Democracy

I've been meaning to come back to this blog. It's still useful as a journal, but I'm not sure I would have known what to write these last few weeks. I've needed to allow some things to redefine themselves. A lot of this was prompted by the confirmation of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General, as I've written about before dropping out of sight. But, honestly, I've also been quite ill. I've been started on a new treatment, and though it seems to be working less well today, on Sunday and Monday I started feeling much improved, so I'll give it time. I'd love to feel like I could get out and do more things. I certainly have a wish to be more active. The spirit is willing. We'll see.

So much has happened in the last few weeks that I couldn't review it all here even if I wanted to. There's more torture in the headlines, of course. That stuff just never seems to go away once it gets started, does it? Part of my paranoid brain wonders if the "torture tape" revelations weren't as much a distraction from the NIE scandal as anything else, although the administration is still doing a dance around that issue. In any event, as usual, when things come out, there's almost too much to process, and practically none of it is dealt with in any depth. Meantime, we're still spilling oil, killing monks, and raping young women in Baghdad, with no end anywhere in sight.

So, how've you been?

I still can't rekindle any enthusiasm for presidential politics, or even for Oprah, although I taped the Iowa rally on C-SPAN, and watched it afterward. I'm not sure why my disgust hadn't hit critical mass before now, but allowing Mukasey's confirmation without a fight was the last straw. I'm not ready to tear down everything, but I'm convinced there are an awful lot of seriously compromised people in government now. That's not really a big surprise, I guess, but this level of compromise, on these kinds of issues -- torture, corruption, lying, etc. -- this close to the awareness level of the general public puts things into bold new territory. If things happened as they should, an awful lot of people would go down hard. That shouldn't be a huge tragedy. We have 300 million people in this country. We can find people to take their places. I don't think most of that is going to happen, of course, barring more surprises, but just because the corruption may be around for some time to come doesn't mean I should give up. It's going to be a long struggle, and at least some of the candidates are still better than others. Just hold your nose next November, and go ahead and vote for somebody.

I've been reading plenty, and again, there's too much to review. I finally got around to reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which I highly recommend. I've continued to read Noam Chomsky's books extensively, as well as watching some of the massive amounts of video featuring Chomsky on the internet. I've gotten to know his thinking much better, and Naomi Klein's work is an excellent extension of that effort. There are, and have been, so many actions that are difficult to view as anything but rapacious greed and powerlust that it does seem like a conspiracy. Fortunately, thinkers such as those mentioned here realize it's a lot more complicated than that. There are bad people, of course, and we see some of them on television every day, but there's also just the whole mechanism, larger than any one of us, driving corporations to profit or die, driving reporters to toe the line or be ignored, driving politicians to compromise or be smeared. It feeds on itself, and some of the worst offenders just want to be rescued, I think.

I'm still searching for redefinitions, and I don't know yet how regular I'll be with blog entries, but it feels like these entries are worth doing, and I'll just have to play it by ear. I've been meditating, of course, both koan and pure zazen styles of meditation. Koan meditation still presents issues for me. Perhaps there's a way to take an orderly approach to koan meditation, but I'm not so sure. Its intention, for me, is to focus so intently on the question as to force a mental crisis. I've had these crises in small ways before. They're like the Eureka! moments when we've examined a problem from all sides, and just when we're about to give up the answer pops into our heads. I've had those moments in theater after agonizing about an interpretation for my character, and many times in programming when the third rewrite of a module left me in despair before I suddenly saw the problem. That's koan meditation. But I'm having trouble taking "Mu" seriously, I'm ashamed to admit. It's a very serious question after all, because it's like asking Who am I? Perhaps because it's so serious, and not a programming problem or an alter ego on stage, that I'm still reluctant to give myself to it fully. I'm 60 years old, folks. I may have had all the mental crises I'm going to have. That's not my final word on this topic, but meantime, my pure zazen has an element that I'm tempted to call satisfying. I feel a sharpness to my attention that feels useful in helping me to collect myself, and every little bit helps.

Here are a couple of short Chomsky videos I plucked off YouTube. I may come back later and add comments for them. But Chomsky speaks very simply about politics. He leaves the linguistic scholar behind when he talks about propaganda and democracy, and he gets right to the point. The videos -- approximately 9 and 7 minutes, respectively -- present a Chomsky overview. If you want to know the gist of what Chomsky is saying, it's right here. It's very important to flesh it out with the details, as I have, but the basic message is very straightforward, and extremely thought-provoking, if you haven't heard it. In both videos, Chomsky quotes James Madison from The Federalist Papers (which I'm also reading, albeit slowly) when he says "the primary function of goverment is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority", then proceeds to explore the implications of that approach as it's filtered down to our lives today. As old as the story seems, it's still a class struggle in our society. It's a lot of other things as well, of course, but the class system is a primary obstacle to a more reasonable sharing of responsibilities, and it's a very important part of the problem.

I just finished watching an excellent video on LinkTV featuring the Dalai Lama. It was made back in 2003, but it's fascinating, as journalists, politicians, business people, and environmentalists discussed ethical issues with the Dalai Lama. It's in the spirit of people such as the Dalai Lama I would like to base my continuing quest for a positive way forward through the dilemmas we're facing. I think we're going to have to deal with some very tough things. I think I've been a little bit guilty of naivete, thinking that we might be close enough to really positive efforts that just a little push here or there might be enough to cause dramatic results. It's disheartening to think that, difficult as it already seems, it's even harder than you thought, and there aren't many real saviors on the horizon. As Gandhi once said when asked what he thought of western civilization, "I think it would be a good idea."

Is The Surge Working?

We waited breathlessly for General Petraeus' report, so we would know if The Surge was working. We'd been hearing about how well it was working from all the talking heads on tv, and we know Bush has been bragging about how we're "kicking a**". But there were whispers by those wuss Democrats that the White House might try to "cook the books" on The Surge figures. And then there's that pesky political progress thing, and all those benchmarks that weren't met.

But The Surge had worked, hadn't it? Wasn't violence down? Didn't we help the Sunnis beat back al-Qaeda in al-Anbar Province? Don't we have a Plan For Victory? General Petraeus is such a brilliant general, everyone says so, except for that terrible MoveOn.org. General Petraeus will tell us how it's all going to work.

Ok, enough of that. I was just trying to get into the head of the average dweeb, sitting down after a hard day's work to get a peek at the evening news. Actually, that was a fairly alert dweeb, wasn't it? Dweebs are hard to understand.

If you want to know the real story about The Surge, there's an excellent article at mediamatters.org called Myths and falsehoods about progress in Iraq. Of course, if you're of a conservative mindset, or maybe if you're a dweeb, you don't want to read some radical web site's opinions about the war. Actually, the article is a careful study of the information provided by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, alongside the array of independent studies like the GAO and NIE reports, and other scattered pieces of information that just happen to be factual. Some of the lesser known facts, for instance: all the success in al-Anbar Province was essentially pre-Surge, and due to a change in strategy in that area completely unrelated to The Surge; and violence is down this summer because violence in Iraq has been down every summer for the last four years -- and, by the way, there's more violence this summer than there was last year. Just read the article and come back here.

Now that we have that out of the way, let's think beyond The Surge. Let's talk about the thing that's so rarely discussed. That's the advantage of blogs like this, that we can talk about what we want to, and not what sells pharmaceuticals. I want to write a little more about War.

I've offered my feelings about War before, in a blog on August 17th of this year titled Masters of War. I wrote that when the din of war drums beating for a battle with Iran got so loud I had to say something. I got a lot off my chest in that blog, and I linked to some of the most hideously gruesome videos of war images I've ever seen, and I don't ever need to see those images again. I still hear the incessant Boom! Boom! Boom! of those Iran war drums, and I still worry a lot about those nukes they decided to fly over our heads last week, and you'd think I'd have gotten it all out of my system on August 17th, and there's nothing more to be said.

I just can't get over how we talk about things, especially on television. So many of us can sit down to a discussion looking for all the world like rational people, and talk about war as if it were little more than an overseas venture for a global corporation. If that's what you think, go look at those videos in my Masters of War blog, because you deserve them. The way the people on American television can talk about war is all I need to know about how sick and demented we really are.

I know there are dangerous people out there; you don't have to tell me. There's a guy out there I swear I would kill with my bare hands if I could, just so you know. There really are times when you have to fight, but Iraq? Iran? These are the corporate wars, the resource wars, and to some it's even an excuse to revive The Crusades, God help us! Those aren't even wars, except for the mountains of dead, of course. They're enterprises.

If the media actually did its job, they would make us look at the terrible images of war. Our hearts went out to the young boy who lost his arms, and his family, to American bombs during Shock and Awe. But the cameras moved on after wrenching our hearts with the images of that child, and those moments of raw truth were rarely seen. For the most part, this has been an incredibly antiseptic conflict as far as we know here at home, so we can listen to those idiotic talking heads without punching the set, because it's not reality.

Is The Surge working? Why should I care? Why do we continue to deny the deeper truths, the real Zen of our existence, with such inauthentic dialogue? I can feel the core of my humanity shriveling when I hear such discussions, and by the way, I can feel your humanity shriveling right along with mine.

There was another hero a few years back, who took a page from that impractical dreamer Gandhi. His name was Martin Luther King, and he had this to say about violence in general back in 1958:

In my weekly remarks as president of the resistance committee, I stressed that the use of violence in our struggle would be both impractical and immoral. To meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Hate begets hate, violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding.

Gandhi and King both believed that the goodness of the human species would prevail over the evil part of its nature. That they were both murdered for that belief leaves one to ponder. But they led two of the most inspiring, successful movements of the twentieth century, so there must be something there. It can't work all the time; everyone knows that. When I see Osama bin Laden, I have a visceral reaction that would make Gandhi gasp in horror. Those situations are crystal clear: Osama bin Laden, Hitler, you fight these people. But when you don't have to fight -- when you have to think about it, should I fight this person? -- then you need Gandhi and King, because they told us about what we can be.

I'm not sure how much Gandhi-like, King-like, courage I see today, but I liked Barack Obama's speech today about Iraq. How many more surges will we have to endure before we actually adopt a policy to "meet the forces of hate with the power of love"? Barack Obama may be growing into an effective spokesman for this kind of thinking.

I know everyone isn't going to love us, and I'm not going to love everybody, but we see what happens when our answer to everything is The Surge. We've seen there are other approaches that can work, and actually make sense in many -- no, most(!) -- situations, and it would be, of all things, the Christian thing to do.

We can keep surging, until our young men and women are chewed up by wars in one way or another, until we've piled up so much debt to fund the war machine we have nothing left to give, and we've generated so much distrust and hatred that our enemies outnumber us twenty-to-one. Or we can wake up, and ask ourselves how we can have such conversations in cold blood. We can swear that we've bombed our last infant, and surged our last surge, unless we truly have no choice. We can reach out our hand, fearful, uncertain, into the abyss that men like Gandhi and King must have seen yawning before them as they made that leap of faith.