DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

My mother died ten days ago. This is the eulogy I read at her funeral, not part of a radio show, at least not yet.   In some ways her death was a great relief, because she has been in declining health for years, and I have been mourning her gradual departure for a long time, but the actual fact of her passage is a tremendous shock. Wordsmith that I am, I am at a loss for words to express my feelings. “Don’t cry for me, ” she said as she lay dying, and, so far, I haven’t. Her death is a tremendous reminder to me to work as hard as I can for what I believe in while I still have the strength.

Without further preface, here it is:

My mother was born April 6, 1912, in New York City, the granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on one side and French Jewish immigrants on the other. Her grandfather was a door-to-door peddler in Illinois; her father was the leading floor covering salesman in New York City—but my mom graduated from high school in 1930, into a society that was falling apart from the Great Depression. So, she had to figure out her own way through the world—choosing to work and travel and be her own person instead of following the traditional path of marrying out of her parents’ home and into her husband’s.

She journeyed to San Francisco in search of a new life thirty years before I did, and I grew up on her stories of being penniless in San Francisco and hitchhiking to Canada with her friends, little dreaming that, as a young man, I too would hitchhike around the country and find myself penniless in San Francisco. She imbued the stories she told with a sense of excitement and wonder that taught me to see my life as a series of adventures—when I could just as easily see it as a series of trials.

As an independent woman, my mother also developed a strong sense of social justice that led her into political activism in the heady, radical thirties, and her passionate stories of strikes, leafleting, and picket lines, (sometimes joined by my grandmother, a feminist in her own right), of partying with the young Communists and taking part in huge anti-Nazi demonstrations when German passenger ships would dock in New York, likewise helped form my view of proper adult behavior. But she was not all seriousness; she aspired to start a dance school where people could learn dances from around the world, as a way of fostering international understanding.

And it was her passionate commitment to social justice, her desire to do as much as she could to stop the Nazi menace, that led her to volunteer for the U.S. Army when war broke out. She started out cleaning airplanes, but soon her natural talent for understanding and expressing the human situation was recognized, and she spent much of the war on the staff of various Army publications as a writer and editor, in England and France.

And it was in England that she met my father, a soldier and a shy country boy from western Ohio with a conservative, traditional Christian upbringing. I think neither had ever met anyone quite like the other. Although she had vowed at twenty-five never to marry and have children, the attraction of opposites and the ticking of her thirty-three year old biological clock combined to pull her and my father into marriage.

So, she moved with him to central Ohio, where she and my father soon began to suffer from culture clash long before it had a name. In an attempt to solidify their disintegrating marriage, she bore me, at the relatively late age of thirty-six. The pregnancy, after several miscarriages, was difficult, leading her doctor to recommend that she never attempt pregnancy again. The final difficulty came when she still had not gone into labor a month past her due date. After one exam, her doctor told her to come back the next day. “NO!” my mother said. “I’m not leaving this hospital until I have my baby!” My ten-months pregnant mother was so forceful about this that the doctor gave in and set up an immediate c-section, in the course of which he discovered that my mother had the beginnings of an infection that, in another 24 hours, would have had serious consequences for both of us. Thanks, Mom.

I was only a year old when my mother went back to college, part-time, with the aim of becoming a schoolteacher. Graduation and divorce happened close on each other, and she found herself with a new life as a single mother and a substitute teacher. Work was unpredictable, my father was not forthcoming with alimony, and there were times when money was short and we didn’t have a whole lot to eat. The penny-pinching skills my mother had learned in the Great Depression came in handy, as did her upbeat attitude. Life was always an adventure.

Then, unexpectedly, one of her substitute teaching assignments turned into a full-time teaching position—eighth grade English—in a Dayton, Ohio suburb, a job she would hold for over twenty-five years. Every night, over dinner and between grading a never-ending stream of papers, she would tell me her day’s adventures. Adventures challenging her students to read, to think, and to write. Adventures working with, and sometimes clashing with, conservative school administrators who found her as fascinating and difficult as my father had, but had to respect her talent as a teacher. Adventures starting a branch of the National Federation of Teachers—a bona fide, militant, AF of L union—when she grew frustrated with the compromises brokered by the National Education Association in her school district. She did not rest until her upstart union was the recognized bargaining agent for Kettering’s teachers. She taught me that you can take on the status quo and win.  (Note–Since writing this, I discovered that her AFT chapter sputtered and died when she retired, which is just as good a lesson–don’t worry about whether you win or lose!)

Through all this time, she stayed connected with her family in New York, Every summer, she and I would head for New York City, where we rented a room in a large, old, ramshackle beach house. My grandparents summered in the room next door, and there were two other couples in the other rooms on that floor, each with its own tiny refrigerator and stove. We all shared the same bathroom. Other couples and families with kids took slightly larger apartments in the attic, ground floor, and basement. Old men smoked cigars, played pinochle, and read Yiddish newspapers. Some of them bore the tattoos they had been branded with in concentration camps. We were on the beach block, and a very long way from Wonderbread, suburban Ohio. It was my first experience of living in community, and I loved it. Thanks, Ma.

So, she shouldn’t have been too surprised when I joined the Caravan, and the the Farm. She came and visited me on the Caravan when we arrived back in Nashville, and spent a night on the bus with me—and the eight or ten other single people living in it. A few months later, when we had settled on the Martin Farm, she arrived on a Sunday morning and found the gate locked and deserted—we were all at Sunday Morning Services. she just climbed over it—in her high heels—and walked in. She was not afraid of adventure.

In addition to her union activities, she had become active in the Democratic Party, working at the neighborhood level to educate people and get out the vote. This led to her running as a Democratic candidate for the Ohio state legislature, but it was a strongly Republican district and a strongly Republican year—1980. At least she made her opponent work for his seat! She was never afraid to challenge power and authority in the name of social justice.

A few years later, in 1984, she was selected as a delegate to the Democratic convention, and helped nominate Walter Mondale. It was not a high point for the Democratic Party, but it was one of the high points of her life. One of my most treasured photographs of her was taken at that convention. She is holding a Mondale sign over her head and looking absolutely fierce.

Her commitment to her family diverted from politics, back into teaching, after that. Our kids were coming into their teenage years and we invited her to come down to the farm and work some of her English teacher magic on them. She devoted a stormy, but fruitful, year to our young wild ones, deciding at the end of it that she had had enough of butting heads with teenagers—but she succeeded in maintaining warm, friendly relations with all those little butt-heads that have continued through the years as they have grown into adults with teenagers of their own. She had a way of finding what kids were good at, and encouraging them, even as she gave them a hard time for their shortcomings.

She returned to Ohio and resumed her Democratic Party work, always pushing for the Democrats to take more populist stances, never hesitating to challenge entrenched elitism wherever she found it. Although age and heart disease were slowing her down, she had not lost her taste for novelty and adventure—so she accepted our invitation to move to Tennessee three years ago and started a new life her at 92, with verve and gusto. She never felt that she was too old to do something to make the world a better place, and she was a tremendous inspiration to everyone who came in contact with her. Although she is gone, her spirit and intentions live on in many, many people.

Goodbye, Mom, and thank you for so very much.

Comments

hello there. i am your cousin of some sort, i believe second, as you know my mother is your first cousin. my name is steffani and i am 31 years old as of tuesday. my mother told me she mentioned me profusely when the two of you met last year, so maybe i am a tiny bit familiar. i have WANTED to contact you for a while, but my mother said that maybe i should wait. anyway, i can no longer wait because i want to share that i really admired your mother when i was a child. i used to be babysat by aunts eva and dot. your mother used to visit randomly, at least in my memory, and i just KNEW she and i were some kind of RELATIVES, partially because even as a young child there was no one remotely like me in our family and mostly because i could keenly feel that unlike every other grownup i had ever met, i had SOMETHING in common with her. my memory of her was that she was ballsy and beautiful and earthy and exotic and SOMEHOW “what i wanted to be when i grew up.”..and of course her DEMOCRAT STICKERS on her car…. i am now the democrat sticker lady in my family (though maybe not so much so anymore i am more “green”, i would say, this time around) and would hope and pray that SOMEDAY would have been an INSPIRATION for some other small child in close minded Ohio (and our family, bless them all) like your mother was for me. losing a parent is an experience that is daunting, enlightening, awful, and transformative, and i want to share with you that my thoughts are with you during this time and my memories are of your dear and wonderful mother, who as you can see meant a LOT to MANY people, even me. thank you and blessings… steffani (jennings) crummett
Posted by steffani (jennings)crummett (sandy’s daughter) on 05/11/2007 02:46:36 PM

I was recently reading the latest issue of one of Nashville’s minor newspapers, The Nashville Pride, which comes to my residence weekly, bearing the name of a woman who has not lived at our address for at least twenty-five years, since my wife and her first husband bought the place. I don’t know what Helen Hickenlooper did to deserve a lifetime-and-then-some subscription to this paper, but I am grateful to her (or to the paper’s subscription department) for a window into black Nashville. Yes, the Nashville Pride is a newspaper for the ethnic black community in this town—I bet you thought it was for gays, right? Nope, “Say it loud I’m black and I’m proud” predates Stonewall, folks.

The paper also serves as a window into black Nashville’s view of the city as a whole, and sometimes it features stories that don’t get a whole lot of traction in other papers in the city. Such is the case with a story about an organization called “Nashville’s Agenda” which is currently seeking input about…Nashville’s civic agenda for the next ten years or so. The newspaper story directed me to a website, “Nashvillesagenda.org,”which gave me a little background on the organization and invited me to take a survey that asked me to rate certain predetermined priorities, invited me to short essay-type answers, and occasionally asked me to fill in the blanks or make multiple choices. After taking the test, I thought it would be a good subject for a story, and I was delighted to find my answers still displayed on the website when I revisited it, because that made it much easier for me to write this story.

A little history first—the original “Nashville’s Agenda” group formed in the early nineties, and its surveys of Nashville showed a strong desire for affordable housing, a performing arts center, and more professional sports teams. Well, two out of three ain’t bad—either the two out of three of asking for affordable housing and a performing arts center, both of which are good things, or the two out of three of actually getting a performing arts center and several professional sports teams, the latter of which we need in this town like we needed the thermal plant downtown or coal heat. Well, coal heat and the thermal plant are history, so maybe we can get rid of the professional sports teams and go back to entertaining ourselves and spreading the wealth around enough to have more affordable housing. But, I digress…..

The steering committee of the current Nashville’s Agenda reads like a who’s who of this town, with representation from the Frist Center, TSU, Vanderbilt, The Urban League, Metro government, big business, one “psychologist,” and a host of other moving and shaking agencies in town. Actually, the Frist Center came into existence partially because of the influence of the first Nashville’s Agenda group, and partially because the Frist health care empire had sucked so much blood, I mean money, out of the people of Tennessee that they didn’t know what to do with it all and figured they could get a tax break by creating a foundation and a museum. My main beef about that is, that as ill-gotten as the Frists’ gains are, they should pay us to visit their museum, instead of the other way ’round. But, I digress again…..

The survey opens with the question, “What do you think have been the biggest changes in Nashville in the last 6-8 years? List the three most important.” I wrote down, 1)more diverse ethnic population;
2)more corporate; 3)more gentrified. The first of those is a good thing. I think it is good for us to have many different cultures co-existing in this town. I like occasionally going into a grocery store with really different produce, a grocery store where not only can I not read the labels on the food containers, I can’t even recognize the letters in the alphabets they’re using, and the music on the loudspeakers is in a language I don’t understand. And, I’m the only Caucasian in the joint. We Americans are a very small minority in this world, but we have been isolated over here on our own continent for far too long. I am in no hurry for these people to adopt our language and customs.

But—more corporate, and more gentrified. These go hand in hand, in many ways. My own experience of this came from having lived in the last hippie house in what used to be a downscale, countercultural neighborhood, and from having worked in the corporate successor to Nashville’s premier locally owned health food store, the late and much lamented Sunshine Grocery. There aren’t any decent low-rent locations any more, whether for folks living on the cheap or for someone trying to start up a business, and it’s hard to find a business niche that doesn’t have several corporate bodies vying for supremacy already, with more resources and deeper pockets than a local guy can muster. When I look at the future of Nashville, I think I see the transnational corporate web falling apart, or at least becoming sporadic and unreliable, and I think there will be a rise in local people providing for their neighborhoods—as repairfolk, permanent yard/garage sales, garden- and prepared-food providers, you name it. The local economy is going to have to come back bigtime, and those who have built large, expensive, energy-demanding retail spaces are going to be struggling to make their payments. Today the subprime lenders, tomorrow the whole economy, folks.

The next question was,  What do you think are going to be the biggest problems or challenges facing Nashville over the next 5-10 years? Not surprisingly, I answered, “decreasing fuel supplies, more tenuous food supplies, scarcity of affordable consumer goods and services, decreasing employment opportunities, lower tax revenues coupled with increased needs and demand for services“ I will be curious to find out if I am the only one thinking this way—I will also be curious to find out if I’m right. I’d kinda rather not be, y’know?

The obvious mate to this was, “If you could pick one thing for the city’s government, business, and other leadership to work on, to make Nashville the best it can be, what would it be?” To which I replied, “local self-sufficiency.”

The next thing the survey asked me to do was to “rate the city’s progress” on a number of issues. This got interesting. How was “progress” being defined? What did some of the short phrases describing the “issues” really mean? It’s hard to nuance rating these things numerically, know what I mean? How are you going to rate the city schools? Is it really a failure if they’re not coming up to the “No Child Left Behind” standards, when “No Child Left Behind” is a completely wrongheaded way to structure and measure educational quality?

What am I to make of a one-word phrase like, “Seniors”? Is it good if there are more distractions for older Nashvilleans, especially if there aren’t more real things for them to involve themselves in? There were a couple dozen of these phrases, and I’m not going to give a line-by-line commentary on all of them, but let me hit a couple of highlights:

Youth (programs, help, employment, drugs)” is one category. The economy is changing so fast that it’s hard to teach kids specific employment skills anymore. They’re even outsourcing legal research to India these days. What’s gonna be left? Kids need to be taught how to think for themselves, how to solve problems, and how to get along with each other. There are a few programs in town that do that, but by and large our educational/youth services system is oriented towards teaching kids to be good sheep—or is it good lemmings? Well, that’s easier for administrators to deal with. Who wants a bunch of kids thinking for themselves?

And as far as the drug issue goes, I think the current boom in meth, crack, and prescription drug problems is due to the fact that Metro, state, and federal authorities have been entirely too successful in breaking up local marijuana growing operations. I know adults who are having a hard time finding good weed, and it must be even worse for kids who can’t afford two hundred dollar quarters. More marijuana in this town would help everybody relax, light a lot of inspirational lamps in people’s heads, and help us envision a brighter future for Nashville. Oh dear, I’m digressing again….

Another issue that rang a lot of bells for me was “Transportation (traffic, congestion, public transportation, alternative transportation)” I am fortunate in that I rarely have to drive in rush hour traffic in this town, but I often listen to the radio during rush hour, and I often wonder why we accept the fact that, nearly every day, there is at least one major traffic tieup in this town, all too often due to accidents which all too often involve injuries or fatalities. I think about a friend of mine who lives near a spot on I65 that is a frequent traffic jam site. My friend has asthma, and he frequently has attacks at rush hour, when thousands of cars are sitting there, idling on the freeway just a few yards from his home. People, what is wrong with this picture?

My own commute involves crossing from one side of town to another very early in the morning, when the buses run hourly, if at all. If I could get to work on time by bus, it might take me an hour rather than the twenty minute drive I currently navigate. Clearly, we need to not only beef up public transportation, but create incentives for people to use it, and maybe even incentives for people to switch jobs or homes so they don’t have to commute so far. If the chain grocery just a couple of miles from my home sold enough organic produce so that I didn’t feel like I was shilling for chemical agriculture by working there, I could switch jobs and bicycle to work. We’ve gotta start looking at these things.

After “rating progress” I was asked to “prioritize” pretty much the same list of issues. One important addition to this list was “waste management,” to which I gave a very high priority. “Reduce, re-use, recycle,” has got to become everyone’s mantra. Nashville currently recycles an embarrassingly small percentage of its waste, as if all this plastic, metal and glass grew on trees every year instead of being a one-shot deal, dug out of the ground and refined at great expense.

Then came another essay question:”What else would you like Nashville’s leaders to think about as they work to set Nashville’s agenda for the next 5-10 years?” I replied, “peak oil, global warming, community participation, Nashville’s ability to feed and otherwise provide for itself in a global economy and ecology that will be breaking down with increasingly devastating consequences.” I hope they really get the part about community participation. We need to empower people to figure out their own solutions, because imposed solutions, no matter how intelligent, will just be perceived as a set of rules to be broken if they are not created with the enthusiastic participation of everyone involved.

Then another essay question: What action would you suggest to community leaders on any of the issues which interest you? I suggested: “quit allowing housing developments that will depend on private automobiles to be viable, ramp up public transportation, encourage local agriculture (including allowing people to keep chickens in their backyards), encourage local manufacturing, preserve open space, encourage solar and wind energy production, don’t fall into the ethanol/biodiesel trap—it’s not a viable fuel source.” One recent example of local governments unnecessarily getting in the way of alternate energy generation is Belle Meade’s initial refusal to allow Al Gore to put solar panels on his house, and their subsequent restriction of those panels to roof areas that will not be visible from the ground. Hey! Wake up over there! As for ethanol and biodiesel, I’ve said plenty already—but I would have to add to the evidence a recent report that Indonesia’s rain forests will, at current rates, be completely gone to palm oil plantations in another fifteen years, to the great detriment of the planet and our CO2 balance.

That’s pretty much it for the survey. I encourage those of you who live in Nashville to contribute to it, and to attend the public meetings that will be held this month to promote discussion of the near future in Nashville. You can find their times and locations, and the survey, at
www.nashvillesagenda.org. They’re asking our opinions—how often does that happen? Let ‘em know what you think, friends.

music: Laurie McClain, “This Old Town

If you want to gauge how far out of kilter our country’s legal system has gotten, consider my friend Bernie, who was busted for growing marijuana to give to people with medical needs. The feds tried to put him away for a five year mandatory minimum, but for reasons I will go into shortly Bernie pulled eighteen months in a halfway house (which my informants tell me is actually tougher than jail) and two and a half years of “supervised release,” plus the federal government wants to effectively fine him a million dollars by confiscating the farm where Bernie has lived for the last forty years. And, they have appealed his parole and are asking that he be given even more than five years. Please notice it’s the feds doing this. If Bernie’s case had stayed at the state level, he would have been dealing with two years of probation and an eight thousand dollar fine, and would not be faced with losing his home. Those are the broad outlines. The more I ponder the details, the more I have to mourn what a Kafkaesque mockery “justice” has become in this country.

OK, here’s some homegrown Kafka for you. First, the complaint. The person who turned Bernie’s name over to the drug task force was was allegedly disgruntled because Bernie wouldn’t sell him any marijuana for recreational use. A certain form of popular justice did catch up with this guy, though, as he finally had to leave the area due to the negative force of popular opinion as word of his role in Bernie’s bust got out. I can only hope a similar fate awaits the rest of Bernie’s persecutors, I mean prosecutors, but so far it hasn’t caught up with them.

Irony of ironies: at the time the helicopters, ORV’s, and SUV’s descended on Bernie’s farm, he was in the final stages of preparing a report for the State of New Mexico on how to implement a medical marijuana program—a medical marijuana program that has just been passed, as written by Bernie, and signed into law by presidential contender and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. Way to go Bill! I mean, I love Dennis Kucinich’s ideals and his willingness to tilt at windmills but Bill Richardson actually got something done about this crazy kink in America’s consciousness.

And here’s the interesting wrinkle in Bernie and Bill’s excellent plan to provide medical marijuana: it will be grown by the State of New Mexico, not by individuals. Now, I think everybody should have the right to grow their own, BUT—in this confrontational day and age, in which the feds have been busting individual growers and private dispensaries right and left in California, New Mexico is setting up a system where the feds will be up against—not individuals, but the State of New Mexico. What a scenario: the feds trying to bust a New Mexico State grow room while the New Mexico State Police deploy to defend the marijuana growing facility…. but, I digress.

So, the state heat came down and busted Bernie, hauling away his plants and his computer (including his draft of the aforementioned New Mexico Marijuana Law). Always back up your work outside your computer, folks! The next thing that happened was…nothing. For three months, nothing. And then, although it had been a state raid, Bernie found himself facing federal charges, allegedly due to the amount of marijuana involved, even though that amount was grossly exaggerated—like, they counted the dirtballs around the roots, not to mention the stalks, as part of the weight, which even violates their guidelines.

At this point, the plea bargaining began. Do you know about plea bargaining? It’s pretty diabolic. The feds figure out everything they could possibly charge you with, which, in most people’s cases, is quite a lot. You have no idea how complex our web of laws is until you become entangled in it. In most of the cases of which I am aware, friends of mine began by facing decades in jail on open-and-shut cases. (The thing about being a prisoner of conscience is, the law does not recognize your conscience in any kind of positive way. You’re lucky we’ve gotten past burning people at the stake.) The upshot of plea bargaining is, you give them some piece of your soul and they drop most of the charges, and a jury never hears the case.

So, the bargaining began. Bernie’s lawyer was adept, and managed to nail down one controversy by getting the evidence reweighed—and discovering that the actual amount was one-quarter of what Bernie had originally been charged with—and that STILL included the freakin’ rootballs, fer cryin out loud! In fact, the usable amount of herb that Bernie was busted for growing came to seven pounds—about as much as the feds legally provide to each one of the five people who are legally getting medical marijuana from the U.S. government. (The original charges against him claimed that the confiscated plants weighed a total of one hundred and forty pounds.) Things were looking good for our boys—Bernie would only have to deal with probation and he’d get to keep his farm—but, when he and his lawyer showed up to sign the agreement they thought they had made with the feds, they had a big, ugly surprise—the feds had gone back to demanding a five year minimum and confiscation of Bernie’s farm. Problem was, thinking he knew what he was agreeing to, Bernie had already entered a guilty plea, and the court denied his petition to revoke that plea, even though the feds had lied to Bernie about what they were going to ask him to plead guilty to. And—the judge set Bernie’s sentencing hearing only two days after that decision, effectively denying him the chance to appeal. How’s that for Kafka?

Fortunately, Bernie drew a sympathetic judge, who allowed sixty character witnesses and medical marijuana testimony and ultimately reduced Bernie’s sentence below the five year mandatory minimum. But yeah, the feds have court action going to get Bernie behind bars, and they’re angling to confiscate his farm. For marijuana he had been demonstrably giving away for years. The guy was a consultant with a six-figure income. He was most emphatically not in it for the money. And if this had been a state case, as many cases of this size are, Bernie would have drawn two years probation and an eight thousand dollar fine. Kafka enough for you?

I am beginning to suspect that this is not some random case of prosecutorial insanity. As I mull over Bernie’s story, especially in light of the current controversy over politicization of the US attorney system and direction of it from the executive branch for the purpose of punishing political enemies of the administration, I connect certain dots and suspect I am seeing Karl Rove’s pasty finger pushing its way up my poor friend Bernie’s ass. I mean, if these people outed Valerie Plame, America’s number one anti-WMD undercover agent, why wouldn’t they go after a vocal, credentialed proponent of medical marijuana like Bernie? This is not the first time he has come to their attention, after all. On one page in the save Bernie’s farm website, he admits that, when he helped win the first big tobacco case against RJ Reynolds in 1984, “Reynolds thugs torched a car in my driveway to send me a message.”

Consider that some of what the junta stands accused of in the prosecutorial meddling affair is dropping the fine against the tobacco industry (of which R.J. Reynolds is, of course, a major part) from a hundred and thirty billion dollars to ten billion dollars, and that the politically appointed Justice Department official who directed this had for many years been a lawyer in a firm that worked for—R.J. Reynolds, a major contributor to the Bush campaign. Kafka, anyone?

I got pretty excited to learn that the current US attorney for middle Tennessee, Craig Morford, who is pressing the appeal of Bernie’s sentence, is one of those interim, without-Congressional-oversight Bush loyalist appointees that constitute another wing of the current Justice Department scandal, but actually it was his predecessor, Jim Vines, who worked most of the flimflam on my friend Bernie. Jim left the job highly praised by the DEA, and has not gone public about the “real” reasons for his departure, but it is worth noting in his favor that he was responsible for prosecuting bribery scandals in the (Republican) Sundquist administration. On the other hand, he was part of the Tennessee Waltz sting, which was so blatantly aimed at discrediting Democrats that the only Republican snared in it was not charged . So would he have prosecuted Bernie on orders from the Justice Department, R.J. Reynolds, or the White House? We may never know, but…

I have often commented that the marijuana laws are in place largely to curb dissent in this country. I think I have just made my case.

In closing, our Truth in Strange Places Award goes once again to freshman Senator James Webb, who recently gave the following response to a question about whether he would accept the position of Vice President on the Democratic ticket:

“I am still finding my way around the Senate and I’m having a really good time in the Senate. We’ve — this is a chance to put a lot of issues on the table. One of the issues which never comes up in campaigns but it’s an issue that’s tearing this country apart is this whole notion of our criminal justice system, how many people are in our criminal justice system .. — I think we have two million people incarcerated in this country right now and that’s an issue that’s going to take two or three years to try to get to the bottom of and that’s where I want to put my energy.”

Senator Webb, I’d like you to meet my friend Bernie….

music: REM, “Welcome to the Occupation”

Well, the good news is, the US still hasn’t bombed Iran, and with the Iranians basking in the glow of worldwide goodwill after releasing their British captives. I don’t think the Bush junta is quite crazy enough to piss in the soup by initiating hostilities any time too soon. Another month or two, maybe….

The bad news is, when they do, the Democrats have already acquiesced to it—and I’m not just talking about Hillary and Barak and John Edwards’ campaign rhetoric, I’m talking about “Give ‘em heck Harry” Reid and company removing a clause from the Iraq war budget bill that would have prevented the Bush junta from spending money to widen the war into Iran without Congressional approval. And, speaking of Congressional approval, the “bring the troops home sooner or later” bills passed by the House and Senate and threatened with veto by Mr. Bush include funding to continue the war well past the so-called deadlines set by Congress. All Mr. Bush is throwing a tantrum about, it seems to me, is that he didn’t get everything he wanted for Christmas. Spoiled brat.

One thing the Dems did give him, besides enough rope to hang himself, was a little-noticed “benchmark” that the Iraqi government is going to have to meet to show its power and good faith. That benchmark is known as the “Iraq Hydrocarbon Act,” which is even now being considered by Iraq’s legislature. When it does get mentioned in this country, Dems and Repugs alike refer to provisions in it that direct that Iraqi oil revenue be shared among all ethnic groups and parts of the country. What they don’t mention is that this legislation also calls for the privatization of Iraq’s oil resources in a manner unique in the Middle East but dear to the hearts of Exxon, Shell, and BP, who will get first dibs on about 80% of Iraq’s oil, pretty much free and clear. The revenue sharing provision refers only to the 20% of Iraqi oil that would remain under Iraqi control. So much for “using Iraq’s oil resources to rebuild the country.” And some people wonder why they hate us!

Let’s revisit my favorite metaphor for this war, but expand it a little bit. The occupation of Poland is not going well. The Germans are encountering a lot of resistance, and the Reichstag is growing nervous about the escalating cost of keeping Poland under Germany’s bootheel. Some delegates to the Reichstag think Germany ought to pull some troops out of Poland, as long as the puppet Polish government can keep its people subservient and let Germany exploit Poland’s mineral resources. There is no debate in the Reichstag about whether it was a criminal act for Germany to invade Poland, only debate about the best way to go forward with Poland as a vassal state of Germany. Plus, the Reichstag agrees that it would probably be a good idea to invade Russia. That’s what we’re hearing from about 95% of the Democratic Party these days. Only Dennis Kucinich and seven other representatives voted against the Dems’ so-called end-the war proposal, which is really a prolong the war proposal. The Dems are all for empire, make no mistake.

That’s why they’re so happy to jump on the Repugs about the incredible growing list of irregularities at the Justice Department. There’s no debate about whether to have an empire there, only a debate about how the empire should be run. The good news is, the Repugs deserve every kick in the ass the Dems can land. Maybe this one will get impeachment on the table where it belongs.

music: Robyn Hitchcock “(A Man’s Got to Know His Limitations) Briggs”

There’s a new book out, written by Mark Lynas, a British scientist. The book is called “Six Degrees,” and it’s not about separation from Kevin Bacon. It’s about the six degrees that can separate us from the world we’ve always known—the six degrees of global warming that will likely come to pass by the end of this century, if we keep up with business as usual, or even business-slightly-modified-because-of-global-warming. There is a great deal of lip service being paid to global warming these days. This book expounds in agonizing detail the dangers of lip service.

We want to stop global warming—but the US and China are pushing ahead with plans to build hundreds of coal-burning power plants, with only pie-in-the-sky promises of carbon sequestration.

We want to save the polar bears and the Arctic and Antarctic icecaps—but hundreds of millions of Chinese, Indians, and Americans believe they are entitled to own private automobiles. You can build a fuel-efficient car, but you can’t build it in a carbon neutral factory, or drive it on carbon-neutral roads, and the physical layout of the private car economy is not carbon-neutral.

We are concerned for the hungry hundreds of millions—soon to be billions—in Africa, South America, and Asia, but we want to eat our globally sourced diets, our meats and our out-of-season fruits and vegetables, we want to run our cars on ethanol and biodiesel that take food out of the mouths of those people and destroy the jungles that are the lungs of the Earth.

One degree of global warming, Lynas tells us, is inevitable. We know from history and palaeoclimatology (the study of prehistoric climates) what this is going to do. It will turn the central United States, breadbasket of the world, into a desert similar to the dustbowl conditions of the thirties, only a little worse. So much for midwestern ethanol, eh? But the dustbowl of the thirties was a relatively local phenomenon. This time the great midwestern desert will be part of a world-wide weather pattern, which will create drought over most of the equatorial third of the world’s land areas—including the Amazon and the Congo. Icemelt in the Arctic, where an area the size of Alaska already no longer freezes in the winter, and the Antarctic will accelerate, raising sea level by a meter or so, which, coupled with the likelihood of more intense hurricanes, will imperil many Pacific and Caribbean islands, as well as low-lying coastal areas such as Bangladesh, northern Europe, the southeastern U.S., and the Sacramento delta area of California. This is pretty much inevitable.

We could hold the line there, if we can make serious changes in the way we live. Serious energy conservation. No more coal-fired power plants. In fact, NO coal-fired power plants. Major cutbacks in private automobiles and air travel, a new breed of sailing ships for international trade. The way we live our lives here in America has a lot to do with this, because, even though we are only 6% of the world’s population, we consume a disproportionate share of its resources. Our demand for private cars, hot coffee, and cold orange juice puts a knife to the throats of peasants all over the world, even as it stimulates imitators all over the world. The planet has strained to support three hundred million Americans living in relative luxury. Billions of Chinese and Indians demanding our level of luxury will break this planet beyond fixing.

If we do not hold the line at one degree of warming, the heat waves that recently baked Europe and the central US will become common, which will start a dangerous feedback loop into motion: instead of absorbing CO2, the overheated earth will start releasing it. This has already begun to happen on a limited scale; more heat=more CO2 release. It’s a simple equation, but a geometric progression. The Himalayan glaciers, the world’s third largest ice mass, will melt, leaving nuclear-armed Pakistan, China, and India dry, hungry, and sinking into chaos. A similar situation, thankfully without the nuclear factor, will wither Africa and South America. Outside the human, political arena, climate destabilization on this order could lead to the extinction of about a third of all currently living species.

Lynas estimates that, in order to avoid this scenario, we will need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60% in the next ten years. Al Gore, in his testimony before Congress, suggested taking forty years to cut emissions 90%, a much gentler curve than Lynas says we need. Mr. Gore’s proposals are regarded as noble, but politically unrealistic.

If that is the case, if humanity is unable to rise to the bar of restraining itself in order to survive, then things will get terrifyingly out of hand. The warming oceans will acidify to a degree that will destroy the phytoplankton that are the basis of the planetary food chain. Droughts, punctuated by unimaginably powerful storms, will intensify, killing hundreds of millions of people and sending the remainder on the march to anywhere that’s still green. The polar meltdown will also intensify, creating more and more coastal havoc as the oceans rise, possibly as fast as three feet every twenty years, a rate that has occurred before. But this time, the warming is happening faster than it ever has, so the meltdown/searise may occur at an even more catastrophic pace. Melting permafrost will become a major contributor to greenhouse gas levels, pushing the planet towards a now inevitable six degree temperature rise.

At six degrees, the methane hydrate deposits on the sea floor become destabilized and rise to the surface, occasioning explosions that will dwarf even the most ferocious nuclear weapons, while clouds of hydrogen sulfide follow in their wake, scouring life from much of the planet’s surface and destroying the ozone layer, subjecting anything that avoids suffocation to slow death from skin cancer.

So, those are the consequences of taking more time to study the problem. Those are the consequences of business as usual. Fill ‘er up? Want fries with that?

music: Persuasions, “Ship of Fools”