The Generalisimo Swings

It’s a nice global-warming kinda New Year’s Eve morning here on the ranch, with a haze in the tree line and impending warm rain for the festivities of the coming evening. I’m barefooted, with no heat on in the house and none needed. After my morning jog through the blogs and news, some final thoughts for this guttering segment of our most “interesting” times.

As has been remarked, the picture of Saddam being prepared for his hanging by hooded men is a nearly exact parallel to the pictures of beheadings by hooded men we’ve seen since the Iraq War fell into its post invasion phase. As has been remarked, in a simple sense, the hanging of Saddam is our only clear accomplishment, unbungled*, unmitigated, just another execution. Of course it’s also been remarked that this route is littered with aspects of coverup and propaganda, like everything our current Administration attempts. There remain the ghost images, of Saddam as U.S. client, with Rumsfeld shaking his hand with U.S. chemical traces on his fingers, of the Bush I Ambassador’s assurances that, really, sure, Kuwait, noooo problemo. And there are the later images, fading like flesh rotting in the ground: starving children, crooked back-channel oil deals, out of date and missing WMD, the mystery of the banner on the air craft carrier: “Mission Accomplished.”

Some years back I watched, by accident, the execution of the Ceausescus on television. They were mad as wet hens when the men dragged them from their beds and out into their own back yard. They were shot dead still raging, and then became rumpled old rags hanging from their poles, faces slack, power vanished utterly. There was a certain clarity to it even if we’ve heard precious little of beautiful Romania since. Is Bucharest still sleeping on the Danube? How are things? Probably I’ll never have the chance to go back again; that strange concert trip will only come around once. (Bizarro update—after writing this I turned on NPR and discovered that Romania and Bulgaria are being admitted to the EU today!)

Shooting Saddam in his spider hole might have been somehow better. The fatal military assault on Uday and Xnay had at least the clarity of the riddled bodies and smoking shell holes. Summary justice is justice I believe, unless it turns out like Mystic River. One last quote from the peanut gallery: Sooo, Manuel, not feeling so bad about your 40 year sentence this morning?

When I was a kid I read lots and lots of War Comics, and listened to the news of Stalin and the myth of Hitler, and imagined that if some brave character could just go over there and shoot Uncle Joe, that would be so simple and clean and then we’ll all live in a happy better world. Instead history just unfolded as it did, and the closest we came to the ultimate abyss was perhaps the Cuban Missle Crisis, which I don’t think anyone just watching TV realized was nearly the end of the world as we knew it, the world that lead instead to Vietnam, to the assassinations, to Nixon and Watergate, to a modest, flawed glimpse in the Carter years of what a democracy might be like, before the oily surface closed back over and we returned to the universe of Republican Power. The most remarkable historical fact of this New Years Eve morning might be the talisman of Don Rumsfeld’s presence appearing and reappearing through the march of time—there he is with Nixon, and again with Jerry Ford (who gets a postal holiday on January 2 for some bizarre reason, and a second funeral—was he briefly born again?), and there Don is, now with Saddam, big smile, big glad hand, and now with his pals Cheney and Dubya, and, oh dear, Bush has fired him—but did he get to be one of the hooded lads adjusting the noose?

Who knows. Don, like Saddam and Uncle Joe, is ultimately just a man. The deeply creepy part is the question behind these people, and this never ending succession of mysterious events that substitute for something more constructive. The polar bears swim on until they drown, but it’s time for the next glittering “event,” we’ll get back to the polar bears later, when we have more time. Meanwhile, there is certainly the question of Diebold, and whether we actually get a vote, but I’m concerned that even when and if we manage to fix Diebold, far too many of us are far too in need of the kind of leadership that dismisses our concerns part and parcel with its assertion of power. It may come with the psychology we all live out, and that’s a pretty scary thought.

Consider that we all do start as children, dependent on adults, pretty much clueless as to what’s safe and what’s dangerous, learning the world to some degree with each bump and stumble. For nearly all of us, our first experience of leadership is authoritarian. This is true of our understanding of what being a leader is, as well. And one of the fundamental rules of parenting is to keep a united front. In a sense, Bill Clinton’s greatest mistake was to reveal that Presidents are actually just adults, with flaws and human failings just like all the rest of us. Beyond their usual craven pandering to power, the Republicans who tried to evict Clinton from office were surely afraid in their souls that government might be truly democratized by Clinton’s disregard of the façade of power. The laughable succession of Republican House leadership italicized the point to absurdity: anyone remember the Right Honorable Mr. Livingston, I presume? Surely his surprise when the trap door opened was nearly as great as Saddam’s, and lingers still. And the press pretty much agreed—whatever happens, do not show them the man behind the curtain.

Just as Carter was defeated by a collaboration between Iran and Reagan, so was Gore defeated by a collaboration of the press and the Republicans. Even the fundamental Separation of Powers was allowed to be winked at, just for a moment, to assure that the page be safely turned once again, and the country be set once again on the authoritarian path. Jerry Ford gets a postal holiday, and no one mentions his complicity in the slaughter of some 200 thousand East Timorese. Even the evidence—Ford and Rumsfeld in the same photograph—is ignored. Let there be holidays.

We, the people, have not developed a sense of adult responsibility strong enough to actually live in a democracy, that is, reality, for more than a few brief moments at a time. That’s what I see in the history of my lifetime. The press tells us only what we want to hear, like the boy who tells the girl he loves her as he slides his hand under her skirt, farther and farther up her thigh. Neal Cassidy wrote the book on this seduction, and he was only living in a world of bus stations and railroad tracks. He coulda been President! Because the fundamental truth is that we mostly want to live in denial, with a Leader. Our system produces “leaders” as incompetent and unthinking as George Bush because we don’t want a system that gives us power. George said “I am a War President,” and he thought that meant we would have to salute—and we did! We all believe we’re children—that’s our fundamental denial. And starting from that state of affairs, it is a fairly simple matter for those folks who understand how to lead flocks of deniers to keep the reins of power in hand. At least until we are really and truly in trouble.

Well, dang, New Year’s Eve again. Here’s the magic formula, so listen carefully: Nice I don’t need so much firewood, as I’m tired of the rattle of the saw, and I need to protect my hearing. Next summer there’ll be more ticks, and blue water to the pole. It’s a tradeoff, and somebody’s gonna make some money sailing those polar routes.

–Bill Hicks

*Oops, wrong—the hanging was definitely bungled, because it was transformed into a lynching according to information available after this posting. Bush continues to bat .000

Yes Men Video

In the interest of keeping even this snappy page of 19th Century Opinions with at least a toe or two into the 21st Century, we post a spiffy video from You Tube commenting on the current commissioners race in Chatham County, NC, about which I have commented previously (see Data Mines and Rock Quarries and Economic Secession). The spry if elderly woman speaking at the podium with such eloquence is Beth Dixon of Mt. Vernon Springs, a small community just SE of Siler City which is the proposed site of ISP-Minerals’ new quarry and granule manufacturing facility. She will live just across the street from the belching behemoth, and expects to see her lovely ‘30s era masonry dwelling cracked and wracked by the blasting and general trembling of the earth the mine will produce as a byproduct of its operations. She’ll also have her well go dry most likely and will probably breathe a whole lot more fine silicate—but what the hell, she’s old. The three men seen voting are the commissioners who were voted out in the May primary, the “yes men.” In this particular vote they’re agreeing to give ISP $3 million in tax monies because the billionaire owner of the company wants some more money. We’re all hoping the new commissioners will be more concerned with the common good. All politics is local, except when it isn’t. As Nancy Pelosi said, “we want subpoena power.” Y’all vote Nov. 7.

--Bill Hicks, Albright Township, Chatham Co.
Here's a link to the "Yes Men" clip on You Tube if you can't view it above: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY0YlX-3oBY The video was posted on October 27 by markbarroso.

Mr. DeLay Arrives on the Midnight Train

It’s depressing that our lame duck commissioners, Emerson, Outz, and Morgan, have chosen to bring Texas Republican politics to our County. Morgan must have figured out his nifty plan even prior to his decisive defeat in the primary back in the spring, since he had two years to work on it. (Not that this is a surprise really—Bunky was a Republican before he switched parties purely as a tactic.) His defeat was fair and square, just like the Connecticut Primary just past. And just like Mr. Leiberman, Bunky and cohort have a fall back plan. In fact, their plan is even slicker than Joe Leiberman running this fall as an oxymoronic “independent Democrat.”

According to the Independent Weekly (why not according to the Chatham News; well, that’s another story I guess), our lame duck county commissioners have voted to redraw district lines in such a way as to pit two elected commissioners, Mr. Barnes, and Mr. Lucier, against each other in 2008, while at the same time the same redrawing allows Mr. Morgan to run yet again from a new, presumably safer district, two years sooner than would have otherwise been the case. It’s unfortunate that the two non-lame-duck members voting against this blatantly self-serving proposal didn’t do what the fine Democratic legislators of Texas did a few years back—remove themselves to New Mexico so as to remove the possibility of a quorum. DeLay tactics deserve delay tactics dontcha know. It’s unfortunate that Messrs. Cross and Barnes were unwilling to stoop to such games. Perhaps they felt—correctly of course—that such tactics were not what they were elected to engage in.

There is another aspect to this maneuver. As well as redrawing districts—with zero input from the northeast area of Chatham where more than half the population of the county now reside—the lame ducks have also put on the ballot in November a referendum to change commissioner election in subsequent elections starting in 2008 to district by district. In other words, Morgan, Emerson, and Outz will not have to face county-wide voters next time they run. And this even though all three were at some point in the past elected county-wide, and were most recently un-elected county-wide. What’s not working?

Get the drift? Here’s the obvious, self-serving goal of these lame-ducksters. Let’s make us some safe districts and get our power back. A majority of voters in our county don’t think we did a good job, so next time we won’t let a majority of voters vote. That’s the plan, Stan. (And why the News and Observer, in an editorial on Monday, Aug. 29, on this obvious sleight of hand, was unwilling to actually characterize it as such, but simply mused about how, possibly, the lame ducks were playing slick, I’m confounded to guess. What does it take to call a spade a spade over on McDowell Street? Has that old red rooster they used run on special occasions ended up in the pot?)

Ok, thanks a bunch, Bunky. You’re one hell of a politician. You the Hammah! Single-handedly, you’re dragging a nice, basically rural, friendly county-wide community into the unnecessary divisiveness that is demolishing our national politics. Chatham County surely has a unity, a singleness of purpose, and at the least a sense of community strong enough to work together, north, south, east and west, town and countryside, black, white, and Hispanic. It’s not us again’ thems over thar. We must not allow Bunky and his ilk—including Siler City’s jesfolks AM radio editorial voice—to create divisions in the good will of our county which are otherwise nonexistent. We share a landfill, for heavens sake, not to mention the air and water. We share an area code, a school system, a big four-lane east-west highway. We will all suffer if this County returns to district-only voting for commissioner. The only beneficiaries will be Mr. Morgan, his followers, and whatever large outside business interests pull their strings. Maybe they should rename Siler City “Deadwood.”

One of the great losses, by the way, will be the erosion of electability of minority candidates such as the popular Carl Thompson. County-wise it is clear that racial bigotry no longer holds sway—thus Mr. Thompson’s recent primary victory. But in a district-only vote there is a much smaller pool of voters, and there is no black majority district. This means that tactics such as single-shot voting are nullified, and it may well be that old racial prejudices will re-emerge with decisive results. If that’s not an argument for voting against this district-only plan, I don’t know what is. It’s one of the reasons Chatham County did away with district-only voting in the first place, by the way. (And the N&O editorial got this aspect of the plan backassward.)

Or think about it this way: with county-wide voting, every commissioner cares about your vote to some extent. With district-only voting, four out of five commissioners may not care at all about your vote. Which odds do you like better? Ask the folks out in the Siler City Extra-territorial Jurisdiction who just got a quarry dropped on them by the Siler City Town Board they didn’t elect and can’t vote against next time.

November is our last opportunity to vote countywide for commissioners, should this referendum pass. The solution is obvious. Vote the damn thing down, decisively, for the pernicious, divisive monkey-wrench it really is. And be real sure that Mr. Morgan hasn’t managed to word the referendum in such a way that you have to vote yes to say no. I haven’t seen the actual wording of the statement, but I’ll guarantee Mr. Morgan and his advisors are calculating which way to write it up so as to cause the most confusion, and the most favorable outcome to themselves. Like Woody Guthrie said, “some will rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen.”

--Bill Hicks, Albright Township, Chatham Co.
[photo from www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/pcoll/01chatham/chatham.html ]

A Fatal Loss of Jo-mentum

There will of course be all you care to read on the meaning of Joe Leiberman’s primary loss yesterday in Connecticut. Here’s my two cents: The Democratic Party is showing some signs of recovery.

As someone remarked (I can’t keep all the remarkers straight), it’s not the “Democrat Party” as the Republicans keep trying to assert, it’s the Democratic Party, a party that is named for a process. There’s a lot to that statement, including the observation that if you pound some sort of falsehood into people’s heads long enough, they start acting as though it was true. In fact, at its best, the Democratic Party does stand for process, for change, for development. And the Republicans do stand pretty much for stasis. That, after all, is the conservative way: just don’t mess with it.

That is why in the Connecticut Primary just past, it was the entrenched, the established, the incumbent, who rallied round Joe Lieberman. Established power tends to become conservative. Joe himself exemplifies the tendency—not accepting his own party’s rejection of him in a democratic primary election, he immediately announced he would run as an “independent.” Which in real terms means he has switched parties, because there are only two parties in U.S. politics, like it or not, and the Democratic Party has chosen Ned Lamont as their candidate for Senate in a democratic primary. Incumbency thus trumps party.

This is also why so many pundits are rallying around Lieberman. Things are good for pundits. Cokie, for example, has a nice gig on ABC Sunday, as well as a place commenting any time she likes on NPR. Why rock the boat. She has good, personal reasons to toss out the old “Oh gawd, it’s the McGovern crowd again,” jive. If the world remains as cynical and static as it’s been since Reagan, Cokie will be able to say pretty much the same cynical, static things she’s been making a good living on since she was just a smart kid with a primo political family behind her. It’s like bad teachers and old lesson plans. The first few years you have to think, but it gets easier, and then you can spend the evenings watching TV like everyone else.

But what happened in Connecticut was, actual voters came out and said, “we’re fed up with this shit, it’s time for a real change.” That is, for a change the voters were not manipulated. Partly that was because Lieberman, unlike Rove/Cheney/Bush, probably didn’t have his whole soul into the fear game. In the Connecticut Primary, Lieberman didn’t run full tilt on his war platform, or his right-wing Supreme Court Justice support platform, or his vote for Alberto Gonzales, the man who brought us Abu Ghraib, platform. Perhaps this was because mostly Democrats actually were the voting block in the primary. That was a real problem for Joe. Statistical vote-ratings aside, he had become a Republican. (As NOW told Jane Hamsher, “we don’t count cloture votes.” So much for statistics.)

At a deeper level of manipulation, we might examine for a moment the original kiss of Bush that started Lieberman on the road to ruin. The resonance to the Judas’ Kiss is surely obvious, and one wonders if Rove prepped George on this opportunity to taint one of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate (at least on paper; after all, Gore was out of politics and Leiberman was the veep nominee in 2000), or if perhaps this is George's political instinct in action--no words, just a perfect moment to nail a potential opponent, the cowboy intuitive quickdraw. Certainly Lieberman had already supported Bush policy at every important turn, and from his point of view the kiss simply annointed: he was in the in- crowd; “he loves me, he loves me.” It was probably only Lieberman's own political instincts which kept him from kissing George back. Certainly Joe displayed, in the coming months, no inclination to reconsider his support for Bush and company, and his cloture vote for Alito cast the final die for many Democrats. Joe had to go. But it's still win/win for Rove in the sense that, at any rate, a potentially formidable opponent is now defanged. If Joe should win in November, it will be as a Republican, not as a Democrat. That's the reality because it's a two-party system we have, and apparently Rove has already sent word to Joe that his counsel is available. Now it’s up to the Democratic Party to keep the ball in their court, to craft deeper victories out of this awakening electorate.

But make no mistake, it’s going to be fear city from now till November. Lamont is a serious wake-up call for Mr. Rove, and he has millions of voters who live in fear 24/7. He also has about 90% of the pundit class at his service—all the Cokies and Broders, not to mention the David Brooks—who are as afraid of being sidelined as irrelevant as they are of any more substantial policy shifts in the government. You will hear every other day about how Democrats like Lamont are going to bring the troops home from Iraq immediately if not sooner, while at the same time they will be fomenting presidential impeachment from the get-go. And of course the Lamonts are going to be fine with Gay Marriage and Euthanasia and Legalized Marijuana. And they might even take back some of those tax cuts to the very well to do who, by virtue of their wealth and status, are the real ruling class of this country. Oh, and Lamont is a turncoat too, since he (just like Joe and most of the others in the Senate) is a “millionaire” not to mention a member of the J.P. Morgan family, don’tcha know.

As far as Rove/Cheney/Bush themselves, well, they have a lot of options. They are already fanning the flames of a wider Middle East War, as are Syria and Iran. By October we may be watching tank battles, air strikes, and missile exchanges all across the Middle East, and we might be looking at $5 gas as well. There will be endless talk of staying the course. Just yesterday I heard a Republican Pollster on NPR say that while Americans view the Iraq War as a disaster and a failure, only one in five Americans want to bring the troops home now. If Rove can translate Lamont’s message into “Bring the Troops Home Now,” Lieberman may yet win in November. Worse, Republicans may manage to maintain control of both houses of Congress. At the moment the Rubber Stamp Congress is at work on a new bill which redefines war crimes in such a way as to excuse Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Just to be on the safe side.

But Rove’s fear, and incumbent fear, has a basis in this truth, just expressed in the Connecticut Primary. The voters up there just woke up and said, “we’ve had a damn-‘nough!” We sure have. We’ve had a stolen election in 2000, another probably stolen one in ’04, a “war of choice” started and continued on false pretenses, a Supreme Court that is likely to erode Roe V. Wade incrementally until nothing is left but a meaningless husk, and perhaps most dangerous of all, a new imperial Presidency, arisen out of the ashes of the Nixon debacle by old Nixonians—Cheney and Rumsfeld, and others—who have blown on those discredited ashes till they burst yet again into flames that threaten the basic legal framework which has held the country together since 1789, the Checks and Balances. George Bush scoffs at Congress and redefines laws at his whim, and his lawyers offer him the justification of the “fact” that “we are at war,” a war on terror.

Well hell, we didn’t need to declare a war on terror, we already had the war on drugs, didn’t we? I know we lost the war on poverty, but whatever. For these people, these “Rethuglicans,” real democracy is too dangerous for America. It’s as outmoded as the quaint Geneva Conventions Mr. Gonzales brushed away when he presented his fine arguments for torture. And he seems to be such a nice man on TV. Just like Mr. Lieberman. Who knows what will happen if someone new actually gets some power, or a voice? Stick with the incumbents.

All I can say is, don’t buy it. Surely enough people are fed up, at this point, to give democracy a chance one more time. There’s a Democratic Party on the ballot. Vote for the process.

–Bill Hicks

Photo credit: Gerald Herbert/AP