"The Surge is Working"

I've always been pretty sure that the apparent peace in Iraq (peace without progress, to coin a phrase) was going to fall apart this April. However, I had thought this because we've been told troop drawdowns would have to begin then. More recently, however, Bush and Petraeus have found ways to keep troop strength at around 150,000 for the indefinite near-term (pre-surge, in early 2007, the level was around 130,000: at its peak in November, it had reached almost 170,000).

So the current re-eruption of violence in Baghdad and Basra doesn't have much to do with the "surge", yea or nay. Which is much scarier, right?, because that means it's systemic.

First bear in mind some of the very basic demographics of prewar Iraq. It was a majority (two-thirds) Shia nation, ruled by a Sunni minority (Saddam). And it's Arabs throughout: unlike neighbor Iran, whose population is also majority Shiite but ethnically Persian.

Well, those Iraqi Sunnis have largely been evicted, certainly from Baghdad. For years now they've been getting funny little notes slipped under their doors - "Get packed and be gone in a week, or you will soon star in our next beheading DVD." So Sunnis make up a lot of the 2-million-plus refugee crisis crammed up against Jordan and Syria (a crisis we don't hear so much about in the press).

This "Shia Power" movement, if you will, has been abetted especially in the past year by us. One of the ways we've been trying to clamp down on violence over there, in addition to the surge, has been to co-opt Shiite militias by paying them to keep their neighborhoods peaceful. Of course, since our money is flowing through the corrupt and ontologically-questionable Iraqi government, none of these folks has actually been getting paid. So the last best glimmer of cooperative spirit we'd seen from these Shia groups is falling back to its default "death to America" state.

This video from the Guardian UK is illuminating and disturbing (particularly the bit about people murdered by being buried up to their necks and then abandoned).

And now we see these Shiite militias increasingly fighting each other for power, as well as fighting the Iraqi army (basically another very large Shiite militia). Note clearly that none of this has the slightest thing to with with Al Queda in Iraq - an extremely minor player - which (a) comprises a couple thousand fighters at best, and (b) is Sunni. Sunnis aren't faring well in Iraq right now.

Intra-Shiite strife in Iraq is going to get a lot worse before it ever gets better. So if indeed it's true that John McCain (who appears not to know the difference between Shia and Sunni) is staking his presidential run on the success of the surge, then I think we can look forward to President Obama* next January.



*Because Hillary can't win anymore. Or if she does, it will be through such extreme methods that the Democratic party will be cleft in twain and we'll be looking at the rise of the Greens.

P.S. to my "*" -- Yes, this means I was wrong in January when I predicted Hillary would win the nomination. It's fun passing out armchair precognitions, and I enjoyed doing it. But Megan was correct back then to comment that there was plenty of time left in the primaries. The only thing I would say in my defense - which really isn't even in my defense, since I'm claiming I was wrong - is that I was inspired to my prediction by a sense of Hillary's... uhm, what word to use?, let's go with... unrelentingness. And she has surely borne herself out on that count.

Here's a topic for you: prison rape

1 of 32 of us lives in prison, which beats any society in human history (Europe imprisons seven times fewer of its people as a percentage of its population). One of every ten African American males lives behind bars. I've always had a strange, fascinated dread of prison - never mind that I'm not doing anything that could end me up there (though hell, innocence certainly isn't sufficient to keep a fellow out). If I believed in hokum like past lives, I think I'd be convinced I served time in a former one.

So I just read Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man's Prison, which is every bit as dreadful as it sounds. But I'd have to say it's one of the best books I've ever read - the cliche was true in this case that I couldn't put it down once I'd started reading.

T.J. Parsell did a number of incredibly stupid things as a teenager, culminating in the 1978 armed robbery of a photo mat with a toy gun (he did this "as a joke", and never quite explains what the joke was supposed to have been...). Out of jail awaiting trial for the robbery, he was picked up again, this time on a trespassing charge after letting himself into an empty room at the hotel where he was working, trying to avoid going home drunk to his parents. He would go on to spend four years in Michigan prisons, starting at age 17.

A new fish in the Riverside Correctional Facility, Parsell was tricked within a day or two of arrival into believing a little party was being thrown in his honor; he drank some homemade liquor which turned out to be spiked with Thorazine; in his incapacitated state, he was gang-raped. Afterward there was a coin-toss to see which of the men would "own" him. Parsell caught a break, if you want to call it that, by falling into the relatively benign hands of a former negro-league baseball player called Slide Step. Who was a nice guy, compared with the alternatives.

Complicating things, Parsell is coming to realize during all of this that he's gay. In case anyone happens to be stupid, it should be said that this doesn't relate to the rape. It's a realization that certainly had to emerge in his mind in spite of it.

So, he's gay. And while serving time in another facility - mind that he's now 18 or so - he falls in love with a young prisoner named Paul. You know how that feels, age 18 and in love: just imagine it happening in a prison, and you'll know that you'll never be able to imagine the intensity of this connection. Better yet, Paul's wiser about prison than Parsell, and so together they have a couple of golden months where they manage to put up a joint front and hold off the maniacs and serial rapists. Then they're separated for spending too much time together. Now, if one of them were a "man" and the other a "boy", it wouldn't have mattered if they'd spent all their free time alone. But as two "boys" together, no go. And, shortly after being separated from Paul, Parsell is raped again.

Obviously, this is a pretty serious book. I don't mind saying that as I finished reading it - at work, during lunch - I had a damn hard time keeping myself from openly crying. It closes with an exchange of letters with Paul, whom Parsell tracks down as part of his writing process. In the 25-some years since they'd last seen one another, Parsell put himself through college at night, entered the tech sector, and moved to the east coast to raise an adoptive daughter with his partner. He'd put prison a million miles behind him. Paul, on the other hand, had botched a prison escape, and with the exception of less than one year outside on probation, had remained incarcerated the entire time.

Their letters glow with a kindness and affection that are almost difficult to bear. I mean, for these feelings to have emerged in the midst of such manifest horror.

So that's the positive side - some transcendence is possible here. But the bigger picture is not particularly rosy. Rape and sexual abuse exist in our prisons as a deliberate tool of social ordering and control. I don't just mean that it's used deliberately by prisoners, to establish a pecking order; I mean that the prison authorities themselves tacitly condone and/or even encourage rape. You certainly can't expect much help from them if, as a prisoner, you report threats of rape or actual attacks - apparently the guards' typical line is that they try not to get involved in lovers' quarrels. According to Parsell, the attitude is that to allow rape and sexual servitude in prison helps the stronger and more aggressive prisoners to let off some steam.

Human Rights Watch has prepared a fascinating, if godawful, report on U.S. prisoner rape that's well worth taking a look at. Certainly, a tenth of our state and federal prisoners are subjected to forced or coerced sex, but the figure may be more like one-third.

Midnight Express notwithstanding, I might prefer serving a sentence in Turkey over doing it here in the United States.

...When the Abu Ghraib photos hit, most folks seemed a little baffled by the weird sex stuff. It was as if we could understand that soldiers in the field would be rough with detainees, but what's with all the nudity and pantomimed coitus and panties on guys' heads? Well, it should come as no surprise that the reservists organizing these activities, Charles Graner in particular, had received their training in prisoner control from the good old U.S. correctional system.

The racial aspect of prisoner rape is also uniquely American. Something like 45% of prisoners are black (as against 12% of the general population), 40% white, and 15% hispanic. Rape appears to occur principally within the racial groups - with the exception of white inmates, who tend to be fair game for everybody else.

I think a lot of folks take an attitude toward this phenomenon - since, after all, the existence of prison rape is hardly a secret - that it's more or less what criminals deserve. But I don't think the reality could possibly bear this out, no matter how cruelly you think we ought to treat our lawbreakers. For one thing, slightly over half of our nation's convicts are nonviolent, including fully three-quarters of the new fish (violent offenders tend to have longer sentences). In 2000, 22% of all prisoners were behind bars for no other reason than that they'd gotten high. And as a whole, it's the nonviolent offenders who are the likeliest victims of sexual assault. The worst, most violent criminals in our system - the ones whose punishments we might rightly want to see be the most severe - are most commonly the "beneficiaries" of systemic prisoner rape. Or whatever you'd call it, since "beneficiary" seems awful crazy to say.

This phenomenon could be relatively easy to bring under control. What would help most, of course, is to admit that many of the Mr.-Tough-Guy laws that have gone on the books in the wake of the Reagan Revolution have done this nation terrific harm. Obviously I'm thinking of the "war on drugs" more than anything here. But the fact is that we have no conscionable excuse to throw seven times the people into jail that they do in Europe. We may have a more violent culture here, but it ain't seven times more violent (and, of course, one of the many reasons America is more violent is our miserably robust prison industry, which, for all the reasons I've been describing, sends people back out into the world a lot more violent than they were coming in).

So reducing the prison population would greatly help, not to mention that it would - hey, Republicans! - save us money. Since that won't happen, the next step is simply for prison authorities to exert a modicum of will to stop the problem. Patrolling blind spots of the prison, following up on complaints, use of protective custody, etc. could all begin to change the perception that sexual abuse is tolerated. In 2003 - thanks partly to the group Stop Prisoner Rape, of which T.J. Parnell is a board member - the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 was passed. Which is great, but I think is only a beginning.

The economy is imploding

For six years I've been expecting this to come down the pike. So it's taken a little longer than I'd thought:

(article)

Now, this piece doesn't blame Bush for anything per se. Also - who knows? The proactive and somewhat unprecedented actions being taken by the Fed may succeed somewhat in containing the damage. But it's Bush's $3 trillion war in Iraq that has put a squeeze on government resources, his downshifting of the tax burden onto the middle class that has squeezed the economy generally: and it was his administration's solution to this problem to create magical wealth for regular Americans by loosening regulation of our housing markets - letting us take on mortgages we couldn't afford, which caused the entire market to be bid up into a bigger balloon than the notorious tech bubble of the 90s. Possibly worse still, he has allowed "financial innovations" in which these bad mortgages were compiled into complex new financial instruments - complex enough to hide their riskiness from the Wall Street giants that are now starting to go bust because of them.

Sure, yeah, George Bush isn't 100% to blame for all of this. Alan Greenspan, for one, deserves a lot of credit (and even he said over the weekend that this is the greatest financial crisis faced by America since the end of World War II). Certainly in general, the culprit is the broader Republican philosophy that all market regulation is bad (which, ironically, may well lead in this case to massive government intervention into the economy). But sure, I'd put Mr. Bush and his administration over the 50% mark for culpability here.

I don't believe in Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-winning war correspondent with a background in religion (his father was a minister and he attended seminary himself). In his previous book, Hedges attacked American Christian fundamentalism. This time he's come out swinging against the "New Atheists" because (guess what's coming. You'll never guess what's coming - ) they're fundamentalists too.

This clip covers some of what Hedges is out to say in his new book, I Don't Believe in Atheists (and his thoughts are explored in greater depth in this Salon interview):



Hedges' criticisms seem bracing; he comes on as a smart and measured critic. Of course, when he says human reason (which he simply conflates with technology and its potential for harm) is elevated by atheists to the status of a fundamentalist's god... well, that sounds bad, eh? I remember from way back in Phenomenology class that you're supposed to call this "scientism", and you're supposed to think it's bad. But one wonders how Chris Hedges feels we should intellectually engage the world around us. I mean, look - if religious literalism and scientific literalism are both problematic, as he suggests, and cultural relativism (which you might call anti-literalism), that's no good either - what then?

Goodness, triangulation may work as a political strategy, but I don't see how moderation among various approaches to knowing Truth in this world (ie, throw 'em in a blender) is likely to be the best approach to Truth. Shouldn't we, in engaging, judging, and assessing the world around us, hold some root principles? Or is that just to be scorned as "fundamentalism", and we'd be better off convening a committee? You know, let the midpoint between Pastor John Hagee and Doctor Steven Weinberg (however you'd define that) be called The Official Best Epistemology?

I'm curious too about the pat way in which Hedges asserts there has been no ethical progress in human history. Unspeakable atrocities do go on around us, and I cede that as a war correspondent he knows more about it than I do. All the same, there has indisputably been ethical change over history, change that you might even want to call progress.

Put it this way. It seems to me that the important variable among ethical systems is in how big a circle they draw. Who's in the circle - who's us - and who's them? Because them can end up getting whacked something terrible if us decides they're a threat. Well, there are exceptions to the claim I'm about to make (many of them in the form of world-historical ethical disasters), yet it seems to me that the circle of us has been painfully and reluctantly expanding over time. Slave emancipation, women's suffrage, the current inevitability of gay marriage, the increasing acceptance of animal rights, you name it. I don't think the fact that I think this - and that I think it's a cause for some hope in a terrible world - makes me a crazed-eyed utopian idealist as Hedges says: and to the extent that he connects the desire for a more perfect ethical world, with Pol-Potish means of achieving that world, I am gravely goddamn offended.

But Hedges is right: I don't think this circle has expanded equally all around the world. Also, I fear that this "progress" in ethics may map to our affluence better than to anything else. In other words, impose crushing poverty on France (say) and the folks there may indeed begin reenslaving one another.

Hedges says he's no moral relativist himself, that he thinks female genital mutilation, for instance, is an atrocity. He also says he knows there is a capacity for evil in every person, and that if a violently-oppressed minority turns to violence, we should not be so terribly surprised. Well hell, friend, where that's concerned I think you and I live in the same mental world. And if it weren't for the fact that you (Mr. Hedges) keep announcing that my personal disbelief in the supernatural means I'm a closet genocidal maniac - then I don't think we'd be in any disagreement here at all.

Yes, that's right. In the Salon interview and at the end of the YouTube clip, Hedges wants to tell me all kinds of things about myself as an atheist of which I had been blissfully unaware till now. For instance, that I want to murder religious fundamentalists (I deny their basic humanity. I consider them a them.). Or that I would like to join with American Christian fundamentalists in supporting a war of worldwide extermination against Muslims. Fascinating stuff. I'd had no clue I felt like that.

I'm being snide, of course, because something else is going on here and it's clear what that something is. Hedges was inspired to write I Don't Believe in Atheists because he had encountered exactly two of them. And he does pick at some genuine weirdnesses about Sam Harris (argues in favor of torture) and Christopher Hitchens (thinks the Iraq War was an outstanding idea) that there's little to argue with. These are bad things these guys said: guys whose books I've mainly read while cheering.

Which is great. If Hedges thinks Sam Harris is intellectually shallow, and that Christopher Hitchens is a solipsistic provocateur, he should write up his report of it. And he may even be right (at least about Hitchens, ha ha.). --But what about, let's say, Daniel Dennett? He's one of the "four horsemen" of the new atheism, right?, and there's no dirt out there against the guy. Dennett hasn't advocated the universal dismemberment of the Hajis, nor the replacement of the U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual with scripts from 24. So - how to handle that, if you're Hedges? Just don't mention Daniel Dennett, that's how.

But you can't avoid mentioning Richard Dawkins, can you?, foremost of the horsemen and the fellow who principally set this New Atheism notion rolling in the first place. Dawkins is something of an embarrassment for a Chris Hedges. Because Dawkins is strident, vituperative, even arrogant in his disbelief, yet has been vociferously against war in general and the one in Iraq in particular from the start; and to the best of my knowledge, he advocates neither torture nor nuclear first strikes. He may not be a Bertrand Russell pacifist (note how his atheism too did not a genocidal maniac make), but he dutifully thinks George Bush is a fool and believes in peace. So good grief, Chris Hedges, what can you say about Richard Dawkins?

"Well, Dawkins is a little different, because he's British." [Salon interview]

Come again? Where the do you think Christopher Hitchens is from? Mobile, Alabama?

So we have some significant silliness going on here. Hedges takes some dumb - okay, call it "reprehensible". He takes two reprehensible things said by two men with whom he had uncomfortable scraps at public debates (Harris, Hitchens). He smears these bad beliefs warrantlessly - indeed in the face of counterexamples - across anybody who agrees with the two guys on other matters (ie, that supernatural entities don't exist. Even if it's sometimes fuzzy whether Sam Harris even agrees with that). Then Hedges goes on to say that this New Atheist "movement", swollen as its ranks apparently are with pro-torture maniacs, is somehow a social force of such scope that as soon as it throws in its lot with its sworn enemies the Christian fundamentalists, then boy, we're in for a global Muslim holocaust.

Wha...? Have you been to a Humanist meeting? First of all, their biggest concern, beyond maintaining a supply of cheese danishes, is about drawing wide ethical "circles" - a big us. These are people who are damn unlikely to advocate violence against anybody. More importantly, there are few enough Humanists and/or atheists out there that if you crammed them all into a clown car, it wouldn't even look particularly funny to watch them climb back out.

Freethinking, this is to say, is hardly a terrifying social movement. It takes a struggle to conjecure that under the most generous definition (the absence of religious affiliation), we make up 16% of the population. And it's less. Because 16% counts everybody who says, "I disagree with organized religion. But I just feel that, you know, out there somewhere, you know, there's something."

In conclusion:

It is at minimum, ironic to claim atheists are so dangerous that they may help trigger a world holocaust - and what makes them so dangerous is that they hysterically demonize groups of people.

Notes on my weekend television viewing

I don't watch much of it - don't have cable, and I stick mainly to Netflix - but I admit yesterday evening I had something of a TV blowout.

First I saw a SoCal man get pinched in a new episode of "Cops". He was already out on probation, and somebody'd phoned in a tip. So the police were free to come round to the guy's place at their leisure and roust him, which didn't take much effort because the man bolted off across his yard the moment he saw them, and unsuccessfully tried to chuck a baggie of meth out of view before they tackled him. We have seen this scene in every episode of "Cops" in existence.

Anyway, it was a "strike three" for the man, so his possession of this drug spells life imprisonment.

Then I saw the first bit of "America's Most Wanted". I was shown the recreation of an incident where a Louisiana rapist, released from Angola after fulfilling a 25-year sentence, gained the trust of a woman whom he then drove out to a bog, raped, and tried to murder. By a miracle she got away and swam to freedom with her hands tied behind her back. Swam, with her hands tied behind her back. No joke.

Now - without exactly coming out yay-rah methamphetamine here, I must say that seeing these two things in sequence really stunned me. First I was stunned with amazement, then with quiver-jawed rage. Naturally much of this rage is directed against the rapist. None of it, really, is directed against the meth guy, whom I just feel terrifically bad for. And therefore the rest of the rage is directed at our national drug laws.

The fact that as a society we should put anything like an equivalency of effort into capturing and punishing these two men: I hope you'll excuse me for saying that's a god-damnable outrage. After all, one of these two felons is hurting people. The other one is getting high. Is it socially responsible to get high? Is it good for his marriage or for his kids? No. But neither is his going off to prison for the rest of his life, duh.

Here's a simple question. Which man would you prefer having as a neighbor, the meth guy or the rape guy? You know the answer. You're not insane. You know the answer. Yes, I know, you don't want the meth guy as a neighbor either. Good on that. But you know the answer.

How can it possibly, possibly be necessary for me to say this - the social offenses of the drug-user and the rapist are not equal? But yet their jail terms are. People, let us please all think.

Alcohol and drugs can do all sorts of terrible things: we know this. And there are plenty of circumstances where the case is clear-cut that a compelling social interest exists to control how these chemicals are used. When people are at work, or driving cars, or simply raising children. But the very suggestion that the ingestion of euphoric drugs is a social problem of such magnitude that not only may the State dictate to private citizens what they are and are not allowed to do with their own bodies anymore; but also that in the enforcement of these restrictions, a vast national apparatus of investigators, informants, and lifelong imprisonment must be maintained with our tax dollars - this suggestion, I say, is so screamingly idiotic, so vile, so indefensible, that the national imagination simply appears to close down around the whole thing and accept it as reasonable. "Wellp, I guess that's just what we've gotta do. What, do you expect me to defend using methamphetamine?"

Nope, nobody expects anybody to defend using methamphetamine. Nobody expects anybody to defend schizophrenia, either. But the thought that anyone should spend so much as an hour in jail for being under the influence of either one of them: this is absurd.

[Note, added later: I'm obviously not talking about this kind of thing. Schizophrenia and extraordinarily acute drug use have in common that they can cause people to go delusional and become a serious risk to innocent people. As a society, we have every reason to press sanctions (incarceration) against this, and to work to prevent it. This is an observation I would count as self-evident... but when it comes to the hysteria surrounding the drugs debate, and the constant magnification of rare and shocking anecdotes into the perceived norm, I guess it never hurts to spell out the self-evident.]

I know I take an unusual view here. Even most folks who believe in decriminalization are at least careful to confine their talking points to marijuana, since every sane person alive knows marijuana is harmless (well, it makes you incredibly stupid, but who are we to deny stoners the right to be incredibly stupid if they insist?). No, not many would come out swinging like I do, using meth in their examples.

Although JFK seemed to tolerate the stuff well enough. Yep, JFK: daily amphetamine user. (Plus every soldier on every side of World War II. And several million regular folks throughout the fifties and sixties, who could readily pick up pills from their doctors, or inhalers OTC.) And Hitler, too - well, amphetamines may have made him a little battier than he already was.

Now you're defending Hitler. Nope, not defending Hitler, nor drugs. But I thought if I was going to trot out one famous amphetamine user who managed to come out not too much the worse for it - JFK - then I should be fair and toss in another one I know of off the top of my head who makes for a less heartening example.

Anyway, using an extreme drug in my discussion here is rather the point, since for me the matter is pretty absolute. There is no compelling state interest in regulating what I do and don't put into my own body, period, full stop, the end, boom, simple as that. One calls this idea freedom. And wouldn't it be a relief if we free adult Americans were treated as such and extended the freedom that we are told, on paper, we inalienably enjoy?

[The big exception I can see is antibiotics. There is a compelling social need to regulate the use of these drugs, since their private abuse leads to their general inefficacy. But since we're squirting a hundred billion liters of the stuff into caged pigs daily, I'm not sure what difference this even makes anymore. That genie may be leaving the bottle.]

And, why, as free Americans, we could then all take responsibility for how we treat our own selves. Because Christ knows half the stuff available in the snacks aisle at Kroger is more dangerous than any schedule II narcotic in the first place. Just slap some labels on the cocaine vials with descriptions of the side effects, the long-term risks, and the addictive potential: the same sort of stuff we informed consumers have learned to expect from our manufacturers of cigarettes, echinacea, homeopathic tar-water, dietary supplements, and all our other cherished placebos and bunkum.

(Nyaa nyaa - for ten years now I knew "Airborne" doesn't work, folks. Know how I knew? Because it calls itself an herbal remedy.)

Now, would it be the end of civilization if cocaine - which, after all, is not an herbal remedy, and therefore works - could be bought from off the shelf? No, it would not. How do I know this? Because it did not end civilization the last time it was the case, right here in the good old U. S. of A. Our great-grandparents barely had any OTC medicines available except as contained either cocaine or heroin or marijuana. You mind if I repeat that? Cocaine and heroin and marijuana were readily-available over-the-counter drugs 100 years ago. I know the paternalistic Republican Daddy-State, those lovers of personal choice, would blow a gasket contemplating this degree of personal choice: but to give a short answer to the question - no, it would not be the end of the world if free adult Americans could go to their local drug stores and buy drugs there.

I don't get any nobility points for stating these things, to be sure. Nobody sounds noble saying that hey, maybe we're overreacting to our nation's drug problem. And so nothing changes in our justice system's ongoing crisis, except inasmuch as that, perhaps, it keeps getting worse. Tough drug laws - presumably affecting only poor people and pariahs, since rich people don't get arrested for these things - have long been a political winner (a) for the notoriously pro-rich Republicans, whose campaign contributors can go get a scrip for the analog of any illegal street drug they like (see Limbaugh, Rush); as well as (b) for the Democrats, who find being anti-drug such a safe message that it's a perennially reliable place to go prove how frigging "tough" they are in contraposition to all their softy stances in areas like welfare. Thus we end up with two parties spending decades out-"tough"ing one another. Meanwhile poor people and pariahs everywhere are having their lives heinously wrecked, at our nation's general tax expense.

Has anyone noticed what it is that our two parties are being so tough about? Nothing. This is 100% Rod-Serling-The-Monsters-Are-Due-on-Maple-Street nothing. We are tearing our own selves apart in reaction to a problem infinitesimally less damaging than the response.

Because what's that problem again? Oh yes, getting high: a social indiscretion, an addictive disease for many, a potential destroyer of families, and a thing to treat clinically to be sure; but something as reasonable to "punish" as the average mood disorder. Not only are we talking about a sustained and systemic human rights atrocity here, but this is also the quickest and easiest way to eliminate "wasteful government spending" that I have ever heard of. Yes, foreign war included. Because hell, sometimes foreign wars are necessary. This never is.

Because you do know that all the crime surrounding drugs is because of their illegality, yes? The gangs and the Al-Pacino-in-Scarface stuff? We had gangs like that, not to mention the original Scarface, back when we misguidedly illegalized liquor. When we re-legalized it, those gangs went away, poof, overnight, gone. And a huge boon of government tax revenue came back into play. There is every... as well as every... reason to believe the same would happen with the legalization of these other substances. Not to mention that drugs would also cease being a funding source for the Taliban.

So, why are drugs illegal? It'll sound like common wisdom to some, but for many I think it would come as a surprise if you could boil it down to discover how much institutionalized racism lay at the heart of the thing. Not that our drug laws are a cleverly-crafted racist cabal: I don't believe that at all. What I mean is that if this "war" were taking out white kids at anything like the rate it's hitting our pigment-enhanced brethren, a truce would be called post haste.

The drug laws originally came online for all your typical corporate-lobbyist-type reasons. Patents, drug companies, market share. The 1937 Marihuana Tax Act was pushed along partly by William Randolph Hearst, who was concerned that paper and newsprint might be manufactured not through business with his timber holdings, but instead more cheaply (and cleanly and efficiently) from hemp. Not that there wasn't a racial concern in tandem with the corporate one - attitudes toward marijuana had been darkening as its use became more popular among blacks and America-dwelling Mexicans in the first decades of the 20th century. Ditto for opium and its derivates, except that their unpopularity had stemmed from the (wholly legitimate, no doubt) fear of white women becoming enslaved to creepy, mustachioed orientals in their subterranean pipe-smoking dens.

And today I would say there is a lingering sort of muddle-headed, nonconscious racism to our attitudes about the penalties attached to drug crimes. Because the crushing wheels of justice are always, you know, "out there". Happening to somebody else. Why don't "those people" just stop taking those terrible drugs? For goodness' sake, they know how severe the penalties are! ...And then, when Junior gets picked up holding a dimebag, Miffy and I hire the necessary legal counsel to make that embarrassment go away. And then duly chunk the kid's ass down into rehab. But prison time? Lord no.

Well. There will surely be no end to this nonsense while I'm alive - politically, it's a total dog. No one will champion the elimination of this evil, and expensive, and ineffectual social injustice. But if the war on drugs ever were to go away, my friends, I think the best result of all would be that we could finally devote our police budgets entirely to the pursuit and curtailment of, ahem, crime. You know - crime. By which I mean rapists, Enron executives, and government employees who wiretap the entire nation's telephone/internet system, or smuggle people to Bulgaria on the basis of unsubstantiated accusations in order to torture them.

Because drugs aren't crime. You mind if I say that again? Drugs are not crime. I know I sound like a froth-mouthed lunatic saying so. A hundred thousand indignant parents and loved ones might want to raise their voices in anger to me for saying something so flippant, and to tell me the story of someone close to them who ruined his or her life, or died, from drugs. I don't deny that any of that happens. I would just say this:

There is nothing bad about drugs that our drug laws aren't making much, much worse.


[Parting note: If you haven't already, and if you don't mind getting wildly infuriated, read Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness. The non-drug part of the book, about pornography laws, is somewhat less infuriating, but equally fascinating.]


***


Next, I watched Rambo III. I've been waiting quite awhile for this one: what with the new Rambo movie coming out last month, III was actually held up quite awhile in my Netflix queue.

I was a little disappointed - I'd hoped it would be funnier. Granted, when Rambo and Trautman face off at the end of the movie four-handed against the entire Soviet army in Afghanistan... and actually start trying to fight that army, the two of them alone... but are saved at the last minute by a grand cavalry of Afghan Mujahandeen who come riding round from behind a mountain to save the day; well, then I laughed. Oh, I laughed. One of these saviors even bore a striking resemblance to Ayman al-Zawahiri (bin Laden must have been back at the cave getting his dialysis).

And the closing title was a real marvel: "This film is dedicated to the gallant fighting men of Afghanistan." Or words to the effect, but gallant was definitely one of those words. None of the words was repressive, fundamentalist, Taliban, or burqa.

This film makes an excellent companion volume to Charlie Wilson's War, by the way. The premise of Rambo III is that ever since the Afghan Mujahadeen began receiving Stinger anti-aircraft missiles (sent, as everyone knows, by Tom Hanks), they have been making substantial progress in their fight against their Soviet occupiers: except in one sector of the country, where an especially brutal Soviet commander has been assaulting civilian populations and suppressing the flow of these much-needed Stingers. Trautman - an over-the-hill Special Ops Colonel who should clearly be behind a desk somewhere - goes into Afghanistan by himself to investigate things and hopefully loosen up the supply channel. He is captured by the Soviets within ten minutes. Rambo, working now as an odd-jobs man at a Thai Buddhist monastery, goes in (also alone) to save his erstwhile mentor. Hilarity ensues in the form of 70-plus pyrotechnic events, and the on-screen killings of more than 200 people (if imdb is to be believed). Yet somehow the whole thing unfolds rather boringly.

***

Then, Saturday Night Live. The cold open was fine but after three months' writers' strike I'd dared hope for a little more. I don't mind confessing to the world that I have a desperate but harmless crush on Tina Fey; her snip of monologue about Hillary was great. And other stuff. And other stuff.

***

Man, I basically slept through the Sunday shows. I hate when I do that. But Nader announced on MTP that he's going to run, eh? Is that supposed to matter? He's been chasing after some diminishing returns these past few elections: this one will clearly fall into that pattern.

Rove v. Crow

My friend Jim sends this:

wow... this is something I'd never imagine...

Sheryl Crow is saying she suspects Karl Rove spread the "toilet paper conservation" story to make her look silly. Geez, that Karl Rove sure gets around !

--link--

...To which I said:

Karl Rove couldn't possibly have enough hours in the day to dream up smears of rock musicians. The very idea is sketch-comedy-worthy. Rove in his office, chomping on a cigar, chuckling devilishly: "I've got it! We'll win the midterms decisively... by making the nation believe Sheryl Crow wants everyone to use one square of toilet paper per bathroom trip!"

Also, Sheryl Crow was going around publicly at that point saying, "People should use one square of toilet paper per bathroom trip." I read a blog post she put up at the Huffington Post saying as much. Karl Rove did not make her do any of this. Sure, in context she was obviously speaking in jest. But with a little trim of Occam's razor we scarcely need bring Karl Rove into the picture to explain how that got misinterpreted....

(This reminds me of Al Gore's troubles in 2000. No, not Florida - before that. I mean back when everybody said he said he'd invented the internet, and was the star of Love Story and of Love Canal and etc. So many false, boasty claims that if fact-checked were actually true, and not even very boasty? Karl Rove didn't sit around crafting weird campaigns of misinformation like this, which were entirely dependent on the amplification within the echo chamber of a hungry news hole 0f misstated facts from lazy initial reports. We know Rove didn't do this, because (a) only the news media itself can be responsible for lazy initial reports and their later amplification, and (b) this sort of misinformation is too weird to make up on purpose.)

In short: the phrase "Karl Rove" is liberalspeak for "the way right-wingers think". And the danger is in considering one-off news items and self-organizing opinion trends as the results of a conscious, evil plot.

Roe v. Wade

[ Roe's 35th anniversary was this week. So...]

This is why I'm pro-choice:

One of the biologically defining features of the human species is neoteny - the fact that our rate of development has been slowed relative to that of our closest kin. Long childhood, long babyhood, and long fetushood. Some events of late gestation that for other primates occur inside the uterus, take place for humans in the first year of independent life. That is, human embryonic development has stretched out so long that bits of it now actually occur after birth. Dramatic changes have been selected for in our recent evolution to accommodate this slowed development. For example, female hips have widened in the effort to keep up with ever-larger babies (particularly their heads) - and sadly without complete success, as the phenomenon of death during childbirth attests. Moreover, humans are born with unfused skull plates so the brain can continue its explosive rate of growth after birth.

That's on the hardware side of things. Growing to be a fully socialized and participatory human can be viewed as its own evolutionary process, and absorbs years of training. Consciousness is no lightswitch flipped on at conception, or at the second trimester, or at birth, or on the first birthday. There's no moment. It is a gradual process of coming into an intentional and reciprocative relationship with one's environment (particularly the social environment) as based on an ever-refined mental model which a child builds of world-and-self.

It's my belief that consciousness lay in the process of building and maintaining a model of the world - and then of course pursuing one's intentions within it. As social primates, the models we build intimately involve our interactions and transactions with other social primates (which, tangentially, is why most of us are so religious: we find it natural to extrapolate the idea of a social hierarchy all the way on up). And I believe it is no terrible oversimplification to say that this process of becoming conscious, indeed of becoming fully human, maps closely onto the process of acquiring language. They're not one and the same, but they're powerfully correlative.

So if you catch the implications of this - of my emphasis on the great duration involved in the development of consciousness - you can see how my personal pro-choice view may even be considered extreme. People want to find a pat answer in this debate and stick with it: life starts here, or life starts there. I say that life - conscious life - comes gradually, meaning that it comes late. And so I strongly believe abortion is not and cannot be murder. Which doesn't make it particularly laudable, nor goes to deny the difficult feelings it entails for any woman choosing it. But for all that, it is morally unobjectionable.


Now, that was a tough argument to make. Not because the argument is baseless, shabby, or uncompelling - I obviously happen to think it's none of those things - but because nobody wants to find themselves in a political debate saying, "I shall now explain why my position is not pro-murder." Because that's a tough rhetorical spot to be in, the pro-choice movement as a whole has gravitated toward other framings. Understandably, they'd like to spend their time talking about something else. Heck, look at that name: pro-choice. What does that mean? Of what sort of choice are we pro-, here? Pro-choice-of-bunnies? Pro-choice-of-peaches? The movement can't even address its own position in its own moniker.

And watch out, because if the pro-choice movement won't argue that abortion is not murder, they've abandoned the field for the pro-life movement to hold that debate all by themselves. Which is why rhetorically I think the pro-choice side has slowly been losing this fight over the past couple of decades.

Consider:

Pro-Life Person: "Help! There is a murder taking place!"

Pro-Choice Person: "Butt out! Everyone has a right to privacy!"

And that's why the pro-choice argument must strongly articulate that there is no murder taking place. The pro-lifers are simply pressing a prior claim.

[Here's a stoned-in-the-dorm-room thought experiment: suppose a woman and a man are into extreme infantilistic fetishism. And suppose the woman is morbidly obese. Okay, the woman has her abdomen surgically opened, is liposuctioned to clear space - the grown man is thoroughly disinfected, fitted with a snorkel, and insinuated in her belly where he is sewn cozily into place. I guess the snorkel is left poking out of the woman's navel. Now, does the woman have the right to block the man's snorkel - or by another means kill him - because he happens to be inside her body, and she has a right to privacy?]

The awkward terms of this national debate - "murder" versus "privacy" - were in no small measure set by Roe v. Wade. Unlike many other western democracies (Britain, France, Italy) America did not establish a right to abortion through a publicly-debated legislative process. The right to abortion was given by judicial decree, and it happened to be handed down on this specious basis of privacy rights. To that extent, perhaps the pro-choice movement hasn't found itself in its awkward debating posture out of the rhetorical cowardice we're so accustomed to from the Democratic Party. Perhaps it's more because they've been making the case they need to make in consonance with the legal defenses of Roe they've been pressing for 3.5 decades now.

But rather than defend Roe - that is, rather than make the privacy argument - a better idea may be to take the offensive - and also abandon a double-negative for a positive - in fighting for a legislative guarantee of reproductive rights: something which would be independently assured in the case Roe were ever to go away as a piece of legal reasoning protecting abortion. The Republicans have had an anti-abortion amendment in their plank since 1980: why not pre-emptively push for a reproductive-rights amendment from the other side?