Happy birthday, Yma Sumac, “she has a panther and a nightingale in her throat.”

I had independently begun to use the word fema’ed with my friends in related but simpler ways. It’s mostly used as an adjective, and I predict a glorious future in the vernacular: (1) A situation can be fema’ed, in a sense that will replace snafu’ed or fubar. (2) A person can be fema’ed. “I’m fema’ed” will replace I’m up the creek without a paddle, I’m screwed or I’m totally fucked. To anticipate some of your objections, I am of course not talking about the sexual act here, but rather some of the less pretty things people frequently do to one another.

Unless you operate on a child’s fantasy level taking your parents’ reassurances that the police and firemen will always protect you and should always be trusted, it seems as if considering the possibility of the incapacitation of local emergency personnel would be basic to any disaster response plan!

Rothstein claims that with the Enlightenment the notion that natural disasters represented the justice of the gods and thus sustained the moral order faded, replaced by an amoral randomness and the challenge of understanding causality in natural science terms. He is on more dicy ground in suggesting that the political blame game in the aftermath of the Gulf Coast disaster represents the emergence of a new theodicy which explains why bad things happen to good, or at least innocent, people in terms of the failures of their political leaders.

I have difficulty with this assertion on several grounds. First, this is not a new theme. Only the fundamentalist crazies have been blaming the victims for the human devastation of Katrina, but the myth of the Fisher King, the ruler whose personal moral failure lays waste to the country he rules, is archetypal (and has, BTW, long formed the mythic justification for regicide).

Secondly, we continue to conceive of the impact of public policy decisions as being in the realm of natural causality, not some separate and rarefied moral sphere. The abandonment of wetlands protection, the diversion of public preparedness resources to a specious terrorist threat, the gutting of public works funding for flood protection projects, and the abandonment of the urban poor (in New Orleans and everywhere else) to their own resources are rational, if reprehensible, causal factors for the magnitude of the catastrophe in New Orleans.

But perhaps there is a sense in which this disaster, like others, does represent a human moral failing — that of hubris. Our conceit in insisting on living on lowlying hurricane-ridden coasts, in wildfire and mudslide zones, on earthquake fault lines, on flood plains, at the mercy of increasingly vigorous weather caused by manmade precipitants of climate change, is a moral decision, and should be made deliberately, recognizing that it relies on our dubious interminable belief that we can live at odds with nature and can vanquish natural forces no matter what their fury. Increasingly, that ‘war with nature’ requires the protection of massive public expenditure and institutional support to be sustainable. People need to wake up to realize that, in voting as they did in the last two presidential elections for an administration that inherently believes government should have no role in protecting its citizens against larger forces, they have voted against the safety they need to continue to inhabit dubious environmental niches.

Happy birthday, Sonny Rollins! (PopMatters)

The Michael Larsen incident: a fascinating read. [thanks, abby]

Rove orchestrates a response comprising by-now familiar elements:

The deadliest, costliest and most intense tropical cyclones 1851-2004 (NOAA via unfutz)

“Horse group: FEMA chief had to be `asked to resign'” (Boston Herald)

It is not clear how, but in an ‘intriguing parasitic strategy’, the parasitic Nematomorph hairworm ‘hijacks’ the brain of the grasshoppers and crickets inside which it grows when it is time for it to transform into an aquatic adult. The worm produces proteins which directly affect its insect host’s CNS to make the land-dwelling host behave in ways it would never ordinarily do, by seeking out and plunging into water. This allows the mature hairworm to emerge and swim away to find a mate, leaving the insect host dead or dying in the water. (New Scientist) I know, not everything is a political parable, but although it is certainly a fascinating story in its own right, it it also an apt description of what the parasites in the White House are doing to the body of the U.S.

“Disabled scientist Professor Stephen Hawking is using a hi-tech gadget to communicate by blinking because his deteriorating health limits movement.” (BBC)

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who cuts a fine media figure these days, thinks he might be a target for elimination because of the choice words he has had for George Bush and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco. Hey, so what if it’s from World Net Daily? It’s a great story.

Video: Distraught Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu threatens to punch out the President. (onegoodmove)

One of my long-term favorite weblogs has always had been an authentic New Orleans voice. One of the first places to which I turned for a real perspective on Katrina when I came out of the woods at the end of the week and learned what had happened while my family and I were out of range of news updates. I am very glad all of Chuck Taggart’s family are safe and sound and that his voice has not been silenced by the catastrophe.

Mice regrow hearts, amputated limbs and damaged organs. The self-healing strain of mice could regenerate any damaged body part except the brain. Scientists at the Wistar Institue, a US biomedical research center, serendipitously discovered the regenerating ability of the strain of mice when the identification holes they punch in the ears of the mice healed without a scar. The ability seems to be controlled by about a dozen genes, comparable genes to which are “almost certain” to exist in humans. When fetal cells from the self-healing strain were transferred to other mice, the recipients too acquired the ability to regenerate. To my knowledge, this is the first demonstration of this phenomenon, well-known in less complex vertebrates, in a mammalian species. (The Australian)

Mithras’ Fables of the reconstruction has this acerbic roster. I have one quibble, however. Jeff Jarvis (“Buzzmachine”) doesn’t just hate liberals and Democrats, he hates whomever doesn’t reflect his grandeur. Mithras is right about the essential ludicrousness of a man whose basis for punditry rests on being a TV Guide writer. ` [via Just Between Strangers]

Designer models interpret Alice in Wonderland, as photographed by Annie Liebovitz. [via boing boing]

Great if you are a tightrope walker with an accelerated aging syndrome. (New Scientist)

It’s not the ’70’s again; it’s always been the ’70’s, but it took a long time for people like Brooks to notice.

My family and I will be off in parts unknown, and I will be away from the keyboard, through Labor Day, so no new posts here until then. Enjoy the rest of your summer and, as always, thank you for your patronage.

Thompson is not much of a diagnostician, and he legitimizes alot of his psychiatric namecalling by invoking the deprecated psychoanalyst Justin Frank, author of Bush on the Couch, who many of us feel violated an ethical canon of the field by diagnosing sight unseen (although I feel the the potential impact of the President’s mental stability or lack thereof on every living soul on the planet makes him fair game in a different way even than other public figures whose behavior is under scrutiny). Thompson’s other claim to the authority to bandy about the labels is his own status as a recovering alcoholic with 11 years sobriety. (“I know all too well the symptoms that Dr. Frank describes and, after watching Bush for the past several years, I have to, unfortunately, agree with him.”) Diagnostic acumen apart, if Bush’s behavior is really as Thompson’s putative White House sources describe it, we had better hope he is being attended to by a good psychopharmacologist. Not that we would ever know, since evidence bearing on the President’s mental health is a state secret, unlike the public status of the results of his annual physical. I would argue that the public has even more of an abiding interest in knowing about the President’s mental health than his physical, and that, if there is not, there ought to be some sort of periodic checkup in this sphere as well, the results being made public. (Bush’s own white paper on reforming the mental health delivery system in the United States, which I read in detail and wrote about in FmH last year, comes close to suggesting a mandatory annual mental health checkup for every citizen, in the interpretation of some, by the way…) Of course, someone as beady-eyed, petty and defensive as Dubya (and, uhh, that’s no psychiatric diagnosis, in case you were wondering) would take exception to such a requirement and fire any White House mental health professional who took their job responsibilities too seriously.

Review of Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens by Susan Clancy. Harvard University Press, $22.95:

I wrote about this story when it first broke in May and felt that the British mental health system was markedly remiss in terms of the lack of resources they devoted to his care. For someone the only clue to whose mysterious identity was that he appeared to be a composer and performer of captivating piano music to be treated by a staff whose knowledge of music could be summed up in statements like “I know it’s classical music, that’s all” (to paraphrase) and then to be transferred for internal reasons to a facility that did not even have a piano appalled me.

Now, at least according to a pulp tabloid ‘exclusive’, mental health treaters are reduced to name-calling. ‘Fakery’ is not a useful term to employ in this situation. We use the term “malingering” in psychiatry when a person deliberately, with conscious decision and purpose, simulates psychiatric symptoms for specific advantage. But it is a very difficult diagnosis to make, and one of last resort, even acknowledging that someone who malingers will always have the healthcare system (that is biased in favor of taking patients’ displays or reports of their distress at face value) over a barrel.

This patient’s actions over the ensuing months in the hospital themselves would seem to confirm, rather than disconfirm, that he is quite disturbed. Naive untrained staffs in mental health facilities often try to sort patients with disturbing behaviors into those who “can’t help it” and those who are “doing it deliberately” (so does the legal system when dealing with deranged behavior, trying to determine whether someone is “not guilty by reason of insanity” or “criminally responsible”) instead of realizing that there are all sorts of gradations of intentionality and all sorts of disturbances of the will. Instead of thinking about suing him for wasting their time, officials should examine their own seeming ineptitude in embodying that naiveté and in not getting to the bottom of this sooner. “Physician, heal thyself”, the saying goes, and also “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Discussion thread on The Onion‘s A.V. Club site about what movies people have walked out of. In almost each instance, they should’ve known better than to go to those dogs in the first place. Most are apologetic defensive about their choices and they deserve to be.

(It is real.) (World Wide Words)

Click here for larger version. (Harper’s via walker)

An Evolutionary Perspective (Human Nature)

Just changed and upgraded my iPod’s battery. Trepidations about popping the case, but an easy five-minute procedure. Painfree. Cute little 40-gig drive inside. If that ever failed, it would be deadly easy to replace too. Does anyone know if there is a program to format a naked drive for an iPod? If so, it would be easy to upgrade to a larger drive as well if a person wanted to, for example to clog the iPod up with podcasts as well as music…

And: Army Planning for Four More Years in Iraq (Yahoo! News)

Although this Leaf Chronicle article stays superficial (the lead is about whether the residents mind being called hippies), it is a good update on what has happened to The Farm, an enormous intentional community in Summertown, Tennessee started in 1970 and going through changes but still going strong. I have long had an interest in what they were doing and spent some time visiting there during the summer of 1980 when I was a medical student volunteering in rural Tennessee as part of the Appalachian Student Health Coalition. The Farm was already legendary in countercultural circles by that time. However, I had lost touch with what was happening there in the last decade or so and, frankly, expected it not to have survived. Good to hear otherwise.

How can it be, however, that the article mentions the spiritual godfather of The Farm, Stephen Gaskin, only once, and spiritual godmother Ina May Gaskin not at all? Her midwifery values were at the core of The Farm’s philosophy and activities. It was well-known that down-and-out expectant mothers from anywhere could come there to give birth and, if I remember correctly, have their children raised there instead of aborting their pregnancies. I wonder where Ina May and Stephen are. Stephen Gaskin, if he is still alive, is 70 now. This online resumé has not been been updated since 1995, but I noted his presence on the scene as recently as 2000 in FmH, when I linked to this R.U. Sirius interview with Gaskin. Gaskin was desultorily seeking the Green Party nomination during the 2000 Presidential campaign. Unfortunately, Sirius asked Gaskin little else about what he was up to back then, preferring to gossip with him about how much pot Al Gore smoked.

Here is a Smart Communities Network entry for The Farm with more details about what they are up to. Again, there is little mention of the Gaskins except in a historical vein. Could they have parted ways with The Farm community or departed the planet? Do any FmH readers know?

Part of the triviality of the Leaf Chronicle article lies in its focus on The Farm’s drift toward some private ownership of property from its stringently communitarian beginnings. Mainstream press coverage of intentional communities has always focused (often triumpally) on this prevalent trend as if it is proof of failure (and somehow a part of the global defeat of Communism?) when in reality it is merely an epiphenomenon of the ongoing compromises and struggles needed to balance right livelihood and principled vision on the one hand with accommodating to the pressures of the real world on the other. What would have been more appropriate would have been a greater focus on the good works of what was and is, after all, an idealistic community which has done an enormous amount to put its principles into action! One aspect of The Farm’s activities which drew my attention was the Plenty Project, a Gaskin-led charity bypassing government structures to offer direct international development assistance, including (if I remember correctly) owning their own freighter to ship relief aid, building materials, grain and seed, farming implements etc. abroad. Plenty International’s website was updated as recently as the tsunami disaster of last winter. It appears as if its scope has, not surprisingly, narrowed, but not its vision.

One of The Farm’s offshoots, the Ecovillage Network of North America, “an effort to link a wide variety of green communities, Eco-City projects and ecovillages, and to encourage a transition from the traditional Western consumer lifestyle to one of sustainable development,” sounds interesting.

Related: The Hippie Origins of PCs, a mini-review of What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff:

Alan B. Scrivener begins by reflecting on Charles Dodson / Lewis Carroll:

“Humpty Dumpty: [Having just proved it is 364 times better to celebrate your un-birthday] There’s glory for you!

Alice: I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory.’

Humpty Dumpty: Of course you don’t — ’till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’

Alice: But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument.’

Humpty Dumpty: When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.

Alice: The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.

Humpty Dumpty: The question is which is to be the master — that’s all.”

An Evolutionary Perspective (Human Nature)

I am relieved that the evictions from Gaza have been achieved so much more rapidly and efficiently than had been expected. As a child growing up Jewish, I recall my visceral revulsion about the culture of victimization that seemed to be the sole source of Jewish identity in the secular Jewish community to which I was exposed. It was important to remain a Jew, the message went, because these were the people who had endured such perennial anti-Semitic persecution and its apotheosis in the Holocaust. I thought it was pitiful that that was all there was to modern Jewish identity and I questioned whether that was a sufficient way of being Jewish.

Of course it wasn’t sufficient, and it isn’t really all there is to being a secular Jew in the contemporary world, but it seemed so. I have been reminded of that pitiful victim stance by some of the shrill extremist settlers’ outcries this week. “How can a Jew do this to a Jew?” “We have nowhere to go, we’ll be homeless!” And, predictably, the ultimate perversion of the memory of the Holocaust, “The Israeli government is treating us just like Hitler did.” I am grateful this particularly egregious sentiment will fade from the front page.

Most group hatred seems based on a tribal mentality in which core identity is maintained by desperate measures to distinguish insiders from outsiders, like from unlike, by construing the foreign as dangerous. This may be hardwired into human neurobiology and is inherently at odds with a world in which we commune with those who are heterogeneous. Those who appeal to our tribal instincts — which, by the way, is the unconscious message upon which the American Republican party’s appeal is built, I am convinced — are appealing to our basest, most reptilian perversion of the yearning for community which functions as little more than a justification for continuing violence and victimization.

Cindy Sheehan describes her June 2004 meeting with Bush. Valuable to have a description of this pitiful deficient and inherent deceitful little man first hand, since his handlers usually do such a good job keeping him away from anyone perceptive.

However, her observations stand in stark contrast to how she described her meeting before her current media visibility:

You can get the download here.

Have you ever wanted to search back for something you read in the past on FmH? Many of the site-specific search strategies don’t work because Follow Me Here doesn’t have its own domain and gelwan.com, which you may use to get here (http://gelwan.com/followme.html) is just a virtual domain pointing to http://theworld.com/~emg. So Atomz, which I used to use here, has stopped indexing FmH posts properly. You could use the syntax that limits Google’s search to one domain by adding “site:theworld.com” into your search box, but you would have to wade through content at all the other pages hosted by The World which are not mine, since all FmH posts are at http://theworld.com/~emg/ and you can’t put a subdomain (i.e. you can’t use “site:theworld.com/~emg”) into Google’s ‘site:’ specifier, only a top-level domain. But, duh, I just realized there is a simple solution. Putting “~emg site:theworld.com”, along with your search phrase, into the box, works fine.

Update: Actually, and I can’t figure out why, you do much better if you use The World’s parent domain, std.com. For example, I get 13 hits if I search in Google for “Iraq ~emg site:theworld.com” but 53 hits if I search for “Iraq ~emg site:std.com”. I get 18 hits on “Bush ~emg site:theworld.com” but 61 for “Bush ~emg site:std.com.” This is even though DNS translation of std.com and theworld.com (and world.std.com) all go to the same IP address. Next question: I’m sure I have referred to Iraq in more than 53 posts here, and Bush more than 61 times (even if you allow for the fact that I usually use an epithet instead of his proper name…). Anyone able to illuminate me on any of this?

Heart Disease: “Death rates from heart disease in New York City are among the highest recorded in the country, and no one quite knows why.”

WWASS? (What would Andrew Sullivan say?)

Donald Berwick recognised by the Queen. I know I am usually expressing cynical sentiments about the state of modern healthcare and its practitioners; you may be pleased to know I recognize that there are exceptions. I’ve just read Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains and am tremendously inspired by Paul Farmer’s work; with his quirkiness and idiosyncracy, he’s no saint but perhaps the closest one can come in the modern world. Although I have never run across his work before, here is another Boston-area physician, Donald Berwick, who seems to be doing real good. If not sainthood, at least knighthood…

A review of philospher Michael Lynch’s True to Life: why truth matters:

Lynch argues that we should be far more concerned that we are slipping in our commitment to truth.

“An increasingly popular movement in the visual arts prides itself on picturing everything that is the raw, untutored, and irrational. ” (WBUR) I don’t know about popular, but I have long been an observer and sometimes collector of raw art, in part because of my work as a psychiatrist. One idea in art brut is that the often compulsive and spontaneous artistic production of “outsiders” (i.e. those disconnected from exposure to the artistic conventions of the cultural mainstream, and certainly untutored in artistic technique, including the mentally ill and developmentally disabled) has an often overwhelming power and pathos, as well as a grace and subtlety, of unmediated and unshaped expressiveness. By the way, if you are ever in Lausanne, do not miss a trip to the Collection de l’Art Brut, the museum of outsider art started by Jean Dubuffet.

The Milky Way is a rare and beautiful barred spiral, not one of those more common ordinary spiral galaxies it has always been thought to be, according to a new survey of the starts at the center of our galaxy. Will proponents of intelligent design take heart?

“Tim Wilson said he and his wife did not know their daughter had been engaging in the practice.” (The Kansas City Channel) Sorry to be callous, I know it is tragic and I am sorry for her parents’ loss, but the practice seems so… stupid!

Deep within this C/NET article on Salon’s fiscal woes, however, is an even more troubling comment from its new CEO about plans that Salon itself will change from “something akin to a print magazine with articles posted online to a more interactive Web site.”

…since it is The Guardian reporting that:

(If you’re supposedly Papally infallible, why do you need to ask for immunity, by the way??)

It seems that nearly everything London officials said to excuse the Tube killing of Charles De Menezes was a misrepresentation, according to docuemnts and photographs leaked to ITV. (“They all look alike…”)

Venerable, vibrant and thoughtful veteran weblog returns with a new design. Welcome home, Lyn!

Thanks to acm for pointing me toward this This Modern World piece setting Michelle Malkin’s words against themselves, one self-contradiction after another. Malkin is right up there with Coulter on my list of blithering idiots we love to hate.

Portrait of Spanish animation artist Carlos Grangel, the hand behind the brush on Tim Burton’s upcoming Corpse Bride, which my family and I are awaiting enthusiastically. (New York Times )

Portrait of Spanish animation artist Carlos Grangel, the hand behind the brush on Tim Burton’s upcoming Corpse Bride, which my family and I are awaiting enthusiastically. (New York Times )

Firing ranges can have more wildlife than national parks. (Nature) More mind-bending arguments along the lines of the rest of today’s posts — that everything bad is good for you and vice versa.

This incredible (in the literal sense of the word, as in “unbelievable”) argument by Andrew Sullivan posits that “American society has rescued itself from what seemed to be terminal decline caused by family breakdown.” He goes on at length about how the cause was the cultural degeneracy of the ’60’s and ’70’s. Between my reaction to this and the smears on the anti-war movement I discuss below, why do I feel I am the sole defender of the legacy of the counterculture?

I have a hard time with both sides of his argument — his notion of the causes of societal breakdown and his sense that things are better — and his use of the term ‘pessimist’ as an epithet to dismiss most thoughtful social criticism that doesn’t proclaim the ‘good news’ as fervently as he would like. Funny, I’m a traditionalist too in some senses, and I think that social anomie and cultural distress relate to loss of community structures, family values and meaningful interpersonal relatedness, that modernity is a disease humans did not evolve to live with from either a mental or a physical standpoint. But it is a question of which conditions of modernity are the destructive ones. It is just that it turns things entirely on their head to say that neoconservative social policy is part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Sullivan may be right to argue that an open society can self-correct more rapidly because of the free flow of information. It is just an incredible illusion to think that that’s what we have here in American society despite the stories we tell ourselves. It is increasingly tiresome to hear people continue to cite the drop in crime, when sociologists have no consensus that it is even a real or enduring trend. Sullivan even cites the claim that cancer rates are down and cure rates are up, while most perspicacious medial observers who know what they are talking about have no such faith for cancer overall, although there have been modest gains with isolated specific tumors.

What planet is he living on when he asserts that he is talking about “a society that its biggest health problem is obesity and its biggest environmental problems are cars that are big enough for our grandparents to have lived in”? Every tired old saw is trotted out, uncritically, from Reagan’s ‘achievement’ in “defining government as part of the problem” to Clinton’s in “abolishing welfare-on-demand.” It is, at least, nice to hear him concede that it is not that the U.S. doesn’t have any social problems left; they are just in “isolated pockets” and he is sure we will eradicate them soon. Sullivan is writing in the Times of London for a British reading public that is several decades behind the US in adoption of neocon ignorant authoritarianism. Woe to those who listen to this pap.

Here’s a loose association, but has anyone seen Crash? This brutal (and somewhat over-the-top) film about a variety of pathologies in human interaction starts with a memorable voiceover monologue by Don Cheadle during the opening credits about how the problem with LA is that everyone is enveloped in steel and glass and isolated from the normal experience of interpersonal contact as they travel through the urban world.

Yes, but don’t stray too far from identifying the central factor — the erosion in bedside manner on the part of physicians, which is a result of productivity pressures but also deficiencies in curriculum design in medical schools and, indeed, in the criteria used to select medical students in the first place. These failings, in turn, reflect the depreciation of compassion as a societal value and the impact of that change on shaping aspirations to and expectations of a medical career.

FmH’s host was unreachable for about the past twenty-four hours or so, so welcome back, readers, I missed you (both of you). I haven’t contacted my web host yet to figure out what happened, but this followed a lightning storm again. Could the microwave internet link atop the Prudential Tower have gotten hit again, as it did several weeks ago?

Can anyone suggest a way that I could set up automtaic monitoring of my website so that if it is unreachable I could receive an email, a text message or something?

…and I’m exasperated. Excitement about a nascent anti-war movement is infused by naiveté, massively unwarranted assumptions, and derogatory misconceptions about the Vietnam era anti-war movement from people who weren’t there.

Kos speculates on the basis for Cindy Sheehan’s appeal, in part citing Jeff Feldman‘s contention that the ‘grieving mother’ meme has ‘captured the nation’s imagination’ and raises the possibility of “a visible anti-war movement centered around a broad-based unassailable concern, a mother’s concern for her children.” Kos suggests that “the country has turned against the Iraq Debacle” without the emergence of a visible anti-war movement and even gives the nod to the suggestion by atrios that this be attributed to the absence of a ‘Vietnam-style’ anti-war movement. He suggests that this family-centered concern might resonate “in a way a more traditional anti-war movement might not.” He is all aquiver over the possibility that this might be the strong breakthrough to the Heartland, and fingers as an aim “push(ing BushCo) toward accepting the reality of the demise of the neocon dream.”

There’s an awful lot of extrapolation, and ill-founded extrapolation at that, from the mere ‘possibility’ going on here. What I wrote below in my riff on the MSNBC piece about disengagement scenarios bears repeating; I think there is a great distance between the turning tide of public sentiment, as reflected in opinion polls, and any potential impact on neocon autocratic decisionmaking. This confusion is largely based on a somewhat naive and unwarranted faith in the so-called democratic political process which surprises me.

Furthermore, it is an utterly specious assertion to say that a ‘Vietnam-style’, ‘traditional’, ‘visible’ anti-war movement is a liability, or that the Vietnam-era movement did not appeal to family values, to families’ grief about the senseless loss of their children, or to the Common Good of our country. Soulsearching and sophisticated strategic thinking about how to build a mass movement and galvanize anti-war sentiment was a constant presence in the anti-Vietnam movement. One organizing strategy was to appeal to the, shall we say, selfish concerns about the domestic costs to the US (in terms of lives and dollars spent) to hook the Heartland, which Kos gushes over as a basis for organizing the anti-Iraq movement. But that was one component and one component only, of a movement with multifaceted appeal. As a sole organizing strategy it is IMHO a way to build a movement doomed to failure. I listen to NPR as my sole broadcast media source of news. Throughout the war, almost at random, they air features about this or that small town’s reaction to the death of a favorite son serving in Iraq. It is an attempt, to use a hackneyed media phrase, to put a human face on the war. I turn those features off in anger at our powerlessness to stop the senseless deaths and anger that there aer no profiles — from NPR or anybody else — of grieving Iraqi families whose children BushCo have murdered. But the Heartland, if they are even tuned to an NPR station in the first place, turns them off as well, and Cindy Sheehan is not going to change that. In fact, the Heartland is up in arms not with, but about, Sheehan.

The movement against the Indochina war, as I say, was much more than the selfish domestic concerns behind Kos’ ‘turning of the country against the Iraq Debacle’. It was about one of our finest human sentiments — global compassion, unselfish, without borders, feeling the pathos of the suffering we were inflicting on the people whose country we had invaded, who we were (literally) massacring, whose society we destroyed in the name of democracy. There were also significant ideologically- and spiritually-based pacifist and anti-imperialist strains melded into the struggle against the Vietnam war, and it was tied to a broader critique of the American projection of power and, indeed, the American way of life in ways that the cowed post-9/11 American public largely dare not utter. This is of course because the American countercultural critique of America parallels and aligns with the third world’s critique of America, including that which fuels extremist anti-Americanism and is, arguably, one of the reasons we are the terrorist target par excellence. Coalitions of widely varying concerns found common purpose in a shared endpoint, that the US rape of Indochina deserved to be zealously fought.

This may be the phobic avoidance behid atrios’ assertion that an anti-war movement today would succeed only in the absence of ‘Vietnam-style’ elements. Buying into the claims of supporters of the war that the anti-war movement gives aid and comfort to our enemies was always, and continues to be, a way of being manipulated into impotence. Of course there are some differences. While some in the ’60’s counterculture revered Ho Chi Minh as an inspiration or an ideological touchstone, I doubt there is any reverence for Saddam Hussein. (Besides, there’s no easy rhyme for his name, unlike that in ‘Hey hey Ho Chi Minh, the Vietcong are gonna win!’). And we live in a far more paranoid country now than we did then (although if you had asked me in the ’60’s I would have been hardpressed to envision the possibility) — while the in-your-face sentiments of wearing a teeshirt with the VC flag or a button saying ‘Cictory to Vietnam’ were everywhere, has anyone seen a ‘Victory to Iraq’ button yet? Can you imagine it?

Back from this digression: both atrios’ suggestion and Kos’s weaker assertion that it could succeed without them are, then, laughable. Any parallels one attempts to draw between the anti-war movement of then and the nascent or ‘potential’ anti-Iraq movement will have to do a far better job accounting for how the latter could succeed without:

• a fervor and passion;
• a morally-infused outrage;
• boundary-less compassion that encompasses but transcends concern for the selfish domestic costs of the war;
• embracing the spectrum of diverse opinions and positions that lead to opposition to the invasion, the occupation and US military adventurism in general;
• a willingness to take substantial personal risks and sacrifices to stop the crimes against humanity that the US commits with impunity;
• the proliferating, explicit centering of the political platforms of candidates for both local and national office around their opposition to the war;
• a willingness to commit acts of civil disobedience and war resistance;
• encouragement of significant resistance within the military itself (despite the fact that there is no military draft, there are significant conscription-like recruitment activities);
• the growth of a panoply of charitable organizations raising money for both anti-war public relations campaigns and humanitarian aid for the war’s victims;
• substantial involvement of the moral high-ground in the form of the clergy;
• and indeed an entire strain of popular culture suffused with anti-war passion

One final comment. Even were a movement to gain the momentum and zeal of the Vietnam-era anti-war movement, “push(ing BushCo) toward accepting the reality of the demise of the neocon dream” is about as likely an outcome as the imam of a Washington mosque succeeding in converting Paul Wolfowitz or Dick Cheney to Islam. Don’t persuade them; disempower them, ignore and sidestep their contemptible agenda in an expression of the popular will. Don’t ask the President to end the war, tell him it is over. Stop cooperating with the war effort in all ways possible.

Several thoughts on this MSNBC story. First, we’ve come a long way toward extrication when the mainstream media are asking when, not if, we are withdrawing. Framing it in terms of public opinion is problematic, though. My most potent reaction to the news that public support for the continuing US troop presence has fallen so far was to be enraged at the powerlessness of public opinion to have an influence even though Bush’s popularity is at a record low for this point in an incumbent’s second term (Yahoo! News) . One could argue that it is the numbers in the polls that are causing the Bush dysadministration to discuss their contingency plans for withdrawal at all, but this is a megalomanic leadership cabal with contempt for what the American people want… certainly when that is in disagreement with their own aims but even when the sheeple agree. Shouldn’t the withdrawal of public support turn into a demand to put a stop to the madness now? During the Vietnam era, as public opposition rose even to a far greater pitch than anything we have seen with respect to Iraq, we still had to blockade government buildings and troop transport trains and facilitate an underground railroad to spirit conscripts and deserters away to Canada to make the war stop. What is to be done simply because the tide has turned? Our elected representatives could at best waffle on appropriating funds for the war effort, but do you think that would stop the executive branch maniacs from finding a way to continue to prosecute their autistic intentions? Our ‘representative government’ is an oxymoron, it is clear.

Apart from whether the people have a right to have a war stopped when their opinion turns against it, though, I struggle with the fact that attacking Iraq was no more justified when it was a glint in Baby Bush’s eye and more like 1% or 2% of us, not 30, 50 or 60%, were declaring that it was not in our names. The measure of this immorality is not really a matter of the weight of public opinion, ever, is it? And especially not when public opinion itself has been so debased, when the powers of propaganda are so refined and the public mentality so execrably malleable as they have become in 21st-century Amerika.

So if we can’t reasonably expect the arrogant and autistic Bush cabal to pay any attention to the polls, why bother? The simple answer — the voting public themselves should be chastened by their own shift in public opinion. As the saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” To put it another, oft-quoted, way — “a people get the government they deserve“.

“Two peas in a pod may not be so friendly when planted in the ground and even two parts of the same plant, once separated may treat the former conjoined twin as an alien ‘enemy,’ according to a Penn State researcher. ” (Penn State via robot wisdom)

A Quicktime movie.

“Experience shows us that when we look at something with a certain attentiveness, we can feel the character and quality of the object in a way that a self-interested or token glance does not give.” — C.J. Moore, author of In Other Words: A Language Lover’s Guide to the Most Intriguing Words Around the World (International Herald Tribune via robot wisdom)

Tony Soprano and Crew Will Return for ’07 Season: “In a deal that will extend the run of the most successful series in the history of cable television for another year, HBO announced yesterday that The Sopranos will not end with its next season starting in March, but will continue with an additional eight episodes starting in January 2007.” (New York Times ) As a clue to what this is all about, it is in the business section of The Times, not the arts coverage. David Chase, guiding light of the show, had previously stated he felt he was nearing the end of his creative ideas for the show, but it became apparent it could be milked for substantially more…

Wife-Beatings in Africa (New York Times )

…Erotic images can turn you blind. (New Scientist) The results lead to calls to ban provocative roadside billboards to reduce traffic accidents.

The spray comprises “glatiramer acetate (Copaxone), an approved MS drug that acts as a decoy for errant immune-system attacks, and Protollin, an adjuvant that stimulates innate immunity”. In essence, as I understand it, it provokes an immune response in the brain and endeavors to protect normal brain tissue from that response, so that only the amyloid plaques are scavenged.