DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

I appreciate the overall tone of that song, but I have to take its gallows references as a metaphor for the end of a dysfunctional identity–like being a member of the Bush/Cheney administration—not the termination of a human life. Scum that they are, I wish them no harm. When I hear the refrain, ” I’d like to see him dance.” I do not visualize Mr. Bush dancing at the end of a rope. I see him—and his wife, and all that whole sad, inhibited, psychotic crowd–dancing around a fire at a Rainbow Gathering, dancing long past midnight to raging drums and shakers and shrill flutes, their eyes unfocused, sweat pouring off their bodies, hair gone wild, ripples of ecstasy shimmering through their brains, having the time of their lives at last. I don’t want the Bush junta hung, folks. I want them, as the Firesign Theater calls it, “returned for regrooving.” Enough said.

This month’s “truth in strange places” award goes to Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is famous for calling global warming “a hoax.” He joined with Senators Jim Jeffords, Mary Landrieu, and David Vitter to pass a bill closing the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Channel, an Army Corps of Engineers boondoggle that helped the flooding of New Orleans last summer and has been responsible for the erosion of thousands of acres of southern Louisiana wetlands. Thanks, Jim. Now, about the rest of your record…

And we give the “one step forward, one step back” award to both Japan and Norway. Japan has decided to withdraw its troops from Iraq, and Norway is undertaking the construction of a a world seed bank on the isolated and, so far, frozen island of Spitzbergen; but the two countries teamed up to soften the International Whaling Commission’s ban on commercial whaling. The Japanese got permission to expand the number of whales they catch for “scientific study”–and oh, their scientific studies are financed by selling the whale meat they just happen to harvest for $100 a pound. Thar she blows! And I mean it–that really blows!

And finally, we give the “my dog ate my homework” lame excuse award to the Bush administration and their leading defenders in Congress, who argued with a straight face for seizure of prescription drugs that individuals bring back from Canada on the grounds that they could be used to hide dangerous chemicals for terror attacks. If you or I insisted on something that ludicrous, we’d be candidates for prescription drugs, ourselves. But nooo, this is the government…..our tax dollars at work…good grief! Fortunately, even the Republican-dominated Senate wasn’t buying that level of looniness, and the bill failed.

John and Beth will be here with you next week. Good night!

music:

James McMurtry: See the Elephant

The Waterboys: Wind in the Wires

When you start loading Nashville mayoral candidate David Briley’s website, the first thing that pops up at you (even if you’ve got a popup blocker) is a green-and-white page proclaiming that David Briley is “The Green Mayor,” and an accompanying sustainability program that, really, isn’t bad at all from a Green standpoint.  Now, the Nashville mayoral race is supposed to be nonpartisan–but “Green” is, after all, the name of a certain political party that is active in this state, although Mr. Briley did not ask for our endorsement or even permission.  He has hijacked our brand name!  Should we sue?  What’s a poor third party to do? And I do mean poor! But then, there are “green building codes” and “greenways” and “green power switches”  and a memorable REM album that don’t have anything to do with us, either, but they’re not political offices.  How should we resolve this confusion?  I’m open to suggestions.

But I’m not going to comment on Mr. Briley’s sustainability proposalsright now.  I already have.  I would like to comment on Governor Bredesen’s proposals for changing the way education is funded in the state, which Mr. Briley brought to my attention via his endorsement of them. Here’s the deal:  Tennessee spending on schools averages around $5500 per student and is among the lowest in the nation, in part because we don’t have an income tax (an issue which neither Briley nor Bredesen will touch), and in part because, besides not having an income tax, our tax rates and revenues are among the lowest in the country.  The source of revenue that Governor Bredesen has found is…a higher tax on cigarettes!  Because Tennessee’s cigarette tax is the third lowest in the country!  Bredesen wants to triple the tax rate, to sixty cents a pack, which still leaves Tennessee in the low third on tobacco tax rates.

Basing increased funding for education on cigarette taxes does present a bit of a conflict , though—it gives the state an interest in promoting tobacco usage, doesn’t it? “Smoke a cigarette, pay a teacher!” And really, shouldn’t higher cigarette taxes go for anti-smoking campaigns and medical care for the cigarette smokers, who are going to need it sooner or later?  But, I digress.  About that funding proposal….

Now, when I start talking about education, I kind of have to split myself into an absolute Green mode and a relative Green mode.  From the absolute, Deep, Deep, Deep Green Perspective, public schools are a way to indoctrinate young people into hierarchical, bureaucratic society, and should be abolished, along with many other elements of Life As We Know It.  From that Deep, Deep, Deep Green Perspective, we need a complete reorganization of society—but, much as my soul yearns for that, I don’t think it’s gonna happen tomorrow or next year or even in the next decade…the next twenty years, maybe.  So, in the short term, we need to find a way to apply our ideals to what is in order to prepare the way for what needs to happen, and that is the “relative Green” spirit in which I am approaching Governor Bredesen’s proposals.

The first proposal simplifies the way in which a county’s ability to contribute to its school costs is calculated, by returning to a formula of  adding property tax and sales tax revenues, which makes it much easier to understand.  It is currently figured out by “a complex statistical regression equation.”  When I tried to find out what THAT means, my eyes started to glaze over as I ran into terms I hadn’t grappled with since I nearly failed Algebra II back in high school and decided not to even attempt calculus.  I think of myself as an educated person, but I’m educated in the social sciences, not math.  If we can take care of government business without resorting to “complex statistical regression equations,” I’m all for it. ( Sounds like something Dave Barry  would say, doesn’t it?)  Anyway, I’d go along with this on the grounds that it’s important for decision making processes to be transparent.  Phil says the more complex way wasn’t working that well anyhow, and I’ll take his CEO word for that.

The second proposal eliminates the “cost differential factor” which helped increase school salaries in communities with high wages.  There are only seventeen of these in Tennessee, which should come as no surprise, and Nashville is one of them, but according to David Briley, even with that factored in, Nashville, which has ten percent of the state’s schoolchildren, has only been getting five percent of the state’s school funds, due to a sales tax distribution formula that predates the ascendancy of Williamson County as an area-wide shopping destination.

Bredesen wants to eliminate this in part because only seventeen school systems in the state benefit from it, and in part to free up more money for teachers’ salaries all over the state.  I think he’s on shaky ground here—sure, all teachers deserve better pay (disclosure:  my mother was a teacher!), but it does cost more to live in Nashville than it does in, say, Hohenwald, and since the state provides the bulk of the money for teacher salaries, it only seems fair to me for the state to help reflect this.

And the next proposal is to return the state’s share of school salary funding to 75%–it was cut to 65% a few years ago and that has been a hardship on many school districts and their employees.  Bredesen also wants to increase basic teacher salaries to forty thousand dollars a year from their current level of thirty-seven five.   This is mostly what is getting paid for by that extra forty cents from every pack of cigarettes sold.  Buy ‘em up, folks!  Along with this is an injunction that counties must maintain their current school funding levels—no slackin’ off because the state’s chipping in more!

Bredesen also wants to give more funds to help educate students who are learning English as a second language, and more to help educate “at risk students,” that is, students who are at risk of dropping out of high school.  The education of “at risk students” should be of special interest to all of us who are committed to alternative education, because it’s usually the “at risk” kids who get innovative, more free-form programs that are more like what school ought to be for everybody, as long as we’re going to have public schools.  “At risk” kids are also frequently kids who have understood the failings of contemporary society and are open to a more radical education.

And that’s it.  Hardly “a dramatic overhaul of education funding in Tennessee,” as Bredesen claims on the state website. Aside from funding the “at risk” kids, there’s nothing about content, which is left to school boards and the tender mercies of the No Child Left Behind Act.  In many ways, it’s a very unsexy issue, but it’s the kind of nuts-and-bolts thing that we need to learn about if we are going to become an effective third party in this state and in this country.

In closing, I have to add that I find it totally shocking that Governor Bredesen has spent so much of his attention on a minor tweak of state education funding while letting Phillip Workman, an innocent man,  go to his death, and leaving Paul House, who has actually had his sentence overturned, to languish in jail, suffering from Multiple Sclerosis.  Phil, this is the kind of behavior that gives Christianity a bad name.  How can you sleep?  Listeners, call the governor’s office at  (615) 741-2001 or email

phil.bredesen@state.tn.us

and say: “Philip Workman did not shoot Ronald Oliver. How could you let a man be executed based on a lie—and why is Paul House still in jail?”

music:

B52’s—Tell It Like It Is

Is everything connected?  Is there a link between a butterfly in Mexico and a tornado in Kansas?  Is there a connection between the mounting tension of the gathering showdown over misuse of the US Department of Justice and Seung-Hui Cho’s decision that he just couldn’t take any more?

I don’t know, although my poor paranoid’s almanac response when I first heard the news that the Gonzalez hearing had been postponed on account of Virginia Tech was “Manchurian Candidate!  Distraction!”  I think I was wrong about that part—but if that were true, it would be less troubling than the truth revealed by the case of the late Mr. Cho, who apparently has been on the same trajectory most of his life.  The troubling truth is that nobody knew him well enough.  We were all just too busy to really sit down with the five-year old, the eight-year old, the twelve-year old, the sixteen-year old, the twenty-year old Seung-Hui Cho and really get to the bottom of what was going on inside him.  Maybe I’m just as weird in my way for blaming society as Jerry Falwell is in his, but I believe that in a saner, less distracted and preoccupied society, this tragedy would never have happened.

And sure, stricter gun laws might help.  Let’s face it, the only reason pistols exist is to hurt or kill other human beings.  Nobody hunts with a pistol, y’know?  Pistols, like coal-fired power plants, shouldn’t just be heavily restricted, they should be shut down entirely.  They should not be manufactured. All existing pistols should be melted down.  Turned into frames for solar panels, or bicycles.  No more pistol ammunition—without ammo, a pistol is just a funny-shaped club.  And sure, some crazy somebody somewhere will keep producing them somehow—I mean, I hear you can still get LSD if you know where to look, and that’s been illegal and heavily suppressed for forty years now.  But there is just no reason for pistols to be commercially manufactured, any more than cigarettes.

How much safer would this make us?  How about thirty times safer?  In England, where handgun ownership has been illegal for ten years, there is one firearm death per million people annually.  In the US, there are thirty handgun deaths per million people every year—so Mr. Cho’s little spree accounted for only about one third of one percent of the firearm deaths in the US this year—what’s everybody so upset for?

Meanwhile, thirty-two people are dead and twenty-five injured, and it’s a tragedy for families,friends, and survivors–and I can certainly understand that.  In all my nearly sixty years of life, no one close to me has been murdered.  I feel very lucky to live in such a safe part of the world.

It’s when I start looking at other parts of the world that I see just how safe it is here, how easily we are shocked by one outbreak of violence.  In Iraq, during the same week as the Virginia Tech shootings, according to a fairly conservative estimate, there were five hundred civilian deaths from violent causes, over seventy a day, more than twice the Virginia Tech massacre every day of the week—and five hundred civilian deaths a week is on the low end for Iraq.  In order to put these numbers in perspective, let’s factor in the differences in population between the US and Iraq.

There are about three hundred million Americans, and about twenty-six million Iraqis, making the difference between the two populations a factor of twelve.  Per capita, then, the death of thirty Americans is equal to the death of about two and a half Iraqis—but the death of five hundred Iraqis is the equivalent of the death of six thousand Americans, and the total number of Iraqis killed—it’s hard to know, really—some estimates run around seventy thousand, some were saying a hundred thousand three years ago, and some have estimated as high as six hundred and fifty thousand—translate to between 840,000, 1.2 million, or as many as 7.8 million American civilian deaths.  Forget thirty unlucky students and teachers at Virginia Tech.   That’s the entire population of the state of Virginia.

Think about that—for the equivalent of the death of two Iraqi civilians, America is traumatized—and responds with attention and compassion—counselling, days of mourning, outpourings of help and sympathy.  And all the while our tax money is going to feed dozens of Virginia Tech massacres every day in a small country, far away, and the Democrats won’t even do anything to stop it.   Getting US troops out of Iraq wouldn’t precipitate a bloodbath, as some imperialists claim.  There’s already a bloodbath going on.  Removing US forces and substituting a Muslim peacekeeping force would likely go a long way towards settling things down in the Middle East.

While we’re on proportions, think of the refugees.  An estimated two million Iraqis have left the country, while about the same number have fled one part of Iraq for another.  That’s like having forty-eight million Americans displaced, half to Canada and Mexico and half internally.  By contrast, the largest mass evacuation in US history occurred when 1.2 million people were evacuated for Hurricane Katrina—the equivalent of a hundred thousand Iraqi refugees—a small fraction of what’s going on there now.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is said to be one of the guiding principles of Christianity and Judaism.  If we’re going to get back what we’ve done to Iraq, you’d better brace yourself.

I’m done with that comparison,  but I’m not done.  I was talking about Seung-Hui Cho—who only did what our military trains people to do—kill people he didn’t know.  Oh, sure, the military conditions its recruits to only kill when they are following orders, but we have unleashed a monster in Iraq and Cho is likely not the last American who will be overpowered by the zeitgeist and kill, kill kill.  According to the American Academy of Neurology, about forty percent of returning Iraq War vets have some kind of “mental disorder,” and not all of them are getting—or even seeking—treatment for it.

On one hand a lot has already been written about denial of mental illness in the military, and on the other, the mainstream mental health diagnosis and treatment paradigm leaves a lot to be desired, but what it boils down to is this:  serving in Iraq drives a lot of people violently crazy, and the government not only doesn’t give a hoot, it lacks the resources to do much about the problem if it did care.  As these veterans return to civilian life, they are going to bring the terrors of the Middle East to middle America—and considering how devious the Bush junta is, maybe that’s how they want it.

Terry Allen, “This Ain’t No Top 40 Song”

On Thursday, we had the Alice-in Wonderland spectacle of  Uberfuhrer—I mean Attorney General– Alberto Gonzalez testifying that, although he “takes responsibility” for New Mexico U.S. Attorney Jefferey Iglesias being put on the firing list, he has no idea who put Iglesias’ name there. Like his famous “I can’t remember” testimony before a Senate committee last month, this put the Torturer-General’s legal skills to the test—how well can you hide the truth under oath without perjuring yourself?

The truth appears to be that the Republicans have politicized the DOJ and attempted to use it as a tool to ensure a “permanent Republican majority.” This has been well reported; I hardly feel I have to go into it here, except to say that our Truth In Strange Places Award this month goes to Representative Adam Putnam, the third-ranking Republican in the House, who told a Florida newspaper, “I had been saying all along that his (Gonzales’) future was in his own hands by his testimony before the Senate committee and I don’t think he did well….His credibility is so severely damaged with the committee that he is no longer able to advance the president’s programs before Congress….This has to be affecting the efficiency and the morale of the people who work for the Department of Justice.  Clearly they are distracted by all of this and by the continued investigations and committee requests. The country deserves an attorney general with the credibility to perform this extremely difficult job, and it is now time for fresh leadership.”

Well, we’re probably not going to get that, because Bush knows that, lily livered as the Democrats are, they are not going to give him a pass on a new Attorney General.  They’ll keep funding the Iraq war and make sure Iraq’s oil is turned over to American companies.  They’ll support attacking Iran.  They’ll pass a watered-down revision of the Helping America Vote Republican Act that doesn’t really change anything, and refuse to investigate the REAL vote fraud cases that the DOJ is ignoring.  And they won’t impeach Bush and Cheney.  So Gonzalez is likely here to stay.  He’s the cornerstone of Rove’s plan to stonewall the Democrats, which, alas, will probably work.  Great job, Bertie.

Grateful Dead, “New Speedway Boogie”

note:  ”new,” “speedway,” and “boogie” are all separate links!

As the Bush presidency continues to crumble, it is perhaps ironic that good news for conservatives comes from France, the land they have spent so much time maligning–”freedom fries,” anyone? In an apparently clean election, in which a near-record 85% of the voters participated, the French chose Nicholas Sarkozy as their new president, rejecting Segolene Royal’s bid to become the first female president of France, and the first socialist in twelve years.

Now, Sarkozy is not your typical American conservative—he’s in favor of legalizing civil unions for same-sex couples, ending homelessness by building more low-income housing, and wants to integrate the country’s large Muslim minority (Islam is now the second-largest religion in France) by instituting an affirmative action program. And he has already chided the the Bush junta for its refusal to take global warming seriously. But that’s about where the good news ends.

Like American conservatives, “Sarko l’Americain,” as he is called in some quarters, looks back to the pivotal years of the late sixties and wants to roll back the changes that happened then. In case you’ve forgotten, that happened here in America in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected. And, in case you’ve forgotten, the countercultural movement in France in 1968 was far more widespread and focused than its American equivalent. We had a Love-In in San Francisco; they went to Paris , put up barricades, and invited the working class to join them—and, unlike American “hard hats,” two-thirds of the French working class joined the general strike and nearly threw out President DeGaulle, who ultimately resigned a year later when Constitutional changes he advocated were rejected in a nationwide referendum. But, I digress…and it wasn’t even to be funny.

Although the May ‘68 uprising fizzled out in the short term, in the long term it changed the dynamics of social discourse in France and, ultimately, the rest of Europe, leading to a common assumption that it is the job of government to take good care of its citizens. This is why European countries have national health care systems, (and high-quality social welfare systems in general), good public transportation, shorter workweeks with higher productivity than the US, government-mandated long vacations and family leave time, and a standard of living similar to America’s, that only uses about half the energy.

Sarkozy is not going to be able to change all that, any more than Bush could privatize Social Security, but it is his stated belief that French workers need to cut back on their standard of living in order to remain competitive, and now he has the initiative. This is not good, especially since it isn’t true, any more than wage/benefit cutbacks and social service safety net erosion have been necessary for American workers to “remain competitive”–it’s not about “remaining competitive,” it’s about putting more money in the pockets of the already wealthy, and yes, Sarko wants to cut estate and inheritance taxes.

So, how does a guy who wants to make life worse for the majority of his countrymen manage to get himself elected? Besides cheating, like the Bush junta did? The answer is the same combination of four-letter words Karl Rove has taken extreme advantage of: PLAY THE FEAR CARD. Sarkozy rose to fame and notoriety when his derogatory remarks about unemployed Muslim youth and his strong-arm police tactics helped trigger the Paris riots of 2005. Nothin’ like fear of brown-skinned furriners to galvanize the electorate!

Unfortunately, this is not just posturing on Sarkozy’s part. In an interview with philosopher Michel Onfray, Sarkozy revealed that he believes that criminal/deviant tendencies (such as pedophilia, suicide, and drug use) are genetic, not culturally learned, a belief that flies in the face of mainstream psychology but marches in goose step with Nazism and France’s perennial far-right bogey man, Jean Marie LePen, whose thunder Sarkozy effectively stole. What this means, in practical terms, is that there can be no correction, only punishment—and this seems to be a widely-applied view of Sarkozy’s. He does not take criticism well, and has reputedly used his connections with France’s conservative media barons to derail the careers of journalists who have disagreed with him. He has also been criticized for using police power to violate the civil rights of political protesters. He wants to test three-year-olds for “behavioral disorders,” and, presumably, medicate them if “necessary.” His election does not bode well for the future of open society in France. Oh, and did I mention he wants to increase France’s reliance on nuclear power? Yeah, you figured as much.

He also benefited from weak opposition. Segolene Royal, the Socialist candidate, talked about fostering a more nurturing government, but ran to the right, joining Sarkozy in advocating ratification of the European Constitution, which the French public has rejected by popular vote, and in calling for crackdowns on crime and tightening immigration standards, although she did advocate retention of taxes on the rich and a higher minimum wage. Many French voters said they liked her platform more but voted for Sarkozy anyway, because he seemed like a better leader. It doesn’t take much analytical ability to see a certain sexist bias operating here.

There are two responses to change. You can either accept it and open up to it, or close down and reject it. In either case, change will happen, but the open option is the smarter one in the long run. In the face of massive global social, political, ecological , and economic changes, France has chosen by a narrow margin to shut down and fight. There’s still a little time left to change your minds, guys….

music:  Eliza Gilkyson, Material Man

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just issued its report on mitigation of climate change. They’re doing their best to act calm, but let me put it to you straight—we are screwed. Really, really screwed. The heat waves and freak freezes, the mile-wide tornadoes and super-hurricanes and disappearing bees we’ve seen so far are just a warmup act, and yes that’s a very bad pun. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

The chart on page 24 of the IPCC “summary for policymakers” is where they finally get around to spelling out the bad news. What they calculate as our very best efforts at curbing greenhouse gas emissions is still going to lead to a rise in CO2 and other gasses to a level of between 445 and 490 parts per million, with a concurrent temperature rise of two to two and a half degrees. There’s one problem with this “prediction”: it is already coming true. Our current greenhouse gas, level, or GHG level for short, is already 459 ppm, and paleoclimatic research shows that where GHGs go, temperature soon follows. If civilization stops dead in its tracks tomorrow, it’s still gonna get mighty warm in here, folks.

Alas, there is every indication that we as a species are not yet ready to put the brakes on our rising GHG emissions. China pushed hard to leave the door open for it to continue boosting its carbon output, and even to have the “danger level” of atmospheric greenhouse gases set higher, despite mounting evidence that the situation is already dire. Although they are making gestures to ameliorate the massive pollution their industrialization has caused, they are still planning to burn more coal, pump more oil, build more automobiles, and strip the remains of the world’s rain forests for cardboard boxes, advertising circulars, and toilet paper. The US is doing no better.

This strikes me as purely delusional. It is also going to send the greenhouse gas level of the atmosphere up into the 5-600ppm range, which is what puts temperatures over the 3 degree tipping point that I talked about last month—but I’ll say it again: above a three-degree, 550pm rise, things start spiraling out of control. Our efforts may put the brakes on a little, but it will be a question of how fast things will get catastrophic, not whether they will. If we can summon the collective will to back away from the precipice right now, we will only have a calamity to deal with, not a catastrophe. Isn’t that reassuring?

So, what does the IPCC suggest we do about GHG mitigation? And could we do better?

Their first suggestion is a nice, stiff, carbon tax—the stiffer, the better. In economic terms, this internalizes one of the externalities—the assumption has always been that it doesn’t cost anything to release CO2 into the atmosphere, but experience is now proving otherwise. They suggest a maximum charge of $100/ton, and project that that would result in as much as a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030, but possibly only a 25% reduction. Given the fact that for-profit corporations are designed to avoid any out-of-pocket cost they can, and the burgeoning world population, and seeing the way mere “carbon trading” has been manipulated on its trial run in Europe, we probably ought to push for a carbon emissions tax more on the order of $200/ton.

That would add about $1200 a year to the average cost of running a gas-powered motor vehicle in this country, $11-1400 to the cost of heating a home, and about $1600 to the average family’s electric bill. That’s an extra $4,000 per family just for those items, which constitute about a third of the average family’s CO2 output of 60 tons a year—which would thus cost the average family about an extra $12,000 a year—even at the IPCC’s recommended rate, it would still be another $6,000 per family. No wonder politicians are not eager to embrace this idea, especially since the current world average carbon output for a family of three is thirteen tons and that will need to be halved—in other words, we Americans need to cut our average carbon output from sixty tons per family to six. No, this is not going to play well with the voters. This burden cannot be borne at the family level—is the business community ready to make the sacrifices and structural changes it will take to save our sorry American asses?

My wife and I live pretty quietly and frugally—we garden, heat with wood from our land, don’t buy into the consumer rat race, don’t travel much, and keep our electricity usage down. Our carbon footprint came out 25% below the world average—but half again what it needs to be. This is not good news.

The IPCC recommends changes in the fields of energy supply, transport, buildings, industry, agriculture, forestry, and waste disposal.

In energy supply, they expect that we will not cut back our use of fossil fuels very much, will increase sharply our use of alternative generating technologies, will increase slightly our use of nuclear power, and devise a system for storing CO2 underground. So, if we want to work harder at this, we will need to cut back sharply on fossil fuel use, and, I would suggest, instead of the massive infrastructure expenses of nuclear power, that we put a lot more research into clean, renewable, alternative power generation modes. As for “carbon capture” by piping CO2 underground, it sounds too much like shaking a bottle of soda to me—and we all know the results of that. I think we are just going to have to bite the bullet and cut the carbon.

In the travel department, they suggest more efficient vehicles and a shift to public transportation and non-motorized transport—they emphasize walking and bicycling, but I would think that modernized sailing ships would be an important addition to our transport options, and that we should pursue something the IPCC didn’t mention—serious cutbacks in air travel, which grew by 5% just last year. They also make the suggestion that we redesign society so that people don’t have to commute so much. Great idea!

For revamping the building sector, they suggest the same things we in the alternative community have been championing for forty years—more efficient kitchen, heating and cooling systems, and homes designed for solar light and heat. If the building industry had taken this up back when it was first proposed, there would be a lot less of a problem now. As it is, almost every new home that goes up is a crime against humanity in the builder’s thoughtless assumption that as it is, it ever shall be. Not. Not, not, not. Too bad, all you suburbanites. You have been screwed.

For the industrial sector, they suggest greater efficiency again, including finding ways to turn one industry’s waste into another’s raw materials. I think we also need to look at whether some “industries” need to exist at all. The arms industry, for openers. It’s highly polluting and serves no useful purpose. War is a luxury we can no longer afford.

They don’t really spell it out in the agricultural section, but it looks to me like the unspoken key word is “organic.” Conventional agriculture is very fossil-fuel dependent and profligate in its treatment of carbon outputs. The chemical fertilizer free ride has got to end. It wasn’t a free ride anyway. We are about to have to pay very dearly for it. There’s better uses for natural gas.

They do spell it out in the forest section–”afforestation, reforestation, forest management, reduced deforestation, wood product management, use of forest products for bioenergy to replace fossil fuels.” That’s why my household scores so low in our carbon footprint—it’s “called heating with wood from your own land.” Now, obviously not everyone can do that, especially if we are trying to plant so many trees all over, but we really do need to let the forests grow back, all over the world—not monoculture pine plantations, but diverse, ecologically stable forests. They are the lungs of the planet. Losing your lungs is not a good way to go. Believe me, I’ve seen it on an individual basis, and I don’t want the whole planet to have to deal with it.

And lastly, under waste, they urge “landfill methane recovery, waste incineration with energy recovery, composting of organic waste, controlled waste water treatment, recycling and waste minimization.” Again, all that same old hippie bleep that we’ve been talking about for the last forty years. They all laughed at us, but fewer and fewer are laughing now. I hope we can gather our collective wits and take action fast enough to beat the odds.

music:   Burning Times—(We Could Be Dancing In) The Only Green World

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”