DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

The majority of the two hundred and fifty people attending an “informational meeting” about a proposed landfill in Bellevue were strongly opposed to the project. As a result, it probably won’t happen. The meeting, called and chaired by Rep. Gary Moore, drew an overflow crowd to Bellevue Middle School auditorium. Attendees, many bearing “NO DUMP” placards handed out by dump opponents outside the hall, first listened to (and heckled) a well-crafted power point presentation by the dump’s proponents followed by a simple rebuttal from Dorrie Bolze of the Harpeth River Watershed Association: it’s illegal for the simple reason that it’s potentially dangerous, so don’t do it. There’s no way to clean up a polluted water table.

The crowd largely shared her sentiment, and echoed it in one way or another throughout the evening. The dump’s advocates are asking for an amendment to the State Scenic Rivers Act that will allow them to fill this former quarry with about four million yards of construction and demolition waste over the next ten years, and then turn the leveled land over to the state for park and recreation purposes–and some condos. They want to clean up this attractive nuisance, this tragedy waiting to happen. A noble purpose, although little mention was made of the approximately thirty million dollars in dump fees the project will gross over its history–not to mention proceeds from the condominiums “Yeah, we’re in it to make a profit,” spokesman Crom Carmichael admitted. “Aren’t we all?”

This “everybody else is doing it, so why can’t we?” attitude seemed to be at the heart of Carmichael’s case. At one point he produced a map of the Harpeth valley showing all the major point sources of pollution that flow into the river, challenging opponents of his plan to go after all the other polluters on the river. Not a bad idea, actually…. At another point he produced a chart showing that the water currently in the quarry is cleaner than the water in the river flowing by the quarry. He seemed to think this would justify creating another potential point source for pollution, but this logic failed to impress the crowd, one of whom shouted out, “The river’s polluted there because of all the crud washing into it from the Riverwalk development!”

This prompted Rep. Moore to ask the audience to please be courteous and allow Mr. Carmichael to finish his presentation. It was not the only time he had to make that request. Most but not all of the interruptions were from those against the dump, but at one point when someone was talking about the obligation of the current owners to secure the property against being an attractive nuisance, and referred to “the millions of dollars they have made from this quarry,” a representative of the current landowner called out, “Since when have you been my accountant?”

One surprise for anti-landfill campaigners was the advocates’ enlistment of Odell Binkley as a potential manager for the project. Odell operates a similar landfill on the floodplain of the Stones River on the other side of Nashville, and is highly regarded for the quality of his operation there. He was also one of the major movers in the effort to close down Nashville’s notorious downtown thermal plant. He is probably the most conscientious person available for the position, but even he had to admit, in response to residents’ repeated concerns about the potential for river pollution, “God’s the only one who can guarantee anything,” and God is not being offered the management of this landfill. Moreover, Karl Meyer reported to me that Binkley admitted to him after the meeting that he was still negotiating with the Carmichael crew about the terms of his management, that Carmichael and friends were having a hard time with some of the standards Binkley wanted to enforce, and were only offering him a five-year contract on the ten-year project.

I suspect that some of their difficulty comes from the recycling dilemma. posed by the project’s ten-year deadline. It is possible to recycle up to around 90% of what gets brought to C&D landfills, especially if you have someone who will take recycled material for fill rather than digging it out of someplace new. According to John vanderHarst, a well known Nashville recycling authority, Binkley recycles about 25% of what comes into his Stones River landfill. That ain’t 90%, but it’s better than Metro’s paltry 2.5%, or the complete lack of recycling at Southern Services, another major player in the Nashville trash game.

But the Newsom Pointe landfill people (“Newsom Pointe Reclamation Project” is the formal name for the dump proposal) are trying to fill their hole in just ten years. The traffic they will need to achieve this goal—it will take a truck every six minutes, eight hours a day, five days a week, for ten years, to fill the quarry with no recycling—is similar to what Mr. Binkley’s landfill on the east side of town is taking in from the whole county already, and with U.S. economic indicators raising red flags all over the place, the future of development on the west side of Nashville could be pretty iffy, and with that, the reality of actually filling this hole could vanish with the value of the dollar. So, it is in their best interests to recycle as little as possible, to make sure they make their deadline.

In response to repeated questioning, Carmichael said that if the ten-year deadline was looming and the quarry was not full, they would have to buy fill dirt from somewhere to finish it off—that, it seems, is one object of the ten million dollar bond they would be required to post before commencing operations. “How far is ten million dollars gonna go when diesel fuel hits ten dollars a gallon?” one resident demanded. Carmichael didn’t seem to understand the question.

Another way they could forfeit their bond is by polluting local ground water. Testing for interconnectivity between the quarry and the river still has not been done, but the quarry is almost certainly connected with the local water table, and many people in the area still get their water from wells. Mr. Binkley assured residents that, once the quarry was pumped out, the landfill would heat up enough to evaporate any water that entered it before it reached the bottom and carried potential pollutants from the landfill into the water table, citing his experience at Stone’s River for reference, but the audience did not seem convinced. After all, it was Mr. Binkley himself who said only God can guarantee anything. One audience member with an engineering background said that he understood that about 43% of all clay landfill liners leak, while another said he had been told in engineering school that all earthen dams leak. (I should point out that lining the stone pit with an “impermeable” clay liner is part of the Newsom Pointe plan.)

Carmichael also stressed the attractive nuisance danger of the currently abandoned quarry, as well as the fact that it has become a site for completely unregulated dumping. Area residents responded that it is the current landowner’s responsibility to stop this, and it doesn’t take turning the site into a landfill to make it more secure. Besides, there are two abandoned quarries in the state park across the street, and they’re tourist attractions, in spite of being nowhere near as spectacular as the Newsome Point quarry.

Representatives of the current owner (an elderly woman) said that if conversion of the quarry into a dump was not approved, they would reopen it as a quarry. In the meeting, they claimed that they still had all the permits they need for this, but Dana Coleman of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation said in an email, “the site no longer has a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit and would therefore be required to submit an application as though it were a new site.”

Such an application would require public hearings and, given the increasingly residential nature of the area, would meet just as much opposition, at least, as the landfill proposal. You can bet residents will be even more upset about dynamite than they are about construction and demolition waste.

At the end of the long line of people with questions was a local minister, who started talking about how much misinformation was circulating in the room and how there had been several public meetings called about the landfill that had attracted no attention. He seemed to be launching into a sermon on the benefits of the proposal when Rep. Moore interrupted him, asking “Do you have a question, sir?”

“No,” the minister replied, “I just wanted to make some remarks….”

“This is an informational meeting. We’re not asking people to speak up for or against the proposal. Please sit down.” Polite but firm. Thank you, Rep. Moore.

Representative Moore and Senator Henry, as well as Charles Graves of TDEC, all said in conclusion that,while they respected the good intentions of Mr. Carmichael and Mr. Binkley, they felt it would set a bad precedent to allow such a variance to the Scenic Rivers Act, and opposed the proposal. The manager of the Kingston Springs water system, which takes water from the Harpeth just a few miles below the quarry, had already voiced his concerns. Mayor Purcell’s office has announced that they see no need for another C&D landfill in Davidson County.

Charlie Tygard, the local Metro Council member who has advocated in favor of the project and was expected at the meeting, had phoned in his regrets to the organizers and gone to a hockey game instead, an announcement which drew hoots of derision from his assembled constituents.

The crowd left the auditorium with the feeling that there will not be a landfill in their back yard. With opposition from both local members of the state legislature, the City of Nashville, and TDEC, it seems at this point that the Harpeth River dump is dead in the water, so to speak. Maybe democracy still works.

music: “We Can Run (but we can’t hide)” by The Grateful Dead

A couple of weeks ago, I pulled a small envelope out of my mailbox. It came from friends of mine, people to whom I owe a favor, and I expected that this letter was going to be about cashing in on the time I had promised them—odd, I thought, why didn’t they just call? But that wasn’t what it was about, at all. I had received an invitation, an invitation to a”meet-the-candidate” party. The candidate was Amanda McClendon, a Metro Council member who is running for a civil court judge’s position. I knew very little about what a civil court judge does, nothing about Amanda McClendon, and nobody I knew had ever invited me to their house to meet a political candidate. I mean, most politicians would see fraternizing with the likes of me as the kiss of death. It’s been a long time since Jimmy Carter posed in that “Jimmy Buffet and the Coral Reefer Band” t-shirt. Of course, Ms. McClendon wasn’t doing the inviting, my friends were, and my buddy is about as disreputable looking as I am….anyway, after initially pooh-pooing the idea of spending a warm Sunday afternoon in early spring indoors in the gritty heart of Nashville, I succumbed to the lure of the unknown and RSVP’d.

It had been a while since I’d been to my friends’ home but it wasn’t hard to find— the three Amanda McClendon yard signs made it easy. I was one of the first people there, and so I got to know some of the other guests while we waited for the guest of honor. There was a woman whose name was familiar to me because I get email from her a lot—she’s one of the mainsprings of “Gathering to Save Our Democracy,” a listserve for people campaigning for verifiable paper ballot voting. (That should be a nobrainer, but Bush’s magnanimously (and deceptively) titled “Helping America Vote Act” was intended to push the country into non-verifiable, hackable, touch-screen voting. Fortunately, enough people have noticed this so that the movement has quite a bit of traction, nationwide. I am cheered by this, friends, and let me tell you, not much cheers me these days—but, I digress.)

Another was a Vanderbilt professor who is doing research into non-drug approaches to treating ADHD. For some reason, he has not been able to get any funding for this. He was fun to talk to. His wife is Ms. McClendon’s campaign manager, and, I found out later, also a Vanderbilt professor. A very distinguished, twinkly older gentleman and his much younger wife entered, greeted as friends by the other people in the room. Li’l ole produce clerk here was in a league far removed from my usual haunts, but I had come for something different, and this was that already, even without the candidate. Gee, I thought, if I hadn’t jumped the academic ship and gone off to chop wood and carry water, I’d be one of these people. I was relieved when my friends Earl and Joan arrived; I was no longer totally among strangers (our hostess was busy with food prep and her hippie husband was down in New Orleans doing volunteer relief work, bless his heart).

We had not been waiting long when the candidate arrived. I discovered that this was not going to be what I had thought—she was not there to give a speech, she just sat down with us, and noshed on hors-d’ouevres and took part in the ongoing conversation. But hey, her campaign slogan is, “Listening to you.” Not “talking to you.” I think that’s a good attitude for a politician to have—after all, they’re our employees. No matter how much money lobbyists wave at ‘em, we’re the ones who pay their salaries. Not that anyone’s going to be lobbying Ms. McClendon for anything much as a civil court judge. She probably gets a lot more of that in her current position on Metro Council, where she heads the finance committee, and has been an advocate for putting a new baseball stadium downtown.

Prodded by our hostess, I finally started asking Ms. McClendon some questions. The first thing I found out is what I’ve already told you—she’s running for a civil, not a criminal, judgeship, which means she would be dealing mostly with lawsuits, probate cases , divorces, and similar matters that end up in court because private individuals can’t agree. “I enjoy probate cases,” she said. She’s been a practicing lawyer for over twenty years. I think you’d have to be a lawyer to say you like probate cases!

“Do you think the adversarial nature of our court system gets in the way of”–I started to ask her.

“Finding out the truth?” she finished for me. “Yes, it certainly does. All too often, I’ve seen that money gets results. I’d like to set up classes to help people who plan to act as their own lawyers, and have a real small claims court that would exclude lawyers.”

“What do you think of mediation?” I asked her.

“It’s been hijacked by the lawyers, who have made it more expensive than going to court, because both sides have to have their lawyers, and then you have to hire another lawyer to be the mediator.”

“From what you’ve said, I gather you wouldn’t be partial to SLAPP suits?” I asked. An activist friend of mine who had been sued by the polluting company he was exposing had requested that I sound her out on this.

She looked puzzled. “What’s a SLAPP suit?” she asked.

“A Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation,” I explained. “It’s when a lawbreaking company sues the activists who are trying to expose it, in order to tie them up in court and weigh them down with legal expenses.”

Wonder of wonders, a woman who had been part of that action walked into the room right at that moment, and proceeded to explain the situation in far greater detail than I knew. And Ms. McClendon listened, asked good questions, and, I think, learned quite a bit, as did we all. It was a great story, and well told, but its substance is unfortunately not really relevant to what I’m talking about here. Ms. McClendon, although obviously interested, said that cases like that were not likely to show up in her court. I appreciated her honesty. She didn’t try to b.s. us, she just gave us the relevant facts. As I understand the rules of this radio station, I can’t endorse candidates, but I will tell you I like Amanda McClendon.

So, what’s the “Deep Green Perspective” on this?

It’s easy to fall way back and dig the big picture, but the closer you get to daily life, the blurrier the distinctions become. As a Metro Council member and a civil court judge, Ms. McClendon is serving deep in the nitty-gritty, at the base of the political pyramid, where any political party worthy of the name has to have its roots. Forget about national office. Forget about state office. How do the Green Party’s ten key values apply to neighborhood zoning issues? How does a Green judge run a divorce court? When we have individuals who are willing and able to answer these questions, we will begin to be a serious political party. When people hear and appreciate those individuals and respond with their votes, and put us into office, we will begin to be a movement to be reckoned with.

I don’t mean to demean my brothers and sisters who are running for state and national office this year, because I think they are the best hope we have right now for spreading our values. I believe that the ten key values of the Green Party are infectious. I think they are ideas that make such good sense that anyone who hears them with an open mind will say, “Yeah!”

I mean, what’s to argue with about grassroots democracy, social justice and equal opportunity, ecological wisdom, non-violence, decentralization, community-based economics and economic justice, feminism and gender equity, respect for diversity, personal and global responsibility, and future focus and sustainability? Now, as I was saying, how does that apply to divorce and probate court? I humbly submit that it takes someone smarter than me to answer that question.

Maybe I should have been prepared to present the matter to Ms. McClendon—but that’s a lot to get into when you’ve barely been introduced. I guess I’ll just have to share this with her and see how—or if—she responds. Stay tuned.

music: Roseanne Cash, “This World”

Nashville just had what may have been its biggest protest demonstration, ever. Those of us who have grown accustomed to seeing the same three hundred people at demonstrations over the last decade were left with our mouths agape at the turnout for the march protesting the proposed criminalization of illegal immigration—as many as fourteen thousand people. Even the organizers of the march were surprised—in a pre-rally story posted at the Tennessee Independent Media Center, they said they expected two thousand marchers—which would still have been one of the largest demonstrations in the history of Nashville. I mean, this town does not turn out.

But the kind of stuff my friends and I have been publicly squawking about for years is abstract compared to what our Latino cousins are facing. A majority of the U.S. House voted to make it a felony to be in this country illegally, and anyone who helped those so-called felons—family, friends, humanitarian assistance organizations—without turning them in to the authorities for imprisonment and ultimate deportation would likewise be guilty of a felony. Passage of such a measure would demand the apprehension, arrest, imprisonment, and deportation of not only the eleven and a half million illegal immigrants in this country, but of possibly millions more individuals, some of whom would be deportable, and some of whom would be native-born Americans who would instead be caught up in the snares of the federal justice system, which is already overloaded by its attempt to enforce our country’s unrealistic drug laws. And speaking of our unrealistic drug laws, these delusional immigration policies are being championed by none other than drug warrior supreme Jim Sensenbrenner, a member of the house from Wisconsin, who may regard imprisoning eleven million illegal aliens as a warmup for imprisoning twenty million marihuana smokers…but I digress….

If Mr. Senselessbrainer, Tony Tancredo and their unrealistic ilk have their way, millions of Mexicans and other Central Americans will be dumped back into their home countries, where they have no way to earn a living; the already tenuous economies of these countries, deprived of the huge sums illegal immigrants send home to support their families, would collapse even further. All of Central America would start to resemble Haiti, and Haiti—you don’t want to think about it.

With its police forces beefed up to handle this mass detention, and concentration camps—I mean detention facilities—set up to handle the arrest of nearly five percent of the country’s population, the land of the free would become a police state. I mean, not since the Nazis declared the Jews persona non grata has a country intentionally set out to incarcerate so many of its inhabitants. There have been stories floating about Halliburton being contracted to establish detention centers—we in the antiwar movement thought they were for US—silly us, they’re for the Mexicans, and for those of us in the antiwar movement who happen to help out illegal immigrants on the side—which, actually, might be a lot of us. I confess, I have. Come and get me.

And, with so many prisoners, would the government start contracting out our captured Mexicans to perform labor? After all, taking eleven million people out of the workforce would create a major labor shortage. Back to the lettuce field, Jose, but this time the government’s collecting your paycheck…

Or maybe the war on immigrants would be like the war on terror and the war on drugs—lots of spending on executive salaries and hardware, occasional high-profile arrests, but no serious attempt to round up everyone —just another club to threaten people with, one that only gets used when it’s politically convenient for the party in power.

Those who want to tighten up our borders make a lot of noise about illegals choosing to come here, without really examining why they choose to come—just as they like to spout about Muslims who hate our way of life, without looking at why—so maybe we should look at WHY these people come here.

Well, as Willie Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks, “That’s where the money is.”

And why is the money here? It’s here because Americans have been very clever about concentrating capital, but not so wise about sharing it with the less fortunate. The immigration issue is not new—Woody Guthrie wrote “Deportees” in 1948, with the lines

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

Things got worse after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which enabled cheap U.S. farm products to be sold in Mexico and ended the Mexican government’s protection of its small farmers. The result has been devastating for rural Mexico, as people face the double bind of having no money in an economy that demands money. Even the maquiladoras, the big factories just inside Mexico that were built to import into the US, and other industries that first moved out of this country into other Central American countries, are moving on as their owners respond to the lure of cheaper labor in China and other parts of East Asia, thanks to the United States and our World Trade Organization. All you folks who are sentimental for a Democrat party administration, remember it was Bill and Al who pushed that through.

So, like moths to a flame, the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free come to America—they see our television, they think they know what to expect. Hah.

Mr. Bush, who appears to be more liberal—or is it just realistic?–about this issue than many Republicans, has cast it in terms of “jobs Americans won’t do.” That’s not the complete phrase—the real deal is, “jobs Americans won’t do for the kind of wages employers are willing to pay.” Employers like to spread the myth that higher wages for workers will have to mean higher prices for everyone, but simple economic analysis reveals that in most situations, there is plenty of room to raise wages without having a substantial impact on prices. Besides, when poorly-paid people get raises, they tend to buy basic consumer goods, which boosts the economy—except for the fact that most consumer goods are made in China these days. Oh, well.

On the other hand, are there really Americans willing to do the jobs that illegals are doing, at any rate of pay? The seven million unemployed Americans have in theory been displaced by eleven million illegal immigrants, but the geographical facts of life probably defuse this comparison. Would you leave your family in the rust belt and move to California to pick grapes and chop cotton? Would you move your family to California to do that? Twenty-first century Okies, anyone?

This is a complex issue, and there are a lot of people insisting on simple answers. They are going to be disappointed. People complain about deteriorating school and health services and blame it on our newest, frequently illegal, immigrants. The truth is that our schools and hospitals are in decline because the current government would rather play Rambo and cut taxes for the rich than take care of the least of us. They often proclaim their Christianity—the Jesus I know said, “howsoever ye treat the least of mine, is how you treat me,” and I think he’d be more likely to scourge Pat Robertson out of the temple than anoint his brow with oil—but I digress.

“Guest workers.” They want “guest workers”–people who are not going to be citizens of this country who will do our dirty work. What does it do to democracy and participation in the civic process to create a permanently disenfranchised underclass? “Guest workers”? They have those in Saudi Arabia and Dubai, don’t they? Is that the kind of country we want to become? A small, fabulously wealthy elite supported by a vast, disenfranchised underclass? That’s where we’re heading. The rich are getting richer and not just the poor but the middle class are all getting poorer. That’s about three-quarters of the country losing it. The auto companies’ dumping of their workers is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. Trickle down economics, right? Only, what’s trickling down is yellow and it smells baaad. This is WTO working, this is GATT working, this is NAFTA working, this is the World Bank doing what they all set out to do—put the U.S. on the same playing field as the rest of the world. You know when American high-tech workers will be competitive with Indian and Chinese high-tech workers? When we’re willing to accept the same kind of wages they are. All these trade treaties are effecting the economic genocide of the American way of life.

But—our much-touted American way of life is based on ripping off the rest of the world. “Middle class” in America is about new cars every few years and sending your kids to college. In most of the world, middle class means you’ve got a spigot in your front yard that gives you potable water that you can haul inside in a bucket to cook and wash with. We have been flying very high for a very long time, it’s a long way down, and in my darker moments I think we may just have to get used to it. The only way to solve the illegal immigration problem may be for this country to become as impoverished as the rest of the world—then there’s no impetus for people to come here looking for work, right?

That’s all the more reason to start building local economies. Large corporations are leeches that suck the money out of communities in order to enrich their management and stockholders. Until we can redistribute those ill-gotten gains, we need to do everything we can to create a personal, face-to-face, non-corporate economy, one that keeps money in the communities it supports. This is not a program that takes a bureaucracy to administer; it just takes a lot of different people in a lot of different places figuring things out among themselves. Storm clouds are gathering, folks, it’s time to get to work. All those Spanish-speaking people who come out of the deep poverty down south have practical skills that we just might find mighty welcome in the years to come. Se habla espanol?

music: Steve Earle, “What’s a Simple Man to Do?”

Comments

For the most part I’d say you’re right on the money. But one thing I’d like to comment on is your view on “guest workers.” I am a spanish speaking white American deeply involved with the Hispanic community. One misconception about most Hispanics is that they want to become citizens or permanent residents. That is not the case. They [most] just want to be able to work here legally, with no problems, and to be able able to travel back and forth from this country to their homeland with no problems. That would be a “guest worker.” Although this situation is something that most undocumented workers would prefer, another situation arises that creates a lack of laborers in their native land, less taxable income, less local investment and entrepreneurial ventures, split and damaged families, fatherless children, abandoned wives seeking new romances… the list goes on and would be rather too long a conversation to take on here.
Posted by Caryn H on 04/24/2006 10:11:02 PM

Thanks for your perspective. From what you are saying, and from my own contacts with folks who have come up from Mexico and Central America to work, (and my own experience of having to leave the depressed area I lived in for economic reasons) I gather that most of them would prefer to stay home with their families and communities, but that this is a financial impossibility. I think the real solution is to re-create economically viable, self-sustaining cultures there as well as here, and I ain’t talking maquiladoras or Chinese timber deals! I bet it would be cheaper than current enforcement proposals and a share of the military budget. I have no problem with their desire to stay connected with their home culture, I just don’t think that having a lot of people in this country who “just work here” is good for the country.

Recently, the University of Washington’s oceanographic research vessel, the Thomas G. Thompson, completed one piece of what the University calls “The Repeat Hydrography Project.” The good ship Thomas G. Thompson sailed from the Antarctic to Alaska up the middle of the Pacific Ocean, taking about three months to complete the voyage. As they sailed, the thirty-five scientists aboard took samples of ocean water, from the surface to the bottom, every sixty miles. The “Repeat Hydrography Project” involves sampling along 19 such routes every ten years, to create a comprehensive picture of the ocean’s health.

What the scientists have found so far is this: the Pacific Ocean has absorbed enough carbon dioxide to begin lowering its pH and decreasing the amount of oxygen in the water. The oceans have a tremendous capacity to absorb CO2. They have absorbed about half the carbon dioxide that has been released into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution. But there are consequences. Less oxygen in the water makes it harder for fish to survive, and a sinking pH will dissolve crustaceans’ shells.

Big deal, soft-shell crab, right? Wrong. The ocean’s predominant crustacean species is microscopic phytoplankton, the foundation of the ocean food chain. Dissolving their shells will kill them. It’s not enough that we’ve depleted an estimated 90% of the edible fish in the ocean, we’re now destroying the very basis for their survival—and our own, because phytoplankton are the major source of photsynthesis on this planet, which means that they are the major source of the oxygen we breathe. So, if we take out the plankton, eventually we will suffocate ourselves. Isn’t that lovely?

In other environmental news this last month, climatologists announced the connection between the meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet and the shrinking of ocean ice in Antarctica. As I reported last month, Greenland’s meltdown is accelerating. There have been reports of “icequakes” due to the fact that the icecap is melting from the bottom, so that while the top looks the same, it is being undermined and ultimately settles several feet. One scientist said that the thaw of Greenland is about a hundred years ahead of the schedule it was thought to be on just a few years ago.

So—when Greenland melts down, that will raise the ocean level about ten feet, and that ten-foot floodtide will sweep down to Antarctica (which is warming up already) and contribute to the erosion of the Antarctic ice sheet, giving us yet another ten feet of water in the ocean, for a total twenty-foot rise, probably in the next hundred years. Bye-bye Florida, bye-bye New Orleans (for good, this time), bye-bye Houston and New York and Boston and the outer banks of North Carolina and much of the Central Valley of California where most of our vegetables come from and—omigawsh, bye-bye London and Holland and Bangladesh and lots of southeast Asia and a whole lot of the South Pacific. Bye-bye fresh water supplies in many places adjacent to the ocean, like Los Angeles.

When you couple the human displacement that this will cause with the cultural and political disruption that will come when the Himalayan ice sheet melts down (that’s the next biggest ice sheet on the planet after Greenland and Antarctica, and it’s shrinking fast, too) and all the rivers of Asia, from the Indus to the Irriwaddy to the Mekong and the Huang Ho, stop flowing, we’re in for a bang-up century.

The ironic thing is, that this didn’t have to happen, and it could be mitigated, if the United States took the lead in casting out greed and selfishness as the foundations of national policy. Our American way of life, and all the resources we employ to defend it, have caused this problem and are keeping it from being solved. It’s time to take the initiative, simplify our lives, get our government to drop its guns, and get to work.

music: Leonard Cohen, “The Road to Hell”

OK, let me try and get this straight. Mr. Bush has been saying for years that if the government wants to eavesdrop on people, all they have to do is go to a FISA court and get a warrant—and they can even do that after they start bugging someone’s phone, if it’s really dire. And getting a warrant from a FISA court is about like getting a marriage license—they just about don’t turn you down.

And Mr. Bush and his junta (or is it Mr. Cheney and his junta?) have spent a lot of time and energy and, yes “political capital,” as they say, pushing for expansion of the Patriot Act, saying they need the tools it will give them to capture terrorists.

But, when it emerged that our government has been engaging in warrantless wiretapping and, Mr. Gonzalez hints, many other things too secret to mention, we were informed that Mr. Bush, as commander-in-chief of a nation at war, has unlimited power and does not need to abide by any law that impedes his relentless search for terrorists. S

OK, so why all the earlier references to “due process of law”? And why all the energy spent pushing to enlarge what is legally permissible under the Patriot Act? That bill, I tell you—it’s enough to give patriotism a bad name. Well, I think I have an idea why—but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Now Scooter Libby alleges that Mr. Bush, or perhaps Mr. Cheney, with the blessing of Mr. Bush—authorized him to tell reveal classified information to several several reporters, thereby declassifying it . It apparently follows that since Mr. Bush, as Commander-in-Chief, can violate the law with impunity, then Mr. Libby—viola! –is innocent of any wrongdoing.

Mr. Bush said, on numerous occasions, that he didn’t know who in the administration was leaking information, but that whoever had done so would be fired at the very least. Somehow, I don’t think he’s about to fire himself.

During the 2004 campaign, the Bush camp characterized John Kerry as a “flip-flopper” because Mr. Kerry is intellectually honest enough to change his mind when he gets new information, as well as politically sophisticated enough to understand that he isn’t always going to get everything he wants. I disagree with him about many things, but I believe he is fundamentally an honest man.

Mr. Bush’s flip-flops, however, are either dishonest or schizophrenic. To go from “we need warrants and legally expanded powers” to “we don’t need no bleeping warrants and we can do anything we want,” to go from “I don’t know who leaked this information but the leaker will be fired” to “I am the leaker and I say it was OK for me to do it”–these are nonsequiturs worthy of Alice in Wonderland. But this is not Wonderland, this is the United States of America, and Mr. Bush’s conduct has destroyed American credibility, betrayed our intelligence officers, and cost thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis their lives.

His rhetoric of patriotism does not excuse these actions.. A true patriot would not trample the Constitution. A true patriot would not endanger the lives of clandestine Central Intelligence Agency operatives for partisan political purposes. (I don’t like the CIA, but I’m a nonviolent pacifist, dammit—I don’t want anybody to get hurt!). A true patriot would not put our precious younger generation—our armed forces—in harm’s way on the basis of evidence he evidently knew was phony.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the entire Republican leadership are guilty of treason, and only their steely, calculated grip on the reins of power—and the timidity of the Democrats—is keeping them from being frogmarched into court. I said earlier that I think I know why Bush lied about his illegal activities up until recently, and here’s my opinion: he was waiting until he felt like he had the Supreme Court stacked in his favor to come out with the truth. Thank you, Democrats, for letting Mussalito and Bob Roberts (remember that movie?) determine the fate of our nation. A special place in hell is waiting for you if you don’t get some spine, real soon.

And Bush and Cheney, Condi and Rummy? I suspect they’ll be reincarnating as tube worms on the edge of some volcanic vent in the deep, dark Pacific for some time to come…but I digress.

I am deeply concerned. If the Republicans can keep the Democrats from taking back the House and Senate this year—and there are enough fools and thieves in this country to make that a possibility—Mr. Bush will have two more years to do damage. Even if the Democrats regain power over the legislative branch of our government, and are not too timid to raise hell, Mr. Bush will still have most of a couple of years before the slow wheels of justice catch up with him. I am concerned that we may wake up one morning to find that our military, tired of being shredded for no good reason, has surrounded the White House and the Capitol and asked for some resignations. That would not be a good way to break this logjam, but if we don’t turn things around fast, it could be our future. And America would never be the same again.

music: Steve Earle, “Jerusalem“