SuperWonderBang

This is made with a cool little web app that a friend wrote for the place we used to work.

Lip Service by Fylmz.com

The Chris Dodd campaign offers this debate clock. Notice that Gravel again gets the shaft. Can’t we ask everyone the same number of questions? How hard is that?

With Bush’s recent commutation of the jail part of Scooter Libby’s sentence, one would hope Americans would once and for all see that this power-mad bully has finally destroyed any sense of legitimacy he may have had left.

Bush’s behavior is that of the sycophant who finally is able to grasp the reins of power. At that point, this putrid person gives all his cronies free passes for whatever transgressions they may have committed during that climb to the top. Additionally, it must be clear to nearly any thinking American that Libby was simply thrown under the bus by the Bush administration with the firm knowledge that Bush is above the law and would be able to pardon him of any punishment he might receive.

Sure, there is no pardon yet, but the only punishments  Libby will receive are that of a $250,000 fine and some probation time. One can only guess where that $250,000 is going to come from. I would to see the paper trail on the funds behind that check. Let’s not forget that Libby has gotten rich as the benefactor of Bush’s inner sanctum. So, he gives a little back. Who’s counting?

This is just one more example of George Bush and his administration making themselves above the law. Add to this Dick Cheney’s asinine assertion that the Vice President is not part of the Executive Branch while out of the other side of his mouth, he claims executive privilege over any documents that might give us a glimpse of the criminal activities being perpetrated in the White House.

We can’t wait until 2008. We must impeach Bush now!

According to Chris Dodd’s blog, these are the amounts of time the different candidates have had to speak.

Looks to me like some of the candidates are getting short shrift. This chart looks a lot like the one of dollar amounts raised by the candidates and that’s troublesome. One surprising note is the lack of time Biden received. He was fired up and he seemed like he couldn’t find the rhythm for his message. Gravel’s problem is that his messages are very nuanced, so they never work for the ADD television audience of today’s America.

A thought has been bouncing around inside my head for a few days now. I’m certain that it’s not wholly original. In fact, I can trace the seed of it to Joseph Campbell’s “The Power of Myth.” I’m sure there are some other really smart people to blame for this mild obsession.

This is as simply as I can summarize it: All of the “explanations” that humans have created for everything are really just narratives that tell the story of an unknowable “all.” Let me explain.

First, let’s look at religions (a lot of this is Campbell). Many of them are bound up in stories whose proof is only in their professing of their own truth. These are narratives that attempt to explain actions, conditions, behaviors, and reason through the use of examples, symbols, and allegories. They are stories that we humans have created to attempt to grasp the capital-T “Truth.”

Religions are probably more effective at this in that many of them are based on some aspect of historical truth. That is, someone named Moses, Jesus, Buddha, or Mohammed probably did really live. He may have done or said some things that seemed really intriguing and insightful. It’s this nugget of truth which makes the narratives within religion so compelling.

Second, let’s take physics. I don’t know much about physics, which will be painfully obvious rather quickly. It seems, though, that physics spends an awful lot of time trying to explain things for which its previous explanations have simply failed to suffice. Quantum physics nearly rendered the entire subject obsolete when it arrived on the scene. It helped usher in the amazingly oxymoronic Chaos Theory. So, now the story of physics tells us that certain things are immutable: gravity, the speed of light, or the wavelength that makes my wife’s eyes green. Then, in its next chapter, it wants us to wrap our head around the idea that all of that may not matter and in fact can’t matter.

The narrative is being written as we read it. Religion’s narrative is long and like some Xmen comic book has a huge continuity to keep intact, but the narrative of physics gives us a narrative framework in which the continuity is infinitely malleable. That’s very convenient.

Math seems to spend a lot of its opening chapters giving us constants like physics does: 2+2=4 for example. Yet, it strives to so much more because it begs the language of religion to come play along. We are to take on faith the notion that a negative number is somehow something with which we should have some concern.

Math also wants us to believe that there are numbers, like Pi, which we cannot fully comprehend. It’s like the belief that Mohammed asks us to take when his overly convenient revelations say that the Meccans can continue to worship a few lesser gods and still be his followers. Pi never ends and the djinns of the desert still fit into Mohammed’s absolute monotheism.

These are examples of the classic author’s intrusion into the narrative. A sort of deus ex machina for which we must take a leap of faith and simply suspend our disbelief. Whenever the story gets written into a corner, we change the rules a bit to open up new vistas and new locations for our characters to enjoy.

I should say here that there is nothing wrong with any of this. It’s important to try to understand the world around us and our place in it. I applaud the fact that this effort takes the form of a narrative. I believe in the power of stories to help us transcend the earthly bonds and truly grasp some greater commonality. I believe just as strongly that its important to understand these things as stories. We should not only realize that they are narratives crafted by the human hand, but that they are not the only narratives.

The bookshelves at the local Barnes and Noble are full of stories which might illuminate some dimly-lit corner of the human story. No one author or character has the monopoly on the “right” story, or if you must, the “Truth.” Every story is important and valid. Whether it be religion, evolution, math or the latest chick lit, it serves as a reflection of the story of us–all of us.

The upshot of all this is that the conclusion to all these stories is unknowable. In fact, they are mere reflections of the unknowable nature of the cosmos. I don’t trust the man who says, “I know that light moves at 299,792,458 meters per second.” I don’t trust the man who says, “I know that if I died tonight, I would go to heaven with Jesus.” That’s the man who presumes to know who the killer is in a Raymond Chandler novel after only reading the first three chapters.

Again, it’s not wrong to create these narratives, as long as we don’t talk about them in absolutes. We must treat them the way we do a Seamus Heaney poem. We are respectful and gentle, but not afraid to tear it down into its combinant parts in an effort to see past the reflection into the “there.”

There’s certainly more to explore within this idea. I would love to hear some comments on writers, thinkers, musicians who are playing around with this idea. I’ll say it again. I know this is not original thought, so please share with me some of the places I might have picked up pieces of this.

How could you not vote for Jim Spoo?

That name makes campaigning insanely easy. No one is liable to forget him and as soon as they see it on the ballot, they will have an instant connection.

We know that Hillary Clinton is delving deep into the name association game with her run at the presidency. The question is whether or no the association is positive. For Hillary C., most people will not know too much about her record as senator. They will only know her as the former First Lady. They will only know her as the woman who stayed married to a man who porked his intern with a cigar.

Whether you like Hillary or not, it’s unfortunate that her campaign will not be judged on her merits, but on her name.

The other candidate with a name issue is Barack Obama. Many folks seem to think it’s not an American name. That is to say, it’s stereotypically anglo-saxon, which is a nice way of saying it’s not a white person’s name. Perhaps worse, Obama sounds a lot like Osama and we all know we are supposed to hate Osama.

The issue here is that America is made of people from the world over whose names indicate an ancestry, a lineage, and a culture of which they are often proud. It’s high time we in America embrace our otherness. True, much of how we feel when we here a name is uncontrollable. It’s deeper even than emotions. We meet someone who has the same name as our mother and a connection is instantly created.

For the candidates, managing the timbre of those connections is of paramount importance.

By now, I’m sure that everyone has heard about the pet food recall. It’s a sad thing that some folks lost their pets from the very food that was supposed to nourish them.

I think that this recall highlights an increasing problem with the food supply, not just for pets, but for us as well. That problem is the large-scale centralized processing of the food that we all eat.

As few as 20 years ago, much of the food an individual might eat was raised/grown and processed within a few miles of where he or she lived. Today, as evidenced by large-scale farming and meat processing corporations, our food is produced and processed in fewer and more centralized places. Look at the number of brands that Menu Foods, the company involved with today’s recall, produces: dog food products and cat food products.

This is not just a threat to our health because of accidental contamination, but makes it that much easier for an intentional attack on our food supply to affect a larger number of people. Accidental contamination has proven to be a bad enough issue. Remember the bad spinach and the bad peanut butter? That’s just this year.

What happens when someone or some group decides to intentionally infect all the apples with anthrax? Or else lace all the milk with botulism? They merely have to visit one or two dairies or slaughterhouses and their nefarious intent could affect tens of millions. With the smaller scales of yesteryear, they might have only reached a small regional group of people with a similar attack.

Another detriment from this large-scale factory farming comes the effect it has on the small, family farms which used to be the backbone of this country. Simply put, it is now impossible for those small farmers to compete on price or scale. They have been pushed out of the market. In addition, communities are hurt in an intangible way because they have lost contact with the source of their food. Kids these days don’t even realize that ground beef comes from a cow. A chicken is the skinless, boneless, grilled piece of teriyaki-flavored meat on their plate, not the living breathing clucking pecker.

What’s the solution? I don’t know. We seem to have reached an intractable situation where we obviously can’t go back to “the way it was” but the way forward is even cloudier. There’’s the price pressure from the consumer. There’’s the government subsidies which are in collusion with the pressure from foreign farmers and food suppliers.

Some indication of how to make progress may be found in the European system of small markets that specialize in only one or two products. There are the benefits of the growth of small business while at the same time having less capacity for cross-contamination. This is just a guess, though.

The only absolute truth here is that our food system is dangerously fragile.

This news story, about a man whose sexual offender status is causing him and his family to be forceably moved, article prompted these thoughts on the state of the legal system’s ability to deal with sexual offenders.

If all the guy did was urinate in public and that’s a sex offense, there seems to be a big disconnect between fear and reality. A friend, who lives in Hawaii, says that in his home state, “urinating in public is called sexual assault in the 4th degree. As such you would be required to register as a sex offender. One guy challenged it and the Hawaii supreme court made them take down the online sex offender registry.” This is clearly a dangerous proposition and exposes the fragility of how we currently deal with this special class of offender.

If he truly is a child molester, the issue here is that we as society do not have a way to treat these offenders. Many of them will never be rehabilitated. Even the psychiatric community agrees to that. We don’t have the space to keep them in jail. So what do we do?

Do we put all the sex offenders in a single neighborhood where no one will ever go?

The law treats sexual offenders differently for a reason. Imagine if we did the same thing for another serious crime, say murder.

Force all the murderers to register their address. Then, make sure that they don”t live anywhere near a person who matches the physical description of the person they murdered. It doesn’t make any sense, right?

But, it does seem to make sense for sexual criminals, because the law, whether it explicitly acknowledges it or not, knows that the crime is different from other violent crimes. Therefore, our old methods of incarceration and full release don’t work.

In truth, sexual crimes are signs of mental illness. Most of these people have deep-seated psychological issues that neither prisons nor the civilian populations are equipped to deal with. Yet, we ignore that and simply create a cycle of prison and recidivism.

To a lesser extent, it’s very similar to those people caught in the cycle of drug use and jail time because of that use. We know that people who truly want to break that cycle have to move away from their old using places and using buddies. Do we force them to do so? No. So, it begs the question of forcing sexual predators to move. Both are likely to commit their crime again.

It’s a hard question with seemingly no answers. That’s why the law finds itself in the situation described above.

I used to live in Georgia. I was born and raised there. I still consider it my home. Most of my and my wife’’s family are still there. So, I become really concerned when I hear that Georgia’’s legislature has decided to allow classes on the Bible to be taught in public school.

I have mixed emotions about this because I am a student of literature. I still spend a lot of time reading and thinking about literature and how it affects our lives. So, I understand how important the Bible and its themes, characters, and symbols are to a deeper understanding of western literature. I profess the Bible’’s importance as a foundational document for the study of literature, though I do not ascribe to its religious worship.

At the same time, I am deeply concerned that in the hands of teachers whose primary knowledge of and about the Bible comes from his or her religious experiences and not from his or her education experiences the line between study and worship may become blurred. I believe deeply in the separation of church and state. I believe even deeper in the dangers of indoctrinating young people with religion. They are not equipped to handle the big questions religion asks.

Within this heady brew of religion and state separation and the importance of thorough and well-rounded education, especially in the humanities, I see the state of Georgia throwing its teachers, who are notoriously underfunded and undertrained, into a precarious situation where personal beliefs are central to interpretation. It is neither fair nor intelligent to create such a path toward failure as this situation seems to do.

As a former teacher of literature at the high school level, I know full well how difficult it can be to be “neutral” on a wide array of topics while discussing things as personal as some literature becomes. How do we broach the use of the n-word in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn? How do we unpack Atticus Finch’s seeming collusion on hand with the racial injustice against which he fights on the other hand?

These are difficult literary questions even when something as clearly wrong as racism is involved. How then would we ever hope to study the Bible in a classroom where some of the students are likely to believe that the document is the word of God? How can we possibly go about interpreting the stories and symbols when some students will surely believe that the Bible is nothing but a literal list of dos and don’ts?

In the end, the dangerous part of all of this is not that any great injustice will be done to the students. They will be able to benefit from any discussion of religion and literature. The truly dangerous part is for the teachers themselves. How long until one of them is sued? It will take only one slip of the tongue or one interpretation, even if it is prefaced as only a possibility, to which someone takes offense.

Religion is still a part of this country for whom many people will suffer no slights. By its own definition, at least within many more literal Southern adherents, religion is not something you discuss, it is something you do. With that in mind, how is it possible to discuss the Bible within a classroom of kids and not have some of them think you are compelling them to do rather than to think?

It seems that the Bush administration’s silence on the killing of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko has finally come home to roost.

According to this Al-Jazeera report, an “American expert” on Russian intelligence services, Paul Joyal, who had previously accused the Russian government of culpability in Litvinenko’s death, has been wounded in a shooting outside his home in Washington, D.C.

So, the Bush administration had little to say when the Russians were killing their own operatives, but hopefully, they will have something to say now that American citizens are seemingly targets of the supposedly “newly secretive” Russian intelligence services.

Hasn’t everyone realized now that the Cold War may very well be back on? Doesn’t anyone see that Iraq and Iran, especially Iran, are the battlefields of the newly frigid Cold War?