Haida Gwai by Bill Reid at the Vancouver airport.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Our patience will achieve more than our force."

Edmund Burke
as recorded in John F. Kennedy's notebook
1946

Margaret Atwood

The Daily Babble

For the Next Nobel, I Nominate...

I caught some of Margaret Atwood's interview with Bill Moyers on PBS (it's available online.) I generally enjoy interviews with writers, and interviews that Moyers does with the people he finds interesting. I still look at his World of Ideas interviews occasionally, and read the printed versions. But Margaret Atwood is a special case among special cases.

I don't know if I can explain it. There's her clarity of diction and expression. Her responsiveness to questions and dialogue. I also heard part of a radio interview with her once in which the interviewer wasn't that good, and she did not suffer foolish questions. Yet she's game to make something out of a question or topic or event, on the spot. So she isn't severe, but it's best not to waste her time. She can be playfully incisive, or just incisive. I imagine that if she's talking and looking directly at you, it is impossible to shift your gaze away. She knows a lot, she clarifies, she's insightful, she gets me thinking and going off in my own directions. Anyway, I find her mesmerizing in interviews.

But that's the occasion, not the reason for writing about her here. The reason is that I am hereby nominating Margaret Atwood for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

She deserves it. Her 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale, is a modern classic. Her book of written talks on literature, Negotiating With the Dead, is a thoughtful and original work. She has written other distinguished novels, poetry, scripts, scholarship and I especially like her short stories. She writes of ideals and realities for all humanity, which fits the Nobel's charge. She has written a definitive work on Canadian literature, which brings me to my second point.

She is internationally known and read, but she is a Canadian writer, and Canadian literature deserves a great deal more recognition than it gets, which is little. Atwood, Robertson Davies, Northrup Frye, Tomson Highway, Alice Munro, Yann Martel, Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields--an amazing variety of forms and styles, in a relatively small population with historical diversity and even more diversity today, spread over a vast country. Not to mention Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. And SCTV. Canadian literature deserves to be honored.

It's a unique literature befitting a unique country that has never been a world power, and never needed to be. International literature has benefitted from Canadian writers, and American literature in particular has benefitted from Canadian literary culture, very different from the combination of commerce, chaos and cliques that passes for ours.

Canada has never had a Nobel lit laureate. It's about time, and Margaret Atwood is the one. So let's start the buzz. Atwood in '06. Or '07 at the latest.


Site news: My Soul of Star Trek blog was sagging for awhile. Why, there were days when Dreaming Up Daily got more hits, a hitherto unprecedented development. Then a few weeks ago I posted a piece on "The Inner Light," a famous episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I'd been thinking about in connection with the gloomier prospects of the Climate Crisis. Then this past week, completely out of the blue, the author of that episode posted a long comment about how the story developed, and his proposed sequel. With news of my most recent post, I mentioned this comment, and sent the links to the two big Star Trek fan sites, Trek Today and TrekWeb. They often link to my posts, but this time they both did simultaneously, and for the past four days Soul of Star Trek has gotten thousands of hits.

It's also gotten comments from Climate Crisis deniers, and I wasn't sure I was going to engage them in a discussion. If they were purely ideologically or politically motivated, or perhaps even paid deniers like Walmart sends out to comment on blogs, I would be wasting a lot of time. But I went ahead, out of respect for Star Trek fans. Here's a direct link to the Inner Light essay.

Sonora desert--alanbauer.com

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"In war, truth is the first casuality."

Aeschylus
as recorded by John F. Kennedy in
his notebook, 1946.

The Climate Crisis

Refuting Climate Crisis Deniers

It could be a full -time job, but apart from those who "oppose" recognition of climate crisis science for ideological and partisan political purposes, and those paid by fossil fuel corporations to be deniers, maybe it's still worth doing for those who have been confused by the supposed contrary science. Today, one of the scientists (Peter Doran) who deniers sometimes cite as providing data contradicting global heating has refuted the misuse of his data on Antarctica in this oped in the New York Times.

Our study did find that 58 percent of Antarctica cooled from 1966 to 2000. But during that period, the rest of the continent was warming. And climate models created since our paper was published have suggested a link between the lack of significant warming in Antarctica and the ozone hole over that continent. These models, conspicuously missing from the warming-skeptic literature, suggest that as the ozone hole heals — thanks to worldwide bans on ozone-destroying chemicals — all of Antarctica is likely to warm with the rest of the planet. An inconvenient truth?

Doran's data has been misused by Michael Crichton and Ann Coulter. Another scientist refuted the misuse of her data by the Wall Street Journal in a Los Angeles Times oped reprinted here. This was a study of studies by Naomi Oreskes:

My study demonstrated that there is no significant disagreement within the scientific community that the Earth is warming and that human activities are the principal cause.

Papers that continue to rehash arguments that have already been addressed and questions that have already been answered will, of course, be rejected by scientific journals, and this explains my findings. Not a single paper in a large sample of peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 refuted the consensus position, summarized by the National Academy of Sciences, that "most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."

Of actual skeptics, one in Virginia, it was revealed today, is on the payroll of coal-burning utilities. A secret coal industry memo calling for more financing of deniers admits that most deniers have "no involvement in climatology."

Most "scientific" skeptics have been financed, directly or indirectly, by the oil giants. With Exxon-Mobil enjoying profit of $10 billion+ in the last three months, skepticism may be a lonely business, but it can be quite lucrative.

One (Big) State at a Time

UPDATE: The CA death toll is now 132.

With heat-related deaths in California now exceeding 100, a new poll cited by Carl Pope shows"Air pollution, global warming and other environmental woes are becoming increasingly important to California voters" -- an unprecedented 85 percent of the voters say that the environment will influence who they vote for this fall for governor.

With those numbers, even Ahnold is an environmentalist, and since he's the sitting governor, that's not a bad thing. He's fighting the Bushites on roadless areas. But California has another of its endless propositions, this one with some real substance. Pope writes: This reality is reinforced by the fact that, in the fall, Californians will get a chance to vote to put their state on a new energy pathway -- one in which the oil industry is finally forced to pay its fair share of the cost of a transition out of our addiction to oil by funding efficiency and renewables. Proposition 87, the Clean Alternative Energy Act, is leading in the polls, 61 percent to 23 percent. And Californians for the first time overwhelmingly say they want their state to forge its own leadership path on global warming, in the absence of federal leadership.

And as Pope points out, only Democratic candidate for governor Phil Angelides supports Prop 87. Ahnold does not.

Contemporary Mayan sculpture by Georgina Cabrera (Mexico) 

The Climate Crisis

Dead Zone

If you ever wondered what "the web of life" or "interconnected environment" meant, the Climate Crisis is providing a hard-knocks schooling. It works in two ways, really: we find situations no one dreamed had anything to do with each other actually have a lot to do with each other (usually in a very dismaying way), and we find the Climate Crisis having effects on different places and parts of our lives, even our memories.

Case in point: I spent my 40th birthday on the beach at Lincoln City, Oregon. I'd been in Portland to give a speech on my last book, and do research for what I expected would be my next book. I delayed flying back east to spend my birthday at the ocean, and took a bus across to a hilltop inn with an ocean view. So that's the first thing I thought of when I read this today:

Bottom fish and crabs washing up dead on Oregon beaches are being killed by a recurring "dead zone" of low-oxygen water that appears to be triggered by global warming, scientists say. The area is larger and more deadly than in past years, and there are signs it is spreading north to Washington's Olympic Peninsula. Scientists studying a 70-mile-long zone of oxygen-depleted water along the Continental Shelf between Florence and Lincoln City have concluded it is being caused by explosive blooms of tiny plants known as phytoplankton, which die and sink to the bottom.

Exactly how this happens, and how the effect feeds on itself, is described in this article. But here's the conclusion:

"If we continue like we are now, we could see some ecological shifts," Barth said. "It all depends on what happens with the warming and the greenhouse gases."Dead zones in other places around the country, such as Hood Canal in Washington and the Mississippi River Delta off Louisiana are caused by agricultural runoff fueling blooms of algae that rot and deplete the oxygen, said Lubchenco. But dead zones like the one off Oregon also occur off Namibia and South Africa in the Atlantic and off Peru in the Pacific. "We're not really sure what is down the road. If it's just for a short period of time, it will not be as devastating as if it starts lasting a significant fraction of summer," she said.

It's not the sea overtopping Manhattan, or the permafrost melting to turn the planet into Jurrasic Park. It's not even malaria spreading with the increased range of mosquitoes. But it's a real effect, that changes our lives in small ways. Here a small way, there a small way, it all begins to add up.

Like what a lot of people are doing this summer. Big power blackouts in Queens and Staten Island, storms and power down in St. Louis. And speaking of dead zones, that's becoming another name for apartments of the elderly in three-digit heat waves: in the 11th day of plus 100F temps in California, the estimated heat related death toll has risen to 86.

NGC688N by astroden

California Killer

You won't see this on Nancy Grace or that other one with the awful voice, but 56 people have been killed in California in the past 10 days, with one suspect: the heat. Thousands of animals, mostly "livestock," have perished as well, and no UFO is reportedly involved. In fact, the suspect is the same.

The AP reports: The stretch of 100-plus degree scorchers that descended on the state last week marks the first time in 57 years that both Northern and Southern California have experienced extended heat waves simultaneously, California Undersecretary for Energy Affairs Joe Desmond said.

Some communities faced their third day without electricity as the record-breaking temperatures strained transmission equipment. The entire state has been asked to conserve energy, and blackouts have happened far from the hottest areas. We're all in this together, folks. So let's get real.

If Gore won't run, why not Moyers?

Molly Ivins' Excellent Idea

It's this: Dear desperate Democrats: Here’s what we do. We run Bill Moyers for president. I am serious as a stroke about this. It’s simple, cheap, and effective, and it will move the entire spectrum of political discussion in this country. Moyers is the only public figure who can take the entire discussion and shove it toward moral clarity just by being there.

It's not because he could win either the nomination or the presidency, she says. It's for the effect it will have when all those primary candidates gather for TV debates.

Think, imagine, if seven or eight other Democratic candidates, all beautifully coiffed and triangulated and carefully coached to say nothing that will offend anyone, stand on stage with Bill Moyers in front of cameras for a national debate … what would happen? Bill Moyers would win, would walk away with it, just because he doesn’t triangulate or calculate or trim or try to straddle the issues. Bill Moyers doesn’t have to endorse a constitutional amendment against flag burning or whatever wedge issue du jour Republicans have come up with. He is not afraid of being called “unpatriotic.” And besides, he is a wise and a kind man who knows how to talk on TV.

Pretty soon they'll all have to be talking like this, at least a little. And the moral issues get heard. Works for me.

Drought in Boulder, Colorado. This state is becoming an enviromental leader. 

The Climate Crisis

To Turn It Into Action

The heat is still on in much of the U.S. and Europe. St. Louis was declared a disaster area last week. Today the power grid in California is teetering due to demand in the hot zones where triple digit temperatures still rule. I'm not sure yet if it's power problems or our own telephone wires but our DSL has been down a lot lately, and my access to the Internet restricted. Just to let you know in case there are long absenses here.

For those of us clutching at hope, there was a heartening article in Sunday's SF Chronicle Insight by Mark Hertsgaard, adapted from his piece in The Nation. It's about Jerome Ringo, the chairman of the Board of the the 4.5. million member National Wildlife Federation, the largest enviro organization in America. Ringo is also the only African American to head such an organization, and he is also a former petrochemical worker. He's a living blue-green alliance.

"I am the first African American to head a major conservation group in history," he says. Most environmental groups, he adds, "were founded by people who fished to put fish on the wall, not by people who fished to put fish on the table. And for poor people, issues like ozone depletion have not been a priority, compared to next month's rent. But I tell people in Cancer Alley, 'What good is next month's rent if you're dying from cancer?' "

Ringo is one of the proponents of a new approach to environment in politics, Hertsgaard writes. He pecifies three changes of approach. First: a focus on economically attractive solutions rather than downbeat warnings of disaster... Second, using clear, plain language to communicate with everyone (the enviro organizations have been mired in regulationspeak for years, as they functioned as lobbyists and legal watchdogs), and third, strengthening local organizations to work politically on local and state levels. One of the inspiring moments in Al Gore's movie is the screen filled up with the names of cities that have pledged to act on the climate crisis (and a prideful moment too, to see our much maligned Arcata on it). Here's the heart of the article:

Part of what makes Ringo interesting is that he can credibly connect with all the constituencies needed to transform environmentalism into a genuinely broad-based movement. The National Wildlife Federation chairman can talk to whites and blacks, environmentalists and hunters, business leaders and union members, church-goers and secularists. And he recognizes that all of them benefit from an environmental policy that stresses both respect for the Earth and economic prosperity.

"The glue that connects the dots" is the fight against climate change, says Ringo. He argues that environmentalists can best pursue this battle by championing a green energy plan put forward by the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of environmental, labor and business groups of which he is the new president.

Apollo proposes investing $300 billion of public funds in green energy technologies during the next 10 years. This investment would create 3 million jobs and countless business opportunities, Apollo says, while also fighting climate change and cutting dependence on foreign oil.

It's a good time to be making this argument. Not only has global warming finally been widely acknowledged as an urgent problem, it is now undeniable that fighting it can be extraordinarily profitable. Beginning in 1999, energy giant British Petroleum invested $20 million to increase energy efficiency throughout its production facilities and offices. Three years later, it had saved $650 million in lower fuel costs -- a stunning thirtytwo-fold return on its investment.

Apollo says there is no reason that state and local governments and other public entities cannot cash in just as handsomely -- a message ready-made for the 235 cities that have committed to meeting the greenhouse-gas emissions reductions mandated by the Kyoto Protocol. Ringo spoke at the National Conference of Mayors in June about the Apollo program and got a standing ovation.

"Apollo began five years ago as a vision," he says. "My goal is to turn it into action."

From the film version of "All Quiet on the Western Front,"
a classic World War I antiwar story from the German point of view.

The Evolution of Brutality and the Skills of Peace

UPDATE: Leads the list for "diary rescue" at Dkos and front page at E Pluribus Media.

We are in a period of brutalization that continues to intensify. The latest uptick in violent language and brutal policy may be evidence of the Bushites and the Rabid Right fighting for their political lives in the face of majority opposition, but it sets a new standard of brutality that affects the whole public dialogue, and all of us as individuals.

“Brutality” means humans acting like beasts (or at least how humans interpret animal behavior.) It carries with it the expectation that human beings in a civilized society should progress beyond this automatic behavior when it is clearly inappropriate and counterproductive, especially in the long term. It assumes a consensus on life as sacred. Progress used to include moving farther away from brutality to the rule of consciousness and more “human” means of solving conflicts.

Brutalization is shifting individual and societal standards to accepting higher levels of brutality as normal and acceptable. In civilized humanity, it is retrogression. So how in the world, early in the twenty-first century, did we get here?

Our sense of the word “brutalization” comes from historian George Mosse, in his analysis of French culture during World War I. In a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement (June 16, 2006), Jay Winter characterized the “war culture” of the period, as described by two other historians, concluding:

“Thus the war became a kind of crusade, a morality play in which good and evil were evidently divided that those who cried ‘enough’ were deemed either deluded or dangerous.”

World War I remains such a profound event in European culture that a colloquium was held recently “on the explosion of extreme violence in 1914-15, marking a kind of degeneration of war into slaughter on a scale the world had never seen before.” France and England lost 2 million men, four times the number killed in World War II.

The slaughter on one battlefield in 1917 was so extreme and so needless that a half million French soldiers refused to fight. This forced a change in tactics, and changed the nature of the war. After the war, a vast veterans movement of some four million arose in France. They formed “overwhelmingly pacifist associations, determined to make war unthinkable…They hated politicians, those self-serving evildoers who sent men to war, but never paid the price for their policies. Their voices were angry. They had a cause and defended it as fiercely after the war as they had defended their part of the front during it.”

This war and this movement, Winter writes, had a lasting effect on French culture and policy. He does not explicitly say it affected the skepticism and refusal of the French government to get involved in the US invasion of Iraq, but the implication is there.

French filmmaker Abel Gance made two versions
of "J'Accuse." In both he used footage of actual soldiers
on the front in World War I playing ghosts of themselves
coming back to haunt the world. Many of them died on
the battlefield within days.

We recognize the us/them buttons that politicians push, and their manipulation of our natural impulse to defend ourselves when threatened. When Shakespeare wrote the phrase, “let loose the dogs of war,” he knew that war releases instincts that can become uncontrollable, and that feed on themselves. A pack of violent dogs is a self-reinforcing mechanism. Humans can rationalize and compartmentalize, and so appear to themselves rational even when they aren’t. Humans also can escalate violence beyond anything a pack of vicious dogs can accomplish, and justify it with the logic of attack and counterattack, with defense soon becoming pay-back and vengeance. War fever is not even assuaged by victory, for there are always new groups to be defined as enemies, and to conquer.

But war itself does not necessarily start the brutalization process that can result in war, or determines how that war is conducted. During the brutality of the Vietnam war, an immense dialogue took place on the meaning of war as well as that particular war. It found in history a long list of voices crying out against the futility of war, the needless brutality and its ineffectiveness in solving problems. It demanded that war be evaluated not just with numbers and geopolitical theories, but by suffering, especially of the innocent, and the brutalizing effect on those who inflicted this suffering as well as its victims. As the soldiers in World War I learned, they are often the same people.

This dialogue was central but also other dialogues were part of it. The Civil Rights movement sensitized us to the racial and ethnic component of the us/them equation, to the fear of difference, of the alien. Prejudices of the past were recalled, and the images of those Other racial groups that by then were obviously false. The examination of socially supported gender roles and their implication in violence and oppression began even before the feminist movement, and men reevaluated what it meant to be a man. Many started on a journey then to revive and refine techniques for solving problems without violence, and to develop new ones.

Today there are thousands of Americans involved in developing, learning and using what I call the Skills of Peace. I divide these interrelated skills into outer (learning about cultures and histories), inner (learning about ourselves, our responses and motivations, as well as cultivating attitudes and learning skills to clarify our relationship to the world) and interface (methods of communication, negotiation; skills of mediation and conflict management and resolution.)

The skills of peace are applicable in our families, schools and neighborhoods, in our political and on-line associations, as well as in international war and peace. They give the lie to the cliché that although “we all want peace” it is unattainable, or we don’t have any idea of how to achieve it.

Our society and our culture spends billions on the skills of war and conflict. We pay little official attention to the skills of peace. We even send soldiers into “peace-keeping” situations with little or no training in how to keep the peace, other than waving weapons, storming homes and conducting interrogations. We do essentially nothing to counter the brutalizing effects on society, or the psychological traumas suffered by the children we turn into killers, and the resulting impact on their families and society. But then, we’ve been notoriously lax in even tending to their physical injuries.

We spend a disproportionate amount of money and time on the skills of war, and that disproportion is one of the causes of brutalization. The self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing, and naturally escalating violence unleashed by war is another. But brutalization can also begin in political choices.

"The Defenders" was a classic, and unfortunately
almost unique, early 60s drama series about
the law defending rights of individuals.

The brutal road to Iraq and Torture

How has America in the early twenty-first century come to the point of justifying the capture, imprisoning and torture of people almost at random, with no regard for rights under the Geneva Conventions and more importantly, for generally accepted minimal rights in the civilized world? How has this prosperous and advanced society turned back the clock on the painful progress towards a more civilized and less dangerous world, for which thousands if not millions have sacrificed their lives?

I believe much of the current attitude can be traced back to the 1980s, when the neocons in the Reagan administration pumped up the rhetoric to absurd heights to justify a proxy war in Central America, while they exploited a highly publicized and inflated rise in urban crime, which led to the reversal of trends in criminal justice. In the 60s and 70s, there was an emphasis on the rights of the accused, to redress the balance of individual rights and society’s interest in preventing crime. Perhaps most importantly as well as symbolically, capital punishment was no longer considered a just sentence or effective deterrent.

The subtext of that trend was this: A civilized society does not enact revenge for its own sake, nor does it feed a spiraling culture of revenge. A modern civilized society finds more effective ways to deter crime and deal with criminals, just as many previous societies had done: without capital punishment. Capital punishment brutalized society.

Though this is now accepted in much of the rest of the world, it is likely to be news to anyone who came of age in the US in the 1980s or after. The culture has turned completely around, and justice is equated with vengeance. You need look no further than the ever-popular crime dramas on television. In the 60s, popular series like “The Defenders” and “The Law & Mr. Jones” portrayed defense attorneys as heroes, protecting individuals against abuses by prosecutors and police, against juries being swayed by emotional appeals to exact revenge, and against aspects of the law that treated the “innocent until proven guilty” unjustly.

In today’s crime shows, the heroes are prosecutors and police who use any means necessary to convict suspects. In surfing TV channels the other night, I caught a minute of a willowy blond prosecutor objecting to an accused killer not getting the death penalty because he had a biologically caused mental illness. “We’ve convicted psychotics and schizophrenics before,” she complained. This is typical. You can see the difference even over the life of one series: “Law & Order.”

We all know of the cases of mentally deficient prisoners who were executed. We know of other cases in which prisoners who committed crimes in their youth were executed many years later, when they were demonstrably no longer that person. We also know that the US has the highest proportion of its population in prison than any other “civilized” democracy. We know that there are innocent executed because they could not afford a decent defense, and that African Americans and other minorities are disproportionately jailed because of race as well as economics.

But crime and support for the death penalty were so politically hyped that even though the President has nothing to do with capital punishment, it became the central issue leading to George Bush the First defeating Michael Dukakis in 1988. This despite the fact that the vast majority of voters were untouched by violent crime, except through their television sets. Having hyped the threat, politicians exploited natural fears by promising to get tough, and enacting three strikes laws and bringing back capital punishment. No more attention to the economic crises in the inner cities, or the collapse of manufacturing jobs, or the patterns of racial injustice. Meanwhile, demographers showed that the jump in urban crime was largely predictable by the jump in the proportion of young men, and would abate as the trend reversed. Which is what happened.

By 2004, capital punishment had become such a non-issue that when John Kerry said he was opposed to it, hardly anyone noticed. But the brutalization had done its work.

The demagogic appeals of the 1980s had expanded into a rhetoric of the right wing which is historically startling in its violent oversimplifications, outrageous untruths and brutal assumptions. But there were also countertrends contending for the national soul. It took the match of 9/11 to set this house aflame again.

the brutality of Guantanamo

Terrorized by the War on Terror

By choosing to regard terrorist attacks as acts of war rather than criminal acts, the Bushites not only gave terrorists the identity they craved—the identity as warriors that would inspire new recruits—but they both hyped the threat and used the resulting fever to justify extreme acts, including official patterns of brutality.

The terror of terrorism is in surprise, and the power of terrorism to inspire fear is directly related to its novelty as well as the violent imagery associated with it. It is certainly not proportional to the threat.

Ben Friedman in the San Francisco Chronicle Insight (February 19, 2006):

Conventional wisdom says that none of us is safe from terrorism. The truth is that almost all of us are.

Most homeland security experts say that Hurricane Katrina's flooding of New Orleans shows how vulnerable we are to terrorists. In fact, it shows that most Americans have better things to worry about. By any statistical measure, the terrorist threat to America has always been low. As political scientist John Mueller notes, in most years allergic reactions to peanuts, deer in the road and lightning have all killed about the same number of Americans as terrorism.
In 2001, their banner year, terrorists killed one twelfth as many Americans as the flu and one fifteenth the number killed by car accidents.

Even if attacks killing thousands were certain, the risk to each of us would remain close to zero, far smaller than many larger risks that do not alarm us, or provoke government warnings, like driving to work every day. And if something far worse than Sept. 11 does occur, the country will recover. Every year, tens of thousands Americans die on the roads. Disease preys on us. Life goes on for the rest. The economy keeps chugging. A disaster of biblical proportions visited New Orleans. The Republic has not crumbled. The terrorist risk to the United States is serious, but far from existential, as some would have it.

Yet the Bushite mantra that 9/11 had changed everything was so ubiquitous and powerful that to deny it was next to impossible for years, until it had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. America did learn it was vulnerable to the kind of attack it had not suffered before, and should have quickly protected itself against this vulnerability. Some of this was done, but not all that was needed. The Bush government took another course when it invaded Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks for political gain.

More than 3,000 people were killed by terrorist acts on 9/11/2001. This resulted in invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, where civil war killed more than 3,000 people in Iraq I just last month, and some 6,000 in the past two months. The number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq is likely to surpass 3,000 soon. This is often the logic of war—of any war, just or not. When a society must defend itself with whatever means are necessary to fend off destruction and hold back an invader, that logic is tragic but must be accepted. When a war is created for political and economic ends, and sold to a democracy with lies and manipulation, it is more than tragic.

The Bushite rhetoricians positioned this war without a nameable enemy as an archetypal fight to the death between good and evil. In such a battle, the good are always good, and can never do evil, just as the evil are always evil. Creating these archetypes is a normal function of war, which both sides do. It is also common to use racial and religious stereotypes, and to characterize the enemy as less than human, as beasts.

Such oversimplification and distortion not only leads to brutality, it is itself a form of brutalization. It is a brutal view of the world, and denies the humanity as well as the possibly legitimate grievances of the Other, the enemy. In denying that the Other is civilized, it justifies acting outside the norms of civilized society. It makes us uncivilized and brutal.

Through surrogates like Ann Coulter, their flunkies in the press, and in their own voices, neocons and Rabid Right Republicans are pumping up the rhetoric of violence. Brutalization also increases in times of violence, as is the case now in the Middle East. While half a million people are roaming Lebanon because their homes have been destroyed, a commentator on Fox brags of the US military capability to turn Syria “into a parking lot.” This is brutalization speaking loud and clear.

But brutalization is expressed not just in blood-thirsty rhetoric, but in indifference. Indifference to suffering, and to those causing suffering. The constant barrage of violent news is like getting hit on the head with a board. It desensitizes, which is an effect of brutalization.

Brutality is commonly an instrument of authoritarian rule, and brutal definitions lead to a logic of authoritarianism. They don’t call dictators “strong men” for nothing.

Brutalization is now so pervasive in this society that we barely recognize all its manifestations. When it becomes part of cultures—created for example by the Cheney rules—it becomes harder and harder to oppose it, and then even to recognize it. But it links the authoritarian White House to the torturers at Guantanamo and the rapists and murderers in Iraq. It is ever-present in the violent rhetoric of the right, that expands the definition of the Other, and brutalizes not only the Other in foreign lands, but in the political opposition at home. It leads to citizens of small towns harassing, vandalizing and threatening violence on the families of other small town citizens, over a zoning dispute, or a public official over a word in a speech, taken out of context or even misheard.

We need to identify brutalization: its manifestations and causes, and shine a light on it. We do not need to add to it with conscripting more cannon fodder for brutal dictators by any other name. We need to put political muscle and will behind accountability, and to promote a government and a society that values and uses and learns the skills of peace.

Check out The Skills of Peace article at the SF Chronicle, and these useful links.

Everybody's Quote of the Day

At T. Goddard's Political Wire, the Huffington Post, and probably a thousand other places---it comes from outspoken former NBA star Charles Barkley:

"I used to be a Republican before they lost their minds."

The Nature of Denial (The Denial of Nature)

Eight weeks after release, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was still #11 at the US box office, just a shade behind the opening week of Scanners at #10. Last week it was in 570 theatres, about a third of the screens of the #8 film. Of all the movies in the top 12 that had been out for more than a week, it had by far the lowest percentage audience drop-off. People are still discovering it. The book version remains at #2 on the New York Times Best Seller list.

As mentioned before, climate scientists have been unanimous in endorsing the facts Gore communicates in this film. His explanations and his arguments, while they could be expanded, could not be clearer. Presented in this way, there is no politics involved. You believe the science, or you don't. (And since the data is overwhelming, from so many sources going back many years, if you don't believe this science, you don't believe any science.) You believe dealing with the climate crisis is a moral imperative and a public responsibility, or you don't. (And if you don't, what do you believe is?)

As Gore says, the percentage of peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals that dispute the existence of the climate crisis and human responsibilty for it through the immense dispersal of greenhouse gases, is zero. But the percentage of articles in the popular press that question it is over 50%.

There are reasons why-- most of them having to do with wealthy companies that want to keep on accruing weath awhile longer, while incurring the least possible cost in investment. Gore's analogy of the tobacco industry deliberately misleading the public is the most apt.

But why do people accept these distortions? Why wallow in climate crisis denial?

It takes courage to change--your assumptions, and what you're doing. There's risk involved. If things are going pretty well at the moment, or even if you're afraid of making things worse for yourself, why take a chance?

The problem looks way too big. The changes look impossible. Cut fossil fuels? Gasoline? Oil? Coal? Who are you kidding? It's unimaginable. Even if it's true, you have to deny it. Everybody's jobs, everybody's lives depend on how things are now.

But it's also very personal. People love their cars and their power tools, and they are afraid someone is going to take them away, take away their only comforts, in a world that gradually or suddenly takes everything away. They probably only need to modify how they do things, and change some, without losing cars and power tools, but they aren't yet persuaded of that. Because the whole thing is too scary. So it's better to turn on the people you think are trying to take away what you love, take away how you want to live.

People are afraid of what they might have to give up. They find it hard to conceive of anything different from their work-to-spend life, that TV tells them is normal-- them and everyone they know. They can't get off that wheel. They don't want to lose the things in their present that give them pleasure, even give them meaning, especially in a gamble to prevent disaster in some future. A future they might not even see.

People also feel guilty, and they don't want to admit, even to themselves, that what they've been doing all their lives has been destroying their planet, and destroying the future of their own children and grandchildren. It's hard to admit that. To feel that. There are way too many things to feel bad about already.

This is all denial, and we're familar with it from psychology, which entered the culture in a big way with the recovery movement. People with a problem, an addiction, don't want to admit they have it, don't want to admit to themselves that what they're doing, what they like to do, is hurting other people, ruining their own health and their own life. That it is ruining the future of their children. They don't want to see the pattern. They don't want to believe the data.

No ordinary people chose to start a climate crisis. No ordinary people made the choice to trade the future of the planet for their cars and hot water, their homes and computers, their jobs and their joys. They weren't given that choice. But science has been telling us for almost a half century that we have a problem, and now that problem has gotten very, very big. The relevant industries should have stepped up to deal with this years ago, but they didn't. Government should have stepped up years ago to lead us out of this, but it didn't. Ordinary people have to force them into it.

More industries (especially in other countries), more state and local governments, more countries are starting to, if not step up, at least crawl up. The US and its major industries are the most responsible for the crisis and the worst at taking responsibility for it. The Gore movie shows how suicidal this is. The car manufacturers of virtually every other country in the world, including China, have far higher fuel standards than the big U.S. automakers. If U.S. car companies want to sell abroad, they can't. And their business is falling way behind, even within the US. Where's the sense in this?

The U.S. responsibility is to lead, and to lead by example. Because if China and India try to walk our current walk, the result will be apocalyptic.

It's time for some consciousness and courage. It's time for a lot of clear thinking, which is going to get harder as time goes on, as catastrophes shake us, emotions run high, and denial gets replaced by equally destructive and self-destructive impulses. Not to mention the impossibility of thinking straight when it's so damn hot.

Why is this a political party issue? Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians have all been using fossil fuels for the past century. Conservatives, moderates and liberals all share the same planet, and their children all need the future. It's basically a huge engineering problem. Nature is the ground of fact. It can't be denied without fatal consequences.

The first step in this recovery program is go see this movie. Are you afraid? Afraid you'll be convinced? Are you afraid of the truth?

The Heat Beat Goes On

It's not just the US in the fryer: Europe is in the midst of a record-breaking heatwave. The Netherlands, France, Italy, England (where the British Open golf tourney is beginning in triple digit temps.) Deaths have started to be recorded. A similar heatwave in 2003 claimed 20,000 dead. In terms of terrorism, that's between 6 and 7 9/11s.

In 2004, a UK climate research group warned that a further sign of the climate crisis would be these heatwaves becoming more frequent and more severe in England and Europe.

In the US, storms wrack the north while the heat continues in the south and west. Tropical storm Beryl is heading north, and could possibly strike anywhere from Long Island to New England on Friday. If it makes landfall in New England, it will be the first tropical storm ever to do so in any July on record. Warmer ocean water feeding storms worldwide is another widely predicted indicator of global heating.