Duty to Warn

Over a year after hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans and the Golf Coast region at large, a multitude of problems still exist. Some of the troubles currently facing the Crescent City include high rent, FEMA/insurance companies being slow to pay, contractor scam artists, squabbles over land rights, the West Nile Virus, citizens not returning from their “surrogate” cities, lack of employment opportunities, and the oh-so-popular and pervasive government inaction. While brilliant political pundits will debate the veracity and severity of the multitude of problems, I really have no desire to throw my hat into that ring. Instead, my dispatch from the former flooded plane of the Mississippi delta attempts to get to the bare, naked truth of the matter. At the heart of this story are the human hearts of the people and the very soul of the New Orleans area.

Pelted by a perpetual hail of electrons fired through a cathode ray tube, the pixels on my PC monitor feed me a generous intellectual bounty of words and images emanating from virtually infinite points dotting the globe. Enabling me to interface with the Internet at will, my computer serves as my window to the world and as a portal through which I can unleash my writings upon the unsuspecting.

Earlier this week as I peered into cyberspace through my ostensibly one-way aperture, I happened upon a picture that my imperialist indoctrination had conditioned me to reflexively dismiss or ignore. However, I’ve grown increasingly resistant to the “charms” of the pathological delusions of American superiority, invulnerability, impunity, and entitlement to decadence. Something about this particular assemblage of glowing pixels left me flailing in a raging river of emotion. As I negotiated the tempestuous feelings surging within me, I made the conscious decision to forgo the American Way of dismissal and distraction. Instead, I connected and contemplated.

In the Wizard of Oz tale, the Tin Man is in search of a heart to make himself more human. Our technology faces a similar challenge.

Not only has our intellectual capacity for invention shot way ahead of our physical and psychic need for the latest and greatest gadgetry, but most current technological advancement has little to do with what we care about most: connecting with ourselves and others in a meaningful, heart-felt way. It''s not just that we still can''t figure out how to program the VCR (now DVR), but you can''t get a hi-5 or a hug from one even when you have figured it out.

Our tech wizardry can help us see or talk to another person across the globe in real time, or shoot us into outer space, but does little to help us relate better to our loved ones. Nor does it console us in times of suffering, and offers us no great solutions to ending war after millennia of repeating our brutal mistakes.

The slithery junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama is ensuring himself a steady political diet of publicity by refusing to take his name out of consideration as a possible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. We're entering the timeframe when all such aspirants have to make up their minds whether they can find the requisite money and political base. Sen. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, the obvious peace-and-justice candidate, has already decided that he can't, which gives us a pretty revealing insight into the weakness of the left these days.

            It's a no-brainer for Obama to excite the political commentators by waving a "maybe" flag. It keeps the spotlight on him, and piles up political capital, whatever he decides to do in the end.

“What kind of a society isn't structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that system.”
---Milton Friedman

What kind indeed? Certainly not a prodigious society such as ours. Thanks to Capitalism, the United States is replete with opulence, might, and benevolence.

Guided by the brilliant foresight of Hamilton, manacled by men like Keynes, Galbraith, and FDR, and ultimately granted a refreshing degree of freedom by the heroic intellectual efforts of Rand and Friedman, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” has wrought a citadel for those wishing to pursue healthy greed, self-interest, and enlightened oppression. While Capitalism in the United States is still afflicted with the diseases of a mixed economy, government regulation and socialistic tendencies, America’s socioeconomic system is far superior to any rival, past or present.

The lead-up to the invasion of Iraq has become notorious in the annals of American journalism. Even many reporters, editors and commentators who fueled the drive to war in 2002 and early 2003 now acknowledge that major media routinely tossed real journalism out the window in favor of boosting war.

But it’s happening again.

The current media travesty is a drumbeat for the idea that the U.S. war effort must keep going. And again, in its news coverage, the New York Times is a bellwether for the latest media parade to the cadence of the warfare state.

During the run-up to the invasion, news stories repeatedly told about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction while the Times and other key media outlets insisted that their coverage was factually reliable. Now the same media outlets insist that their coverage is analytically reliable.

Just as local cities have adopted environmental and wage laws that exceed federal standards, maybe it's time for local initiatives protecting the sanctity of the vote. We've been seeing electoral abuses and manipulations since the Bush administration took power. So we need to ensure the Democrats make national electoral protection a priority. But we can also act on a local level.

Though the Democratic surge took back the Senate and House, some ugly actions quite likely shifted several close Congressional races. The poster race for this election's abuses, appropriately, is Catherine Harris's old Congressional district in Sarasota, FL. Whether through manipulation or error, electronic voting machines in that district logged 18,000 fewer votes in this neck-and-neck congressional race than for governor or senator, and fewer than wholly uncontroversial down-ballot races like the Sarasota Public Hospital Board. Whatever the causes, these votes disappeared in a county that Democrat Christine Jennings carried by 53 percent, and would have likely allowed her to defeat Republican Vern Buchanan.

Troublemaker Charles Rangel, the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has a deliciously bad idea.

The New York congressman recently reprised his audacious proposal - first made nearly four years ago, with the U.S. about to launch Operation Iraqi Quagmire - to reinstate the draft. He reasoned that, if a military action is really necessary, we should, you know, share the sacrifice: get congressmen's' children, presumably even Jenna and Barbara, involved in the action. And if it isn't, we shouldn't go to war.

As a faux-naive device for exposing hypocrisy, Rangel's idea is worthy of Michael Moore, if not Borat. The hemming and hawing of establishment opposition is worth savoring for a news cycle.

But the real reason why the draft, so passionately defended by conservatives during the Vietnam era, is no longer "necessary" or wanted by the military-industrial-media complex is that the country is far too peace-loving to tolerate it.

[Author's Note to Establish Context: I composed this on 11/24/06, the day after Thanksgiving]

"Tell me where do I belong in this sick society?

....Look at yourself instead of looking at me. With accusation in your eyes. Do you want me crucified for my profanity?

....Tell me the truth and I'll admit to my guilt if you'll try to understand. But is that blood that's on your hand from your democracy?"

--Ozzy Osbourne, You're no Different, 1983

Bow your heads and drop to your knees, brothers and sisters! Feel the power of the Holy Dollar coursing through your being as you humbly offer your prayers, exaltations and gratitude to Mighty Mammon!

Lay the perpetual argument to rest. There is no separation of church and state.

It is indisputable that the United States is one nation, under God. Our nation worships the unholy trinity of the Dollar, Acquisitiveness, and Opulence with the fanaticism of the Inquisitors.

‘Tis (officially) the season to be greedy...

Imagine a steer in the stockyards hollering to his fellows, "We need a phased withdrawal from the slaughterhouse, starting in four to six months. The timetable should not be overly rigid. But there should be no more equivocation." Back and forth among the steers the debate meanders on. Some say, "To withdraw now" would be to "display weakness." Others talk about a carrot-and-stick approach. Then the men come out with electric prods and shock them up the chute.

            The way you end a slaughter is by no longer feeding it. Every general, either American or British, with the guts to speak honestly over the past couple of years has said the same thing: The foreign occupation of Iraq by American and British troops is feeding the violence.