Elsewhere

The latest in the Trekalog series, considering the film Star Trek: Generations is available for reading at Soul of Star Trek.

A Trillium grows in Arcata. BK photo.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Albert Einstein

Designing a Better World

Earth Day brings out the optimism, so as it gets closer let's focus on some positive ideas. The World Changing site is doing a series of Earth Day statements and interviews, and two of the first were with designers/architects with the kind of expertise and vision to actually build the constituents of the future.

One is William McDonough, a vital visionary who isn't nearly well enough known. He may turn out to be the Buckminster Fuller of the Climate Crisis era, with actual designs that arguably are more practical. His "cradle to cradle" concept accentuates the positive, in more ways that one:

We can envision and design, for example, buildings that purify air and water and produce more energy than they use. Design can eliminate the concept of waste, producing perpetual assets rather than perpetual liabilities. An architecture of abundance would create objects and energies that are socially, economically, and ecologically delightful.

His World Changing statement is here, and his website is here (it's also in the Climate Crisis Links column to the left.)

John Thackara is another designer and visionary of the practical/physical world. His statement begins:

William Gibson's take on the subject has become a classic modern aphorism: "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." Most elements of a sustainable world exist. Some of those elements are technological solutions. Some are to be found in the natural world, thanks to millions of years of natural evolution. The majority, I suspect, are social practices - some of them very old ones - learned by other societies and in other times.

Thackara can also be found at Doors of Perception. I recommend his book, In the Bubble, as well. I reviewed it for the San Francisco Chronicle, together with a couple of others.

Environmentalists are often their own worst enemies, either losing themselves in bureaucratic envirospeak or getting lost in the ozone layer of their worst stereotypes. And architect/ designers have their own problems with relevance and direct language--but I'm forgetting this is an optimistic Earth Day post. Let's try and extract the really good practical ideas and the really healthy and inspiring visions. We've got a few days left.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"I met the author Dick Francis at the Kentucky Derby years ago. I knew he had been a champion rider in steeplechases. I said he was a bigger man than I had expected. He replied that it took a big man to 'hold a horse together' in a steeplechase. This image of his remained in the forefront of my memory so long, I think, because life itself can seem a lot like that: a matter of holding one's self-respect together, instead of a horse, as one's self-respect is expected to hurdle fences and hedges and water."

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Timequake

The Weekly Babble

Eye on the Ball/Prize/Future

I actually watched the NCAA Women's Final between Tennessee and Rutgers. It was a better game than most of the men's Final Four. Those two teams were fast and skilled, and played a fast-paced, exciting game. Rutgers held their own for much of the first half, but Tennessee wore them down with experience and a deeper bench. If I'm remembering correctly, the announcers said that most of the Rutgers starting players were freshman. Tennessee is a big time sports school, while Rutgers emphasizes academics, and hasn't played for the championship of anything for a very long time.

The furor that unwound all week over Imus' remarks about the Rutgers women was remarkable. It came to be about race and gender, about children, about the media and its diversity, and lack thereof. It was also about our basic standard these days of accepting whatever leads to making a lot of money or getting a lot of power.

Thanks in part to Congress being out of session, and the Administration and presidential candidates saying or doing nothing very new, it completely dominated the airwaves all week and all weekend. Now Congress is coming back, and the Justice Department and White House are going to be back on the hot seat. And so is Iraq, where the violence continues and grows.

Here's why there was nothing in this space last week about any of this: apart from weariness of the repetitive nature of these events and controversies, and as important as they are, they will pass, and we'll still be facing the future, and in particular the Climate Crisis.

For instance, Iraq. It can end the future for people there, for people who go there. But there is nothing new about it essentially, and from now on there probably won't be anything new. The talking heads on TV are saying pretty much the same things they were saying a year ago. And nothing really new is going to happen. Now it's just a matter of watching this sickening spectacle play out. By 2009, it will pretty much be over, and it probably won't be over much before that.

That's how it was with Vietnam. By 1971 everything had been said and done, and it was just a matter of how badly the war would end, and when. It's the same with Bush and Cheney. It is very likely they are criminals by statute as well as international law, and Constitutionally they are begging to be impeached. Those wheels are not yet turning and they probably won't because there isn't enough time. It could happen, it should happen, but it probably won't. But it's going to be ugly from here on out, with more outrages to come. And then in two years they'll be gone.

But the Climate Crisis will not be gone. It's clearly here--as the East Coast is currently learning--and it's going to get worse. There are always going to be outrages and crises and controversies over race, politics and American Idol. If all we do is devote saturation coverage and total obsessive attention to each of them as they burn through cyberspace and cable TV, we'll certainly lose the future, which is currently a scary background to the present, but will eventually fill up the present like a flood. And then it may be too late to talk about what to do.

I don't mean people shouldn't be interested or concerned about these matters, or that they shouldn't protest or take political action. It's just that there ought to be some people who keep their eye on what in the present is likely to have the greatest effect on the longer term future, if any. And these days, it feels like one of them would be me.

I've got another blog (Scorched Mirth) which I can use for snark and venting on these daily nightmares. These days however I find that the need or even the desire to do so doesn't last long, and I seldom devote the energy to it. All that news is old news, really, even before it happens. Saving the future is the story worth the focus.

Step It Up

Demonstrations in Washington, New York and all over the country today organized by "Step It Up" focus on taking action to address the Climate Crisis. Some 1300 events in all 50 states, and maybe the best part is that it's all been organized by young people, recent college grads in Vermont. From the photos of their hq, it looks a lot like 60s antiwar organizing. This is their future, and they know it.

Meanwhile Cheryl Crow and Laurie David (producer of An Inconvenient Truth) began a national performance tour to the same end. Together these attempts signal the political shift to an action phase. Their call for an 80% reduction is in line with the best science.

Crow and David began in Texas, the CO2 capital of the country, where a major storm terrorized Dallas and nearby places, with tornadoes and winds high enough to overturn a tractor trailer. This same storm is moving into the deep South today and will become a major storm for New York and New Jersey coastal areas, and is already pouring rain and snow into the Ohio Valley.

We've already seen unusual quantities of lake effect snow in the midwest and mid-Atlantic, and parts of Colorado are knee deep in snow today. Though it may still seem paradoxical to some, these are all predictable effects of global heating, having to do with the temperature effects on bodies of war and their effects on precipitation and the weather in general.

I saw a short clip of Crow and David yesterday. They said more in 30 seconds than most experts manage in hours. Basically: the earth is heating, humans are causing it, we need to do something about it now.

R.I.P.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

He survived Pall Malls for 84 years, and it was a fall resulting in brain injury that led to his death. Kurt Vonnegut has been part of my life and close to my soul since the 1960s, when my fiction writing teacher who'd been his student at the Iowa Workshop got us reading his early novels, just a few months before the world discovered him big time with Slaughterhouse Five. Of contemporary writers, I felt closest in ways I can't explain to two: Vonnegut and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

His New York Times obit is here.

Vonnegut was one of the voices we clung to in those bitter years of the late 60s. His voice was so distinctive that it was something that writers attached to rhythmic mimickry had to get loose of. No sooner had you broken the habit of writing like J.D. Salinger, Hemingway and Joseph Heller, along came Vonnegut. So it goes.

He was a countercultural voice who came by it honestly; he earned it. His use of science fiction motifs was part of it, especially for me. In later years he took on the appearance as well as the mantle of our 20th/21st century Mark Twain.

I've known so many people who knew him, and I've seen him on various screens and of course read him, so I feel I did know him, in that peculiar way in which he didn't know me from Adam. I encountered him in person at least three times I can recall. He spoke in Pittsburgh, where the U.S. Army had once sent him to study engineering. His speeches, especially at colleges, are legendary--even the ones he didn't actually deliver. They were full of wit and practical wisdom, and lots of provocation of thought and feeling, worth any 20 political or academic talks.

Before that, he passed through my mind as I was walking in Boston one afternoon, idly thinking I might run into him. Late that night, while sitting in an unprestiguous, noisy, overlit restaurant with members of a rock band I was supposed to be writing about (the drummer lamenting the absense of the groupies he had been promised), I glanced across the room and saw Kurt Vonnegut looking at us, and not real kindly. Such a coincidence is common in Vonnegut's fictional universe, where there are "leaks" between worlds and time is permeable. It actually happened to me twice within a short time; the other time I was in O'Hare airport thinking about Paul Simon, and a minute later there he was. It was weird enough to be a little scary, and so it's never happened again.

The last time I remember was in Manhattan. It was on the street and I saw him walking towards me, wearing just a comfortable indoor sweater on a cold coat-and-scarf day. I recognized him and smiled; he looked at me the way I was often looked at in New York--that ' are you somebody I should know?' look--and when he'd concluded I wasn't, he looked away. But I have that picture of him, walking the midtown streets as if from one room of his house to another.

I was talking about a short story of his just the other day. Someone, I forget who, has recently written a satire in which the suggested solution to social security and medical care shortfalls because of aging baby boomers is to kill them--humanely, I assume. Apparently this idea is striking a chord, which doesn't surprise me. Vonnegut wrote about it in the 1950s, in a story called "Welcome to the Monkey House" (also the title of his first story collection.) Because of overpopulation, old people were encouraged to visit their government sponsored Ethical Suicide Parlors. It was a wicked idea, but what makes writers cherish Vonnegut is his imagination, his detail. These Parlors were housed next to Howard Johnsons, their purple roof next to the orange roof of HoJos. They all had Hostesses, stewardess-like young women who humor the old folks but efficiently hurry them along to take their injection and die peacefully in the Barcolounger. You absolutely know that when these places are established, this is what they will be like.

I've only quoted him here once, from a 2006 speech in which he said: “The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected.” That's Vonnegut in a nutshell: vivid, combative, funny, outrageous, passionate, pushing at the edge but with wit and meaning.

Vonnegut often wrote about Kilgore Trout, his alter ego--a version of who he might well have been if it hadn't been for the sudden success of Slaughterhouse Five, a poor and obscure science fiction writer. In Vonnegut's last novel, Timequake, Kilgore Trout dies. He was 84.

See It Now: Darfur

I wear my Save Darfur t-shirt enough to know from personal experience that few people know where it is and what's going on there. Now Google and the Holocaust Museum have stepped in to bring the evidence of the ongoing genocide in the Sudan to your computer, via Google Earth.

Using high resolution imagery, it's now possible to see some 1600 destroyed villages, more than 100,000 destroyed homes, schools and other buildings, in addition to seeing exactly where on the earth this is all taking place. Pop-ups provide facts and personal stories for even more understanding.

"When it comes to responding to genocide, the world's record is terrible. We hope this important initiative with Google will make it that much harder for the world to ignore those who need us the most," said Holocaust Museum director Sara Bloomfield in a statement.

You can find instructions on downloading Google Earth and finding the Darfur maps at the Holocaust Museum site here.

"Night and Day" by Germaine Arnaktauyok
at Inuit.com.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

This Is Not the Room

of polished tables lit with medalled
torsos bent toward microphones
where ears lean hands scribble
"working the dark side"

--glazed eye meeting frozen eye--

--Adrienne Rich

Climate Debate in the UK: It's a Little Different

UPDATE: a version of this has been "Rescued" at Daily Kos.

Like, the US, the UK has its more "liberal" party (Labour), which is currently in power, and its more conservative, the Tories. So their differences on the Climate Crisis would be similiar, with Labour backing carbon limts, and the Tories yelling that global heating is a hoax?

Not exactly. According to the Guardian:

The Tories are to challenge Labour on a key plank of their green policy by adopting a far more ambitious target for cutting harmful greenhouse gases.

Experts asked by David Cameron to look at climate change have concluded that they should set a target of reducing carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, a substantial advance on Labour's commitment to 60 per cent. Many scientists believe the 80 per cent figure must be achieved in developed countries if the average temperature around the world is to rise by no more than 2C over the next 40 years. Any rise greater than that represents what scientists believe to be the 'tipping point', when climate change would start to have a devastating impact, with floods, hurricanes and the loss of eco-systems.

If you've been accustomed to recent American politics, you might conclude this is a cynical attempt to show up the opposition, with no actual intention to pursue such a policy. Maybe. But it doesn't sound like it:

Nick Hurd, MP for Ruislip-Northwood and chairman of the group, said: 'We are under no illusions about the political challenge, not least in securing an international agreement on a global emissions framework. However, the politics must fit the science and not the other way round.' The group's recommendation was endorsed last night by several environmental groups, including WWF, Christian Aid and the Tearfund.

All the national politicians take the Stern Report seriously, which says that the UK needs to devote 1% of its budget to addressing the Climate Crisis now, or it will be paying far more in the future. Although the UK is not meeting its CO2 reduction goals yet, there is far more awareness generally there than in the US, and more debate on "how" rather than whether anything is necessary. The citizenry appears far more aware of the transformations that are coming, one way or another. If the US doesn't wake up soon, we are going to be--at the very least--the Ford to the world's Toyotas: because of a lack of foresight and will: obsolete and whining.

cups in place #7

Climate Munich?

More emerges on how the pols softened the IPCC climate crisis report. From AP:

"There was no split in the science — they were all mad," said John Coequyt, who observed the closed-door negotiations for the environmental group Greenpeace.

In the past, scientists at these meetings felt that their warnings were conveyed, albeit slightly edited down. But several of them left Friday with the sense that they had lost control of their document. At one point, NASA's Cynthia Rosenzweig filed a formal protest and left the building, only to return, make peace and talk in positive tones. Others talked about abandoning the process altogether.

One weapon the diplomats used was endless talking. At one point, the translators had to be sent home because the deliberations were over budget.

The result: A comparison of the original document, written by scientists, and the finished paper showed major reductions in forecasts for hunger and flooding victims. Instead of "hundreds of millions" of potential flood victims, the report said "many millions." A key mention of up to 120 million people at risk of hunger because of global warming was eliminated.

All of this will be in the technical report issued by the scientists themselves. According to the AP's viewing of the technical summary not included in what's already been released:

• "More than one sixth of the world population live in glacier- or snowmelt-fed river basins and will be affected by decrease of water volume." And depending on how much fossil fuels are burned in the future, "262-983 million people are likely to move into the water stressed-category" by 2050.

• Global warming could increase the number of hungry in the world in 2080 by anywhere between 140 million and 1 billion, depending on how much greenhouse gas is emitted into the air over the next few decades.

• "Overall a 2 to 3 fold increase of population to be flooded is expected by 2080."

• Malaria, diarrhea diseases, dengue fever, tick-borne diseases, heat-related deaths will all rise with global warming. But in the United Kingdom, the drop in cold-related deaths will be bigger than the increase in heatstroke related deaths.

• In eastern North America, depending on fossil fuel emissions, smog will increase and there would be a 4.5 percent increase in smog-related deaths.

• Because global warming will hurt the poor more, there will be more "social equity" concerns and pressure for governments to do more.

Whether these stark conclusions to what many view as an already unbearably stark report would have changed the generally weak media coverage is debatable. The report was barely mentioned on TV news channels on Friday. They had more important things to talk about.

The Climate Crisis

Feeling the Heat

News through the night (U.S. Pacific Coast Time) was of contention and possible postponement, but the latest Reuters report indicates that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue its report forecasting effects of the Climate Crisis today, as scheduled.

Though some scientists still say the executive summary has been watered down (especially by objections from the U.S., China and Saudi Arabia--why I am not surprised at those names?), it still provides, in Reuters words: the bleakest U.N. assessment yet of the threat of climate change, predicting water shortages that could affect billions of people, extinctions of species and a rise in ocean levels that could go on for centuries. .. climate change could cause a sharp fall in crop yields in Africa, a thaw of Himalayan glaciers and more heatwaves for Europe and North America. The IPCC report says climate change is no longer a vague, distant threat. "The whole of climate change is something actually here and now rather than something for the future," said Neil Adger, a British lead author of the report.

An AP report earlier said that much of the internal debate was over some charts that showed effects in various specific places according to possible temperature rises--apparently too graphic for some politicians. The charts have been called a "highway to extinction" because they show that with every degree of warming, the condition of much of the world worsens -- with starvation, floods and the disappearance of species. Those charts "tell us there's a danger in the future," said Belgian delegate Julian Vandeburie, who is in the science policy branch of his government.

Vandeburie compared the world's current situation to the Munich peace conference in 1938, when Britain and France had a choice between confronting Hitler and appeasing him: "We are at the same moment. We have to decide on doing something or not."

It will be interesting to see how this is covered today and this weekend, although my impression is that so far, not only the U.S. government but the U.S. media is softpedaling these conclusions, highlighting the most conservative and near term predictions. In Europe, where public and political awareness is higher, the emphasis has been different. For instance:

Draft versions seen by BBC News warn it will be hard for societies to adapt to all the likely climate impacts. The report is set to say that a temperature rise above 1.5C from 1990 levels would put about one-third of species at risk of extinction. More than one billion people would be at greater risk of water shortages, primarily because of the melting of mountain glaciers and ice fields which act as natural reservoirs. The scientific work reviewed by IPCC scientists includes more than 29,000 pieces of data on observed changes in physical and biological aspects of the natural world. Eighty-five percent of these, it believes, are consistent with a warming world.

There's also reference in the BBC story to the conceptual conflict over whether to concentrate on the "Fix It" phase of dealing with the effects rather than the "Stop It" phase of forestalling worse heating in the farther future by cutting carbon emissions drastically now:

Some observers of climate issues have long maintained that action on climate change should focus on protecting societies and natural systems against impacts such as floods and drought, rather than on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

The IPCC, however, is set to conclude that "adaptation alone is not expected to cope with all the projected effects of climate change, and especially not over the long run as most impacts increase in magnitude".

In other words, we have to do both.

But will we do either? Even if we can't quite accept the bleakest assessments, will we take enough action in time? And what does "in time" actually mean?

I mean to address those questions as best I can in continuing the Climate Crisis Future series here. I keep adding chapters to this series, so I won't make any further promises on how many more are to come. But I do think next time I'll take a step back and look at all of this from the perspective of 1989. Why that year? Come back and see.

UPDATE: The New York Times has a quote on the interference and the final report:

As a result, the final document was “much less quantified and much vaguer and much less striking than it could have been,” said Stéphane Hallegatte, a participant from France’s International Center for Research on the Environment and Development.

Several U.S. news outlets, like the Times and the Washington Post via AP are emphasizing, as the Post headlines, "Poor Will Suffer Most." Well, apart from the axiom that in any major crisis the poor suffer most (so that's a duh deal) it is true that areas of Africa immediately endangered by drought (some of which has begun) and places most vulnerable to sea-level rises like Bangladesh are poorer on average, the comfort that the affluent Post reader might derive from this headline is deceptive. Some of the apparently suppressed graphs showed potential devastation within the U.S., and reportedly data on hurricanes were also kept out (while an active season is predicted this year by weather people.) A new report predicting a long and devastating drought in the U.S. Southwest (already well underway) is separate from the UN document, but eventually everybody is going to feel this.

The Post does quote Greenpeace: "This is a glimpse into an apocalyptic future." Apocalypse may not be an equal opportunity employer right away, but eventually...

Pelican nebula from a San Francisco backyard

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“ If societies were incapable of surprising shifts and turns, if religions and philosophies, language and clothing never changed, we’d surely have to grimly crunch away in the same old story, and certainly drown in some sort of Blade Runner-type movie.”

Gary Snyder

More on his new book of essays at Books in Heat, or with more photos at Boomer Hall of Fame, where there's also a new something on Captain Midnight.

"The Boomers Are All Right" Manifesto at 60's Now.

Antarctic ice fish--one of many recently discovered species.

The Court and the Climate

The TV babbleheads could prattle on about nothing else yesterday but the obscene amounts of money various presidential campaigns accumulated so far, and what those amounts "mean." (Hint: not much.) Of course, most of that money by far ends up paying the salaries of those very same babbleheads, as the millions are poured into TV commercials. That's what the world needs: more TV commercials.

Meanwhile, they largely ignored the news that could make a great deal of difference to the world: the Supreme Court decision that said the Environmental Protection Agency can regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act, because they cause global warming. And despite the fact that the Bushites currently in charge of that agency said they couldn't, and don't want to.

By a 5-4 decision, the Court found the EPA offered "no reasoned explanation" for why it can't regulate these emissions. Just as importantly, the Court sent the matter back to the EPA to prove that these emissions don't contribute to global warming. Otherwise, they not only can regulate them, under the law they MUST regulate them.

That's the next legal step. The significance for the moment is that states like California that have moved to regulate emissions can't be stopped by the feds. But this is important also because it's the first climate crisis decision from the Court, and it sets a precedent that has the Court on record as endorsing the connection between greenhouse gases and global heating.

It's a glimmer of hope in a week of very bad climate news that's likely to get worse, as draft reports for the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report to be issued in May.
But more on that anon.

Hillary Dumps Bill--Elopes with Rosie O'Donnell!

While supposed statesmen like John McCain and Lindsay Graham claim Baghdad is safe, American soldiers and correspondents in the field laugh at them. One veteran reporter said that everyone knows an American alone wouldn’t last twenty minutes anywhere in Baghdad—if not killed, then kidnapped for politics or money. Meanwhile, "The Surge" that's meant to help Iraqis take over their own war has resulted in twice as many dead American soldiers in March (81) as Iraqis. As they stand up, we fall.

Meanwhile, millions are homeless and hundreds of thousands dying in Africa in wars invisible here, while Americans obsesses over the final resting place of a model. The fate of civilization and the health of the planet are in grave jeopardy, according to a scientific consensus nearly as strong as that suggesting there are laws of gravity, but in the leading nation of the world deniers rule and no action is taken, as every moment brings future generations closer to a cursed and inevitable fate.

Hah hah—didn’t mean it! April Fool!

Hah hah—didn’t mean that! It’s true! So who’s the April Fool now?


April Fool’s Day has roots in many cultures that reach as far back as history goes, and probably farther. Part of its complex pedigree is a fairly direct relationship to the Bill of Rights.

The historical roots of the day include ancient festivals of spring which often had some component of comedy, trickery and release from ordinary rules, which in the western world at least usually included orgies of gluttony, drunkenness and sexual licentiousness. The probable direct ancestor of April Fool's Day is more specific—when France adopted the Gregorian calendar in the sixteenth century, New Year's moved from April to January 1. But old habits are hard to break, especially those beginning in 45 B.C., which was when Julius Caesar set up the old Julian calendar. Some gullible Parisians were tricked by clever neighbors into celebrating New Year's on what was now the wrong day.

Out of this was born the classic cry, April Fish! Which is something that did not cross the Atlantic when the calendar was later changed in America. No one is quite sure what the fish thing is about. Still, the first April Fool's Day jest was probably, "Happy New Year!"

But the more important aspect of this history relates to the tradition of the licensed fool. For centuries, most European and some Asian countries had them, popularly known as court jesters. From imperial Rome through the medieval period and the Renaissance, official fools were not only a popular and well known presence in royal courts, but for part of that time were also employed by cities, clergy and wealthy families.

Their duties ranged from song and dance to pratfalls and acrobatics, ribaldry and general foolishness. At times no fashionable dinner party was complete without a fool hired to insult the guests. But the key element of the "allowed fool" was his (and occasionally, her) freedom to do and especially to say anything to anyone.

The official fool also has roots in an aspect of the aforementioned festivals, which featured a Lord of Misrule— a commoner who took on the trappings of the king or bishop or town mayor for a day. As far back as the tenth century, these became elaborate performances, mixing entertainment with social comment, and topical plays or burlesque sermons that satirized the real rulers of state and church, who had to at least pretend to enjoy it. These events became hugely popular, but nobody was fool enough to criticize the powerful if there were going to be reprisals. So the tradition included immunity for the fool.

When kings hired permanent court jesters, political satire as well as pointed personal remarks were part of their repertoire, and the tradition of immunity came with them. Archibald Armstrong, one of England's last and most political jesters replied, "No one has ever heard of a fool being hanged for talking, but many dukes have been beheaded for their insolence." So it happened that the only people in Europe with the absolute right of free speech were kings and queens, and fools.

This fact was not lost on others who were agitating for that kind of freedom for all. The original document of the Magna Carta, England's first great challenge to absolute royal power in 1215, was decorated with the figure of a court jester. From the late 15th century until well into the 17th, "societies of fools" flourished in France, composed of young men who criticized the government and agitated for freedom while wearing the traditional court jester motley.


America never had court jesters, though some of its first expressions of freedom and identity were in the foolery tradition, from the burlesque of the Boston Tea Party (a bunch of Anglos badly costumed as Indians who struck a blow for political independence by dumping tea into cold water) to some early symbols such as Yankee Doodle and Uncle Sam. "Yankee" was a British ethnic slur which New Englanders turned into a badge of honor, and Yankee Doodle Dandy was a clown figure (what else can you say about a guy who sticks a feather in his cap and calls it macaroni?) made immortal in the song sung at key moments in the American Revolution, including at the British surrender. A similar figure, a Yankee "wise fool" stock character popular in early American stage comedies, was a source for Uncle Sam.

Americans also pride themselves on being straightforward, so there's also a tradition of mistrusting the tricky. But today our Zeitgeist depends so heavily on some forms of deceit--spin, disinformation, oversimplifying and the straight-faced lie--that selectively moralizing about other forms rings hollow. Historians are dishonored for missing quotation marks, but not if the history they write is dishonest bunk. Injustice wears clothes of obscurant nomenclature, and success by any means necessary is our guiding morality. Mendacity is a trick of power.

The heart of the fool's relation to free speech is speaking truth to power. For awhile we may have thought that serious journalism was going to speak truth to power, but when the most powerful owns the most presses, and the line between editorial and advertising becomes more and more imaginary, it's looking like a piquant hope.

The rich and powerful can easily ridicule the countrified (the original meaning of "clown") and unsophisticated, but the figure of the fool deflects the ridicule back upon the pretentious and corrupt. Freedom to criticize the powerful is at the heart of both the fool tradition and free speech.

The pretensions of power are automatic, perhaps the inevitable product of consciousness equipped with opposable thumbs. Our particular social systems depend on some forms of deceit while moralizing about others. Historians are dishonored for missing quotation marks, but not if the history they write is dishonest bunk. Injustice wears clothes of obscurant nomenclature, while paradox or irony shade into hypocrisy as we deny freedoms in the name of protecting freedom.

Today April Fool's Day is just about our only nod to this tradition. You can play tricks on people any day of the year, but the idea is that on this day, you are allowed to. This year it falls on a Sunday, so the usual office trickery is shall we say a bit trickier. Yet the Internet more than makes up for this as a celebration of intentional foolery that unintentionally looks like every other day on the Internet. This is the scarier side of information without authority, and often wthout conscience.

Since laughter seems to override anger, wit is often its own protection, at least temporarily. The cosmos itself seems designed with persistent uncertainties, which is perhaps why many religious and cultural traditions make the trickster a major myth.

Historically and perhaps in practice, the freedom of the fool makes way for freedom of speech in all its aspects. Humor often seems to make the truth clearer and perhaps easier to acknowledge. We have to be tricked into seeing what we would rather not see. We can have tricksters without truth, and in our entertainment-dominated society we mostly do. But rarely can we fallible humans have truth without tricksters.

"Small Friendship" by Eunice Henry. Vtnet.com.

Broken Faith

It cannot be an easy time to be a fervent Christian conservative. Someone who truly believed that if fundamentalist Christians took political power, they could end everything that threatened God-fearing Christians who were also patriotic Americans, and they would begin doing the Lord's work, bringing morality to public life, especially the government, and perhaps approaching the world's problems with Christian charity, or at least justice.

Well, the fundamentalist Christians did take power, to an extent we're only just learning. We know they represent the single most important bloc of voters that got G.W. Bush close enough to seize the White House. Now we're learning how much the Bush government was staffed by fundamentalists. Not in top positions, where the qualifications were knowing and being personally loyal to either G.W. Bush or Dick Cheney, and when they ran out of them, people who had been loyal to Bush the First, as well as Reagan and Nixon. But in the jobs where people actually did things; the people who really ran the government.

It's important to note that Bush was successful because of those who tried to make Christian fundamentalism and the Republican party virtually identical, and so the people who staffed the Bush administration had to be both zealous Christian fundamentalists and zealous Bushites. Every political regime prizes and rewards loyalty. But the Bushites took it to unmatched extremes, and further, this combination of Christian fundamentalism and zealous Bushitry was the only necessary qualification for just about any job in the government that the Bushites controlled.

Those are the people, we learned in the book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, were given the responsibilty of running the Iraq occupation. Their loyalty to Bush was their top qualification, followed by their adherence to the Fundamentalist social and "moral" agenda.

Now we are learning how extensive this is in Washington as well, through the example of Monica Goodling, the Justice Department official who is preemptively taking the Fifth in refusing to testify before Congress on matters related to her job. Goodling it turns out is a graduate of Messiah College and received her law degree in 1999 from Regent University, run by Pat Robertson. Further, since this information came to light, some 150 other Regent grads were identified in the Bush administration.

Whether she was in over her head, or her political zealotry overwhelmed her commitment to religious ideals (of Messiah College, for example), it's pretty clear that she's in the middle of a sordid mess. It may be that she believes, as some fundamentalists apparently do, that their ends or simply their beliefs entitle them to use any means necessary to accomplish their goals, including lies on a grand scale, and corrupting the very basis of the American judicial system by--among other things--firing prosecutors who follow the evidence instead of the party line.

Outside of these precincts of zealotry, I expect a lot of sincere Christians are in shock. Their people got power, and whatever was in their hearts, or whatever the condition of their souls may be, they have acted immorally with a frequency and on a scale that adds up to the most functionally immoral administration in my lifetime at least, and given the wars in Vietnam and Nicaragua, Watergate etc., that's saying a lot.

Though some may argue with the extent of that judgment, I doubt anyone is going to claim that the Bushites brought higher moral conduct to Washington. The corruption over the past six years is so extensive and pervasive that it's impossible to keep track of it all.

Among the most immoral acts I can remember being discussed in my religion classes was the unjust war. And yet, the Bushites invaded a country that had not attacked us, was no threat to us, and yet our bombs and firepower have killed and maimed many thousands, and driven many more thousands from their homes. The Bushites lied to justify this war, then they lied to cover up the lies. They continue to make war, destroying American families and killing and maiming the flower of our own youth. I'm sure many conservative Christians are troubled as well by the aggressive championing of torture, even if they feel it is sometimes necessary.

I don't know if fundamentalist Christians go in for sins of omission, but in the Church I was brought up in, something like Katrina would weigh pretty heavy against this government. G.W. Bush and President Cheney have broken faith with the American people, and with the American system of government, as well as with the core Christian principles as I learned them. It seems to me they've broken faith with many of the Christians who believed in them.

cups in place #7

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

Failure is an opportunity.
If you blame someone else,
there is no end to the blame.

Therefore the Master
fulfills her own obligations
and corrects her own mistakes.
She does what she needs to do
and demands nothing of others.

79. Tao Te Ching. Stephen Mitchell.