The Gas

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_clinker27_12-27-07_328BGDN_v8.2a70d43.html

Fairweather Libertarians

The insurgent campaign of Ron Paul is fascinating for several reasons, but the most intriguing aspect of Paul's candidacy is his unapologetic libertarianism. Previous would-be spoilers such as Jesse Jackson or Pat Robertson enjoyed genuine support, but neither of them espoused positions as fundamentally at odds with the status quo writ large as has Ron Paul.

Libertarianism is a stance the speaks directly to the holder's beliefs; libertarians believe in libertarianism. But what do Democrats believe in? Democracy? Don't most of us believe in democracy? What do Republicans believe in? The Republic? Don't most of us believe in the Republic? Isn't it, in fact, impossible to be an American without believing in both democracy and the Republic?

The vapid nature of our modern political discourse is betrayed in the very names of the parties: Republican and Democrat. It's just drivel, the sort of drivel reflected in talking points about "a comprehensive approach" or "protecting the American people".

Democracy in Great Britain is inferior to ours in some aspects, but at least their parties are unabashedly called "Conservative" and "Liberal/Labour". Such straightforwardness is rare in our "Democratic Republic".

It is clear that a third way is needed. Actually, since the two "ways" offered at present are so similar as to be indistinguishable, it would be more precise to say that a second way is needed.

To say that the Democrats and Republicans are substantially different is akin to saying that green and red apples are substantially different; they are, but only if nothing else if for sale. When shopping in the marketplace of ideas, how lazy do we have to be to focus on the apples and ignore all the other produce, never mind the grains and meat?

When assessing the major challenges facing the Republic today, some manifestation of libertarianism is clearly the best option. America's problems today are primarily financial, and they stem from two overreaches which libertarianism is uniquely equipped to remedy.

Global garrisons and insolvent entitlements are 90% of the financial problem. Put simply, America is promising to fulfill its promises to its own citizens with Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, and America is also promising to police the world. And America does not have the money for both of these delusions in the short term or either of them in the medium term.

Democrats occasionally propose cutting military expenditures, but not nearly often enough to betray actual conviction; they have been, are, and always will be without the courage to honestly critique American imperialism.

Republicans assail the social mandates rather than the military machine, and they do so far more aggressively than Democrats challenge the Pentagon. While the Republicans deserve credit for making a strong stand against one money pit, they deserve condemnation for choosing the wrong dragon to slay; how many Americans would rather pay to pacify Fallujah than be guaranteed to get their own money back via Social Security?

The only person to honestly critique both the empire and the mandates is Ron Paul. He does what is easy for Republicans; he rightly criticizes Social Security as harboring a suicide gene. As soon as retirees outnumber wage earners, which will be soon, Social Security will crash and millions of folks will lose their money for the sin of forcibly investing in the United States government.

Paul goes further, though; he dares to call the American empire what it is: a money and morality pit which strips us of material and moral might. He is the only person running for president who will dare assert the obvious: there are people on earth whom the United States has wronged.

The problem with Paul's supporters, however, is that many of them are fairweather libertarians. They want the government to step back when it suits their own agenda, but when it does not, they argue for an intrusive government.

For example, Paul's devastatingly logical critique of the Iraq War appeals to many liberals. They feign support for Paul, but they would never abide his ideology as applied to anything other than American militarism. They would use his logic to end the war, but they would not use his logic to abolish the IRS or the Department of Education.

In kind, many conservatives applaud Paul's rhetoric of government restriction in terms of education or taxation, but they will still hold that the government should legislate sexual morality or fund and train the police force in Baquba.

If you are not, on some level, frightened of following a new path, then that path is not new at all. Enlightenment and liberation requires sacrifice and faith. To follow libertarianism, everyone must let go of some of their concepts of the proper role of government.

Liberals must accept that people should be left with their own money rather than having the government hold it for them, with the implicit premise that the government is wiser than the citizens. Right now the government is run by George W. Bush. Is George W. Bush wiser than you?

Conservatives must accept that, if the government has no right to tell a man in Raleigh where to send his child to school, then the government has no right to tell a man in Ramadi when he can leave his house.

The beauty of letting go is the resultant liberation. Liberty is often scary, as it implicitly rejects the security of paternalism. But if we value "democracy" and the "republic" as much as our prior votes for president imply, then libertarianism is the only American way.

The Evolution of Revolution

The truly world-changing revolutions that have occurred in the history of civilization are far fewer than one might think. In terms of political revolutions, there are only a handful around which history actually pivots in a very real sense.

Scientific revolutions, broadly defined, have been inestimably important in the progress of civilization, of course, but scientific leaps are rare in societies that are not relatively freer than their contemporaries, despite of how their definitions of "freedom" may pale under our presentist Kleig lights. This is why it may be said that political revolutions lead to scientific revolutions.

Here are the five political revolutions which most define the present, in chronological order:

1. The adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire 312

2. The American Revolution 1776

3. The French Revolution 1789

4. The Russian Revolution 1917

5. The Iranian Revolution 1979

A cursory glance shows us that politics was overwhelmingly static, in terms of fundamental upheaval, from the early first millennium to the late second millennium.

While I am of the opinion that Christ was Romanized far more than Rome was Christianized, the adaptation of the most powerful political entity in world history to date of a nominally pacifistic and egalitarian religion was an earthquake by any measure. The remaining four revolutions of the handful are unthinkable without this shift, despite its legion and well-documented destructive aftershocks.

The American Revolution was quite simply the most important thing that has ever happened, if one deems freedom, in a palpable rather than a Hallmark sense, to have concrete meaning and value and manifestation. The American Revolution has been castigated by modern liberals as the pet project of a racist and oligarchic elite, but this is an absurd exercise in relativism.

The Declaration of Independence represented the first time in the history of the world that individuals with real political and military authority defined the purpose of the government as the protection of the equal rights of all citizens.

We take this for granted, just as we take for granted unlimited and affordable supplies of food and clean water, but there was a time, a long time, lest we forget, when there was no guarantee of food or clean water, never mind freedom of speech or free legal representation.

Put simply, the American Revolution took more power away from the few with the guns and the money than any other thing that had ever happened.

The Declaration was not followed, of course, for nearly two centuries; we all know the saga of slavery and segregation. But the very fact that the Declaration existed made it certain that it would be fulfilled, albeit far too late for millions. The Constitution of the United States is the practical, cumulative, and uniquely legitimate tool for turning the Declaration's ideological wind into concrete and federally-protected reality.

To say that the American Revolution was not the most radical manifestation of dignity and community that has occurred in modern history is like arguing that the pyramids are unimpressive because they are not as tall as the Sears Tower; it entirely misses the point.

The French Revolution, to many liberals, was the fulfilment of the promises of the American Revolution. People that adopt this view are more likely to be apologists for Stalin and Mao as well, since the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions all descended into pornographic scales of murder and terror that only a willfully-blinded ideologue could excuse with such pithy exercises in amoral ism as, "you need to break some eggs to make an omelet."

The French Revolution was the American Revolution on acid. And it was a bad trip. It was a precursor to the Russian, Cuban, and Iranian Revolutions, in which a progressive coalition overthrows a calcified despotism, only to have the fringe elements proceed to purge the less radical elements from the new power structure.

The French Revolution descended not only into a nihilistic orgy of beheading and bathhouse shankings, but to a truly psychotic scale of destruction in the name of progress. My favorite anecdote about the French Revolution is how the radicals in power attempted to restart the calender at year zero, with the new calendar to run on the metric system, with ten months to a year and so forth. Before the freedom of dissent was respected, the French revolutionaries attempted to redefine the mechanics of space and time itself, as if they could slow the moon or speed up the earth.

More important than these aberrations, however, the French Revolution led to monarchy and imperialism. While Napoleon is largely given a pass by modern historians as a relatively enlightened tyrant, and while anyone would take him over Hitler any day, the fact remains that he was a dictator and an aggressor who ascended due to the overreach of the French Revolution, which held so much promise in its genesis.

The Russian Revolution is seen by conservatives in the West as on a moral level with Nazi ism and by their liberal counterparts as misguided idealism. The truth, as always, is in between.

The revolutionary Russian government was the first government to end a war at the behest of its citizens. This, like the American Revolution, was an earthquake. After the Bolsheviks purged their more moderate comrades, things got darker, but American historians are well-practiced in totally ignoring the American invasion of Russia in a failed attempt at regime change in 1918, which gave a rationale for their paranoia which was never acknowledged as legitimate by the United States.

The Russian Revolution forced things. It forced governments and industries in the West to cede far more security and prosperity to their citizens and workers than they had prior, despite the real progress of the American Revolution. The rhetoric of the Russian Revolution was infinitely more important for human history than the reality of it.

The ultimate gift of the Russian Revolution, however, was the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Russians beat Hitler, not the Americans. We were not even the Scottie Pippen to Russia's Michael Jordan in World War II; we were barely the Ringo Starr to Russia's John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison combined.

The Russian Revolution forced a quickening and broadening of the American Revolution, which in turn raised the standard for freedom worldwide. The Russian Revolution was the Declaration of Independence to the American Revolution's Constitution; it lit a fire under our ass.

The Iranian Revolution shattered a simplistic and lazy paradigm espoused by diplomats and eggheads everywhere. This paradigm held that the world was divided into capitalist and communist camps and that political history would "end" when one of the two camps achieved critical mass.

Iranian intellectual Ali al-Shariati described the Persian mindset, however, when he rejected communism and capitalism as "two sides of the same coin." And he was right, of course; to accept the capitalist/communist duality is to accept the premise that all of human existence is driven primarily, if not solely, by economics, by material and money. That is by no means a settled debate.

The Iranian Revolution, in a menacing way, embodied a third way. This revolution, as much like its Russian, Cuban, and Chinese counterparts, was immediately attacked with American money and guns, if not American soldiers; Saddam Hussein supplied the soldiers this time. It is fortunate for the United States that Iran is neither Sunni nor Arab, because if it were, 9/11 would have happened fifty times by now.

When Chinese Revolutionary Deng Xiaoping was asked about his thoughts on the ramifications of the French Revolution, he replied, "it's too early to tell." There's a lot to be said for this perspective. But, then again, history moves a lot faster now.

It is clear to me that the American Revolution is the most essential revolution ever undertaken. It is equally clear that, after our 75-year battle with the Russian Revolution, we will spend our next 75-year battle with the Sunni imitators of the Iranian Revolution.

The Believer

The conventional wisdom, which is heavy on convention and most decidedly light on wisdom, holds that Mitt Romney gave some sort of landmark address on the proper role of religion in politics last week. The address was held to be significant because Mr. Romney belongs to a religion that many Americans consider a heresy, much like John Kennedy in 1960.

Mr. Romney's address was significant in that it highlighted the depraved cynicism that distinguishes Romney from Kennedy. Kennedy was morally weak in many regards, but this did not extend to his religion; Romney may never cheat on his wife, but he will pimp out his faith without pause.

The beauty of Kennedy's speech was that he declared that his religious beliefs were nobody's business unless or until it affected the execution of his office, which he pledged would never happen, and which I have heard nobody argue did happen while he was president.

Essentially, Kennedy had the spine to say, "back off." Romney feigns to take a similarly principled stand, but he lacks Kennedy's conviction; he can not simply say, "back off." Instead, Romney says, "back off...but, while backing off, keep in mind that I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the savior of mankind."

Romney insists on his right to have it both ways, which is really "having" it no way at all. "There shall be no religious test..." That is one of the most important phrases in the most important document ever written, the United States Constitution. Romney has every right to assert it, but he cannot assert it and then proceed to ignore it. He seems to be saying, "There shall be no religious test, since my religion is even more provably ridiculous than most, but I would like you all to know I believe in Jesus as much as you do. If you ask me any specific questions about my dogma, however, I will play a martyr." How palpably disingenuous.

The most egregious line of Romney's speech, which at times was admittedly well-written and well-reasoned, was the following paroxysm of historical and moral ignorance: "Freedom requires religion." Really? Some case studies, perhaps?

Let's take Europe, which is largely post-religious except for Muslim minorities in western Europe, Catholic Ireland and Poland, and Muslim Albania. Could anyone rationally argue that Europe is not free? Regardless of how freedom is defined, if Europeans are not free, then nobody is free. So, clearly, freedom does not require religion, or else Europeans would have converted their now-empty cathedrals into torture chambers. Actually, has anybody noticed that the most enduring peace in European history coincided precisely with the abandonment of religious identity. Probably just a coincidence.

And what about the places where religion thrives? Here's a list: Saudi Arabia. That's a long enough list to make my point. In fact, I would argue that, looking at the earth as a whole, religion is more closely aligned with oppression than with freedom, both in the present and in the past.

The history of the spread of democracy, of freedom, on earth is the history of the restriction of religious power. Period. If freedom required religion, why wasn't first century Palestine a "free" country? People there and then were religious, to say the least. And where was the freedom under the Taliban?

The further sin in Mr. Romney's assertion is its logical inference; if freedom requires religion, then it follows that one can not be free without religion. Now, even if Mr. Romney held every recognized religion to be equally legitimate in bestowing "freedom" upon its practitioners, which I humbly doubt, that leaves a great many people, such as myself, who under Mr. Romney's definition can not be "free".

Mr. Romney did not say freedom requires faith. That is an assertion that I would be inclined to agree with. Faith is not, despite what many may claim, a willingness to believe provably absurd things; it is a willingness to believe things that could never be proven to be either right or wrong. Faith requires us not to believe that a virgin could have a child, but to believe that every child has equal dignity simply by the virtue of being alive, that every human being is equal in the eyes of the Creator God. That is a leap of faith; it is a forever unprovable contention.

Mr. Romney, instead, said that freedom requires religion. Faith is liberating; religion is restrictive. Faith opens our minds; religion closes it. Faith inspires the best elements of human nature; religion inspires the worst, even if they are not manifested as such by every practitioner.

Mr. Romney knew exactly what he was saying. He was saying that there should be no religious test, but that religion was the test. That his religion was nobody's business, but if that someone else had no religion at all, they could fairly be excluded from the club. The club of the "free".

I am not religious. But I am free. In fact, I am freer than Mr. Romney, since, unlike him, I am free to say in public that the idea that Jesus Christ came to Missouri is ridiculous. I, unlike Mr. Romney, can say in public that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was a charlatan, a pedophile, and a traitor. I, unlike Mr. Romney, can say that blacks were equal to whites before 1978, when Mr. Romney's God sent a prophecy to Mr. Romney's church informing them of as much.

Not only am I free, I am also..............a good person. See, I would never kill or rob. Not because Moses told me so, but because my parents and my God-given intuitive morality told me so. To Mr. Romney, I would say, "freedom does not require religion; it requires faith. And leadership requires that you have faith in the American people, rather than faith in their religions."

On Consciousness

"Your skin cells are not aware that they are part of a human being. Skin cells are not equipped for that knowledge. They are equipped to do what they do and nothing more. Likewise, if we humans--and all the plants and animals and dirt and rocks--were components of God, would we have the capacity to know it?"

"They'll Follow Us Home" or, The Fallacy

Like so much else with the Iraq War, the question of the most likely effects of an American withdrawal are colored by Vietnam. It's about time for the United States to get over the Vietnam War, since the Vietnamese seem to be over the American War, as they call it, but until we can do the same, let's study the logic employed by those who insist upon staying in Iraq.

"They'll follow us home", they say. This sentiment is extremely widespread, including among many who criticize the war with varying degrees of passion. It is taken by most as an article of faith that the Arabs are especially bloodthirsty, vengeful, and given to an emotional lust for revenge that stretches across generations. There is no small amount of truth to this, which is why we should not have invaded Iraq in the first place.

What the debate must revolve around, however, is not the wishes of the enemy, but the intentions and capabilities of the enemy. In last week's Republican Debate, John McCain stood tall with a rare blend of moral authority and direct language on the issue of torture. Then he started talking about Vietnam.

First, he told Ron Paul that failing to invade Iraq would have been the equivalent of ignoring Hitler. Actually, failing to invade Iraq would have been the equivalent of ignoring Gunther Weisbadden. Who is Gunther Weisbadden? Exactly. Next, he informed Mr. Paul, who due to being the only sane man on the stage inevitably comes across as a lunatic, that the Americans "never lost a battle in Vietnam".

Aside from the fact that it is very hard to lose battles to an enemy with no airplanes, what was McCain getting at? In spite of himself, he was making the case that that war should never have been fought. If you win every battle and still lose the war, that means the battles were irrelevant, does it not? Of course it does.

It was public opinion that lost the Vietnam War, McCain informed us. The audience largely cheered this tired old herring, which used to be red but is now just a pathetic, faded pink. Yes, the audience cheered, as if to say, "you're right John, it was our fault! that fucking 1st amendment! if only the hippies had given you guys another ten years, another 2 million dead Asians, we would have had that thing won!"

To put it bluntly: if you want to live in a country where the government is not constrained by its citizens when it wages a decade-long illegal war on their behalf and sacrifices their children by the tens of thousands on the altar of proven lies and moral bankruptcy, then fuck you. Move to North Korea.

At the end of McCain's "free speech fucked us" rant, he told us of the difference between the enemy in Vietnam and the enemy in Iraq: "The Vietnamese didn't want to follow us home". Okay. Well, since the Vietnamese never harbored any intention of harming the United States, doesn't that mean the Vietnam War was unnecessary? Careful, Senator.

Anyhow, to parse this proposition: first of all, it seems safe to say that countless of thousands of Vietnamese harbored a blood grudge against the United States, and there is no reason to think that, if they could have, a great many of them would not have sought to exercise revenge for their dead countrymen and family members. But there was more important work to do. Like rebuild their incinerated country. Iraq will be much the same.

When people say "They'll follow us home", who is they? They is al-Qaeda and assorted Salafist wackjobs would actually would come here aiming to kill indiscriminately. Thankfully, "they" is not the Iraqi people at large; it is a small and shrinking element of the insurgency. That being said, let's look at this logically.

To say that the hardcore terrorists would "follow us home" implies that they are not coming here right now because American soldiers are in Iraq. That, in turn, implies that terrorists would rather try to kill the best-armed and best-trained Americans on earth, taking a good many Muslims with them, than try to kill defenseless civilians in the belly of the Great Satan itself.

The implication is that thousands of hardened, competent, and motivated terrorists have decided to go to Iraq instead of America, but that if Americans weren't in Iraq, they would come to America. That makes no sense. Why would a jihadi opt to face an American tank if he had the capability of blowing up an Ameircan high-rise? They're suicidal, yes, but they are also motivated to kill thousands of Americans. In Iraq, that takes 5 years. In America, that takes 5 mintues.

Let me put it this way: how is having Americans in Baghdad preventing a terrorist from flying from Karachi to New York? From Casablance to Los Angeles? From Dubai to Chicago?

We are not fighting in Iraq because we have realistically assessed the premise that "they'll follow us home"; it seems clear to me that American armies in Baghdad are totally inconsequential to the logistical feasibility of terrorists coming to America. All American armies in Baghdad are doing is to swell the ranks of those who would come to America if they could.

So why are we still there? We're there because there is resistance there. And herein lies the second fallacy. This fallacy holds that anyone who would resist the American military overseas is an enemy of America who must be crushed where he lives so that he can not "follow us home". This is the bull refusing to leave the China shop until there is no glass on the floor.

"The notion that wars are fought not to protect real national interests but to avenge the suffering of soldiers is another of those problematic syllogistic formulas that politicians have used for decades to snow the public into military action. Just because we can find enemies overseas who are willing to deal harshly with our soldiers doesn't mean we should have been looking for them in the first place, or that it's right to keep letting them have that pleasure."

The Crime of the Millenium (Part II)

Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.




This is the 14th amendment to the Constitution of the United States. What does it mean to you? What it means to most rational people, including the people who wrote it, is exactly what it says: the federal government would guarantee that no state could deprive an individual of his constitutionally-protected rights. This somewhat superfluous and manifestly obvious amendment was necessary to ensure that the southern states would not deny newly-freed blacks their rights.




If you know anything about the post-Civil War south, you know that the 14th amendment was worth less than the paper it was written on for millions of blacks for a century; it simply was not enforced, and local southern governments openly and systematically deprived blacks of their constitutional rights. The 14th amendment has been used, however for other designs. The first was a little-studied case with enormous ramifications for the country. The second was the culmination of the crime of the millennium.




The first landmark use of the 14th amendment was not to ensure that southern blacks were allowed to vote; it was to determine that a corporation enjoyed the same legal protection as individual citizens. Since no person could be "deprived of their property", the corporate lawyers argued, it was unconstitutional to limit the property of a group of persons coalesced as a corporation. Henceforth, it would be illegal to limit the size of corporations. The ramifications that this decision has had on our society is literally impossible to comprehend and frankly out of my league to even begin to articulate.




This footnote of history aside, the most recent abuse of the 14th amendment was its incorporation in the crime of the millennium, the coup d'etat of 2000. To prove that George W. Bush did not win the 2000 presidential election is so easy that the case suffers under the sheer weight of evidence. In this sense it is analogous to the O.J. Simpson murder case; any competent prosecutor could ignore 90% of the evidence and still convict.




In the case of the 2000 election, let's clear the table of the mountains of evidence that Bush did not win. Let's forget that he lost the popular vote nation-wide by hundreds of thousands of votes. Let's forget that thousands of blacks were not allowed to vote in Florida because they had names similar to convicted felons. Let's forget that the Florida election was certified by Bush's Florida campaign co-chair, who was employed by both Bush and his brother, the governor. Let's forget that Bush's legal strategy following the voting was focused on stopping recounts, which was, quite simply, an admission that he would be harmed by the truth.




Let's just focus on the Supreme Court's decision to stop the recount and anoint (there is no more appropriate word) Bush as president. What logic did the Supreme Court use in its coup? You guessed it: the 14th amendment. The amendment written to guarantee rights to newly-freed slaves was used by George W. Bush to argue that he was being deprived of equal protection under the law. This is the equivalent of Bill Gates citing anti-genocide statutes in arguing that the Microsoft monopoly should not be dismantled. Does it get any more cravenly cynical than this?




As the Florida recounts progressed, it began to become clear that Bush would lose. His strategy then was to halt the recount at any cost. The recount was not the initiative of Al Gore; it was mandated by Florida law. Bush needed to prevent Florida law from being carried out. But how?




George W. Bush filed suit in the United States Supreme Court claiming that the equal protection of Florida's citizens were being violated. This is a bizarre claim for two reasons. Firstly, the citizens of Florida never asserted that their rights were being violated; George W. Bush took it upon himself to speak for them, to essentially invent a grievance on their behalf. Secondly, the way in which Bush claimed that Floridians' rights were being violated led to an unsustainable conclusion.




Bush claimed that, since the counties of Florida used different types of ballots, any recount would violate equal protection due to different standards in different counties. So, the party of local government came to argue that local government was unconstitutional. Okay. But what was the inference of this argument? Well, the inference of this argument would be that the presidential election itself was unconstitutional, since the thousands of American counties each have their own particular ballots and standards.




This inference, however, was ignored; Bush argued that different standards were fine until the recounts began; once the recounts began, and his lead began to disappear, different standards became unconstitutional in his mind. The Supreme Court of the United States agreed with Bush; they ruled that it was indeed a violation of equal protection under the law to recount Florida's votes. It was unconstitutional, in other words, to objectively discern who won the presidency.




Bush's venal cynicism in bringing the case under the equal protection clause should not surprise us; the Supreme Court acquiescence to a coup d'etat that would make Pinochet blush should surprise us. Here's how blatant it was. In their written briefs, the justices were afforded the opportunity to explain their "reasoning". Antonin Scalia informed us that to continue the recount would do irreparable harm to Bush's "claim" to have won the election. So, Bush's "claim" to have won was so important to Scalia that it must be protected, even at the expense of the truth.




The Supreme Court sets precedence. Stare decisis, it is called. Once a precedent has been set, it takes a very high standard to overturn it. This is why legal segregation lasted so long. It is also why Roe v. Wade is nearly unassailable; it takes alot to overturn a Supreme Court ruling. Knowing this, the Supreme Court justices who handed the presidency to Bush did something that the Supreme Court had never done in its history.




If Bush v. Gore had set precedence, as every single Supreme Court case over the prior two centuries had, what would that precedence have been? Well, it would have read something like this: "Any election with more than one standard for casting and counting votes is unconstitutional, and a candidate's claim to have won an election is sufficient cause to stop counting votes." If this ruling was allowed to become precedent, it would mean that every national election in the history of the country was unconstitutional and that America has never had a legitimate president, since America has never had a president elected by a universal standardized ballot. It would also mean that if, for example, Richard Nixon had claimed to have won the 1960 presidential election (which he probably did, by the way) he should have been granted the office.




Clearly, this could not be precedence, because to do so would literally de-legitimize every election in the nation's history. How did the Supreme Court square this circle? They decided that this case, unlike every single one of the thousands that had come before, would not establish precedence. They decided that their ruling applied to precisely one person in the world: George W. Bush. No future litigant could bring a case under this premise.




Back to the O.J. analogy; this is the equivalent of a judge saying that, since evidence is collected from murder scenes following different procedures in different jurisdictions, and since Simpson claimed to be innocent, any appraisal of the evidence by a jury would violate Simpson's equal protection. This is how Bush became president, by arguing that the truth was unconstitutional. And the Supreme Court agreed. We all know what the results of that decision have been. Could the crime of the millennium realistically have led to anything else?

J’Accusé

"If you believe a truck is coming toward you, you will jump out of the way. That is belief in the reality of the truck. If you tell people you fear the truck but do nothing to get out of the way, that is not belief in the truck. Likewise, it is not belief to say God exists and then continue sinning and hoarding your wealth while innocent people die of starvation. When belief does not control your most important decisions, it is not belief in the underlying reality, it is belief in the usefulness of believing."

"There is more information is one thimble of reality than can be understood by a galaxy of human brains. It is beyond the human brain to understand the world and its environment, so the brain compensates by creating simplified illusions that act as a replacement for understanding. When the illusions work well and the human who subscribes to the illusion survives, those illusions are passed to new generations."

"The human brain is a delusion generator. The delusions are fueled by arrogance--the arrogance that humans are the center of the world, that we alone are endowed with the magical properties of souls and morality and free will and love. We presume that an omnipotent God has a unique interest in our progress and activities while providing all the rest of creation for our playground. We believe that God--because he thinks the same way we do--must be more interested in our lives than in the rocks and trees and plants and animals."

Scott Adams, God's Debris

My God

There has been much debate recently revolving around the utility, the morality, and the role of religion in our postmodern dystopia. Like all too many debates in America these days, the initiative is claimed and jealously guarded by those who aim to dismantle a fundamental foundation of our society and those who deny that any remedy is needed at all. Both views are wrong, of course, and both have much to fear from the middle ground, because the middle ground represents common sense, the ultimate threat to the faithful, regardless of where their faith lies.

One side, led by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, excoriates literally everything about religion, since religion is based, by definition, on blind faith, which is wholly incompatible with a rational, globalized, and militarized world. For the atheists, religious faith, even in its more benevolent incarnations, is a relic of a bygone phase of history, which should have been cast aside along with human sacrifice, alchemy, witch trials, and all the superstitious flotsam of the pre-modern era.

The other side, led by Dinesh D'Souza and other far less articulate thinkers, argues that without religion, there would be no morality, no sense of dignity for the individual, no social cohesion, no incentive to restrain the darker impulses of human nature, no broad rejection of slavery, and no reason to love our fellow man. For the theists, religious faith, even in its more sinister incarnations, is the foundation of human life, the water to the fish, which is more relevant and necessary now than ever.

Both sides are absurd in their reductionism, and both have a vested interest in ignoring the third way, the way of the deists.

The atheists have an airtight case, up to a point. I agree with the premise that blind faith is not a virtue in itself, and it can often be a serious retardant to moral and material progress. While it often serves to comfort, it just as often serves as an excuse to ignore evidence of one's own error or sin. And blind faith, when it is blind enough, can make men do things that an open mind would preclude out of hand. Like fly a plane into a building. Or invade Iraq.

So while blind faith can uplift, it can also excuse inexcusable behavior. To argue that religion is the source of human morality is to adopt a dim and ultimately self-loathing view of mankind. It is to suggest that, if it were not for the Torah or the New Testament or the Koran, people would be savages. It suggests that, prior to these revelatory works, people recognized no reason to refrain from theft and murder.

But ask yourself this: can we really believe that the civilizations of Egypt, Babylon, Greece or Republican Rome could have progressed as they did if their builders recognized no disincentive to murder and theft? Do we believe that the Jews survived forty years in the desert murdering and robbing each other before Moses was told that these acts were forbidden?

To suggest that morality comes from the Holy Books is to suggest that men did not write the Holy Books. To suggest that any book was written by God is, quite simply, ridiculous. Ridiculous. Morality comes from man himself. I do not believe in a theistic, personal God who is capable of either granting me eternal life or eternal damnation, but even so, I would never murder or rob. I know it's wrong without having to believe that the only reason I know this is that the creator of the universe revealed this secret to an illiterate nomad in the Sinai after allowing humanity to live a thousand centuries in barbarism.

To imply that humans would be incapable of morality, love, discretion, and just plain goodness without ceding their autonomy to a set of unbelievable, or at least unprovable, stories that differ from the Lord of the Rings only in the quality of writing (which is considerably poorer) is to take, as I said, a self-loathing view of humanity and to endorse of global cult of leader worship, where the high priests arrogate to themselves the right to tell us who the leader is and what he wants, since nobody has ever seen him or proven that he even exists. This is the crime of theism.

All this being said, I have seen the true Christianity of sacrifice and love personified in many, especially my father. This experience leads me to recognize the merits of Christianity which, in my opinion, completely outweigh whatever merits could be found in Judaism of Islam. If you have to pick a monotheism, Christianity is the clear choice, as it eschews Judaism's "chosen people" racism and Islam's glorification of violence (yes, jihad means killing).

It is important to keep in mind, however, that the brand of Christianity preached and practiced by my father is relatively new and relatively rare. For the balance of history, Christianity was dominated by the Catholic Church, which told children vicious and ugly lies for century upon century, teaching them to hate themselves and their bodies, that they were born into filth and depravity, that their very existence was proof of their sin, and that their only hope was to submit themselves to the worship of a long-dead Palestinian who was subjected to a brutal human sacrifice for their own good. A failure to give oneself to this message of "love" would be eternal torment. At least Judaism let the heretics go after death.

When my grandfather was my age, the Catholic Church was busying itself with accommodating Adolf Hitler's extermination of the Jews of Europe, excommunicating exactly one member of the Nazi Party. That man was Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister. His crime? Aggressive war? Genocide? Nope. Marrying a Protestant. Apparently, the church of Saint Peter knows when to put its foot down.

The sins of the theisms are not equal, and they are not relative, but they all spring from the same delusion, which is shared even by the most benevolent sects of Christianity. That delusion is theism itself, the insistence that not only is there a personal God, but that we know what he wants. That works out fine when he wants us to love our neighbors, but when he wants us to kill them, the flaw is evident.

And it is not intellectually honest to argue that the premise of theism is sound, if occasionally abused. As soon as you grant someone the right to speak on behalf of an invisible master, you have no right to criticize him if he misunderstands that master from your point of view. You must reject the premise of an invisible master out of hand. It's sort of like nuclear weapons; they are unacceptable in principle, their is no "correct" way to wield them, even if nobody is hurt for the time being.

All this being said, the atheists' arguments indulges in quite a bit of willful blindness, especially as pertaining to the influence of Christianity on history. To argue that Christianity has held back Western civilization is like arguing that Bob Dylan held back songwriting. You don't need to endorse or embrace the former to appreciate its enormous impact on the latter.

To say that Christianity was incidental to the Enlightenment, the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, the abolition of slavery, the spread of democracy, the legal protection of minorities, and the legal recognition of the inherent dignity of every individual is simply to discredit oneself. Many of the foundations of Western Civilization are taken for granted by atheists and theists alike. The culture of Christianity is a crucial component of our progress, as inseparable from our progress as the leg to the stool.

The middle ground of deism incorporates the positive attributes of both Christian theism and atheism. Rationality and discernible evidence is given its proper dominance, but not at the expense of blind faith. This blind faith, however, is directed not at discerning what God wants you to do, be it blow up a bus, refrain from masturbating, donating to charity, or dressing a certain way. Rather, it focuses faith, which is necessarily blind, and which is necessarily necessary, since there will always be unknowables, toward the Creator God rather than the Personal God.

The Creator God gives man his need for faith and spirituality without depriving him of agency over his own life or granting him agency over the lives of others. The Creator God allows us to understand that we don't need a Personal God to tell us how to behave, that we intuitively know right from wrong, and that, since we owe everything to the Creator God, we are reminded of and reinforced in our need for God after all.

In other words, we need not a God of minutiae, not a dictator God, not a peeping Tom God, not a vindictive or jealous God, not a human God, but a Creator God who gave us what, in the final analysis, makes us human, and that is consciousness and free will. We should thank God every day for those blessings; we must not insult his creation by deluding ourselves into thinking that we speak for him. We speak for ourselves. And that is freedom. And freedom is the point of creation.

Some Thoughts on Fundamentalism

But then I sigh and, with a piece of scripture,
Tell them that God bids us do good for evil;
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol'n forth of Holy Writ,
And seem a saint when most I play the devil.
Shakespeare, Richard III

In an age in which economists take for granted that people equate well-being with consumption, increasing numbers of people seem willing to trade certain freedoms and material comforts for a sense of immutable order and the rapture of faith.
Eugene Linden, The Future in Plain Sight

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

Both revelation and delusion are attempts at the solution of problems. Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way to the next artistic or scientific problem. In contrast, those who embrace religious revelations and delusional systems tend to see them as unshakable and permanent...

Religious faith is an answer to the problem of life...The majority of mankind want or need some all-embracing belief system which purports to provide an answer to life's mysteries, and are not necessarily dismayed by the discovery that their belief system, which they proclaim as "the truth," is incompatible with the beliefs of other people. One man's faith is another man's delusion...

Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the numbers of people subscribing to it.
Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay

The Prince and The Dunce

“For, in truth, there is no sure way of holding other than by destroying, and whoever becomes master of a City accustomed to live in freedom and does not destroy it, may reckon on being destroyed by it…Hence we may learn the lesson that on seizing a state, the usurper should make haste to inflict what injuries he must, at a stroke, that he may not have to renew them daily, but be able by their discontinuation to reassure men’s minds, and afterwards win them over by benefits” .

While it can hardly be argued that Iraq or its capital of Baghdad, which reflects the divisions of Iraq, was accustomed to “freedom” before the American invasion, it at least enjoyed freedom from foreign occupation. The above quote is relevant to the American experience in Iraq because, pursuant to the failure to destroy the enemy in the opening stages of the war, the American mission is in serious risk of being destroyed by that very enemy, years after taking nominal “control” over Iraq.

A failure to pacify restive Sunni centers such as Fallujah, Ramadi, and Mosul during or immediately after the initial invasion, a failure to “destroy” in Machiavelli’s parlance, left the American occupation armies among its enemies rather than victorious over them. This negligence, and the willingness to bypass centers of resistance on the drive to Baghdad rather than to subdue them, led directly to the next stage of failure, and the next piece of relevant advice from The Prince.

“If, however, the newly acquired City or Province has been accustomed to live under a Prince, and his line is extinguished, it will be impossible for the citizens, used, on the one hand, to obey, and deprived, on the other, of their old ruler, to agree to choose a leader from among themselves”.

The Prince in this scenario, of course, is Saddam Hussein; Hussein’s “line” was both biological, in the form of his sons Uday and Qusay, and political, in the form of the brutal and brilliantly organized Ba’ath Party. The United States willingly destroyed the heart, brain, and nerve center of the Iraqi state and came with no workable plan to replace them. It should hardly have come as any surprise, bearing all of this in mind, that the Iraqi people have been unable to come to any sort of consensus on what form their new government should take. The entire gamble of the Iraq War, from the perspective of the Bush administration, hinged on the hope that Machiavelli was wrong, the hope that citizens deprived of a powerful prince would be able to peaceably choose a new leader from among themselves.

A further failure of the American enterprise in Iraq has been the inability to instill a sense of loyalty for the new Iraqi government and army among a critical mass of the Iraqi people. Loyalty should not be taken to imply affection, but merely respect and deference. Employing historically brutal methods, Saddam Hussein garnered a certain sense of “loyalty” from the Iraqi people. The new Iraq government, however, is not recognized by most Iraqis as the legitimate or competent representation of the Iraqi state; instead, a slew of militias and insurgent groups command far more loyalty on the street than do the national institutions sponsored and supported by the United States.

The first rule of any government, democratic or not, is the rule of “one gun”. In other words, the state must be perceived to be the only legitimate employer of violence. That is most decidedly not the case in post-invasion Iraq. As Machiavelli wrote, “a wise Prince should devise means whereby his subjects may at all times, whether favourable or adverse, feel the need of the State and of him, and then they will always be faithful to him”.

The legitimacy and the staying power of the Iraqi government is the most important factor of the American mission in Iraq, since the emergence of an openly anti-American government would dissolve any theoretical benefit from the original invasion. The trouble is that a self-perpetuating cycle is at work; the Iraqi government likely cannot survive without American military protection, yet that very protection ensures that the Iraqi government will never be genuinely legitimate in the eyes of its citizens. “Mercenaries and auxiliaries are at once useless and dangerous, and he who holds his State by means of mercenary troops can never be solidly or securely seated”.

In a country as divided by clan and ethnicity and religious sect as Iraq is, an invading army must have a solid appraisal of what groups it must count as allies in order to effectively govern the country. Several of the decisions taken by the American proconsul, Jerry Bremer, imply that this appraisal was either never made or was horribly blundered.

Two such decisions come to mind. Firstly, the Iraqi army was disbanded and its soldiers and officers were sent home without any way of supporting their families but with their weapons. Secondly, the Ba’ath Party was dissolved, and a massive proportion of its members were excluded from meaningful participation in the new Iraq. Due to the nature of the Iraqi military, especially its officer corps, and the Ba’ath party, these decisions effectively made enemies of the Sunni minority in Iraq, which included the most militarily competent, technocratic, educated, secular, and Western-oriented elements of the society. The very Iraqis, in other words, who could bring either the greatest harm or the greatest aid to the American occupation. “As Princes cannot escape being hated by some, they should, in the first place, endeavor not to be hated by a class; failing in which, they must do all they can to escape the hatred of that class which is the stronger”.

After dismissing the Iraqi army, and thereby humiliating a large portion of the population, it became evident that the American occupation could never succeed without an Iraqi army, as there were not nearly enough American soldiers to pacify Iraq. The Americans therefore began training and arming a new Iraqi army, but the damage had been done. By dismissing the nearest thing to a truly “national” institution in Ba’athist Iraq, the Americans proved their distrust of the Iraqi people. It was therefore inevitable that the new, American-backed Iraqi army would be tainted as occupation collaborators by the population and occasionally as insurgent collaborators by the Americans.

Most experts now point to the decision to disband the Iraqi army without pay and with weapons was the single biggest blunder that the United States made in Iraq. This single decision instantly created a vast class of humiliated, impoverished, idle, and armed young men, which essentially guaranteed the emergence of an insurgency. “By disarming, you at once giver offence, since you show your subjects that you distrust them, either as doubting their courage, or as doubting their fidelity, each of which imputations begets hatred against you”.

It seems unreal now, but it is important to note that there was no insurgency in the early months of the American occupation; it seems now that the Iraqi people were giving the Americans a chance to make clear their true motives and intentions. One wonders what may have happened had the Iraqi army been called upon by the American army to join together in rebuilding and securing Iraq, a goal that both groups shared. One wonders what may have happened had thousands of mid-level Ba’athist technocrats been allowed to keep their jobs, such as running electrical grids, hospitals, and water purification plants. One wonders indeed.

The above quotes and examples are all variations of one unifying theme; the American errors in Iraq have been driven by a failure to recognize its natural allies, to preempt the emergence of natural enemies, and to win the trust and loyalty of the local population. Each of these necessities was articulated in The Prince, and one wonders if George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld ever read the book.

The Crime of the Millenium (Part I)

The crime of the millennium was so insidious and somehow anodyne that not a drop of blood was directly shed during its commission, owing in large part to the fact that it was perpetrated by the types of cowards who kill through surrogates so as not to sully their self-righteousness. The types of cowards who would lock up a man for stealing a car but would not think twice about stealing the votes and voices of 50 million of their fellow citizens or the very dignity of their nation and its highest offices. You know, "white-collar" criminals. Like Woody Guthrie said, "ramblin' through this world / I seen lots of crazy men / some would rob you with a six-gun / and some with a fountain pen."

One of the mantras of the right-wing in America today is that the nation has fallen under that sway of "activist judges", who seek to impose their worldview via judicial rulings, rather than deferring to local and national legislatures as the only legitimate law-making bodies. There is some truth to this critique, as there is to most critiques, but keep this in mind: without "activist judges", de jure racial segregation would have continued indefinitely in the American south, since segregation "laws" were promulgated by legislatures, the elected representatives of the people.

In other words, "activist judges" reversed the greatest of American sins, and does anyone argue that their activism was wrong? Are those judges deemed tyrannical for "legislating from the bench"? The courts are the ultimate check on the tyranny of the majority. Absent the courts' activism in the 1950's and 1960's, segregation would have continued until southern legislatures took it upon themselves to integrate their communities. Would this eventually have happened? Would it have been acceptable to wait another twenty years or twenty minutes? The answers are, respectively, probably not and absolutely not.

So while we are correct to be suspicious of "judicial activism" which serves to overturn decisions taken by the elected representatives of the people, we must also bear in mind that the representatives of the people have taken several unconstitutional and indefensible actions, both locally and nationally. The crime of the millennium, which was carried out in two separate but intertwined decisions, was a case of "judicial activism" which would have made any genuine conservative apoplectic. At the culmination of the crime, the judicial activists did not simply overturn an action taken by the elected representatives of the people; they overturned the peoples' right to elect their own representatives in the first place.

It is a profoundly depressing commentary on our society that the way one feels about the Supreme Court's rulings in Clinton v. Jones and Gore v. Bush depend so heavily on one's political affiliation. To be a Republican who supports those decisions is to support one's political party over one's country, pure and simple. It is analogous to the O.J. Simpson verdict, in which black people were exponentially more likely than whites to assert Simpson's innocence. Those folks supported a member of their race over the self- evident truth and the integrity of the criminal justice system and the rights of the victims to live.

This loyalty to party, to race, to any sub-national group above the national interest, the rule of law, and the pursuit of disinterested justice is the very definition of anti-Americanism.

II

First, for Clinton v. Jones. Paula Jones brought a civil suit against Bill Clinton alleging that Clinton had sexually harassed her, and I would like to make two points pertaining to Clinton's conduct in this matter. Firstly, I have no doubt that Clinton is an adulterer. Secondly, I reject the argument that such behavior has no impact on his fitness to serve as president. Clinton is reckless and self-destructive and narcissistic. Such traits can not simply be compartmentalized and only directed toward sexual pursuits; this man proved that he lacked the judgement to be the most powerful man alive.

Those are only my opinions, however; the two most pertinent facts of the law, which seemed absent during the ruling and during the reaction to said ruling, are as follows: Firstly, any civil case must weigh the rights of the individual against the rights of the group. Secondly, military personnel are immune from all civil suits while they are in uniform.

The Supreme Court was tasked with deciding whether President Clinton would have to answer to Paula Jones' civil suit while he was in office. In other words, did Paula Jones' right to a speedy trial take precedence over the right of 270 million Americans to have a full-time president? What type of logic could be employed to argue that this is even debatable?

How did this happen? Well, the red herring offered at the time was that the Supreme Court had to decide whether or not Clinton was "above the law". He was not above the law, of course, and he never argued that he was. He simply argued that, in the interest of the rights of the many (the entire nation), the rights of the one (Paula Jones) must be put on hold until the end of his term. Clinton never said he was above the law; he said that he should be allowed to subject himself to the law only when he was done running the country in two years. He was right, of course.

Here's an experiment: what if someone sued George W. Bush, alleging that he owed him money from an investment gone bad in Texas years ago? Does anyone seriously think that the president of the United States in such a situation should go down to Houston for a month, a week, an hour, to testify in such a case? Of course not. Why? Because the president is above the law? No, because the nation is above a civil suit brought by a single citizen. Said citizen would simply have to wait until the president was relieved of the awesome responsibilities of his office to answer the charges against him.

So, not only did the Supreme Court literally imply that Paula Jones was more important than anything else in the world, or at least in the country, it simultaneously ruled that, effectively, the president is not a member of the military. The commander-in-chief, in other words, is not afforded the same protections of a private first class. A private first class, as noted above, is immune from civil suits while in uniform, since his role in defending the nation supersedes a plaintiff's right to a speedy redress of his grievances. The court held that a private first class must be spared from distractions that the commander-in-chief must answer to as they arise. Again, what form of logic...

It is clear that there was no logic at work here; there was only self-interest. The majority of Supreme Court justices had an interest in seeing Clinton distracted, persecuted, and humiliated due to their political allegiances. And that, clearly, is all that was at work in Jones v. Clinton. How clear is it? Well, after it was decided that the president of the United States deserved less consideration than Paula Jones or an 18 year old sailor, it was further decided that Clinton could be asked, under oath, about Monica Lewinsky. Since the Paula Jones suit involved allegations of sexual harassment, and since nobody had ever, or has ever, implied that the Clinton-Lewinsky affair was anything but consensual, it had no relevance to the Paula Jones case. But, again, common sense and the law took a back seat here.

So it came to pass that a sitting President was asked, under oath testifying about a totally unconnected matter, whether he had done something that is not against the law (consensual sexual contact with Monica Lewinsky). And it came to pass that the President was impeached and tried for the crime of lying about an unrelated non-crime in the course of a civil suit which was deemed to be more important than the rest of the nation's business. More important than Al-Qaeda. More important than Middle East peace talks. More important than America's image. More important than everything was that Bill Clinton be forced to testify about a consensual sexual affair in the investigation of an alleged non-consensual sexual advance that had taken place years prior and simply could not wait another 2 years for redress.

We know how the impeachment farce, which must be understood as an attempted coup d'etat, nominally concluded. We also know, however, that without this absurd and despicably self-interested charade by the Republican party, George W. Bush would not have had a chance at the presidency. Or, to be more precise, the Supreme Court would not have had a chance to give the presidency to George W. Bush.

DC Inversions

The Two DCs

Drop a Paradigm

"The problems that face us cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them. What we need is a shift in consciousness." ---Einstein

Visiting our nation's capital this week was a study in contradictions for me, as shame mixed with pride, and as hope did the same with despair. These polar opposites were not poles apart, however; they tended instead to occupy the same physical and temporal spaces. The recurring theme for me was the unassailable truth of the quote above, and the undeniable necessity of embracing it with sober hearts and open minds.

The photograph above is part of the World War II memorial in Washington. It's quite an impressive monument and it elicited a solemn and serious pride and respect from my own admittedly skeptical, though hopefully not cynical, heart and mind. More than anything, it illuminated the relevance of Einstein's quote.

The American narrative of World War II is that of a selfless act of liberation. There is some truth to this, of course, and I personally have never been more proud to be an American as I was at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. This was a killing factory whose murderous machinery formed as efficient an abattoir as possible and made no distinction between man or woman, child or elder, soldier or doctor.

That killing was stopped by American soldiers. American soldiers died taking that camp, died to ensure that the killing would not continue for one more day. And despite what pacifists may say, the only way to stop that killing was to kill the killers. That, of course, is the tragedy and the moral inversion of war; to stop a killer, you become him.

There were a great many acts of liberation and selfless sacrifice by Americans during World War II. The problem is that the oversimplified and omission-riddled image of the American liberator was allowed to distract attention from the true cost of the war and then to serve as "rationale" for all manner of subsequent killing by Americans, facilitated by the fact that World War II had given Americans the permanent delusion that they killed only for freedom, that their bombs and bullets magically sought out only the enemy, and that anyone who would resist them was simply Hitler revisited.

This willful blindness began during the war, and it is present at the memorial. The above photograph is from the part of the memorial that lists all of the theatres in which American soldiers fought and died. "Air War in Europe" is quite the euphemism. It is actually much more sinister than that; there's not as much difference as we might wish to believe between calling what the United States did in Europe an "Air War" and calling the Holocaust a "Ground War".

The "Air War", which calls to mind images of dashing and roguish pilots locked in combat with enemy fliers high above foreign territory, resulted in millions of deaths in Europe. Millions. And it was policy. "Area bombing", it was sometimes called. A choice taken by American leadership to destroy the enemy's will rather than his capacity was actualized by a campaign of terrorism, pure and simple. Cologne. Dresden. Hamburg. Destroy those cities and everyone in them and perhaps the enemy will lose "his" will. Such was our policy.

Without erasing the acts of liberation or the evil of Hitler, we could change "Air War in Europe" to "Indiscriminate Terrorist Slaughter of German Civilians" without sacrificing any intellectual integrity. The point isn't to make us feel bad about ourselves; it's to ensure that war is always the last option in deed as well as in word. It is to guarantee that we have a realistic understanding of what we are forced to do when we are forced to war, rather than to portray the greatest slaughters of all time as redemptive violence.

Next I wandered over to the Vietnam Wall, another solemn and sorrowful exercise, this one even more tragic that World War II, since only the most blinkered and delusional ideologues can seriously argue that the Indo-China Wars, whether gagued by their origin, their conduct, or their conclusion, were worth 3 million lives.

As I glanced at thousands upon thousands of names, one number kept coming back to me: 19. The average age of those 58,000 American "men" that were lost in Vietnam was 19. Since there were no 12 year old soldiers dragging down this average, we know that virtually all of the Americans killed in Vietnam were 18, 19, or 20 years "old".

But how big would the Vietnam Wall be if everyone who died in the Vietnam War was on it, rather that just the Americans? Well, it would be 50 times the size it is. Because for every one of those American boys whose breathed his last breath screaming for his mother in the Mekong mud, there were 50 Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotians.

While in Washington, I attended a public health convention including a lecture on Veteran's Health. To my surpirse, one of the lecturers, a Vietnamese woman, focused on the Vietnamese veterans of the Vietnam War. Don't we tend to think of "veterans" as exclusively American? The doctor's presentation was on the effects of Agent Orange in her country.

Forty years after the fact, this woman delivers children with no heads, with three arms, with no arms, with no mouth, and so on. This is the real cost of the Vietnam War. Vietnam was not something that happened to the United States; the United States is something that happened to Vietnam. And, after saturating the country with chemical weapons and killing millions with conventional bombs and bullets, we left. No reparations, no war crimes trials, and no apology.

When the Iraq War memorial is built, will it make mention of the Iraqi dead, now numbering 1 million? Will it memorialize the millions of others who were driven from their homes? Will it be built to remember an entire nation which exists now in name only? Of course it won't; it will memorialize the few thousands American soldiers who died there.

And this is why we need Einstein's "shift in consciousness". World War II lulled us into a myth that wasn't even entirely true at the time, never mind in the sixty years since. Americans have not fought to liberate since World War II. They have fought to impose. They have always argued that if they failed to impose a certain system onto a certain country that country would succumb to a worse system. This has occasionally been true, but it does not erase the American impositions, the American aggressions.

When we are convinced that we fight to liberate, we end up doing things that we rightly hung Germans and Japanese for doing after World War II. Torture. Wars of aggression. Use of chemical weapons. War is not waged to liberate; it is waged to destroy. It is not a political debate; it is a killing contest. Once we started killing Vietnamese or Iraqis who could never have harmed us, the relative merits of our system as opposed to theirs became totally inconsequential.

Let's be honest about what World War II was. It was the low point of Western civilization. The United States had the good sense to stay out of it until it was dragged in. The "Greatest Generation" was called upon to kill for its country, and to kill on a scale previously unimaginable. And it did so. And in doing so, it guaranteed that no subsequent American generation would have to do what they did.

However, subsequent American generations have done these things, against progressively defenseless foes. What more direct way to disrespect a World War II veteran than to send his son and grandson to kill men in sandals because they are the "next Hitler"? What greater disservice to them than to glorify their killing rather than to memorialize them as the most evil necessity upon which our nation ever embarked?