180. STRATEGIC DISTRACTIONS, OR, WHEN IN DOUBT, ADD MORE CHEESE!

From the Archives

(January 2006) The latter part of my title (“When in doubt, add more cheese”) is the final line of a New York Times food article written by a child of the seventies who grew up eating falafel and stir-fry and only recently discovered the pleasures of well-prepared macaroni and cheese.

This foodie would appreciate the graffiti scrawled on the bathroom door of a major live music venue here: Random Cheese Fact No. 4: Cheese is the best ingredient in any dish in which it is a part.

I don’t have any clue why someone would pay good money to see Sun Ra or the Connells or Two Dollar Pistols, then head to the bathroom to scrawl cheese facts on the door, but there you have it.

(And ueah I’ve been ranting about our government so much lately that I figured I’d talk about food today before I slip into a familiar rant.)

So, yeah. In the deep south where I was raised (twitch twitch), macaroni and cheese is a staple. A field guide to the region would define its natural habitat as Baptist meals on the grounds, funeral wakes, Sunday afternoon family gatherings, your Grandmother’s Thanksgiving table, hot food bars, and little plastic children’s bowls everywhere.

My paternal grandmother always arrived at our house for Thanksgiving carrying a glass baking dish of the creamy stuff fitted into a matching wicker basket (and, incidentally, made THE BEST macaroni and cheese in the world).

The gourmands who insist that Whole Food’s free-range chickens taste divine tend to incorporate a horrid white sauce, but even this newly macaronied author recognizes that this sauce is wrong for the dish.

(And, come to think of it, my ex Mud once took this mistake a step further and added onions to her bechemel sauce.)

Any southerner worth her weight in grits would tell you that you should not get too adventurous with time-honored culinary traditions that are all about nostalgia and comfort though (although parmesan-topped collard greens ain’t half bad).

Meanwhile, the White House now has three leak investigations underway.

(No, not corruption investigations, leak investigations.)

The most secretive administration since Nixon—one that condones torture and suspects Mexicans crossing the border of terrorist acts—isn’t concerned with it’s corruption; they just wantsto know who dared challenge the dictator’s wishes.

(Wonder if the neocons handpicked their investigators to ensure that they only ask questions that monkeyboys can answer?)

So here, let me coin a phrase. Our administration is plaming the messenger. (You heard it here first.)

There's no so-called liberal bias behind my failure to understand how a thinking citizen can fail to notice that punishing whistleblowers thwarts democracy. Plamegate (or Nixon, Revisited) may catch up with the Administration eventually, but I bet attention will remain focused on who informed the public about the (illegal) eavesdropping.

(Speaking of which, wonder what Bunnatine Greenhouse is up to these days?)

I worry that Americans have been rendered so logic-impaired by the Tim Russerts and Rush Limbaughs and Pat Robertsons and yammering hate-radio soundbiters of our age that they’l kowtow to whatever the administration tells them to believe.

Or maybe we’re just decorative citizens now who spend our time focused on consumer questions such as what to wear and where to live and what ringtone to use on our flip-top mobile phonesas our civil rights vanish?

And why not? I mean, come on. Consumer culture tells us that we are defined by our material possessions and our very-own FEMA director wrote, in the midst of a hurricane that was drowning thousands of people, “I am a fashion god.”

Or, worst of all, do you think people actually believe that it’s fine for our unapologetic president to confer dictatorial authority on himself and to stalk anyone who dares question his authority?

(Yep. What a strategy: Plame the messenger and maybe no one will notice that a military coup is taking place in their homeland.)

•

Meanwhile, I guess we’ll have to get ourselves geared up for the Alito hearings, which begin on Monday.

(That information alone has no doubt sent many a tofu-eating liberal in search of some good old mac and cheese.)

But we can at least remind ourselves that the GOP is mired in corruption and plaming the messenger will only cover that fact up for so long.

Alito is the scariest nominee since Bork. A loyal friend to big business who opposes to the Establishment Clause (which prohibits public prayer/religious displays) and is “especially proud” of his work opposing abortion and affirmative action.

He protects homophobic speech. And, at a time when corporations rape the environment even as our polar ice caps are melting, the judge favors limiting our ability to sue against toxic omissions under the Clean Air Act (which he probably also opposes).

Alito favors capital punishment for children and opposed admitting women to his alma mater. And he was deputy assistant attorney general to Ed Meese.

(Remember those “Meese Is A Pig” protests? I've still got my pig nose from them .)

He disagrees with the Miranda decision and struck down an anti-harassment policy that interfered with Christian groups’ right to speak out against queers (because, you know, it's just a life-style choice really. People can choose to whom we are attracted.).

Alito also has a history of being sole dissenter in cases involving sex or race discrimination.

(Thank you Daniel Pollitt for sharing this information with the world.)

...but enough about Alito because maybe you’d prefer to know which men are the nation’s most eligible bachelors.

That’s what Yahoo! is headlining today.

I feel trapped in a rock-paper-scissors world where convenience and stress and obligations and static from the talking heads are trumping my civil rights. And I don’t like it one bit.

SANG IN SHOWER: “Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat baby. Rock the boat. Don’t tip the boat over.” Who sang that? I want to say Hues Corporation but am too lazy to Google it.

READING: The Nation

134. AGE OF UNREASON

From the Archives

(August 2005) So yeah I know I should probably just paste a hyperlink here instead of pasting an entire (brief) article, but just quit reading already if you aren’t concerned about the fact that only 28 percent of US citizens believe in evolution but 68 percent believe in Satan. And since Bush's endorsement of so-called Intelligent Design, the battle between faith and reason is growing stronger every day.

So here’s a damn good article:

WIDESPREAD IGNORANCE
by Sam Harris, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted on ALTERNET August 10, 2005

President Bush has endorsed the pseudo-scientific notion of "intelligent design" (ID) and declared it to be a legitimate alternative to the theory of evolution. This is not surprising, as he has always maintained that "the jury is still out" on the question of evolution.

But the jury is not out—indeed it was well in before President Bush was even born—and anyone familiar with modern biology knows that ID is nothing more than a program of political and religious advocacy masquerading as science.

It is for this reason that the scientific community has been divided on just how (or whether) to dignify the spurious claims of ID "theorists" with a response. While understandable, I believe that such scruples are now misplaced. The Trojan Horse has passed the innermost gates of the city, and scary religious imbeciles are now spilling out.

According to several recent polls, 22 percent of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years. Another 22 percent believe that he will probably do so. This is likely the same 44 percent who go to church once a week or more, who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, and who want to stop teaching our children about the biological fact of evolution.

As the President is well aware, believers of this sort constitute the most cohesive and motivated segment of the American electorate. Consequently, their views and prejudices now influence almost every decision of national importance.

Political liberals seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from these developments and are now thumbing scripture, wondering how best to ingratiate themselves to the legions of men and women in our country who vote mainly on the basis of religious dogma.

More than 50 percent of Americans have a "negative" or "highly negative" view of people who do not believe in God; 70 percent think it important for presidential candidates to be "strongly religious." Because it is taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs, political debate over questions of public policy (stem-cell research, the ethics of assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free speech, gay marriage, etc.) generally gets framed in terms appropriate to a theocracy.

Unreason is now ascendant in the United State—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality. Likewise, Stephen Jay Gould's notion of "non-overlapping magisteria" served only the religious dogmatists who realize, quite rightly, that there is only one magisterium.

Whether a person is religious or secular, there is nothing more sacred than the facts. Either Jesus was born of a virgin, or he wasn't; either there is a God who despises homosexuals, or there isn't. It is time that sane human beings agreed on the standards of evidence necessary to substantiate truth-claims of this sort. The issue is not, as ID advocates allege, whether science can "rule out" the existence of the biblical God.

There are an infinite number of ludicrous ideas that science could not "rule out," but which no sensible person would entertain. The issue is whether there is any good reason to believe the sorts of things that religious dogmatists believe—that God exists and takes an interest in the affairs of human beings; that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception (and, therefore, that blastocysts are the moral equivalents of persons); etc. There simply is no good reason to believe such things, and scientists should stop hiding their light under a bushel and make this emphatically obvious to everyone.

Imagine President Bush addressing the National Prayer Breakfast in these terms: "Behind all of life and all history there is a dedication and a purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful Zeus." Imagine his speech to Congress containing the sentence "Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that Apollo is not neutral between them."

Clearly, the commonplaces of language conceal the vacuity and strangeness of many of our beliefs. Our president regularly speaks in phrases appropriate to the fourteenth century, and no one seems inclined to find out what words like "God" and "crusade" and "wonder-working power" mean to him. Not only do we still eat the offal of the ancient world; we are positively smug about it. Garry Wills has noted that the Bush White House "is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study cells, like a whited monastery." This should trouble us as much as it troubles the fanatics of the Muslim world.

The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.

Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.

A president who regularly speaks in phrases appropriate to the fourteenth century—and he’s certainly not talking about the fact that 98 percent of our genes are the same as those of chimps! And, these days, our populace revels in its own ignorance.

Sadly, that describes a good portion of the populace of the deep South (and, yeah, I know I just raised some Southerners' hackles, but they also know that this is true. Plus, I'm from the deep south myself and I choose to live and beat my head against the wall here, so I'm going to say it anyway. Only now it's the entire country, seems like, and not just one region, that's embracing this unreason.

A commentor says “If there ever was an Anti-Christ, I would have to say that it is religion.”

BEST OF SPAM: Find Mr. Right and Keep Him. (No thanks. Saw enough hairy backs at the beach this past weekend.)

133. COLLAPSING ICONS

From the Archives

(August 2005) Diane Arbus was a fashion photographer for twenty-some-odd years. Then, in the late 1950s, she turned away from models and began photographing freaks (her term)—transvestites, midgets, Down syndrome patients, carnies, and whoever else fit her category on any given day. What made her turn away from conventional beauty, change her lens? And what made her ingest barbiturates and slit her own wrists twenty years later?

People in New Hampshire once flocked to see a series of granite ledges that jutted out of a mountain to form an old man’s face and, eventually, “Old Man of the Mountain” came to symbolize their state. The granite man collapsed without warning one day though, and New Hampshire was left with a symbol that no longer reflected its reality.

So what do you do when the symbols that represent your core way of being in the world collapse, when you no longer see yourself through your familiar lens? It seems folly to attempt to reconstruct yourself in your former shape, but freefalling into an unfamiliar void is no picnic either. And it’s no easy job to believe that you will experience salvation in some as-yet-to-be-revealed form.

Maybe Diane Arbus looked at the last fashion model she would ever photograph one day and realized that she had reached the point of no return. And she put down her camera, took a deep breath, and took a leap of faith, trusting that she would be okay.

Maybe she knew that she would collapse altogether otherwise.

And maybe changing her lens turned out to be the salvation that sustained her for another twenty years.

And maybe, when she went into freefall in 1971, she believed that she would once again find herself on a new plane.

And maybe she did.

Well, that’s faith, isn’t it? Because, let’s face it, all those I Can’t Wait to See Jezus songs combined won’t alter the fact that, when you lose yourself, you just don’t know what new symbols might coalesce into your new self.

And no one can tell us with certainty what will happen when we die, scare us though they try.

Bush recently said, of global warming, “we’ll get used to it.” But I do not intend to watch the fish die because I might get used to a different ecosystem.

Still, I do believe that sitting still during times of great change and just absorbing the changes until we can get used to it and breathe again is the trick to surviving collapsing worlds and symbols and relationships (but definitely not democracies).

Change is the only constant, right?

LISTENING TO: unfortunately, a prof said “hey, remember this?” and then played “Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting (those kicks were fast as lightning)" so now (damn it) this song is stuck in my head.

SINGING IN SHOWER: That round about being by the wah-ah-ters, the wah-ah-ters of Babylon

BEST OF SPAM: Esperanza Hendrix (she speaks the universal language while mouthing her guitar strings?)

78. PASS THE COW CHIPS

From the Archives

(2005) Today is April 15. One year has passed since Lynne's untimely death and I am in a pensive mood.

It's also tax day. Or, as Molly Ivins’s aptly says

April 15: You’re Getting Screwed.

She refers to NYT regular and Pulitzer prize–winner author David Cay Johnston’s Perfectly Legal—The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super-Rich—and Cheat Everyone Else.

Johnston reports:

Through explicit policies, as well as tax laws never reported in the news, Congress now literally takes money from those making $30,000 to $500,000 per year and funnels it in subtle ways to the super-rich—the top one-one hundredth of one percent of Americans.

People making $60,000 paid a larger share of their 2001 income in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes than a family making $25 million, the latest Internal Revenue Service data show. And in income taxes alone, people making $400,000 paid a larger share of their incomes than the 7,000 households who made $10 million or more.

The rest of us are subsidizing not only the super-rich, but also corporations. Fifty years ago, corporations paid 60 percent of all federal taxes. But by 2003, that was down to 16 percent. So individual taxpayers have to make up the difference, as corporate profits soar and wages fall.

It’s a Bush world after all.

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Meanwhile, the stock market fell to the lowest it’s been in two years today and the World Cow Chip Throwing Contest was held in Beaver, Oklahoma.

(The ways in which some people can distract themselves never fail to amaze me.)

JUSTICE SUNDAY?

From the Archives

(April 2005) I'm pasting this entire article because the news is so obscene. We’re already a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy; will we be a theocracy by the time Bush finally leaves office?

FRIST SET TO USE RELIGIOUS STAGE ON JUDICIAL ISSUE
by DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, New York Times
Published: April 15, 2005

WASHINGTON, April 14—As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.

Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias [by SC Dixicrat Strom Thurmond-MEDEA], and it is now being used against people of faith."

Organizers say they hope to reach more than a million people by distributing the telecast to churches around the country, over the Internet and over Christian television and radio networks and stations.

Dr. Frist's spokesman said the senator's speech in the telecast would reflect his previous remarks on judicial appointments. In the past he has consistently balanced a determination "not to yield" on the president's nominees with appeals to the Democrats for compromise. He has distanced himself from the statements of others like the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, who have attacked the courts, saying they are too liberal, "run amok" or are hostile to Christianity.

The telecast, however, will put Dr. Frist in a very different context. Asked about Dr. Frist's participation in an event describing the filibuster "as against people of faith," his spokesman, Bob Stevenson, did not answer the question directly.

"Senator Frist is doing everything he can to ensure judicial nominees are treated fairly and that every senator has the opportunity to give the president their advice and consent through an up or down vote," Mr. Stevenson said, adding, "He has spoken to groups all across the nation to press that point, and as long as a minority of Democrats continue to block a vote, he will continue to do so."

Some of the nation's most influential evangelical Protestants are participating in the teleconference in Louisville, including Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; Chuck Colson, the born-again Watergate figure and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; and Dr. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The event is taking place as Democrats and Republicans alike are escalating their public relations campaigns in anticipation of an imminent confrontation. The Democratic minority has blocked confirmation of 10 of President Bush's judicial nominees by preventing Republicans from gaining the 60 votes needed to close debate, using the filibuster tactic often used by political minorities and most notoriously employed by opponents of civil rights.

Dr. Frist has threatened that the Republican majority might change the rules to require only a majority vote on nominees, and Democrats have vowed to bring Senate business to a standstill if he does.

On Thursday, one wavering Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, told a television interviewer, Chris Matthews, that he would vote against the change.

"By the way, when Bill Clinton was president, we, effectively, in the Judiciary Committee blocked a number of his nominees," Mr. McCain said.

On Thursday the Judiciary Committee sent the nomination of Thomas B. Griffith for an appellate court post to the Senate floor. Democrats say they do not intend to block Mr. Griffith's nomination.

That cleared the way for the committee to approve several previously blocked judicial appointees in the next two weeks.
The telecast also signals an escalation of the campaign for the rule change by Christian conservatives who see the current court battle as the climax of a 30-year culture war, a chance to reverse decades of legal decisions about abortion, religion in public life, gay rights and marriage.

"As the liberal, anti-Christian dogma of the left has been repudiated in almost every recent election, the courts have become the last great bastion for liberalism," Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and organizer of the telecast, wrote in a message on the group's Web site. "For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the A.C.L.U., have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms."

Democrats accused Dr. Frist of exploiting religious faith for political ends by joining the telecast. "No party has a monopoly on faith, and for Senator Frist to participate in this kind of telecast just throws more oil on the partisan flames," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

But Mr. Perkins stood by the characterization of Democrats as hostile to faith. "What they have done is, they have targeted people for reasons of their faith or moral position," he said, referring to Democratic criticisms of nominees over their views of cases about abortion rights or public religious expressions.

"The issue of the judiciary is really something that has been veiled by this 'judicial mystique' so our folks don't really understand it, but they are beginning to connect the dots," Mr. Perkins said in an interview, reciting a string of court decisions about prayer or displays of religion.

"They were all brought about by the courts," he said.

Democrats, for their part, are already stepping up their efforts to link Dr. Frist and the rule change with conservatives statements about unaccountable judges hostile to faith.

On Thursday, Mr. Schumer released an open letter calling on Dr. Frist to denounce such attacks. "The last thing we need is inflammatory rhetoric which on its face encourages violence against judges," he wrote.