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"Italian police said Tuesday that letter bombs were sent to three embassies in Rome by Italian anarchists in solidarity with jailed Greek anarchists, who had asked their comrades to organize and coordinate a global "revolutionary war." --from the Associated Press, via USA Today.


So now the anarchists are getting organized. Beg Pardon?


I mean, are they going to form clubs? Political parties? Who's in charge of the anarchist organization? And what are the By-Laws going to look like? In fifty years, will our grandchildren be trooping to the polls to vote for the Anarchist candidate?


Has the world always seemed to get weird, as one gets older? Or am I a special case?


I can't even decide if this is Fop, or something else.

Military Commissions, and Omissions

The morning paper brings news that the government’s initial prosecution under the new and improved military commission process for Guantanamo is not going so well. It seems that the first up is a young man who was “captured” –laying on a battlefield, badly wounded—at the age of fifteen, and subsequently charged with tossing a grenade that killed an American soldier. This was in early 2002. the young man has grown up in the Cuban prison camp. He was threatened, implicitly, with gang rape in an American prison if he did not confess (the interrogator has admitted to this in court), so he confessed. But it seems that certain backward parts of the world look down on such practices as torture, or imprisoning children, or waiting eight years and longer to bring an accused to trial.

The Republicans accused the Obama administration, fifteen minutes after Bush left office, with coddling terrorists because, the military commissions Guantanamo inhabitants were being tried and convicted (the latter being considered a natural concomitant to the former, in Republican-speak). So the Attorney General arranged, with the endorsement of the Mayor of New York, to conduct civilian trials in federal court in Manhattan. The Republicans, though, objected to this as being way too dangerous, like the plan, also scuttled for the same reason, to house the remaining Guantanamo “detainees” in a rural prison in Illinois that is otherwise unoccupied. It’s funny how those who are always crowing about how tough we Yanks are, how “these colors don’t run,” etc., find it too dangerous to house fifteen year-old non-English speakers* in maximum security prisons on American soil.  

*Actually, Omar Khadr, the fifteen year-old in question, being a Canadian, probably speaks English at least as well as G. W. Bush.

So, no trials in the tried and true US court system; it’s back to military tribunals. But the tribunals are stalled because of the “danger to lower Manhattan” controversy that basically shut down the entire process, except for the initial five who had been selected for military trials; and as luck would have it, the case that progressed most expeditiously happened to be that of a fifteen year-old who speaks English and so can be quoted in the press as taking offense at being offered a minimal sentence just so he would agree to a plea deal and spare the government the embarrassment of trying him. He argues that he is not guilty –the nerve of this guy!

And, as a sort of final indignity to the entire sad affair, the Obama administration’s pledge of transparency has been rather damaged in the performance by the Pentagon’s decision to bar from the proceedings two reporters. The reporters were eventually allowed back, but according to the Times they “had to acknowledge in writing to the Defense Department that they understood that they had violated military rules by disclosing the identity of an Army interrogator, even though his name was already publicly known.” So there you have it: it is an offense against the Defense Department’s rules “to disclose information that the military deems “protected,” even if that information has already been disclosed” as reported in the Times.

Why is all this important? Because if the Department of Defense can make its own rules, separate and apart from the US Constitution or other laws, it is a short step to go from that to starting wars on flimsy pretexts, conducting secret operations untroubled by Congressional supervision, conducting military operations, abductions and imprisonment without disclosure of the identity of those imprisoned or even the fact that they have been taken into custody, and similar operations in clandestine fashion within the US as well as elsewhere in the world.  Oh, wait.

The Internet Makes Possible So Much

But it makes one thing impossible, and that is to escape the conclusion that the average American is not only marginally literate, at best; he is unutterably, inalterably, stupid.

Don't agree? Try reading, for an hour, the comments posted to virtually any news item displayed on Yahoo.

They don't call it "yahoo" for nothing.

An Open Letter

Dear Representative Stupak:

Well, you have come out, forcefully, against the latest version of Congressional Health Care Sausage, by stating that you will not vote for the bill that might allow reconciliation of the House and Senate versions, and so produce at long last a giant step along the road to health care reform.

Your opposition is principled: the Senate bill (which the House would pass, under the current plan) provides for a taxpayer subsidy of abortion; at least, you think it does. You oppose abortion. End of story; end of debate.

I believe your position represents the greatest single threat to the continued prosperity of American democracy. That's right: greater than the "socialism" that is so feared by the wingnuts, greater than the moral hazard risk that the financial machinations of the past year have produced, greater even than the destructive, anti-democratic United States Senate and its cloture rules.*

Don't get me wrong: I am all for principle. I believe we should all live our lives according to our principles. Unfortunately, you seem to want to force me to live my life according to your principles, which is coercive beyond any concept that can be reconciled with American democracy.

My principles include an opposition to war. Also, an opposition to killing other human beings.

Other citizens have principled objections to the teaching of evolution in public schools, to the lack of religious symbols in public places, to divorce, to the charging of interest, to the eating of pork, to gay marriage or any gay association at all (indeed, it appears that some Americans have supported an effort to make homosexual association in Uganda punishable by death). We are a diverse country; we have diverse views. Normal citizens advocate their views in the public sphere according to their preferences.

Unfortunately, I cannot affect, in significant fashion, the fact that the United States participates in war, or that it devotes nearly a trillion dollars per year to its military establishment. I cannot even effectively prevent the U.S., and its states, from executing those convicted of certain crimes; even in the face of strong evidence that innocent people are still being executed in this country, I have no effective way of stopping that. I could, of course, go to great lengths personally to state my principled objections, and to publicize my views. I could write letters; and if I were persistent enough or lucky enough or rich enough, I could perhaps have my own newspaper or television program to use as a forum for this. Hell, if I were rich enough, I could buy a seat in the Congress and vote for the abolition of those things I find objectionable.

But more realistically, I could refuse, as some have done, to pay the portion of my federal income tax bill that is devoted to the military. I could chain myself to the death house fence at some state prison.

I could, in other words, take a serious personal risk, and accept the consequences, in order to assert my principles and avoid violating them even by proxy. I could go to jail to advance my cause.

Not you. You don't have to worry about personal risk: the expression of your principles comes cheap, by virtue of your position. Your big risk, I suppose, is that you might calculate incorrectly and lose an election. If you offend enough people in Washington, you might get a crappy office and less-desirable committee assignments.

I am sure that it is only a matter of time until your example prompts some red state congressman to vote against some funding bill because it threatens some child, somewhere, with exposure to a federally-financed discussion of evolution. Or perhaps some senator has a principled objection to the use of the term "Civil War" to describe The War Between The States. We can't have federal funds paying for that, can we? Or, if we oppose gay marriage, let's ban the use of federal funds to pay for the courts in Washington, D.C., now that it has legalized the practice.

You are prepared to use your opposition to something that is legal as a club with which to push your view to the detriment of us all. And there is absolutely no difference between your principled stance and a similar stance by a congressman who holds one of the other principled views mentioned above: I know it's legal, but I don't like it; so, to prevent it, I will do damage to efforts to address some other widely-perceived need.

Fine; go ahead. You are a poster child for the balkanization of American politics. If you have your way, then the Congress will do nothing. Not because nothing is needed; but because there will always be a single individual, or a small group of individuals, who happen to have the power to rob us all, to thwart our expressed ideals and goals.

In the name of principle.



*I am being precise here.

America's Army

You will be happy to learn, as was I, that version 3.0.7 of America's Army has corrected the annoying problem of weapons suddenly disappearing. In addition, grenades will now display properly, and the problem of killing oneself with a grenade has been fixed. They've even addressed the issue of player name-length!


Not that things are perfect, as one "Phoenix" posted on the AA3 blog: "Now just fix the part where I empty an entire clip into someone only to have him turn around and shoot once and kill me, and walk away without a scratch.." 


I know that would seriously upset my day.


What is this all about? Well, I must confess I came late to the subject, myself. "AA3" is, of course, the third (major) version of America's Army, a video game that is so good that it is used by the U.S. Army as a training exercise. One commentator said that, if you give the Army combat simulation training to an 18 year-old, he already knows most of it.


Video games make killing fun! And why shouldn't the ordinary foot-soldier enjoy the same convenience of killing by remote control that the pilots of drone aircraft get, sipping their coffee in Texas while destroying bad guys (and the occasional village) in Pakistan? what's the qualitative difference between killing on-screen and killing on-scene?


"Well, things aren't quite so antiseptic on a real battlefield," one reviewer cautioned. "And sometimes, in actual combat, you have to go tell your buddy's wife that his brains are scattered over some mountainside and he won't be coming home."


Bummer. Where's the reset button?

M.S.

Attending my commencement at Iowa City long ago, my father, who never went to college and had a self-made man's robust disdain for things academic, said, "Well, last year you got your B.S.* --everybody knows what that is. And now you've got your M.S: that's just More of the Same. When're you going to get your Piled higher and Deeper?"

       *Actually, it was a BA (and an MA); but even my father understood poetic license.

I seem to keep running across MS, if not PhD. A late example is the sodden, tear- and beer-stained resignation of the Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor of the state of Illinois, who, only days after his winning the primary election, was apparently discovered to have (1) abused his former wife, (2) abused steroids, presumably in a different fashion, and (3) held a knife to the throat of a former girlfriend (who, the news helpfully added, was a prostitute, although it was not made clear whether this factoid cast further  aspersions on him or, contrariwise, mitigated the offense).

The resignation took place during the Super Bowl, in a Chicago bar. And he really did cry. Scott Lee Cohen (actually sort of a cool name for a political candidate), who had been spamming me for weeks in the run-up to his unexpected electoral triumph, has seen his star fall even more rapidly than it rose. Of course, Democratic politics in Illinois are now, as always, in pretty much of a muddle: who should have the now-vacant ballot slot bestowed on him? the runner-up? the third- or fourth-place finisher, each of whom has claims to enormous, heretofore untapped, political resources that will benefit the ticket? The personal preference of the Governor?

The Lieutenant Governor-ship, an office for which one party's nominee, years ago, ran on the sole proposal that the office itself should be eliminated, has become a hot commodity, now that, for the third time in my own recollection, a former governor seems to be on his way to prison and so was, last year, relieved of his post by our alert legislators.

For me, all this was a billboard on the expressway: I felt free to ignore it, because of a recent personal decision. I no longer participate in the electoral process. After decades of patriotically voting, even in Chicago's oddly-timed and inconvenient (so as to minimize turnout and thus insulate the political machine from casual voter disgust) municipal elections, I decided this winter to dispense with that formality. As long as one senator in D.C. can thwart the electorally-expressed will of a majority of the population, and forbid the President his choice of a cabinet member, agency head, or sanitary district commissioner, who am I to presume to express my preferences by voting?

It's FOP; and having identified it, if tardily, I owe it to my self-respect to walk away from it. After all, I'm a Dapper Dan man.