Lennon at 70

"How terribly strange to be seventy," sang Simon and Garfunkel in 1968, when they were 27 (Paul will turn 69 on the 13th of this month, and Art on the fifth of November) and John Lennon was 28. It's hard to imagine John Lennon at 70. But that's what he would be today--October 9-- had he not been shot and killed in 1980, a couple of months past his 40th birthday.

But maybe it's not so hard to imagine the writer of "Imagine" at 70. If he continued to master his demons as he seemed to be in the last years of his life, the decades since might have been quite different. Apart from the flash of the 60s and the tumult of the 70s, John Lennon was that rare combination of an inspiring idealist and an inspired ironist, who wrote lines like this: "sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun/If the sun don't come you get a tan from standing in the English rain." In the middle of the surreal "I Am the Walrus," those are lines they could be teaching in poetry courses.

It's tempting to think of him as the spokesperson and lightning rod for causes, the role he sought at times, and which got him shadowed and harassed by the Nixon police. That's a role that's difficult if not nearly impossible to sustain, especially with the increasingly low boredom threshold and the ageist attitudes that survive virtually unchallenged. But he was able to break so many rules, so who knows? He might have been the champion for Climate Crisis awareness say, and Lennon Saves would be a legacy instead of a fondly recalled button from the 60s. Although Lennon, first among equals, saved many a rainy day, English and otherwise in those years.

We would undoubtedly have more Beatles music, and now that we know that you can still rock when you're supposed to be in your rocking chair, we might still be hearing from Lennon. His absence did create room for his former band mates to shine in their own light--Paul McCartney is a global figure, Ringo Starr has found peace on the road, and it took George Harrison's death to reveal so clearly that his talent and accomplishments were major and lasting, and that at his best his song-writing was equal to Lennon and McCartney.

But I have to say that in the last Paul McCartney tour video I saw, the lack of any reference to the other Beatles, particularly Lennon, began to stand out ever more prominently as it went on. And the lack of any Lennon representative at the wonderful memorial concert for George Harrison (which featured McCartney and Starr) was eerie and sad.

It would have been very interesting to observe Lennon as he aged. The anger that seemed to have fueled that incredible energy--and together with his wit and high spirits, made him the model of charming insolence--seemed almost to destroy him, but in his late 30s he seemed to have come to a different place. The energy was different, but it was there in those last songs. What would have come next? There's only 30 empty years to contemplate.

But in those 40 years he left us music to express almost everything, from the vision of "Imagine" and "All You Need is Love," and the social vision of "Working Class Hero," to the bitter ironies of his version of "Nobody Loves You"; the involvement of "Give Peace a Chance," and the detachment of "Watching the Wheels"; the surrealism of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" to the raw pain of "I'm So Tired." He wrote and sang about being a son and a father, and all the emotions of relationship from young passions to Starting Over.

For those of us who were just a few years behind him, our aging was unaccompanied by new tunes and insights from him, and this absence, this void, was felt, though as one among others. But we always had what we still have, the songs, the images, the words he produced in what amounts to less than 20 years. That's more than most get, but it's a lot less than we wanted, or that we could have used.

click collage to enlarge

On 10/10/10

On Sunday, which is this portentous date--a very powerful one, if I remember my basic numerology--Bill McKibben's 350 organization is holding a Climate Crisis Global Work Party, which McKibben explains:

"On 10/10/10 we'll show that we the people can do this--but we need bold energy policies from our political leaders to do it on a scale that truly matters. The goal of the day is not to solve the climate crisis one project at a time, but to send a pointed political message: if we can get to work, you can get to work too--on the legislation and the treaties that will make all our work easier in the long run."

The event has been announced and in the process of being organized for months, and I hope that come Sunday the participation is high and the media notices. And maybe by Saturday all the progressive and enviro blogs will be reminding everyone that it's happening. But as of today, the online silence is eerie. I was about to say that it isn't even on the homepage of 350.org, but between the time I started this post and now, it has appeared!

But in a quick click-through of the relevant sites on my "Climate Crisis Future" bloglist, it's prominently mentioned only on Climate Crisis Coalition , the Environmental News Wire, Environment at change.org, Grist and World Changing, which is not nothing, but still... Let's hope that the rest of the sites get to this Saturday, along with the social media tools.

For this is a test not only of participation but of the environmental movement's ability to work together effectively. There are a lot of organizations--some very large ones--with their own agendas, who don't seem to work together much. And there are a lot of sites with smaller organizations clustered around a key figure and his/her (actually, almost always his) books and speaking engagements.

But if this is a transcendent moral issue, a crisis that threatens civilization and portends hardships that some are already suffering and many more will in a few short years, then it is long past time for everyone to transcend their agendas and egos and make one big voice.

Our Common Wealth

From the first day I stepped into a library, as a gradeschooler entering a fairly modest brick building on South Main Street, to pretty much every time I walk through the stacks, following the coded numbers that will lead me to the magic of an unknown book in the (public) university library some three thousand miles from there, I've felt it all as a kind of miracle, outside the normal rule. How could I have such free access to all this wealth? I suppose I always knew they were going to take it away.

This wealth has been the birthright of Americans for generations now. The public library in particular was once a mark of the progress of our civilization as well as a shining product and exemplar of our democracy. I suppose part of what made it so unlikely to exist, even in my child's mind, was that it was supported by so many people who seldom if ever used it. But it was valued and supported. And they were right--for their children may have used it, or others who used it and the knowledge there would provide for the town in many different but ultimately substantial ways.

But municipalities of all sizes are cutting back on services, and libraries are often victims. So it happened that some hard-pressed towns heard the siren song of privatization--you know, since it works so well in health insurance--and the library was put in corporate hands. Then the next step--and a financially healthy town in California privatized, leading to some cries of outrage.

If I ever had any doubt about the effect of privatization on libraries, I only would need to listen to the CEO of the company taking over, which specializes in libraries, as quoted in the New York Times:

There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”


Yes, somehow they have. Somehow they are sacred organizations. That seems to make him pretty mad. He mocks the idea. He sounds like somebody out of Dickens--if I might make a literary allusion to a fellow who lives chiefly in libraries.

I don't know the specifics of this union situation in Santa Clarita, but this doesn't sound like the librarians I've known:“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”

The Mayor says this is not true privatization, because the library stays open to the public. Privatization always seems sweet at first, however, until the real profit motive shows up--usually when a corporation gets control of enough of the "business," that is, the libraries. Then watch out.

The consequences of the corporate predation known in corporatespeak as privatization has more obviously cruel consequences than taking over libraries, as the recent situation I mentioned at the end of the earlier "Follow the Money" post--the family watching their house burn, with their pets dying inside, because they hadn't paid the $75 fee for fightfighters, who stood beside them and let it all burn. While perhaps not precisely a privatization example, it suggests where it is going.

But while the cruelty of closed or restricted or profit-oriented libraries may not be so obvious, the example of libraries makes one aspect of privatization crystal clear: it is a corporate threat to our common wealth, to profit a few.

There are other pressures on the library, like this machine I'm using at the moment. But that's more a result of human folly, a little more correctable and open to argument than the corporate grip. I suppose if the library goes, I won't actually be surprised. I'm too surprised it's still there every time I'm there. It's lived not only because people dreamed it and worked to build it and keep it going, but because people like Mr. Pezzanite were restrained by at least some strong belief in the library and what it stands for as, yes, a sacred--public--institution.

Election 2010: Follow the Money

There's a lot to be said about the politics and the psychologies involved in this upcoming electoral expression, and of course a lot is being said and will be said. But a lot of it will be disproportionately evaluated, because a lot of it may be less relevant than the cold hard cash silently changing hands. Right now as Dylan said, money doesn't talk, it swears.

So before I meander down those roads, let me state what should be obvious: the super rich and the merely rich are trying very hard to buy this election for the Republicans.

The general approach is ancient, as old as oligarchy. The rich stir up the fears and prejudices of the poor, and flatter them with attention temporarily by making a few stars from their number to voice their platitudes and mockery of their enemies. They do it to serve their own interests, not at all the interests of those they inflame and flatter. And they do it with money. They use money to bribe and buy people. Money to fund institutions that buy people, and buy them influence. Money to buy media, to buy media time, and to fund political campaigns. And of course, they do it chiefly for money. The kind the Tea Partiers they finance will never see.

This year they are empowered by a Supreme Court decision that both allows unprecedented amounts of money into the political system, and hides where it is coming from. Odd that it should come at such a propitious moment, after the Obama campaign showed how much cash as well as energy could come from the grassroots, and the Democrats as a party began to raise money more effectively than the official Republican party. They're doing so in 2010 as well.

But the evidence is growing that the secret corporate and rich folks money is overwhelming, and applied to GOPer candidacies. First a little exposing of a shadowy tax-exempt group operating in Alaska and elsewhere. Then another phantom in Oregon. Then articles exposing the billionaires behind the Tea Party movement. President Obama called it an insidious attempt to take over democracy.

Now the closer we get to election day, the more obvious it is--though only if you pay attention. At First Read Tuesday: AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said he expects labor unions will be outspent 20-to-1 by corporate groups aligned with Republicans. The CS Monitor focuses on the infamous Karl Rove, and his funneling of millions to GOPer candidates--the Monitor wonders if it is legal, but when has that stopped Karl Rove before?

Update 10/7: President Obama continues to hammer this issue, noting that Democrats are being outspent 6 and 7 to 1 in many races, usually by outside groups--including at least one race in which an outside conservative group is outspending Dem and GOPer candidates combined, on behalf of the GOPer candidate. He also pointed to evidence that some of this money is coming from foreign corporations--something he warned might happen at the State of the Union where one member of the Supreme Court that allowed this was seen to disagree. Some of the evidence of foreign money was turned up by Think Progress.

"A note to Tea Party activists: This is not the movie you think it is. You probably imagine that you’re starring in “The Birth of a Nation,” but you’re actually just extras in a remake of “Citizen Kane.” So begins a column by Paul Krugman, noting the other strategy of corporate interests funding institutions and people to press their case--especially the phenomenon of Fox. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy." But that's hardly all that Fox does. While still claiming to be a news network, it relentlessly pushes one point of view and now, particular candidates, with no respect for accuracy or fairness, and with relentless distortion and innuendo in its daily toolbox. As Krugman and others note, the Tea Party movements owes much if not most of its rise to Fox News.

This simply adds new money, new muscle and new megaphones to old sleaze, and there's no better symbol of that, writes Bob Herbert, that the GOPer who could become Speaker of the House, John Boehner. Herbert recalls that he was the guy who literally gave out money from Big Tobacco to sympathetic members on the House floor. Boehner is even more of a tool of corporate interests today, he writes. "Both major parties have, with great enthusiasm, turned more and more of the government over to corporate and banking interests. But the G.O.P., with Mr. Boehner currently the point person, is fanatical about it, has barely tried to hide its willingness to offer up the government wholesale, no questions asked." He concludes "The U.S. is in terrible shape right now because far too much influence has been ceded to the financial and corporate elites who have used that influence to game the system and reap rewards that are almost unimaginable. Ordinary working Americans have been left far behind, gasping and on their knees. John Boehner has been one of the leaders of the army of enablers responsible for this abominable state of affairs."

The America the GOPers want is what their patrons want: very low taxes for the super rich, to be paid for by the cumulative poor of future generations; incomes for the super rich rising into further obscenity while most Americans slip back and more fall into poverty; corporations allowed to pollute their way to higher profits, to sacrifice the planet and life as we know it to their further financial enrichment and temporary power. And they will tell the most outrageous lies--pleasant ones and vicious ones--and with their own network, and others too scared to contradict them, they are given the legitimacy to do so.

They may get the country back all right, to be further exploited and despoiled, thanks to invisible money financing campaigns, and their visible shills--such as the failed actor Glenn Beck, noting with approval the spectre of a family watching their house burn down, killing their dogs and cat, alongside the fire fighters that refused to put the fire out, because the family had not paid their $75 fee to the privatized fire company. This is the GOPer future, and it could be coming to your town, too.

So when I write about other aspects of this election, other kinds of portents, please don't forget that politics and psychology may be potent factors, and ultimately the psychology involved may be the most basic. But for the winners and losers and what it all means, don't for a minute forget to follow the money.

Emerson for the Day

“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.”

Emerson

(Or maybe this Magritte painting is better to illustrate the Village Voice story, White America Has Lost Its Mind...)

The Green Comet

Look, up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, no--it's a green comet! The recently discovered Comet Hartley is coming to a sky near you. Right now it's visible through backyard telescopes and in some places (with very old-fashioned darkness at night) with the naked eye. (This is one skywatcher photo among many already.) It's a fairly small comet with a long tail, and it makes its closest encounter with Earth on October 20, so eventually it will be visible through binoculars at least in a lot of places. Then in November, a NASA craft has its close encounter with the comet, but just for photos . So from now on, look up (towards the constellation Cassiopeia) and think green.

Forward

The 10-2-10 One Nation Together rally brought tens of thousands (which could also mean hundreds of thousands) of people to Washington Saturday, a very good turnout for a rally that wasn't all that well publicized. But it was a Democratic base rally--lots of unions, churches and other organizations did the organizing. Media accounts I saw were nondescript--participants noted the diversity (in marked contrast to the Beckistan rally) and good feeling. Here's what it looked like ( a diary posted at Kos by The Red Phone is Ringing, from which the above photos were liberally borrowed.) It's exactly a month until the election, and it's being recognized that if the Dems turn out, they win. Especially with info like this poll, which says that on all the issues polled (except terrorism), the majority of voters trust Democrats to do the better job.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"What I'm very proud of is that we have, as an administration, kept our moral compass, even as we've worked through these very difficult issues. Doesn't mean we haven't made mistakes, but I think we've moved the country in a profoundly better direction just in the past two years."

President Obama in his Rolling Stone interview. Photo above is from the rally this week in Madison, Wisconsin, with a crowd estimated by local officials at 26,000.

Politics of Governance

If as expected, President Obama announces the departure today of Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff, there's likely to be a lot of blather all day and night about the evil Rahm, his style etc. ad nauseam, and in particular from self-anointed progressives who blame him for leading Obama astray into compromises and misguided sissy attempts at bipartisanship. And maybe even a little worry that his replacement, Pete Rouse, isn't enough of a progressive fighter. (Interesting piece on Rouse in the W Post.)

While I'm reluctant to dive back into this mess at the point that progressive politicos may finally be focusing on winning midterm elections rather than whining, I'm still shaking my head over their conduct. Sure, they've got legitimate disappointments, and differences on how to get things done (the outside game of pressuring Congress by going to "the people" on issues vs. the inside game of carving out legislation and getting votes for it) but I'd like to point out that their inability to shift from braying constantly about politics to examining and analyzing governing is part of the problem, and one of the chief reasons for any "enthusiasm gap" that might exist. A big result of that is they talk much more about GOPers than they do about Democrats and President Obama (except of course to complain.)

For example, late last week President Obama went back to the U. of Wisconsin campus where he made headlines during his campaign by drawing an audience of 17,000. This time his audience was 26,000 with thousands unable to get in. He gave a rousing speech, which he duplicated to a smaller but very enthused audience of younger voters on Thursday. But both speeches were pretty much ignored in the progressive blogosphere (only the reliable blackwaterdog at Daily Kos diaried the former some 24 hours later, and an apparently very young and not very ept diarist did the latter), and while Rachel Maddow presented part of the Madison speech, other progressive gabfests turned to the complainers, one of whom--with unearned arrogance dripping from his Ready-for-K Street suit--said he was heartened because Obama used the word "fight."

On the day of the Madison speech, Obama's in-depth interview with Rolling Stone hit the net, and was quite amazingly ignored by these blogs and shows. I hope to write about this interview more than once in the next few days, but for now, I want to quote just this from President Obama:

"When I talk to Democrats around the country, I tell them, "Guys, wake up here. We have accomplished an incredible amount in the most adverse circumstances imaginable." I came in and had to prevent a Great Depression, restore the financial system so that it functions, and manage two wars. In the midst of all that, I ended one of those wars, at least in terms of combat operations. We passed historic health care legislation, historic financial regulatory reform and a huge number of legislative victories that people don't even notice."

Why didn't people notice? Maybe because on progressive blogs, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party get more ink than Obama and the Democrats. Maybe because the blogs and shows are so focused on the latest Tea Party racist xenophobic comment, the latest Republican lie and GOPer mini-scandal. Look at Friday's posts on TPM, which I regard as one of the better sites: one after the other about Christine McDonnell and her resume fibs. And not much else.

Some may say these kinds of stories are sexier, but I really don't get that. What's so sexy about gossip, which is essentially what these most resemble? I'm not denying they are relevant to a candidate's fitness for office. But so is what they've actually accomplished in office.

The way I see it is this: the progressive blogosphere and media couldn't break their addiction to politics long enough to cover governance. And Obama--and Nancy Pelosi--were about governance, in a time of multiple crises that deeply threaten(ed) the country on several fronts at the same time.

This was true more broadly. As President Obama said in Rolling Stone: "What is true, and this is part of what can frustrate folks, is that over the past 20 months, we made a series of decisions that were focused on governance, and sometimes there was a conflict between governance and politics. So there were some areas where we could have picked a fight with Republicans that might have gotten our base feeling good, but would have resulted in us not getting legislation done."

But what frustrates people including me is this obsession with the GOPer freaks and with everybody's opinion on how things should be done instead of reporting on what was being done. Apart from the diarists propelled chiefly by their glands and the usual inflated egos attracted to the big political stage, a lot of it is due to this tight Washington/media game that big time blogs are now part of. People get reputations and air time for being controversial and as extreme as they can get away with. They talk to each other on each other's shows, and they bounce around in the same echo chambers.

I know I'm not the only one who followed them with bated breath during the campaign who has been largely turned off by them since the Inauguration. This is a cumulative thing--individual hosts and writers can probably point to stories they've done on governance issues. But careers apparently aren't made there anymore.

They basically have been playing the GOPer FOX game: they talk about the same GOPer folks on progressive blogs and shows as Fox News does, except that Obama is probably on Fox more. And they wonder why the Obama administration makes some intemperate comments about them.

Besides which, I doubt that it's effective. Except for the gossip buzz, nobody outside of Delaware cares about just how weird Christine O'Donnell is, and moreover, nobody outside that tiny state can vote for or against her. The only national story with impact on local elections is what President Obama and the Democratic Congress do or don't do. That's the story that hasn't been very well told.

Taking a tabloid or more pertinently, a social media approach to issues and elections doesn't cut it, at least not by itself.

Tony Judt

The last two quotes posted here, from Emerson and William James, both apply to Tony Judt. There's a fine memorial piece on him by Timothy Garton Ash in the New York Review of Books. Here are some excerpts:

"Critical though he was of French intellectuals, he shared with them a conviction that ideas matter. Being English, he thought facts matter too.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of polemical intellectuals. There are those for whom the taking of controversial positions is primarily a matter of personal peacock display, factional or clique positioning, hidden agendas, score-settling, or serial, knee-jerk revisionism. Then there are those who, while not without personal motivations and biases, are fundamentally concerned with seeking the truth. Tony Judt was of the latter kind.

Sharp and cutting his pen could be, but his work was always about seeking the truth as best we can, with all the search tools at our disposal—from the toothpick of Anglo-American empiricism to the searchlight of Gallic overstatement. Unlike the other kind of polemical intellectual, he was always in good faith. And he was always serious. Not drearily earnest—he enjoyed the acrobatics of intellectualism as others enjoy baseball—but morally serious. This was as true in private chat as in public discourse. In what he said and wrote, there was always that moral edge. He felt what he himself called, in a study of three French political intellectuals, the burden of responsibility.

Tony Judt was a very public intellectual but a very private man. He had a rich, close family life. In the last months of his illness, his wife, Jennifer Homans, and their sons, Daniel and Nicholas, set up for him a screensaver slide show on his desktop monitor. Besides happy moments from family holidays, it showed a lot of mountains (particularly the Alps) and railway stations—trains and mountains being two of his private passions.

Tony was a fighter, and he fought this illness with all his strength and will. Not for him the consolations of imagined eternity or Kübler-Rossish “acceptance.” We laughed at the great line that the English playwright John Mortimer reported coming from the mouth of his dying father: “I’m always angry when I’m dying.” He was a clear-sighted realist about what was happening to him, and what would or would not come after. Less than three weeks before he died, I said something to the effect that I knew he was going through hell. “Yes,” he said, with the eye equivalent of that no longer possible shake of the head, “but hell is a nontransferable experience.” So better to talk of other things: friends, bêtes noires, politics, books.

With the dedicated support of his family, devoted students, and professional carers, he found a way to go on doing what he did best—thinking, talking, and writing. In fact, the two years of his fatal illness were the occasion for a creative outpouring, with the Remarque Lecture on social democracy expanded into a short book (Ill Fares the Land, 2010); a set of memoir essays, composed in his head in those long periods of immobilized solitude, and then dictated (some have been published in these pages; the complete set will appear in book form as The Memory Chalet); and a book in which Tony talked through his planned intellectual history of the twentieth century, in conversation with Timothy Snyder. On e-mail—for once, an unmixed blessing—he could continue to “speak” in his old voice.

It is probably inevitable that his life and work will now be viewed, at least for some time, through the prism of his cruel illness—and the quite public way in which he described and fought it. But death should not be allowed to define life. These were, after all, only two years out of sixty-two. As a hardheaded, nonreligious, unsentimental realist, Tony would have greeted any formulaic sentimentalities about what “lives on” with that dismissive shake of the hand. But in some important sense, his intellectual Czernowitz is still alive; and his books will long be walking and talking among us."

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“We measure ourselves by many standards. Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort we can put forth...He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero.”
William James

Emerson for the Day

"He is a poor writer who does not teach courage of treatment."

Emerson

painting: Heroic Roses by Paul Klee, as a Happy Birthday to MTK and DKB.

The Infernal Storm

If the polls and pundits are right--the many that claim an increasing likelihood than Democrats and President Obama will be repudiated with one or even both houses of Congress becoming majority Republican--the outlines of the perfect and perfectly infernal oncoming storm are all too clear.

There's the separate but related phenomena noted before: the increasingly blatant theocratic Christian right, the increasingly bold racism, and the increasingly confident Bush Redux pols, all trafficking in Big Lies. That the Bushcorpse agenda is once again front and center, less than two years removed from its greatest disaster, is in itself a measure of the insanity.

There's the big money secretly fueling the so-called grassroots revolt, and the powerful anger of the rich.

There's the new media environment that (as previously noted) no longer restrains extremism or covers it in proportion, but amplifies it. From E. J. Dionne:But something is haywire in our media and our politics. Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian whose new book is "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History," observed in an interview that there is a "hall of mirrors" effect created by the rise of "niche" opinion media. They magnify small movements into powerhouses, while old-fashioned journalism, which is supposed to put such movements in perspective, reacts to the same niche incentives.

There's congressional Democrats and even the White House doing itself no favors in terms of generating voter enthusiasm by not forcing a vote on renewing the budget-busting Bush tax cuts for millionaires, and opposing enforcement of a judge's decision to end Don't Ask Don't Tell.

There's whiny progressives apparently willing to pull a Nader because they didn't get everything they wanted, lacking all historical memory when they point to the contrast with the great days of JFK, FDR and even Bill Clinton, all of whom were castigated by the progressives of their day for not doing enough, just as they were all castigated by conservatives for doing too much. Obama eloquently addressed this tendency, in a speech which I saw covered only by a newspaper in England. "This is not some academic exercise," President Obama said of the coming election. " Don't compare us to the Almighty; compare us to the alternative."

Though measuring the fault and the factors is more than I can calibrate, the reality is that the Obama record has not been clear to the country, and now the President is barely being heard by anyone, it seems. The GOPers are controlling the debate, or in any case, defining the noise. (For one thing, asks E.J. Dionne in a different column, why is everyone talking about the Bush tax cuts and not about extending the Obama tax cuts for the middle class, which are also about to expire?)

But the most important supposition is that voters aren't thinking beyond punishing Democrats for the slow pace of economic recovery. In their fury and effectively their stupidity, they will choose extremists making the same promises that the Bushcorpse either broke or broke the country with. And extremists without the sagacity or even the intent to serve as responsible members of government, which is what they're running for. Some of whom are on record as racists and theocrats, and some of whom are on record as suggesting armed insurrection if they don't get elected.

Against all this noise, there is some counter-evidence. Dionne gathered some to suggest that the Tea Party in particular represents a tiny minority, with electoral victories representing a very small number of votes. There are studies and polls that suggest the country is not moving into Rabid Right Suicideland. But all of that will be cold comfort if this infernal storm combines voting extremists with sullen stay-at-home moderates and progressives, and ends up with elected officials and ballot propositions that stop the change, and throw us into furious battles just to keep from making things worse. It's hard enough repairing the damage from the Bushcorpse years, slowly turning the ship of state in a positive direction. But that's what the infernal storm threatens: next stop Hell.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Whether we achieve what we are hoping for or not, it is important for us to keep hope. Hope is the basis of our future."

Dalai Lama

Happy Autumn...a day early.

The Sunset Effect

I don't know if William Irwin Thompson invented the idea of the Sunset Effect, though he mentions it several times in his work, without (as far as I could find) really defining it. I take it to mean that just as the dying day produces a final spectacular brightness, a dying aspect of culture lights up the sky before fading and going dark completely. He does use the idea to explain the disconcerting power of the Rabid Right, when the progress of science and culture offers possible solutions to the mortal threats the old culture has caused, but such progress is seemingly superseded politically and culturally by the regressive and reactionary ideologies of groups that time is passing by. He calls it a "farewell phenomenon."

The metaphor of the Sunset Effect may offer some comfort, and perhaps some explanation, for what's happening in U.S. politics and culture at this moment. It may be pertinent to the power of white reactionaries as their numbers dwindle while other demographic groups grow (as discussed in the previous post, White Makes Right.) It may in some sense explain the extremes of the efflorescence. I am daily amazed by just how bold are the extremes that suddenly current political and cultural leaders are stating openly, as amplified by the eager media, including progressive Internet sites. There's the not unfamiliar political extremism (it used to be getting rid of federal cabinet departments, now it's slicing away at the Constitution), but notably the racist extremism linked to an emboldened religious extremism.

In part this seems to be a final venting, an explosion of true beliefs that these folks feel the culture has suppressed, with all the power of repression unleashed. The anger over needing to keep quiet or talk in code seems to furnish a lot of the power behind this extremism, now that it's become politically permissible to say this stuff, proud and loud. In addition to the open racism (while denying that's what it is), there's a coming clean about the Christian right dogma--their God as they define God is the real one, and everybody else is wrong and probably evil--as expressed by this Tea Party candidate for the U.S. House: "But … the significant difference between the kumbaya sessions and interfaith vigils and atheist protests of the Religious Left and the Bible studies and prayer circles of the Religious Right is that our God is real."

The white Christian Right component is integral to this End of Days efflorescence, as its own politicians admit. There's another Sunset Effect component, too--the traditional manipulation of the lowest common denominator by the highest monied interests, protecting their flow of wealth derived from exploiting people and the planet, including the fossil fuel industries eking out the last billions before they deplete themselves and kill off the life of the planet. Notably, President Obama last week named them as insidiously attempting to take over U.S. democracy, a pretty strong assertion that in other times would have resounded more than it did. Though statistics so far back him up, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for media to blow any whistles on corporate millions secretly empowering political extremism, since the same media are the chief financial beneficiaries of this spending. If it weren't for billions spent on political advertising, much of the media as we know it would disappear.

The Sunset Effect may be some solace in explaining why even the most outrageous views and antics don't seem to slow the momentum of these extremists. But there are probably less metaphorical reasons. The rise of the Tea Party extremism--which has yet to prove itself in electoral tests, by the way, beyond intra-party primaries--is inextricably bound to ongoing shifts in the U. S. media of public information. For almost a century, Americans have received political and cultural information--and importantly, absorbed political and cultural clues--through a relatively small number of large media outlets they shared in common (as well as smaller, special interest outlets.) This was particularly true in the television age of three national networks.

Now there are no media sources of information Americans have in common, and all the media are special interests. In particular, the ideological and political power of Fox News is a new factor in this age, joining the somewhat dwindling power of Rabid Right talk radio beyond Rush Limbaugh. Nobody in America gets more air time than Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Not the President, not any elected official or any progressive on any issue. The rest of the media plays to their agenda, either supporting or opposing it, but always amplifying it and feeding off it. Add to that the need for corporate money by all the traditional media running scared, plus the financial need of new media to expand and take their place.

Various polls and studies conclude that Fox's audience is overwhelmingly white, old and Rabid Right wing, and that they pay attention to no other news media but Fox. It is the Sunset Effect itself blossoming on the screen. But the moment is dangerous. This year is clearly some kind of culmination, a purging of poisons. But it may infect the body politic, and eventually kill the host. Politically, it's a fight between the rapid march to Armageddon fostered by the Rabid Right and the slow, painful change begun by President Obama. As Obama said Sunday, "The last election was a changing of the guard. Now we need to guard the change.” Whether Americans have the patience to continue on this path is a test of political maturity, the kind that Americans have flunked repeatedly in the past couple of decades. But the darkness gets ever closer.

Emerson for the Day

"I lose days determining how hours should be spent."

Emerson

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight."

Tom Stoppard

Jumpers

Emerson for the Day

“The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.”
Emerson

Photo: Emerson's house in Concord, from the NY Times story on the new caretakers. I can't help but wonder how Emerson would react. But couldn't miss the opportunity to really make this Emerson of the day.

White Makes Right

For white dominance in America, it's the end of days. That's the demographic truth. And for a certain segment of white America, it's a cause of fierce fear.

Among those exploiting it is Newt Gingrich, first with this "Final Struggle" retread video and lately with his jibe that President Obama's worldview is "Kenyan, anticolonial" (to which Obama should reply, no--it's American anticolonial.") Why I single him out here is the imagery--there's pale powder puffy Newt with the super-whitest woman you can imagine, even whiter than Mrs. McCain. I don't know if this is the new wife that Newt left his old wife on her deathbed for--that was a long time ago now--but her bright whiteness seems even enhanced in this photo.

So what's that all about? Few people in America are ever going to admit to being racially prejudiced, and some of them are mad about being censored that way. There are a lot of white people who may not even admit it to themselves. But it's so clearly behind so much of the emotion and so many of the phenomena leading up to the 2010 election.

It twists together several strands. There's the economic fear that regularly gets projected onto the newest race or nationality in the labor market, especially at the bottom. So that's the anti-Mexican immigrant piece, that gets fueled by those folks being brown, not white. (It was the same in earlier downturns, when the emnity was turned on blacks. In the 80s it was an undercurrent in the fear of urban crime, cf. Willy Horton.)

There's the Christian Rabid Right, that sees their brand of Christianity as the only truth, and therefore Islam as inherently wrong and now evil. It helps that Muslims tend to be brown or black. So there's the Islamaphobia element, currently the ugliest and most virulent.

And at the center of this perfect storm is Barack Obama, the first black President who looks a little too much like Malcolm X, and with his brownish skin color, a little too much like a Muslim. He's driving these folks crazy, and there's really very little he can do about it.

Because for them, when President Obama talks about the American Dream as opportunity to move up to the middle class, get a good job, educate your kids, he's talking about paying special attention to blacks and browns. They believe that's his agenda--special treatment for non-whites. And taxing white people to pay for it. That's the country they're taking back---the white country of white people.

These folks are a small minority of the soon to be white minority. But they are loud, and thanks to conflict-hungry media with no sense of proportion, just greed, plus the new politics of constant campaign season, they are what the media talks about--because that's what the media now does mostly, it talks and talks, offering opinion after opinion-- off-the-top-of-my-head, first thing out of my mouth, as well as plenty from the other end--with little patience for presenting or evaluating facts, and certainly for perspective.

The good thing is that while the so-called Independents (who generally speaking are the most easily influenced, ill-informed and generally brainless bunch still able to find a voting booth) swell their numbers in polls, their ranks haven't grown so much as revealed themselves. The voting public has not changed so radically since 2008--it's that so-called "enthusiasm gap" that's the problem. If the same people vote in 2010 as voted in 2008, Congress stays Dem, and the white crazies stay out of power, until they gradually die off. (Here's a cogent piece on why the enthusiasm gap matters.)

The bad thing is if their Last Stand becomes the apocalypse. If the proud-to-be-prejudiced, wish I was even more ignorant, thinking with my Rabid Right reptile brain, all intolerant Christian all the time, climate crisis denying, white supremacist Tea Party crowd becomes the balance of power in the U.S. Congress, the next two years could be devastating to the future, as well as providing us with the familiarly insane present we remember all too well from the not distant enough past.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"One day she woke up understanding clear as the air that as long as a person was willing to forgo credit, there were very few limits on the good it became possible to do."

Thomas Pynchon

Against the Day

Painting by Georgia O'Keefe

The Island

From the New York Times:

Given the vitriolic opposition now to the proposal to build a Muslim community center two blocks from ground zero, one might say something else has been destroyed: the realization that Muslim people and the Muslim religion were part of the life of the World Trade Center.

Opponents of the Park51 project say the presence of a Muslim center dishonors the victims of the Islamic extremists who flew two jets into the towers. Yet not only were Muslims peacefully worshiping in the twin towers long before the attacks, but even after the 1993 bombing of one tower by a Muslim radical, Ramzi Yousef, their religious observance generated no opposition

“We weren’t aliens,” Mr. Abdus-Salaam, 60, said in a telephone interview from Florida, where he moved in retirement. “We had a foothold there. You’d walk into the elevator in the morning and say, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ to one construction worker and five more guys in suits would answer, ‘Aleikum salaam.’ ”

One of those men in suits could have been Zafar Sareshwala, a financial executive for the Parsoli Corporation, who went to the prayer room while on business trips from his London office. He was introduced to it, he recently recalled, by a Manhattan investment banker who happened to be Jewish.

“It was so freeing and so calm,” Mr. Sareshwala, 47, said in a phone conversation from Mumbai, where he is now based. “It had the feel of a real mosque. And the best part is that you are in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City, the World Trade Center — and you had this island of spiritualism. I don’t think you could have that combination anywhere in the world.”
......
Such memories have been overtaken, though, by others. Mr. Siby’s cousin and roommate, a chef named Abdoul-Karim Traoré, died at Windows on the World on Sept. 11, as did at least one other Muslim staff member, a banquet server named Shabir Ahmed from Bangladesh.

Fekkak Mamdouh, an immigrant from Morocco who was head waiter, attended a worship service just weeks after the attacks that honored the estimated 60 Muslims who died. Far from being viewed as objectionable, the service was conducted with formal support from city, state and federal authorities, who arranged for buses to transport imams and mourners to Warren Street.

There, within sight of the ruins, they chanted salat al-Ghaib, the funeral prayer when there is not an intact corpse.

“It is a shame, shame, shame,” Mr. Mamdouh, 49, said of the Park51 dispute. “Sometimes I wake up and think, this is not what I came to America for. I came here to build this country together. People are using this issue for their own agenda. It’s designed to keep the hate going.”

Emerson for the Day

"In the long run men hit only what they aim at."

Thoreau

photo: Mars surface from orbit

Time to Get to Work

President Obama's Labor Day speech in Milwaukee made news and ignited the progressive blogosphere, first for his delivery of its fighting rhetoric and spirited defense, and second for the proposal he unveiled, to spend $50 billion this year on jobs for infrastructure projects--roads, railways and runways. In about forty minutes he revived Democratic hopes for 2010--and pledged to continue making his case all across the country.

Two quick observations: The infrastructure proposal caught the media and everybody else by surprise. Nothing about it had leaked, so analysts scrambled to evaluate it. That surprise also helped inspire immediate praise on the progressive blogs, with few if any complaints that it wasn't enough.

Second, there were some new rhetorical flourishes in the speech. Obama's inserted line about special interests ( "They talk about me like a dog") got the most immediate attention, but dubbing the Republicans as the party of "No We Can't" is likely to have more lasting utility. But it's clear that some commentators simply haven't been listening all that closely to what he's been saying in the past weeks and months, noting turns of phrase he's field-tested before. Did President Obama suddenly find his speech-making genius again? Or did commentators just pay attention for once? Probably a little of both. But if the name of the game this year is voter enthusiasm, the Democrats just took a big step towards getting some.

Vacation's Over...

Click collage to enlarge...

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"The real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals...The true war is a celebration of markets."

Thomas Pynchon

Gravity's Rainbow

Labor Daze

So it's Labor Day, a national holiday since 1894. So what will I be doing? Working, of course.

I'll be working partly because others will be. I can't interview unless somebody agrees to be interviewed--in this case, because she's too busy during the official work week. I have a meeting because others will be there, and the grant proposal is due soon.

Though Labor Day--like a lot of holidays--now has very little to do with its origins (more about them in a sec), this year it's the occasion for opining on the economy. Which in case you haven't heard is pretty bad. President Obama (backed by some recent numbers) says it's improving, though not fast enough, and he will announce several proposals this week. The Republicans will be against them, progressive Democrats will be disappointed they don't go far enough. Paul Krugman's column of a few days ago seems the best summary of where we've been and where we are, and it points out the basic ironies. First, that Obama's Recovery Act is looking to have been too small, although it was the biggest he could get through Congress, and arguably what is needed now is another infusion of job stimulus money, although Congress will never pass it, partly if not wholly because Republican opposition is guaranteed. As Krugman writes," if he[Obama] came out for motherhood, the G.O.P. would declare motherhood un-American."

Krugman thinks President Obama's proposals should be bold anyway, just to force the GOPers to own up to opposing them. That's one political theory of how it might play out, but it's not the only one.

Anyway, everybody's got advice. Robert Reich, for example. President Obama keeps repeating that this is a long term process but people do eat--and vote--in the short term. Nevertheless, as TIME noted, the Recovery Act is going to transform the American economy--just not right away. Its investment in a green future is paying dividends in the present and will pay even more in the next several years, but the report that caught my eye suggests that green jobs of a certain kind can do even more to revive the economy. This Center for American Progress study finds that: retrofitting just 40 percent of the residential and commercial building stock in the United States would create 625,000 sustained full-time jobs over a decade, spark $500 billion in new investments to upgrade 50 million homes and office buildings, and generate as much as $64 billion a year in cost savings for U.S. ratepayers.

Labor Day is also the traditional start of the election season, though that's now 24/7/365. The economy may be the excuse, but this campaign (if not the election itself) is shaping up to be a kind of climax of psychosis--the stoking and organizing of fear, pretty blatantly using the forbidden and hence more powerful undercurrent of fears focused on our first black President--in support of ignorance and lies, otherwise known as the GOP agenda. That's another irony of the Krugman column-- the GOPers who opposed the Recovery Act because it would spark inflation and kill the stock market were proven utterly wrong. So far, polls and those who interpret them claim this doesn't matter. People aren't mad at them just because they were dead wrong.

Will GOPers win back Congress with the same promises that, enacted during the Shrub years, ruined the economy? That's this year's bet, and it has a chance of winning, enhanced if not totally created by the very wealthy who profited the most in the Shrub years and have the most to lose from fairer taxes and a green economy with prosperity for more than just them. Newscorpse and its Fox in the henhouse of supposed news media don't bother hiding their manipulations anymore, and revelations of the billionaires behind the Tea Party movement are merely the most recent.

Which leads us back to the origin of Labor Day. It was a response to the slaughter of American workers by the U.S. military and U.S, marshals during labor union strikes against one of the most powerful economic interests of the day, the railroads. To avert something like a class war, Congress rushed through the Labor Day proclamation by unanimous vote. There were still plenty of bloody battles ahead for labor unions until they achieved better pay and working conditions...for a few decades anyway. Now it's a bloodless class war, in which workers are all but defenseless. The rich are getting immensely richer, and everyone else is getting poorer, with no shots fired except for the ones fired usually by members of the American underclass chiefly at members of foreign underclasses, who fire back. And the rich find ways to get richer still. A lot of people are unemployed, and GOPers want to let them starve. Nearly everyone else is working more hours and more days and more years, for less payment. But hey, there's this extra day off. Sort of.

This is also the traditional end of summer, and once again, it doesn't quite work--at least where I am. We had our warmest day of the year last week--almost 80-- and we look forward to what is often the warmest, sunniest time of the year here, in September. So: no farewell to summer cookout, no day off anyway, in a country apparently no wiser about falling for demagogues and fearmongers, or TV happy faces and push-your-buttons commercials obscuring the continuing rapacity of the ruling class, and their media/political pets. And happy Labor Day to you, too.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"This is our own age of exploration," she declared, "into that unmapped country waiting beyond the frontiers and seas of Time. We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we've seen. What are any of these 'utopian dreams' of ours but defective forms of time-travel?'"

Thomas Pynchon

Against the Day

photo: from the Cassini spacecraft near Saturn: Saturn's moon Janus in the distance, its moon Rhea in the foreground, partially obscured by Saturn's rings. Photo 2010.

Turning the Page

In his Oval Office address, President Obama called war "the darkest of human creations." On Tuesday night, he ended one. Turning the page doesn't mean ignoring the lessons that must be learned. And of course, fighting and dying in Iraq and other places hasn't ended. But it has lessened significantly, and many people there and here can turn back to an emphasis on life. And that alone is worth celebrating. From President Obama's speech:

"So tonight, I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.

This was my pledge to the American people as a candidate for this office. Last February, I announced a plan that would bring our combat brigades out of Iraq, while redoubling our efforts to strengthen Iraq’s Security Forces and support its government and people.

That’s what we’ve done. We’ve removed nearly 100,000 U.S. troops from Iraq. We’ve closed or transferred to the Iraqis hundreds of bases. And we have moved millions of pieces of equipment out of Iraq.


The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of Iraq in the hands of its people. We have sent our young men and women to make enormous sacrifices in Iraq, and spent vast resources abroad at a time of tight budgets at home. We’ve persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people -- a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it’s time to turn the page.

Unfortunately, over the last decade, we’ve not done what’s necessary to shore up the foundations of our own prosperity. We spent a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits. For too long, we have put off tough decisions on everything from our manufacturing base to our energy policy to education reform. As a result, too many middle-class families find themselves working harder for less, while our nation’s long-term competitiveness is put at risk.

And so at this moment, as we wind down the war in Iraq, we must tackle those challenges at home with as much energy, and grit, and sense of common purpose as our men and women in uniform who have served abroad. They have met every test that they faced. Now, it’s our turn. Now, it’s our responsibility to honor them by coming together, all of us, and working to secure the dream that so many generations have fought for -- the dream that a better life awaits anyone who is willing to work for it and reach for it.

Our most urgent task is to restore our economy, and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work. To strengthen our middle class, we must give all our children the education they deserve, and all our workers the skills that they need to compete in a global economy. We must jumpstart industries that create jobs, and end our dependence on foreign oil. We must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines, and nurture the ideas that spring from our entrepreneurs. This will be difficult. But in the days to come, it must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as President."

Remember: Cry Havoc in Iraq

[Third of three posts]
Tonight President Obama will announce the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq. At this moment it is instructive to remember how all this began, seven years ago. It began with the bombing of Baghdad, a massive American bombing campaign of a city and a country that had not made war on anyone, including the United States. It was one more escalation in the morally indefensible history of bombing, and it presaged everything that's happened since in that part of the world.

The history of such bombing is considered in the following piece, published in the San Francisco Chronicle several weeks before the Baghdad bombing began, and the evil of bombing, culminating in our time with nuclear bombs, is the thread that runs through my three essays posted here in the past two days, which all originally appeared in the SF Chronicle.

In this piece I refer to what was a new and little known phrase then, but which has since become a cliched description of this bombing campaign: Shock and Awe. It was supposed to break the will of whoever the Bush administration considered the enemy, but it did not.

I also quoted the famous lines from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war." I focused on the "havoc" in this piece, but in other writing of the time I emphasized the rest of the quotation. The point of the metaphor of the dogs of war is not only that a pack of dogs are indiscriminately violent but that once loosed, they are very difficult to control or to stop. A war is much easier to start than stop, and it begs the question of how many wars it will take before people figure that out.

Once this war started it was clear to some of us at least, that it would go on for a long time. And it has, with immensely and deeply destructive consequences to the U.S. as well as to Iraq. It has eroded us morally, depleted us financially, destroyed thousands of people physically and psychologically, and distorted our politics. We don't seem to have learned much from it either. If for no other reason than the resources of all kinds it stole from facing up to the double challenges of the Climate Crisis, it has deeply wounded the future.

February 2003

When Islamic armies were the most powerful in the world, conquerors of Asia Minor and North Africa, and poised at the gates of Europe in the 8th century, Abu Hanifa, founder of a school of law in the city of Baghdad, proposed that the killing, maiming and raping of civilian noncombatants in war be forbidden. It was one of the first attempts to codify some kind of moral and legal restraints on civilized societies engaged in the dangerously uncivilized practice of warfare.

If and when war comes to Iraq, it will likely feature the relentless and perhaps unprecedented bombing of Baghdad. According to CBS News and other sources, the United States is considering implementing a strategy called "Shock and Awe," developed in 1996. The plan could result in at least 300 Tomahawk cruise missiles raining down on Baghdad in just the first day of an aerial campaign - more than were used on all targets in the entire Gulf War. And the plan calls for an equal or greater number on the second day as well, up to 800 total, each capable of carrying 1,000 pounds of explosives. There was no estimate of how many days the bombing would continue.

Although missiles would likely focus on infrastructure including electricity and water supplies, an average of one missile striking a city of 5 million inhabitants every four minutes around the clock could kill and maim thousands of civilians.

"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," according to an unnamed Pentagon official quoted by CBS. "The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before."

The prospect of war in Iraq is crowded with moral as well as political questions, with multiple possibilities for ethical outrages of stunning proportions. But the continuous bombing of a city of civilians would probably be the first that confronts the watching world.

In A History of Bombing (published by New Press in 2001, and forthcoming this spring in paperback), Sven Lindqvist follows three main threads: the technology and use of aerial bombing in history, the attempts to deal with the moral implications of its use against civilian populations (Abu Hanifa is one example he cites), and social attitudes toward bombing found in sources such as popular fiction.

The historical parallels to the current prospect as well as the ironies are disquieting. The impact of the "shock and awe" strategy is meant to be on hearts and minds: to destroy the enemy's will, and mental and psychological ability to resist. But bombing's ability to terrorize - the sudden explosive death from the sky without warning - was one of the first effects to be observed, noted in 13th century China. It has often been a prime strategy of bombing, according to Lindquist, used extensively by European colonial powers in Africa, India and Asia.

Bombing is especially terrifying when used on the helpless. At first it was shelling from ships far offshore (which is how the United States bombed Nicaragua in 1854), then bombs dropped from airplanes. Bombing was a cost-effective way of keeping subjugated populations in line. Baghdad was a British target more than once in the 1920s.

As airplanes, bombs and cities all got bigger, moralists and diplomats negotiating the international rules of war and definitions of war crimes struggled to keep up. Several prohibitions against air warfare and the bombing of cities were proposed, and some were signed, except by the major powers capable of the bombing. Well into the 20th century, bombing was considered not so bad if the victims were of "inferior races." Some authors wrote glowingly of bombing as a way to civilize the world by permanently subjugating or even wiping out these races.

European bombing gradually got closer and closer to home, until the German military on behalf of Franco tested new kinds of bombs by dropping them on cities in Spain. Japan bombed civilian cities in China. Then in the 1940s, bombing of even the capital cities of combatant nations - Berlin, London, Tokyo - became a normal instrument of warfare, finally leading to the annihilation of the undefended cities of Hamburg and Dresden by British saturation firebombing, and of Hiroshima and much of Nagasaki by the U.S. atomic bomb.

By that time, terror was not the only result of bombing. Fifty thousand civilians were killed in a single night in Hamburg, most of them women, children and elderly. Twice that number died in Dresden. Two atom bombs did fill Japan with shock and awe, and killed several hundred thousand civilians in the process.

There are various strategic arguments for bombing campaigns that dovetail with apparent moral concerns, usually involving shortening a war's duration or substituting for ground assaults, thus saving lives, especially the lives of the side doing the bombing.

When facing the possibility that this war would unleash chemical, biological or nuclear weapons that have been largely absent from warfare for decades due to international taboos of one kind or another, it may seem quixotic to argue that bombing of civilian populations should be regarded as an evil in itself, and beyond the pale for nations that desire any sort of international relations. But it seems morally obtuse that there is a stronger taboo against assassinating a declared enemy's head of a state than against slaughtering babies in their beds. Surely bombing should be a last resort, not the first.

For even if the historical parallels are coincidental and not disturbing echoes of residual racism and empire-building, the bombing of Baghdad to begin this war would have a terrorizing effect on more than its residents. In Shakespeare's time, there was another word for the terror, the shock and awe that accompany a war without moral limits. The word was "havoc," as in the famous quotation from Julius Caesar, "Cry 'Havoc', and let slip the dogs of war."

The bombing and havoc may already be starting by the time you read these words, although according to Los Angeles Times reporter Doyle McManus on the Washington Week in Review, "You can pretty well mark on your calendar March 15. " It's the date formerly known as the Ides of March.

Postscript: The bombing of Baghdad and Iraq began on March 19. It involved more than 500 cruise missiles. There is still disagreement on the number of civilian deaths.