consider what it might mean to starving or homeless families that 50% of the world's military spending is by America's 5% of the world's population; or what it means to disenfranchised voters or children missing a parent that the United States has as many people behind bars as China and Russia combined. How many people are trapped in indentured servitude to pay off student loans, credit debt, or bad mortgages? How many people lost their retirement when they were laid off, when the dot-com bubble burst, when Enron imploded, when the housing market crumbled? How many people work two jobs but still can't make ends meet? What would the inflation rate be if food and fuel costs were factored in?

Why should anybody be made to feel like a piece of meat manipulated by some bean-counter somewhere with a spreadsheet?

Where I live, televisions have recently been installed on the city busses. There are three televisions on each bus; typical programming on these televisions includes yesterday's weather, news and entertainment headlines, 3-minute cooking shows, inane word puzzles, and an occasionally-crippled route map. And advertisements: frequently for no-name companies asking you to text them arbitrary strings of numbers from your cellphone.

These televisions also speak and play music over the bus's intercom, making it difficult to read a book. The exterior of the busses are sometimes painted over with advertisements, so it's difficult to even look out the windows. You can talk on a cellphone if you talk loud enough so nobody else can think.

On its website, the company responsible for the televisions boasts to prospective advertisers:

"Transit TV's unique medium and compelling programming offer a truly captive audeince [sic.] -- no channel changing, no DVR's -- maximum impact for your message."

A truly captive audience: yes, we are treated as captives even on our way home from work. This is how we are regarded by those who fight for our eyeballs, our pocketbooks, our hearts and our minds.

Although we are raised to believe we live in a republic governed by law-abiding and democratically-elected representatives, we often find ourselves voiceless, powerless, repressed or ignored. Our minds have been occupied and our bodies entrapped: we must try not to be personally offended by affronts to our dignity perpetrated by systemic blindnesses, even as we are systematically alienated -- by identity politics, psychoanalysis, bureaucracies, and institutions -- from the effects of our own lives and from the most profound questions of self-determination from the time we become old enough to think a bit for ourselves.

Politicians rarely speak about citizens any longer -- we are more important as consumers: corporatist serfs rather than citizen electors. We are only seen insofar as we are seen as consumers: predictable statistical constructs defined by feudal corporations. The role of our legislature has been relegated to managing our demographics for the corporate policy-makers, in strict accordance with the tyranny of statisticians and bureaucrats trained in the blind rituals of quantitative reasoning. Our strings are tugged by nationalist rhetoric in the interest of multinational corporations who owe no national allegiances whatsoever.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher in large part responsible for our modern conception of a constitutional republic, suggested that "the impulsion of mere appetite is slavery."

Psychological captivity would seem to be a complex pathology. We see the symptoms more clearly than the cause: the language of disease is familiar, the image plain. We can readily find ways to identify with those who are victimized by straightforward afflictions.

It is easier to identify with young university students filled with potential than it is to identify with the Afghan children about whom General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, remarked: "It is unfortunate that the cluster bombs -- the unexploded ones -- are the same color as the food packets. Unfortunately, they get used to running to yellow."

Even as we offer our sympathies to the victims of this awful crime, and the families of the victims, we should keep in mind that our public discourse about these events will leave important questions unasked -- or decided by numbers long after this story has left the headlines, or incoherent amidst a multitude of obscure details.

The causes for such events are complex, and the despair that makes such actions seem reasonable is not limited to sensational expressions of destructive discontent. We are not made aware of these events for objective or disinterested reasons, nor because it is in each of our best interest to have accounts of such events periodically thrust before us.

Somehow the failure to understand these things is our own failure -- for these events were not random, but rather, performed in a deliberate fashion. Yet the meaning escapes us, and we find only the fierce competition among those who would tell us what this all means. And should this have truly been a random occurrence, for all our analysis it may not in the end be possible for us to know any more sense in these horrors than any among those who witnessed them first-hand.

As we offer up our sympathies to those who have suffered here, we should remember that the shooter too was human and deserving of our sympathies, as this would seem to have been an individual tormented in some way -- whose last thoughts were some terminal nightmare, and whose parting deeds defy all logic. And yet, we can't rightly say what this man will find in the next world.

And though he may not see judicial retribution, we must also remember that justice is not the same as retribution, but rather, that harmony which makes retribution unnecessary.

The rapid police response at Northwestern Illinois University should demonstrate this is not at its core an enforcement issue, but some social problem that is not being adequately addressed in our public discourse. Perhaps the social problem is not that too many people can buy guns, but that too many people want to buy guns. Perhaps the fault here is not with numbers or procedures, but with where we look for faults in the first place.

Television, Contradiction, and Social Manipulation

Often, when I enter a bar or a club to which I haven't previously been, I count the number of television screens. I frequently find the high tally somewhat disconcerting. I've entertained a number of possible explanations for the ubiquity of television screens in social gathering places, which range widely in character.

Some time ago I settled on a somewhat concrete biological explanation. In 1927, Ivan Pavlov described what he called the "orienting response," which is basically a physiological reaction to novel stimuli. This reaction is why, if there is a television in the periphery of one's vision, it will draw one's attention, even if one is otherwise engaged in an interesting conversation. Television, because of the types of motion it depicts, and the frequency of edits it employs, activates this "orienting response" continuously.

As described in the February 23, 2002 issue of Scientific American:

"Typical orienting reactions include dilation of the blood vessels to the brain, slowing of the heart, and constriction of blood vessels to major muscle groups. Alpha waves are blocked for a few seconds before returning to their baseline level, which is determined by the general level of mental arousal. The brain focuses its attention on gathering more information while the rest of the body quiets."

What this means is that when one sits in front of a television, one's body becomes relaxed. One's mind creates a positive association between the presence of a television screen and physical relaxation. When one stops watching television, one's mind, furthermore, creates a negative association between the absence of a television screen and the return of one's body return to its previous state of physical arousal.

Armed with this piece of information, I concluded that the ubiquity of television screens in bars subconsciously contributes to the sense of relaxation felt by patrons.

I recently read about a UCLA study which used fMRI scanners to observe the brain activity of television viewers. The subjects in the study were observed while they watched the advertisements run during the Super Bowl. What the researchers found was that many of these ads produced reactions of fear and anxiety. Researcher Said Iacoboni noted that "the amygdala, which is a kind of a threat-detector region of the brain, was much more active compared to other brain regions."

So if the formal properties of television have the effect of keeping audiences physiologically relaxed enough to stay put, the content of broadcast television can be used to simultaneously elicit an opposite emotional reaction.

This insight prompted in me a further re-examination of the more subtle effects of broadcast television. Beyond the contradictory effects that exist between the television and the individual viewer, there exists within broadcast television a mountain of contradictions. This can be seen especially clearly if one considers broadcast television both as a continuous stream of video content and as a series of discrete programs.

When one watches television, one is subjected to numerous advertisements juxtaposed one against the other. These advertisements often try to coerce audiences into doing very different things: spend your money here, no, don't spend your money there; like this person, no, don't like this person; support this cause, no, don't support this cause; do this, no, don't do this. Each advertisement might promote a worldview oppoite to the previous advertisement, or might promote a worldview contrary to the worldview of the scheduled program during which the advertisement is run.

There may be a tendency among individual audience members to "tune out" these contradictions, to dismiss them simply as motivated by the business interests of others; but the fact remains that many people still watch, and what they watch still has an effect.

Numerous studies have been conducted to examine whether television desensitizes individuals to violence; I have seen no study which examines whether television desensitizes individuals to being given contradictory statements, or which examines whether television desensitizes individuals to the distortions of reality that characterize much of advertising and marketing. The fact that researchers are using brain scans to evaluate audience reponses suggests these effects might be quite calculated.

If such a desensitizing effect in fact exists, and people are every day trained to ignore or dismiss lies and contradictions, how might this affect a population's ability to make sound judgments and informed decisions? If television manipulates viewers emotionally while disengaging reason and discernment, might this in part be used to account for the paranoia surrounding the threat of terrorism, which comes at the expense of the threat posed to individuals by drunk drivers and gun violence?

I can recall watching, some time prior to the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq, a Public Service Announcement which ran during a Sunday morning political talkshow. The PSA was part of the War on Drugs, depicting a teenage girl purchasing a bag of marijuana. The PSA traced her purchase back to some brutal Mexican druglord, with narration that ran: "Here's Jane, here's Jane's bag of marijuana, here's Jane's drug dealer, here's the supplier for Jane's drug dealer, here's the smuggler who supplies the supplier, and here's the druglord who murdered an innocent family to supply the smuggler." Beyond the fact that most of the marijuana consumed in the United States is produced domestically, I couldn't help but think - as somebody who has never owned a car - about the format of the PSA transposed onto the structure of the oil industry: "Here's Jack, here's Jack's sport utility vehicle, here's the lower-middle-class owner of the gas station Jack frequents, here's the wealthy oil industry executive with his mansion and his summer home and his private jet, here's the Washington lobbyist who makes it all possible, and here's the brutal dictator on the other side of the globe who profits most."

Of course, we've now deposed Saddam Hussein and imposed our Republic's brutal colonialism in order to liberate his former subjects. So where's the contradiction?

Why the President is a Puppet

To understand why the President is a puppet, it is important to think of the President as primarily a communications hub. The volume of sensitive information passing across the President's desk makes the President a valuable intelligence-gathering target.

This is why the President is always surrounded by so many people: it is important to pass information directly from person to person because, for many communications, the use of communications technology is a counter-intelligence liability.

The President probably doesn't carry a cellphone all that often. Since the FBI can access your cellphone's GPS chip, or can remotely activate the microphone, so can some disgruntled Nokia or AT&T employee. The President needs to have many person-to-person communications for security reasons.


The content of the communications with which the President is entrusted contain implicit or explicit instructions regarding how the President ought to behave. Either a piece of information is not to be divulged, or it may only be divulged under certain circumstances. Every communication the President receives says either "do this" or "don't do this," and the President is entrusted with skillfully discerning and faithfully following these instructions.

In many instances, specific phraseology is important. Between the nuances of jargon, inner-circle meetings, and the spin-doctor's propaganda marketing prescription, one word or a few letters can make a world of difference to different people. "At the end of the day," "make no mistake," "going forward," "support the troops," "family values" -- people pledge allegiance to these terms. The President needs to identify which phrases serve as proper nouns, which as verbs, which as convenience, which as ornament; and the President needs to know how to act accordingly.

In many instances, the President may not know what a specific phrase means to a specific group of people, although the phrase may fit quite comfortably inside a sentence of otherwise ordinary speech. The President just follows orders. It was no excuse at Nuremberg, but it's how our present government operates. This is why third-party candidates have difficulty breaking into Washington politics: third-party candidates are outsiders who don't know what phrases motivate various interests, or which phrases tell various interests "I understand what you really want, and I'll help you get it." The consolidation and perpetuation of this pass-phrase system is why the central government seeks to expand its influence into local realms.

Most of the Administration doesn't turn over every four years. The phraseology and popular parlance of various departments have a life of their own, to which any new President must adapt. The concept of "Homeland Security" was already in use among various military circles in the 1990's. This is a concept which has lived in the Administration for years. Sami G. Hajjar discusses "homeland defense" in the 1998 report, "Security Implications of the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East." The Department of Defense Advanced Concepts Technology Demonstration program proposed the Homeland Security Command and Control several months prior to September 11, 2001. Although I can't recall ever thinking of my country as my "Homeland" until after 911, it would seem a good number of military professionals have been working out this doctrine for some time. The Department of Homeland Security is not something the President thought up in a pinch, it is something the President assembled for entrenched political interests. The President may not be fully aware of the scope of the communications he issues, but one thing is clear: whenever the President talks about "homeland security," there are groups of people all over the place who behave according to decades of doctrinal development.

And so the puppet is also a puppeteer, albeit one with a limited understanding of the drama that is unfolding. And so this is why a Washington outsider would serve the American people better than a career politician from the ranks of the political aristocracy: an effective outsider would need to ask all sorts of people what they mean when they speak, whereas a Crown Prince who has lived his life immersed in the secret incantations need not understand them to see how they are used.

Preemption and the New Kind of War

I was reading a little bit about the US Cold War nuclear planning in the 1960's, and came across these two facts, which really struck me:

1) A PREEMPTIVE nuclear war would attack 1000 targets with 3000 warheads;

and

2) A RETALIATORY nuclear strike would attack 700 targets with 1700 warheads.

These two facts struck me because the attitude that informed this war planning seemed counter-intuitive at first. If somebody hits you, and you're going to hit back, don't you want to hit them with everything you've got?

Part of the difference in the scale of attack is certainly due to war planners anticipating some portion of our capabilities being disabled in the case of a retaliatory strike. But the numbers are incredible: in a full scale preemptive strike, 3 nuclear warheads were to be delivered to each target. That's a lot of redundant destruction. Which got me thinking about the character of preemptive strikes in general.

If you're going to hit somebody first, and you don't know whether they've got a black belt in karate, or a knife, or if somebody's got their back, you drop them quick, and make sure they don't get up. Go for the knees, the throat, the eyes, the groin.

A preemptive strike means targets are hit that don't really need to be hit, because a preemptive strike has a lot of strategic redundancy.

Which got me thinking about the attitude of "our leaders," who launched a preemptive war in Iraq, as part of a larger campaign in our New Kind of War. "Our leaders," who rose to prominence during the Cold War, who built their house of cards during the Cold War, find great value in preemption. Whatever THEY're trying to get at now, it's worth an awful lot to them (look out Iran).

Right now, we're reorganizing our Federal Bureaucracies left and right for the War on Terror, spending blood and dollars hand over fist in our Central Front in the War on Terror, using National Security Letters to draft private citizens into the War on Terror. Imagine what the War on Terror costs in terms of administrative overhead alone. Screw bullets, there are bureaucrats to pay. We're going to be paying this off forever...

OUR POLITICIANS ARE UP TO SOMETHING AND WE DESERVE TO KNOW WHAT.

The War on Terror is a preemptive war. The United States has not seen terror anything like what Northern Ireland or Israel have seen. More people dead in Iraq than on 911. More people dead in car accidents every year than on 911. More people shot to death in the ghetto every year than on 911.

We don't re-organize our society because of car accidents, we build more roads and make it cheaper to drive than to use mass transit.

We don't re-organize our society because of inner city violence, we copyright rap music and sell it to white teenagers who play violent video games and manufacture more guns and sell Army surplus AK47's and crack to gangsters and keep the white kids hooked on speed for their attention defect disorder. We make thieves because the wealthy have more money than they know how to possibly spend. We make weapons for peace, use copyright to sell people their culture, we tell people our culture is a culture of peace and we put them in debt and put them to work and brainwash them into USA #1 because YOUR reality is entertainment for some monarch or oligarch.

OUR POLITICIANS ARE UP TO SOMETHING AND WE DESERVE TO KNOW WHAT.

If the War on Terror is a preemptive war, and the War in Iraq is at all part of the War on Terror, it may not really matter what happens in Iraq.

There's a war on for your mind. Propaganda is marketing. If they don't hook you in with Iraq, they've got something else in the pipe, be sure of it.

What Are We Really Doing in Iraq?

The Admministration has given the Citizenry of the United States of America varied and malleable rationale for our invasion and occupation of Iraq, ranging from false pretenses to revisionist propaganda.

While the Executive refuses to relinquish its ideological crusade, and the Legislature squabbles over the political ramifications of sparing thousands upon thousands of soldiers and civilians unnecessary suffering, We Citizens, strong-armed into funding this war, are deprived by Our Federal Government of all but the most basic figures regarding the true human and economic costs of this man-made disaster.

The Administration and its Neocon allies have played the Press like a fiddle, and the Press has obediently followed along.

Who really benefits from this war? Is it really right to view the Iraq conflict as "a war" in the singular sense of the word?

Are We an occupying force confronting a nationalist insurgency?

Are We fighting terrorists in the Global War on Terror?

Are We fighting a proxy war in an ideological standoff with Iraq's neighbors?

Are We peacekeepers working to quell sectarian violence?

Are We a police force suppressing opportunist criminals?

Are We liberators there to cast off Sunni fascists?

Are We a scapegoat for Shi'ite bitterness after the 1991 uprising?

Are We in the middle of a pan-national conflagration of Anti-American Arabs upset about the situation in Palestine?

What We are doing in Iraq?

When Our Government fails to give Us clear answers, We often turn to the free Press. Yet We must be wary that, if the fallout from the recent Walter Reed scandal is to serve as an indication of a free Press's power, it must also serve to warn Us of the power of a manipulated Press.

As so many of Us watch in horror and dismay while the Administration discusses open war with Iran, We, as Citizens, must take it upon ourselves to write Our Press, Our Senators, and Our Congressional Representatives; it is not enough to vote periodically. We must clearly express Our feelings about the current state of affairs, demand forthright governance, and prompt action. And as We find Ourselves in the midst of a psychological war waged against Us by the Administration, We must seek out alternative sources of information with which to arm Ourselves against that most potent weapon, ignorance.

Diversity in American Politics

I feel like race is something that everybody in America has to live with, but which many people feel as though, in order to discuss it with anybody but close friends, they must go out on a limb. There are a few things that can be said about race with reasonable certainty: race is first and foremost a cultural and linguistic construct because genetic variation is continuous among the human population. Genetically, skin color is about as meaningful as hair color.

Then there is the sand of time, the ocean of language, the tree of life, and the dollar. Sometimes there is harmony, too often discord, always this beat of a collective march towards something greater. Blind marchers and marchers who see, sleepwalking or awake but dreaming, never too long complacent with complacency; in America, by and large, people get along so long as they are left alone.

American culture has this paradox: we say the Civil War is over and that we live amongst ourselves in peace; yet judging by the number of gun deaths here, a foreigner may be hard-pressed to say there is not a war underway.

Is politics really war without bloodshed, or are there bodies in the streets? Why are these deaths not shown on the news like the faces of soldiers brought home from Iraq in flag-draped coffins?

I would argue that cultural diversity contributes to much of the beauty in American society. I would also argue that it continues to contribute to much sadness. I will not argue for a beauty of sadness, but I will speak to the transformative power of sadness, and for the nobility of a just struggle.

The democratic struggle begins and ends with a voice; the interim need not see bloodshed, but too often does. What is the struggle of democracy, if not to end political bloodshed?

Too many of our political struggles end in complacency: polarization in American politics is a rhetorical illusion, which suggests that, for example, Democrats and Republicans exist at opposite ends of a continuum. Yet these two parties encapsulate the diversity of neither American culture nor American politics. There should be not one black party, but multiple; not one conservative voice, but many; and many revolutionary voices to define the centrism of their parties.

The United States of America is a republican democracy, with constituencies that believe in fiscal conservatism, liberalism, communism, and anarchism. Those constituencies interested in the pure pursuit of power leverage their influence to engineer self-reinforcing social systems, such that most citizens can only participate in politics if they vote to reinforce the illusion of polarity.

Our government collects so much information about us, and makes so many decisions based on derivative information, that the Democrat/Republican/Yes/No vote we are offered (depending on the most popular spin) is drowned out by all the other votes we make with our consumer habits. It seems to me that if we had a greater number of viable parties in our politics, we could express more articulately what we would like to see in our government. Politics could become a forum for popular discourse, rather than an elitist form of oppression.

But democracy starts and ends with the people, and a diverse body politic is not something a government can give a people, like a government might give people safe food, national security, or roads.

This election season, Americans have a number of viable candidates seeking the Presidency. If John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Ron Paul, and Mike Huckabee stopped competing for candidacy under the same two parties, and sought instead to represent other parties in our upcoming Presidential election, Americans could use their votes to help create viable third parties. A third party candidate only needs to earn 5% of the vote in a Presidential election to qualify for federal matching funds the following season. Viable third parties could create a situation where, if a candidate wins the Presidency with one third of the popular vote, the President will have no choice but to cooperate with other constituencies in order to get anything done. If we continue under our current two-party system, we have rule not by the majority, but by the handful of Representatives willing to vote across party lines.

Perhaps a vote should be viewed as an investment in democracy rather than as a payday wad to blow uptown. A vote for a third party candidate is an investment in American cultural and political diversity. If you don't vote at all, the government won't hear what you have to say.

The Modern Contemplative in Wartime

It is difficult to live the life of a contemplative in an age so fraught with strife, iniquity, and callousness. History, replete though it may be with violent conflict, has until recent decades never presented so many individuals with the threats we face today. Climate change, global war, and the spread of preventable disease, despite our collective ability to end such horrors, are epidemic. It is hard to make sense of a world where so many individuals struggle under these and other pervasive oppressions, with meaningless employment or debt, while the unimaginably wealthy, who profit from these struggles of others, cloister themselves away from the misery they’ve wrought.

When by the hands of ruthless oligarchs, lobbyists, and corrupt legislators, employment is systematically converted into a form of global oppression, there are relatively few problems that can be directly confronted by individuals, who are enslaved by market forces and daily distracted by unnecessary struggles. One turns perhaps to anger, violence, indulgence, or subservience as means towards the cessation of one’s struggles, if only for temporary release from bewilderments that render one deaf or mute before the presence of seemingly insurmountable corruptions, which threaten by their weight and inertia to drag down or hold back even the most simple of aspirations.

The contemplative of the Globalizing era, who seeks to struggle against war without engaging in violence, to procure sustenance without engaging in exploitation or oppression, who must look inwards while the sounds of the city beg endless distractions, must contend with an array of strange influences which the archetypal contemplatives of ages past were able to avoid; our present state of media saturation ensures that even if one does not watch commercial television, one is still made aware every time Tom Cruise has a baby.

Lovers of nature and seekers of simplicity are today most often without recourse to agrarian self-sufficiency or freedom from an increasingly invasive media landscape. Although by enculturation we lack personal knowledge of the ways of the seasons, of the soil, and of the stars, we move mountains, carve valleys and craters, redirect rivers, and create lakes. We shape the earth with machinery and color the heavens with the din of sodium vapor electrified, and claim dominion over the air itself with bands of electromagnetic radiation that turn the ionosphere into a deadly weapon. And what outrage will halt these machinations?

Anger, violence, indulgence... a fearful subservience before these unnatural powers, which can take from men and women their livelihoods or their lives with the stroke of a pen or the push of a button...

For all our modern refinement, we mask the visage of war in grotesque displays of nationalism and sacrifice, and deny our “savage” forbearers the nobility of their insights into the horrors of violence. The Vikings who fought their battles hallucinating on mushrooms, or the Aztec priests who, in ecstatic trances, tore out the living hearts of youths knew that to obscure the nature of violence was a grievous error that their civilization could not endure.

The symbolic lessons of our Western culture are so often buried under the clinical verbiage of disease and disorder that we no longer see why we inscribe our skin with tattoos, pierce our flesh, or why at birth we mutilate the genitals of our boys (to remind us all how powerless we shall be at the time of our death). Our clinical rituals are designed to hide from us any inkling we shall one day perish, while at the same time, on the other side of the globe, we cause scores of senseless deaths and permit the brutalization of the innocent for the sake of some man’s profit.

We have stockpiles enough of weapons to defeat any adversary by way of wiping clean the planet of our race, yet we continue to invest more resources in our military than our education, our art, and our starving citizens combined. Although our military expenditures are equal to those of the next nine most industrialized nations together, we encounter great difficulties gaining ground against insurgents in an impoverished plot of land in the middle of the desert: what can this mean but that war is some madman’s game, who defines victory how he sees fit? How can this be more sensible than peace?

More Questions than Answers

Is it too much to ask that our President pronounce "nuclear" correctly? Is this perhaps some strange metaphor for the nature of his resolve? Is he willing to take on not only Iraq, but moreover every English dictionary and encyclopedia on the planet? Or does he just plan on the rest of us obediently adapting to his will?