PRESIDENT OBAMA

I've been creating a sort of score card for the president. When I am being naive and sentimental I give him good marks, particularly by comparison with his predecessor.

Category: Obama/ Bush

Articulateness: 100/ 0
Intelligence: 100/ 0
Culture: 100/ 0

But on matters of substance Obama scores very differently, despite all his promises: promises that I naively believed were honest promises.

I am not talking about health care: Congress has to agree before we can have decent health care for Americans. Obama can't give us that by executive decree. Nor can he abolish the death penalty by himself.

But in areas in which, as president, he has full executive authority, I hold him responsible for the promises that he made. And he did indeed make promises--which he is not keeping.

Category: Obama/ Status Quo Ante (Bush)

Close Guantanamo: 0/ 100
Restore Habeas Corpus: 0/ 100
Stop, Punish Torture: 0/ 100
End war against Iraq: 0/ 100
End war in Afghanistan: 0/ 100

As I see it, Obama is--after one year in office--a complete and utter failure. I would rather have a known enemy--McCain--in office than a dishonest friend. It would take some major changes to make me support Obama right now.

He is a very bright and articulate man, but a spineless self-promoter. His ambitions, as he told them to us, were all either lies or things he didn't care about nearly as much as he cared about being president.

My first president was Franklin D. Roosevelt. I have voted in every presidential election since Ike beat Adlai Stevenson. I have campaigned for Stevenson, Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter (the first time), Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barak Obama.

Right now I am as likely to campaign for Barak Obama again as I would be to campaign for Richard Nixon.

Bert Hornback

JUSTICE FOR ALL--IS THAT WHAT WE WANT?

As the United States Attorney General prepares for the trial of five people held for the past eight years in cages at Guantanamo, Americans are shaming themselves and their country by objecting to their trial.

George W. Bush abolished the constitutional protection of habeas corpus, and nobody--right of left--objected. Now after eight years of unconstitutional imprisonment for several hundred people, President Obama--who promised a year ago to close Guantanamo immediately--finally decides he will bring five of those men to trial. And Americans are outraged.

A U. S. Senator asks the Attorney General if he can "guarantee that these five men will be convicted." Doesn't that idiot Senator even know what law is? or what courts are for?

Americans are busy showing their ugliest underbellies. We are showing the world how utterly uncivilised the United States and its people are.

Shame. Shame on our stupidity and our arrogance. Shame on our lawlessness.


Bert Hornback

JUSTICE

In the United States of America, "Justice" is a dead word. "Law" has no meaning. And the supposedly revered "Constitution" of the United States is nothing more important than crapper-paper, an ass-wipe.

We will not permit anyone to see the evidence that we have of torture and abuse of prisoners. The torture and abuse are violations of international conventions which--in its more civilised days--the United States officially agreed to. Those tortured and abused are being held without being charged with any crimes: this violates the U. S. Constitution.

But George Bush, the rogue president, suspended the right called HABEAS CORPUS--illegally, of course. The president can't suspend the Constitution; to do so is an act of tryanny. And Barack Obama--supposedly a legitimate president and an honorable man--agrees with Bush. So Obama is a rogue as well, a tyrant, an enemy of democracy and the rule of law.

And Americans quietly sit on their hands, watching football games, being selfish, and preparing for the Thanksgiving holiday.

We have no shame. All we have are nuclear weapons, which keep the rest of the world from challenging all our crimes and immoralities.

Bert Hornback

WE THE PEOPLE

Many USers are worried about the Obama government's plan to try five of the detainees from the US concentration camp at Guantanamo. Good Americans, they are worried that the five captives may not be convicted in our courts. Many Americans are afraid of justice, afraid of the rule of law.

It is possible that justice might prevail in the trial of those five men. The evidence against them was likely gained by illegal surveillance, or by torturing them. It won't be admissable in court.

Rather than face that possibility, many USers want to keep those men in prison for the rest of their lives. Many Americans want to "disappear" them. Are there any USers left who remember when Americans responded with horror at the "disappearances" of people in other countries?

Of course, the United States has "disappeared" people for years, thanks to the thugs at CIA and NSA. And for the last nine years we have held hundreds of "disappeared" people at Guantanamo--and still hold them there, a full year after we elected a president who promised to close down that illegal torture camp.

Presumably, the Obama government thinks it has something of a case against these five men. But the other 300? The government must not have a case against any of them; the only thing they may have done wrong was get captured.

"Abandon hope all you who enter here." That's what the sign says as you enter Dante's Hell--or Guantanamo. And if many USers had their way, the motto of the American courts would be what the Artful Dodger thinks ofthe English courts in Dickens's Oliver Twist: "This ain't the shop for justice."

Our patriotic friends and neighbors say, "We can't trust our courts to lynch people."

Americans aren't a people who respect law, or want justice. We aren't even a "we," really. And not believing in justice or society, we aren't a "people."

Teaching Greed

American universities teach greed.

Never mind that they sometimes teach more "academic" subjects like maths and physics and philosophy, history, chemistry, and literature. Mainly they teach greed.

They teach greed by example. There are now 28 American college presidents who take salaries of $1,000,000 a year, or more. And there are hundreds more who take salaries of $500,000 a year, or more. There are also dozens of football and basketball coaches who take salaries of $1,000,000 or $2,000,000. And how many thousands of vice-presidents and vice-provosts who take salaries of $400,000 or more!

Our students aren't stupid. But they are intellectually and morally vulnerable. And no matter what they learn in their classes about society--and the sciences and social sciences as well as the humanities departments teach about society and social values--our students see the example of their universities' "leaders." And their example is hard to resist, and hard to misinterpret. GREED is what it says. GREED.

Universities in America don't teach their students how to make money, except in "business courses" and "business schools." But American universities teach their students--all their students--to want to make money. That's the goal. That's what students are learning.

How shameful. What an obscenity. What a disservice to humanity. What a destructive undertaking.

Bert Hornback

FUNDING FIGHTING DOESN'T FEED PEOPLE

Funding fighting doesn't feed people, but peace does. In the United Gun-toting States of Bombs Bursting in Air America, however, we fund fighting: for the year 2010, at the rate of $2,000,000,000.00 a day. That's two billion dollars a day. And that's just for the Department of Defense. (It used to be called the "War Department"--which at least was honest. Given that our two current wars are--as Vietnam, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Greneda all were--wars of aggression, not national defense, the present name is an obscene lie.)

Part of the Pentagon's $600,000,000,000.00 budget--$160,000,000,000.00 total or almost $500,000,000.00 a day--will be spent on our two outrageous, illegal wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And nobody will object. We are so committed to violence that to secure passage of a bill to protect homosexuals from hate crimes, the measure had to be attached to a fat military spending bill. (Knowing that the Defense spending bill would pass, twenty-seven Republican senators voted against it just to demonstrate their approval of violence against homosexuals.)

If we spend $2,000,000,000.00 a day rebuilding the Iraq we have destroyed and feeding and housing and educating Afghans, we might actually win peace in both countries. But all that our $2,000,000,000.00 a day for contunued war will win for us is further destruction, more violent deaths, more hatred, more shame.

"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Baron Acton said that a hundred plus years ago. And here we stand, budget in place, blood on our hands, and bombs away: absolutely guilty.

DESTRUCTION AND DECONSTRUCTION

I want to talk about a silly word, which is used to do something that is not good. GOOD is a social word: it and "gather" come from the same root, and mean the same thing. "Together" is an intensified version of "gather." And something that holds together--or holds us together--is GOOD.

One of the things that hold us together is language. Communicationis another social word, and language, as verbal communication, is socially important. Communion is a word that probably comes not from com+unis ("one together") but from com+munis. Munis is a curious word that means both "gift" and "duty"--and it gives us words like "common," "communion," and "community." All of those words have to do with or gifts to each other or our duty to each other.

Good things hold us together.

In our language a structure is something built. If I destroy it, I destruct it: un-build it. Construction is something built complexly, out of parts, put together, to make a new structure.

When we read we put things together, to understand them. We read words in sentences, we read maps, some of us read tea-leaves or the lines in palms. Sentences, maps, tea-leaves, the lines in palms are all, in a sense, constructions. A single line on a sheet of paper is not a map, nor is a single line in the palm of a hand. Nor is a single word.

Suppose I say--aloud--the word there. Did I say "there," or "their," or "they're"? You don't know. So I add another word, merry. Did I say "merry," or "Mary"? I add and Tom. That doesn't help, except that I can forget about "merry." If I add, then, who, you have to wait again: I might be saying "There Mary and Tom, who are young, eat. . . ." Or I might be saying "Their Mary and Tom, who are young, are older than my Mary and Tom." Or maybe I'm saying "They're Mary and Tom, who are young."

The words work together, constructing sense. And the structure of the sentence lets me understand what the words mean, together.

But if I destroy that structure, I can't make sense of those words. Destroy is the act of destruction: which is not a good thing.

We have another word, deconstruction, used these days by people who don't care to read, who don't value communication, who aren't intertested in community or goodness.

A deconstructionist looks at a sentence--let's have a new one: "When I offered the small boy a cookie, he held out his hand, like a Catholic taking communion from a priest, then--trusting me--popped it in his mouth without even thinking that it might be poison." That's clear enough, isn't it?

But the deconstructionist ingnores what the sentence says, and instead focusus on and "priest" and "poison." Ha! he says. "Priests poison young people with what they pretend are gifts." And before you know it, we will be talking about religious prejudice and pedophilia and parental responsibility and safe streets.

Deconstructionism is an egotistical practice. It lets the deconstructionist ignore what someone has said, in order to talk about what the deconstructionist wants to talk about. It uses and abuses what other people say. It is a formalization of the attitude that lets some people say, "What I hear you saying is. . . ."

Deconstructionists pretend to be interested in language. But they aren't any more interested in language than they are in the act of communication--the gift and duty of communication. If they were interested in language, they wouldn't use a word like deconstruction. They would use the word destruction instead.

Remembering FDR

I am old enough to remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president of this country. I lived in a small Kentucky town just south of Mammoth Cave, which was cleared by Roosevelt's C.C.C. workers. The area benefited from the Rural Electrification program, too. He brought the country back from the Great Depression, and brought millions of Americans back from unemployment and poverty and bankruptcy to work and stability.

I also remember that Roosevelt was hated by large numbers of Americans, Republican and Democrat alike. My aunt worked in Washington, starting in 1939. She regularly sent home carbon copies of hate material distributed quite openly in the Commerce Department, where she worked. They were type-written, and the biggest letters were no more than twelve-pouint caps--LIKE THESE. But they were big enough that you could see the venom, and hear the hate.

You could hear it on the radio, too. And read it in the newspapers. And your neighbors talked it. What was said on the radio and in the press wasn't so bad as the not-so-very-underground smears that my aunt sent us from Washington, but they were often hateful, too. The neighborhood hate was almost mild, because even if you were (or had been) rich, Roosevelt was saving your tail. But you knew it was wrong, because of the way he was doing it--and because he was doing it. And what he was doing was Socialist and therefore bad. He was making everybody work together, and even if he and his Socialism saved us, we knew that he and his Socialism were wrong.

The vicious stuff called Roosevelt a "Jew," or sometimes just a "Jew-lover." The hate-mongers called him "Roosenvelt," as though that made him as Jew. They called him a traitor because he insisted that Black Americans were not only human, but just as human as White Americans. They hated his wife, Eleanor, too: she was a loud-mouthed, ugly woman, and like her husband, a Socialist. And of course she was a "Jew-lover" too. No telling what Americans would have thought or done if they had known that somewhere in Eleanor Roosevelt's background there are most probably Black ancestors.

Americans hated the Roosevelts because they were intelligent, because they spoke in sentences, because he had a "snooty" accent. Americans hated the Roosevelts because they told us what to do. They didn't insult our intelligence; they simply noted it, silently, and tried--for our sake and the country's--to overcome our ignorance and stupidity.

Because Roosevelt and his policies got us out of the Great Depression, we could only hate him; we couldn't vote against him. Our selfishness told us that. We had to put up with him, and re-elect him. We were like stupid, incompetent boy scouts, lost in a woods, and having to trust a compass--which in our ignorance we couldn't possibly trust--to find our way out.

President Obama's situation is a lot like that of President Roosevelt. And the best we can hope is that he can survive all the stupid attacks, and save us in spite of ourselves.

NOBEL OBAMA

President Obama's Nobel Prize for Peace has Americans furious. Why? Let's start with the most obvious one: he's a black American. And America's vocal chords are not much different today from what they were forty-five years ago, when Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize.

I was a new faculty member at the University of Michigan then. I walked into my freshman English class and began by noting Dr. King's being so honored. One of my students--never mind his name, but I still have his name, his face, and his home town of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in my head--said, loudly and with conviction, "Give a prize to that n*****? They ought to shoot him."

But it's more than that. Obama stands for change. And in doing so he stands for a different America from the one George Bush appealed to.

Why weren't there constant protests against Bush? Why did the media avoid mentioning what protests there were? Because even among those who voted for John Kerry, there were plenty of Americans who supported Bush: even as he lied to us, even as lies were exposed that cost several thousand young Americans their lives. He was a warrior, a My-Country-Right-Or-Wrong American who thought war was the American Way of Life. He was a rich man who thought being rich was a Constitutional Right for his kind of Americans. And he was stupid. All three of those things appeal to Americans, never mind the political party.

President Obama has a tough road ahead of him. But he is a strong man, and he believes in what he is doing. He has to end the wars he inherited; there is nothing right about either of them, and never was. He has to close Guantanamo and the other illegal concentration camps the United States runs hidden away in other countries. He has to forbid torture absolutely--unless he wants to let somebody torture Dick Cheney for the rest of his life. And he has to get health care for ordinary Americans.

That's a lot. And a Nobel Peace Prize should help toward those goals. It would, certainly, in any country on earth except the United States.


Bert Hornback

Feed the Poor

Europeans don't do stupid things so very often, but the great milk spill last week was stupid. And shameful. And mean.

I sympathise with the farmers who are being squeezed out of existence by corporate "farmers." But the proper protest is NOT to dump milk.

The milk--thousands and thousands of liters or gallons or tons or tonnes of it--were dumped. Why couldn't all that milk have been sent to starving children in Africa? Why couldn't countries that have big airplanes have flown milk to Africa?

That would have been a much more effective and efficacious protest.

We need to try thinking every now and then. Even an occasional thought would make this a better world.

Bert Hornback

My Lai and Lockerbee

It must be an accident, of course, but the uproar over the release of the one man convicted in the Lockerbee disaster coincides poignantly with the reappearance of Lt. William Calley, the officer convicted of mass murder in the killing of 300 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968.

The man convicted in the Lockerbee disaster, which killed more than 300 people (it missed me by one day on that flight)in 1988, was the only person brought to trial. He was prosecuted in a Scottish court by the U. S. Attorney General. He was released--under Scottish law--on humanitarian grounds; he is dying of cancer.

The man convicted in the Lockerbee disaster was alleged to be the "mastermind," though obviously he did not personally murder anyone on that flight. He has consistently claimed himself innocent, and until his release had an appeal of his conviction pending.

Lt. William Calley recently made a speech at at Kiwanis Club is the United States. Lt. Calley was a platoon commander in Vietnam. He admitted to what happened at My Lai: there was no doubt of his guilt. He and his platoon were "frustrated" at not finding any Viet Cong to kill, so they went into a small village and murdered 300 civilians. Then they burned the village--and the evidence of their crime. Lt. Calley was convicted, not of ordering the massacre, but of personally murdering at least twenty-two people. But he was responsible for the deaths of 300 people. Not Viet Cong, not enemies, but civilians: people like those who flew on the Pan American flight that exploded in mid-air.

Lt. William Calley's prison sentence was never carried out. The President of the United States intervened, and Lt. Calley went free after three years of house arrest. And is still free.--and making speeches at civic club lunches.

But Americans--including a former U. S. Attorney General and even our president--object to the release from prison of a dying man who even as he approaches death insists that he was not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted.

We talk about "justice," and the "rule of law." WHO ARE WE TO TALK ABOUT JUSTICE AND THE RULE OF LAW?

We didn't punish Lt. Calley for ordering the murder 300 innocent people--a whole village--out of "frustration." We didn't even punish him for killing at least twenty-two people with his own gun. Now we are in the process of trying to pardon ourselves--every one of us--for torturing people at Guantanamo, in Afghanistan, and in dozens of other concentration camps around the world: and we won't even release them from their torture camps.

In the average American mind,"justice" is utterly meaningless. "Might Makes Right" is the motto of this country, the first article of our popular constitution. Though this country proclaims piously to believe in a "higher power"--an American God--there are really only two powers we believe in: and neither of them is what anybody else would call God. Americans believe in military power, and the power of money.

What the rest of the world fears most--as it has since 1945--is that when the money runs out, the United States will still have its military power--its nuclear bombs--and will destroy not just My Lai or an airliner, but the world.

Can't we change? Can't we learn to be civilised? Please?

Guns Again: Against Guns

More campus shootings in the news. And a gun-dealer in Butler, Missouri, giving a gift certificate from a local gun-shop worth $450 to everybody who buys a new GM car from him. (And $450 is the price-tag at the gift-certificatre gun-shop for an
AK-47: to use at Yellowstone, I guess, or Grand Canyon. Or maybe just for a neighborhood drive-by, or at a school somewhere once classes start again.)

We are insistently crazy.

Maybe we should require that people carrying AK-47s, bazookas, machine-guns, howitzers, battleships, and nuclear missiles carry them only as "concealed weapons."

Maybe all members of Congress should be required to carry hand grenades, and mount 106 mm. recoil-less rifles on their desks in Washington.

Maybe Congress should give every American a $450 gift-certificate from his or her nearest neighborhood gun-shop.

Maybe American babies should all be born with guns.

Fifteen years ago, as a joke, I advertised in the "For Sale" column of the Louisville Courier-Journal: "Used Sherman Tank turrets, complete with their cannons. Suitable for mounting on Lincoln Town Cars. Offense for the Offensive." I received fourteen calls--and twelve of them sounded serious. The thirteenth laughed, and the fourteenth was angry that I didn't like Lincoln Town Cars.

If I placed that advertisement today, my phone would ring itself to death!

Stupidity

In the Boston Case--the arrest of Professor Gates and President Obama's answer to a question about the arrest, the stupid people are (1) the police chief who says Mr. Obama injured his officers' (that's a plural) "pride," and (2) the Republicans who are outraged that Mr. Obama criticised a policeman. Should the police be proud of making a stupid mistake? And shouldn't the police be criticised when they make mistakes or do something wrong?

Maybe Republicans should criticise stupid Republicans for criticising Mr. Obama. After all, Mr. Obama is the president--the nation's number one police officer, as it were. Should stupid angry Republicans be allowed to hurt his pride? Or maybe, to stupid Republicans, black people shouldn't have any pride, and can be criticised by stupid white folks--or arrested for entering their own homes.

God bless America: it needs it!

Bert Hornback

Ending Poverty, 535 Families At A Time

By imposing one-term limits on membership in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S.Senate we could make a serious start to ending poverty in the United States. We would take 435 families permanently out of poverty, every two years, and an additional 100 families every six years. Each state would get its share.

All members of the U.S. House and Senate have a special form of "social security." When they retire or otherwise lose their seats in Congress, they are paid 100% of their most recent salary for life.

Under this new plan, every two years each state would choose--by lottery or by election--one member of its electorate stuck in poverty for each of its seats in the House. Similarly they would replace their senators every six years with poor people.

Government would not be affected in any harmful way. No one could be any worse at legislation than the Congressmen and Congresswomen we now elect. And we would save how many billions of dollars each Congressional election season by not having Congressional elections!

We will start with the poorest of the poor in each state, and work our way up. Every time we make another 535 people rich for life--by seating them in Congress-- they will start paying taxes: so this plan won't actually cost as much as we might think.

We will make the U.S. Congress a respectable, honorable institution.

PANETTA AND CHENEY

I am no great fan of CIA Director Panetta's, not by any means. But I am in utter agreement with his comments about former Vice-President Dick Cheney. It's Cheney, not Panetta, who should apologise.

Cheney should apologise for what he said about President Obama being "soft" on terrorism, and making America more "vulnerable." Cheney is a war criminal. And his policies are what have made America vulnerable. Cheney was a sponsor of state terrorism, and as a result of whast he and his cronies did, America and Americans are in danger wherever we go or don't go.

THE OBLIGATIONS OF CIVILISATION

Civilisation may seem sometimes not to be worth much. A teen-ager has been arrested in Florida for torturing cats. Not too many years ago Ann Arbor, Michigan had cat-torturers,too: two fraternity boys. Mostly we ignored it. Last week we had a hate killer at the Holocaust Museum--but we always have hate killers in the news, so that isn't much. New Orleans registers almost a murder a day, but we still call it "the Big Easy." For the most part, poor kids attend terrible schools; but we get more upset about potholes than we do about that. Do we notice homelessness? hunger? Of course not; we're busy barbecuing tonight. Our country dropped more bombs on more civilians in Pakistan today--but that happens every day, and we don't care.

What undermines civilisation--makes it worthless, or at least seemingly so--is our we-don't-care attitude as much as it is the violence. Thus, despite the usual news, today is a good day, because of a federal judge in San Francisco.

Judge Jeffrey S. White has ruled against John C. Woo, another judge whose former job was justifying torture for the Bush administration's torture teams. Jose Padilla has sued, arguing that Woo's memoranda justifying torture caused him to be tortured while in U. S. custody.

Judge White cares--about law, about justice, about civilisation. Most of the rest of us don't. What passes for decency in this country is a betrayal of decency that says says "as long as I am happy, everything is okay." It says "don't complain." It says "don't bother me; I want to be happy."

Hoorah for Judge White. We owe him our thanks, for caring. For accepting the responsibility that most of us hide from.

And we owe him our contribution to the cause of civilisation for which he stands. We need to support him publicly, and to demand that Mr. Woo be removed from his judicial position while he faces trial. And if he is convicted, we need to insist that he go to prison. And when he goes, why not let him go to Guantanamo? He knows what it's like there.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: A VOICE OF HOPE

President Obama deserves the world's thanks and congratulations for his wonderful speech in Cairo. I only hope that now he will make that same speech to Americans.

And in addition to SAYING to people in the United States exactly what he said to the rest of the world in Cairo, he must act up to what he says. He must stop claiming "national security" to interfere with the process of law and the achievement of justice in the United States. He must agree to fight terror at home as well as abroad: and torturers--war-criminals--are terrorists. Protected by a president, they become state terrorists, and the US becomes a terrorist state.

President Obama knows that. Is he so afraid of the American people that he can't say to us what he says to the Muslim world? To the whole world, listening?

Surely not. He is the elected president of the United States, and he is responsible both to the American people and to the world to stand up for what he says. His words must be followed up--now, not next year or the year after--by action.

JUSTICE VERSUS EVASIVE ADJUSTMENTS

George Bush has now proudly joined the absurd Defense of Torture. If torture gets "results," there is nothing wrong with it. That's the Bush-Cheney-Right Wing argument.

Obama's argument is a bit different: torture was torture, but now that it's been done, we should forget about it. If we blame anybody, that will cause hard feelings. And though our military proudly took photos of themselves torturing people, and kept those photos in Pentagon files, nobody should look at them. People might get angry at us if they see those images.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice makes "misprision of a felony" a crime. In civil law, hiding criminals is a crime; one can be an "accessory after the fact" of a crime. General Petraeus and his cronies should be charged under the UCMJ. And Bush and Company should be charged in U. S. civil courts, both with their crimes and with their long cover-up of those crimes. And if Obama keeps trying to hide what we did, maybe he should be charged as well.

Justice requires that we face the facts of what we did. The whole world has a right to demand that of us. Might doesn't make right. As things now stand, the United States is a rogue nation. We must change that. We must be just--even among ourselves. We can't adjust the truth to suit our cowardly convenience.

NEW RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES AT THE CENTER FOR THER ADVANCEMENT OF PERIPHERAL THOUGHT

RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES: THE INSTITUTE FOR LEGITIMATE LIBERTIES

I don’t mind buying a new tube of toothpaste every two months. Another marker of time passing: another two months on. I don’t mind having to go buy a new ink cartridge for my printer: another three hundred pages written. And tax-time, every spring: it’s a time to reflect on what good my country has done in the world in the past year.

But I do mind having to replenish the toilet-paper supply. There ought to be more things that you only have to do once in your life, like get vaccinated for small-pox, and buying toilet-paper should be one of them. Toilet paper should come the way running water does.

The Institute for Legitimate Liberties at the Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought announces today a new series of research grants for the creation of continuous supplies of toilet paper. Proposals can be submitted to the address below. The deadline for applications is flexible.


RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES: DEPARTMENT OF TECHNOCONVENIENCE

We humans waste millions of hours each year looking for our eye-glasses. Some people wear their glasses all the time, except when they are sleeping; and when they go to bed put their glasses close beside them where they can be easily located. (Some sleep-walkers put on their glasses when they are sleep-walking, and put the glasses back where they belong when they return to bed.) Some people who don’t need their glasses all the time wear them on strings around their necks; but evidence conducted from clinical trials indicates that when they lean over water-fountains they make messes, and if they have to pick up big boxes or carry several grocery bags they may well break their frames against their chests. Most of us just put our glasses down when we take them off--and then we have to go looking for them.

(Squirrels never remember where they have buried their nuts; but they bury so many of them that if there are enough squirrels in a neighborhood, no squirrel will ever go hungry because there will be a nut almost anywhere, buried by one squirrel or another. But humans and their glasses are a different matter.)

The Department of Technoconvenience at the Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought is accepting proposals for research projects designed to create glasses which will follow their owners wherever they go. Proposals should be sent to the address listed below. The deadline for applications is under construction, and will be posted beforehand.

EVERY NIGHT WE GO TO BED. . .

My fellow Americans,

Every night you and I go to bed, knowing that 300 of our fellow-humans are locked up in cages we have built for them in Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba. These men have not been charged with crimes. They have not been arrested by competent legal authority. They have, in effect, been kidnapped by our government and put in cages in a place that our government claims is nowhere. Some of them have been there for six years of their lives.

Every night you and I go to bed knowing that we have imprisoned those 300 men in those cages illegally, in violation of international law and in violation of our own nation's constitution.

Every night we go to bed, knowing that more than 300 men are being brutalised--and have been so for years: each and every one of them, for thousands of days and thousands of nights, by us.

Every night we go to bed, knowing but not caring that they will wake up--if they have been allowed to sleep--still in their cages. They will still be there because we are too cowardly, too uncaring, too inhumane to demand that our country, our government, release them.

Every night, and every day, our guilt grows. This great crime is our great crime. We run this concentration camp. We run this illegal prison. We could close it today, if we were willing to: we could rise up today and say NO to our government.

If we won't--if we don't--the world, perhaps, should imprison us--all of us--in cages. And leave us there to rot our ugly, careless, craven American lives away. Every day, and every night. Every one of us.

white phosphorus

Israel uses white phosphorus explosives--made in the USA, of course--against Palestinians. White phosphorus burns, and burns, and burns. You can't put it out. Can you even imagine your flesh burning from a white phosphorus wound?

But the USA also uses white phosphorus on its enemies. In Afghanistan.

White phosphorus is not quite the same thing as nuclear disintegration, or irradiation, but the use of white phosphorus shells is as close as the USA can get to using nuclear weapons, I guess, without inciting absolute disgust and total condemnation.

But why not absolute disgust and total condemnation for the use of white phosphorus?

If President Obama doesn't ban the use of white phosphorus--and the sale of white phosphorus--immediately and unconditionally, then the USA should be banned from the human community.

If there is a god, he must surely damn the USA.

OBAMA GOES TO NOTRE DAME

His Hypocrisy, the Gold-Shoed Pope, has today told the Muslim world that it is a mistake to use religion for political purposes.

Of course, the Pope's Roman Catholic Church is busy at the moment trying to keep the president of the United States from speaking at the University of Notre Dame. He and his bishops are engaged in an outrageous use of religion for political purposes.

Is there a more hypocritical institution on the face of the earth than the Roman Catholic Church? And what sin did Jesus most despise? In the four Christian gospels, what sin did Jesus condemn, ten times for every time he condemned all other sins put together? Hypocrisy, of course.

NOTRE DAME and PRESIDENT OBAMA

I am old enough to remember President Jenkins's predecessor as president of the University of Notre Dame. I don't mean CEO Molloy--he and his Mercedes limo don't count; I mean Father Theodore M. Hesburgh.

In 1963 the Texas Club at Notre Dame invited George Wallace to speak on campus. Not a single Roman Catholic bishop protested against that invitation. I did: I went to see Father Ted. I was an instructor in English at Notre Dame then.

Father Ted was one of the original members of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and later its chairman. He explained to me why he had not stepped in to stop Wallace's speaking at Notre Dame. "If I refuse to allow Wallace to speak, someday when somebody else is president, and you want to invite a Civil Rights leader to Notre Dame, he might refuse to allow your guest to speak." He advised me to organise a peaceful protest against Wallace's appearance. Along with several others, I did so. It received little support from the student body, and members of the Texas Club mutilated our "End Segregation Now" signs so that they read "Segregation Now," and waved them gleefully during Wallace's speech.

Four months later Rev. Martin Luther King appeared on campus. He had been invited by Father Ted, and Father Ted introduced Dr. King's speech.

In 1966 I attended Notre Dame's commencement; a number of my former students were graduating. I don't remember who gave the commencement address, but I remember well Father Ted's farewell remarks to the graduates.

"As you leave Notre Dame," he said, "I don't know what you believe. But I hope you believe in something. And I want to tell you that finding what you believe and believe in is the most important thing you will ever do in your lives."

I am proud of Father Jenkins, Father Ted's successor as president of my university.
I am proud of him for inviting President Obama to speak at commencement. And I am very, very proud of him for standing up for Notre Dame and for President Obama against the hypocritical fascist Catholic bishops and their faithful.

I wonder if the Catholic bishops would object if a Catholic university invited Bernard Cardinal Law to speak at its commencement? But then Cardinal Law couldn't come; the Catholic Church has him safely in Rome, in charge of Sta. Maria Maggiore, where U.S. law can't reach him.

You remember Cardinal Law: he is the holy man who kept moving pederastic priests from school to school and parish to parish when they were caught sexually molesting little boys. He protected criminal pederasts. And now the Catholic Church protects Cardinal Law.

JUSTICE FOR ALL

The United States is finally going to let John Demanjuk be extradited to stand trial in Europe for alleged Nazi war crimes. Does that mean that the United States will not block war crimes extraditions for persons accused of more recent Nazi-style war crimes--like torture? Are George Bush, Dick Cheney, Daniel Rumsfeld, Condolezza Rice, and their underlings eligible now for extradition, when their turn comes? Or will we actually be courageous and honorable and trey them for such here at home?

The United States is dropping charges against pro-Israel lobbyists accused of spying, however. News stories so far don't make clear why the charges against these men are being dropped. One assumes, of course, that it is not because they are pro-Israel.

Vice-President Biden has given wise advice to Americans and others about the threat of swine-flu: avoid crowded places. That is why in several cities--in the United States and elsewhere--schools are being closed. That is why, in Mexico, churches and movie theatres are being closed. Mr. Biden suggested we avoid subway trains and airplanes. That makes good sense.

But the United States airline industry prefers profit to safety or health, and they have objected. And the news media have with one great capitalist, commerial accord blamed Mr. Biden for misspeaking--or worse. Absurd.

I remember when the CEO at Chrysler, many years ago, proclaimed confidently that "Americans can't afford clean air": meaning, of course, that we were so commercially, capitalistically stupid that we would happily die with our motors running.

I say, thank you Joe Biden. I wish there were more Americans as honest and wise as you.

Bert Hornback

BLESSED BE EXECUTIVE GREED

I wrote on 3 April about executive greed at the not-for-profit retirement fund TIAA-CREF. Roger Ferguson, the CEO at TIAA-CREF for the past year, takes $11,200,000 of retired teachers' savings as his annual pay. This amount includes $5,000,000 (from his first year on the job) as "performance compensation." I complained to Mr. Ferguson that his greed was offensive and thoroughly immoral.

TIAA-CREF has a new motto, by the way: "Financial Services for the Greater Good."

Today I received an answer to my letter from Dan Lindner, the Senior Customer Resolution Manager. (I am the customer to be "resolved," I assume.)

Mr. Lindner doesn't apologise for Roger Ferguson's greed. Rather, he tells me that "IN LIGHT OF OVERALL MARKET CONDITIONS, MR. FERGUSON HAS VOLUNTARILY AGREED TO FOREGO 25 PERCENT OF THE PERFORMANCE COMPENSATION TO WHICH HE IS ENTITLED IN HIS EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENT FOR 2008." That's 25 percent of $5,000,000, which leaves him--poor man!--with only $3,750,000 of his "performance compensation," and another $6,2000,000 untouched to go along with that. I am supposed to be impressed, I think, with Mr. Ferguson's generosity.

I am not impressed with his generosity. Rather, I am disgusted at his greed. He is still taking nearly $10,000,000 this year of retired teachers' savings. Most of the retired teachers who have invested in TIAA-CREF earned no more that the $1,250,000 which Mr. Ferguson has "agreed to forego" in their entire working lives! Even if he gave back all of his "performance compensation," that wouldn't be enough. He is a greedy bastard, an offensive and thoroughly immoral man.

Greedy people like Roger Ferguson make it all the more obvious that the world's wealth needs to be redistributed by force of law. Greedy people aren't generous; we can't depend on them to be socially responsible or decent.

My letter from Mr. Lindner advises that his communication with me "is protected by law," and that "any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited."

GRADUAL JUSTICE, PART 8

America, as a nation, has never understood the idea of right and wrong. "All men are created equal" didn't mean what it said. "All men" didn't include black people, or women; it meant "all white men." After the Civil War, when slavery was abolished, that didn't free black people. And when women were given a constitutional right to vote, that didn't make them equal citizens along with white men.

"Oh, it takes time."

How many generations of black people were told that? How many generations of women?

And homosexuals.

A nation in which the comfort of the citizens in power can override the rights of those without power is a tyranny, not a free country, not a just or honorable state.

The U. S. military's discrimination against gays and lesbians will continue--despite the president's acknowledgement that it is discrimination, and thus unlawful. Secretary Gates tells us that "it will take time."

We could also say that to serial killers, I suppose, and to bank robbers: "Slow down. Don't kill so many people next time. Don't steal so much money next time."

We mock the idea of justice every chance we get.

PIRATES

The U.S. has captured a Somali pirate, and will bring him to trial in a federal court in Manhattan.

This news comes the day after the Obama announcement that members of the CIA who engaged in piracy--who stole people, not just property, cannot be tried for their crimes, because a president of the U.S. authorised those crimes.

So U.S. governmental piracy--stealing humans, kidnapping--is legal, but private stealing of U.S. material possessions by unauthorised Somalis is not.

I don't want piracy to be ignored, but I want HIGHER crimes--much more serious crimes--to be taken as seriously, and prosecuted.

Until I get a chance to feel sorry for George W. Bush and his thugs, under indictment, I will feel sorry for Abdul Wal-i-Musi, facing U.S. justice.

DOES THE U.S. HAVE THE RIGHT TO EXCUSE TORTURE?

President Obama has decided that because an American president authorised torture, no crime was committed by the torturers--and the president who authorised torture is free as well.

I don't think the world accepted such logic at Nuremburg, nor would the World Court at the Hague accept such today. When the guilty get to excuse the guilty, then there is no law.

Does President Obama expect the world to honor his absurd edict? Does he expect the world to excuse and forget torture because a criminal U. S. President authorised it? Does he expect the civilised world to respect such ruthless, selfish, arrogant proclamations?

"We have more nuclear weapons than anybody else, and we aren't afraid to use them to defend our criminals." Is that Obama's idea? Is that going to be his policy? Does he expect anybody in the world to respect this country of his?

No doubt he does. And unless enough Americans have the courage to denounce such arrogant stupidity, he will get continue to mock justice with this stupid policy. But the rest of the world will hate--as well as fear--the hypocrites whom Obama leads. And when they try to set foot anywhere in the civilised world, they will get arrested by the honest people who believe in and are brave enought to defend justice.

Stand up, Americans! Don't be cowards, like Obama. Don't let this happen! Insist on justice. Start at the top--with the president who authorised torture. No president--no leader of any country, no human being--has the right to "authorise" torture. Everybody but Obama knows that.

Obama is absurd. And he makes all of us who keep quiet absurd with him. And guilty with him. Guilty of obstruction of justice. And that makes us as guilty of torture as the original criminals are. And we, too, can be arrested--all of us--if we step outside this blighted, benighted country.

HYPOCRISY

The Roman Catholic pope doesn't want Caroline Kennedy as the United States Ambassador to the Vatican. And he doesn't want the University of Notre Dame to let President Obama speak at the university. The reason? Both Kennedy and Obama are opposed to criminalising abortion, and are supporters of stem-cell medical research.

Jesus, of course, never said anything about abortion or stem-cell medical research. He did say a lot about hypocrisy, however. He condemned hypocrites and hypocrisy five hundred times for every time he mentioned all other evils put together.

It seems strange that the pope doesn't want Caroline Kennedy in Rome, and doesn't want Barack Obama at Notre Dame; after all, he invited the conservative English bishop Williamson back into Rome, though Williamson insisted that the Nazi holocaust didn't happen--and holocaust denial is a serious crime in the pope's native Germany. And though the pope doesn't want Kennedy in Rome, or Obama speaking at Notre Dame, he has Bernard Cardinal Law in Rome, in charge of the basilica of Sta. Maria Maggiore, a major church whose pastor serves directly under the pope, and reports only to the pope.

Pope Benedict's predecessor installed Cardinal Law at Sta. Maria Maggiore to get him out of Boston, where he was an indictable co-conspiritor and accessory after the fact in a number of child abuse cases against priests in his diocese. These priests were long-time molestors of little boys. For years, Cardinal Law had moved known pederasts from Catholic parish to Catholic parish, and from Catholic school to Catholic school, as their crimes had been uncovered. And when the scandal broke, ten years ago, Cardinal Law blocked or tried to block the prosecution of his priests for their serious and repeated sexual crimes against little boys.

So Cardinal Law was whisked away to Rome. He is safe there.

Of course the Roman Catholic Church hates homosexuality--except among the clergy.

"Oh, ye HYPOCRITES," Jesus would have said.

The Catholic Church has a long history of priests and bishops abusing little boys--and not just by seducing and raping them. Every time one listens to beautiful old Church music, one should remember that the soprano parts were all written for little boys--and castrati: men who were castrated (for the glory of god) as pre-pubescent boys, so they wouldn't lose their beautiful soprano voices. The Catholic Church didn't allow women in its choirs--and if you watched any of the Easter celebrations on television this year, you would have noticed that the Vatican choirs are still all male. But presumably there are no castrati among them.

And Easter: who among the Roman Catholic heirarchy remembers that Jesus was born in a stable, not in a palace? Do they remember Jesus saying how hard it will be for rich men to enter heaven, or his telling a would-be follower "give up all you have if you would follow me." Did Jesus wear gold shoes, as the pope does? Did Jesus sit on a gold throne, as the pope does, with people bowing to him, while he blesses the poor? Is ostentatious wealth Christian?

"Oh, ye HYPOCRITES!" Jesus would have said.

WATCH WITH ME

WATCH WITH ME

Hamlet is hard to read. I’m not sure why that is so, but it must be: otherwise, why would it have been read and played as a revenge “tragedy” for four hundred years?

Let’s start with revenge—which will let me introduce the parallel I want to draw with Hamlet, from Christian literature. This is not to say that I want to consider Hamlet as a Christian play; the tradition to which both the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemani and Hamlet belong antecedes Christianity by hundreds of years.

Revenge is called “an eye for an eye”—or, in modern slang, “getting even.” We pretend that to hit somebody back for hitting you makes up for the hurt, or that killing party A because party A has killed my friend party B will make the death of party B any less terrible. As Socrates argued, it is worse to do evil than to have evil done to you.

I learned about revenge, accidentally, when I was four years old. My father used to bring home stacks of used mimeograph paper from his office; I could use the blank sides to draw on. One afternoon I somehow got my little hands on a pair of scissors. I figured out—made up as a formula or a moral law—that if I cut a piece of paper in one direction, and then cut it again, at a ninety degree angle (I had no idea that than perpendicular was ninety degrees of course) the second cut would heal the first one. I tried out my idea, and a corner of the piece of paper fell off. So I tried again: whack, then a second whack at a right angle across the first. The corner fell out again.

But my logic was sound—or so I thought. I kept repeating the experiment, and getting more and more frustrated. Finally I had a tantrum, and attracted my mother’s attention. She came in and took the scissors away from me.

I had learned that revenge doesn’t work.

We pretend that revenge makes up for something bad. But it doesn’t. Rather, it produces a second bad something. Stupidly, revenge brings more evil into the world.

But we want Hamlet to be a revenge play. Revenge plays are simple: the first domino knocks down the second domino and the second knocks down the third. Etc. Shakespeare’s contemporaries wrote dozens of such plays. If Shakespeare had wanted to write one, he could probably have done so in two or three days. But he didn’t want to write a revenge play; he wanted to write a tragedy.

“Tragedy”—despite what journalists and literary critics say—is not something bad happening. If a man killed at a railroad crossing happens to be the hard-working father of ten children his death is not necessarily a tragedy. His being the father of all those children may make his death more pathetic, but it doesn’t make his death tragic. If five hundred people are killed in an explosion, that there were five hundred of them—or that they were all children, or pregnant women, or priests—doesn’t make the accident a tragedy. It’s simply sad. And we should respond with sympathy.

The ancient Greeks invented what we call tragedy, though there were tragedies in human history preceding the Greeks. Our mythologies contain many tragic stories; the Greeks, however, made up the word, and used it to dsescribe certain kinds of plays. Curiously, the Greek word TRAGODIA means “goat song.” It has been suggested that the name comes from the prize given to the winning tragedian at the Dionysian festival each spring in Athens—but there is no evidence to support this, or for that matter any other theory about where the word comes from.

So let me suggest another origin, propose another theory.

Goats are not the most musical of animals. So it’s odd that something as serious and culturally or morally important as a TRAGODIA was called a “goat song” by the Greeks. In the zodiac, the goat is Capricorn: and his time is the beginning of the year. The twenty-second of December—the winter solstice—is the first day of Capricorn. It is also, of course, New Year’s day and Christmas day, except that we didn’t get the calendar right. The winter solstice is also integral to Hannukah, the “festival of light.”

The shortest day of the year is the day that requires the most faith: the most faith that the world will be reborn. And that faith is rewarded on the twenty-third of December, when the future is born, the earth rejuvenated, life renewed. But that rebirth requires the death of the old year.

Tragedy occurs at the bottom: when only hope can save us, when we give up what is, in order to learn and to have what will be. Tragedy is not despair: despair is the failure of hope, DE+SPERO. Faced with chaos or extinction, we can only save ourselves through hope: for Shelley, we must “hope till Hope creates/From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.” William Butler Yeats defines tragedy as “Heaven blazing into the head": it is the understanding that will save us.

Tragedy is what we find at the end of Oedipus the King. Oedipus understands what he has done, and accepts responsibility, not for murdering his father and marrying his mother, but for his ignorance: the ignorance that let him do so. And it is this that makes him, for Sophocles, a great hero. Oedipus was a good king; he cared for his Thebes more than he cared for himself. He was not selfish, like Teiresias. In the end, when he exiles himself from Thebes to save his people and his land, he is a great king, a tragic hero.

I want to argue that Hamlet is a tragedy, the most seriously such of any of Shakesperare’s plays. But I want to argue something else as well: I want to argue that Hamlet is very much like the scene in the Christian gospels which takes place in the garden at Gethsemani on the evening before Jesus’s trial and death.

Let me begin with Gethsemani. Jesus goes there after his Last Supper. He takes some of his apostles with him. “Watch with me,” he asks them. They fall asleep. He asks again, “Can you not watch with me?” And they fall asleep. When the soldiers come to take him, Peter draws his sword and cuts off a soldier’s ear. Jesus admonishes him: put away the sword. “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword,” he tells Peter. Revenge accomplishes nothing.

Those who were with him at Gethsemani weren’t very attentive to Jesus. He was lucky, however, to have four gospellers who were true to him, and who understood what he taught. They recorded his condemnation of revenge, and violence in general. They recorded his kindness and his love. And according to their gospels, for every time he condemned any vice, he condemned hypocrisy fifty times. But look what that got him: “Onward Christian Soldiers,” crusades, and a grossly hypocritical church.

Hamlet’s chosen gospeller is Horatio. “Watch with me,” Hamlet might have said. But Horatio isn’t a good watcher, and his understanding of the world—his “philosophy”—is very limited. As Hamlet dies, lamenting his “wounded name,” he commissions Horatio: “tell my story.” And almost immediately, Horatio does: “. . . let me speak to the yet unknowing world / How these things came about.” He tells Fortinbras,

you shall hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on the inventors' heads: all this can I
Truly deliver.


A recital of "carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts" and "casual slaughters"is not the “story” Hamlet wanted from Horatio. Hamlet’s “wounded name” will not be saved by what Horatio will tell—or by the scholars, actors, and directors who read Hamlet as a revenge play, a revenge “tragedy.”

When Hamlet realises what has happened—that both Claudius and Laertes have plotted to murder him, and that by accident he has now killed Laertes with the poison intended for himself—Hamlet, who had abhorred the idea of revenge throughout the play, now understands that he is free. Laertes has killed himself, as with a boomerang, and now Claudius will do so as well. Hamlet “stabs King Claudius,” then gives him the poisoned cup to drink.

If we see Hamlet charge madly at Claudius with his sword, we may think “revenge.” But Hamlet—wounded, dying—knows he doesn’t need to kill Claudius with the sword; all he has to do is touch him, scratch him, make him bleed. The tip is murderously poisoned—but not by Hamlet.

Claudius seems not aware that Hamlet has the poisoned foil, and Hamlet’s “stab” has not been itself a murderous, mortal wound. After Hamlet stabs Claudius, the king says, “O, yet defend me, friends; I am but hurt.” Then Hamlet gives him the poisoned cup: and doubly, then, Claudius kills himself:

Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane,
Drink off this potion.

Hamlet asked Horatio to “tell [his] story,” to “report [him] and [his] cause aright.” Horatio fails Hamlet. He will “speak to the yet unknowing world / How these things came about,” but what he plans to say—what he can “truly deliver”—is not about Hamlet’s heroism, not about his tragic understanding and his accomplishment. It is up to us, then, taking the play home with us, to understand Hamlet’s story, and when we talk about it—or put it on stage—to “report [him] and [his] cause aright”: not as the enactment of revenge, but as an accomplishment of justice.

If we can learn to be so responsible in reading Hamlet, perhaps someday we will learn to read Jesus’s story as well: as a gospel of love, not violence, a gospel of truth and honor, not hypocrisy.

Bert Hornback
Easter 2009

TORTURE AND THE LEGAL, MORAL OBLIGATION TO INVESTIGATE

Now that even in the United States the news media are talking openly and directly about the Bush administration's torture programs, isn't it time President Obama quits hiding and orders thorough and open investigations of this outrageous, illegal, immoral chapter in United States history? And isn't it soon going to be time to charge everyone involved, from George W. Bush down to the medical personnel who cooperated, with criminal acts of torture?

The Nuremburg War Crimes trials were organised by the winners of World War II. The winners this time must be the free people of the world--including United States citizens. And we must all act to bring the criminals to justice. Not to act is, in legal terms, to be accessories after the fact: and we, then, become guilty of the same offenses the Bush criminals committed.

Everyone in the Bush adnministration who had anything to do with torture, everyone who knew it was going on and kept quiet with that knowledge, should be prosecuted. And if our present president refuses to act, he too is an accessory--and he must also be charged with obstruction of justice. His oath of office must still be fresh in his mouth; he should recall what he said about upholding law and defending our constitution.

The justice system in Peru works; Alberto Fujimori was been convicted and sentenced. Does the United States justice system work, or are we cowards, afraid to bring our criminals to justice, afraid to admit in any official way that the United States has been acting as a rogue state?

SPRING VARIOUSNESSES

If the English had been the first settlers in what is now New York, it wouldn't have been in New York at all. It would have been somewhere up the Atlantic coast, or inland. The English didn't know how to build on a swamp--but the Dutch did. Lower Manhattan must have looked somnething like home to the first Dutch settlers: flat, a bit on the damp or wet side, right at sea level. They knew how to build on such land--had been doing so for quite some time. So they started building on Manhattan.

What are the least energy efficient machines in the world? Beef cattle, of course. Grain-fed cattle consume about 10,000 times as much energy as we get from their meat. Let's quit raising beef cattle, and give the grain to hungry people.

I live these days in a socialist country. And like most socialist countries, Germany shamelessly provides numerous social services to its people. In addition to such evil things as good health care, good schools, serious recycling services, excellent and speedy rail transportation, and clean safe cities, Deutsche Telecom charges me $6 a month for unlimited calls to anywhere in Western Europe, Canada, and the United States. My basic telephone and internet bill is $30 a month--and my long distance calls to North America--even if I talk all day every day--cost me an additional $6 a month. Isn't that terrible? Just think how much profit is not being made!

President Obama's trip to the G-20 in London and the NATO summit in Strasbourg and Baden-Baden was a giant stimulus package for the United States economy. Well, if you believe that what we need to do to get us out of our economic woes is spend as much as we can, that's what the trip was. He arrived in London with 500 aides and cooks and bodyguards. He had five fully-equipped command helicopters--four of them to be flown as decoys every time he used the fifth, and a three-ton armor-plated limousine. Rumors from London said that Washington also flew in a large hotel and two army barracks buildings to house the 500 people.

This morning in Saarbruecken I saw a car with a surprising model name: "Prestige." I didn't see the make, however. I can't believe that a European auto company would name one of its models "Prestige"--but an American-made car could easily be named such, and quite appropriately. America is fond of "prestige," and things that are "prestigious." From the time of the Romans until the 1930s, prestige had to do with "trickery" and "deceit." The Latin root was praestigium. John Stuart Mill wrote that Napoleon's success was all a matter of prestige; W. E. Gladstone, the 19th century British prime minister, referred to "that vile thing called prestige" as the opposite of honor. But then, thanks to the advertising industry mostly, Americans turned prestige into something supposedly good, and everybody wanted prestige. The once-great University of Michigan became a "prestigious" university during the presidency of Harold Shapiro, who loved the word the way he loved money. . . . I wonder if the car called "Prestige" is made by General Motors or maybe Chrysler? Has anybody else seen one?

WAR WAR WAR WAR

According to President Obama,the rest of the world must take up the burden USers have shouldered for so many years: the burden of spending. With USers less and less able or willing to spend, the world's economy can't grow.

Of course, a very large portion of USer spending does anything but grow the economy in any but the most simplistic terms. Economists have known for years that the greatest returns on governmental spending come from investment in health care and education--and the US governments do very little of either. Instead, the US government spends massive amounts of money on the military--though any decent economist knows that military spending actually has a negative effect on economic growth.

The first six years of my life--from December of 1935 until December of 1941--the US was not at war. That's the longest period of warlessness I have known in 73 years.

The US was involved in World War II from 1941-1945, and in ther Korean War from 1950-1954. In 1958 we invaded Lebanon, but only got to stay for three months; we managed to destroy all of Beirut's streets, however, and a good deal of the port facility, which we had to rebuild. In 1962 we started training CIA infiltrators into North Vietnam, and began military operations in 1964. When we got out of Vietnam in 1974, we tried a little bit of war, invading North Korean to rescue some US Navy patrol boats that had strayed into North Korean waters: that was Gerald Ford's attempt at war. In 1978-79, while our European allies were trying to arrange a peaceful end to the take-over of the US Embassy in Iran (with its 49 or 51 CIA operatives held captive), Jimmy Carter stupidly tried to invade Iran; luckily, his attempt to start a war was foiled by US military technology--our helicopters crashed in the desert before they reached Teheran. From 1981 to 1989 Ronald Reagan waged his war against Nicaragua, and actually won a little war against Grenada. In 1989 George the First made war against Panama and his former good buddy Manuel Noreiga; then in 1991 he attacked Iraq. Bill Clinton bombed Iraq right at the start of his presidency in
1993, and then sent troops to Somalia and bombed the Balkans fiercely. We had a brief lull in war-making then--our longest since the end of World War II--until George the Second invaded Irag again, and Afghanistan. President Obama doesn't seem ready to end either of those wars of aggression, so we can probably expect to continue being at war through at least 2012, probably longer.

Since 1941 the US has been at war almost constantly. But war is our way of thinking, or dealing with anything. That's all we understand. We have also had a Cold War, a War on Poverty, and a War on Terror.

After the end of World War II, military personnel went back to wearing their dress uniforms in public. They weren't allowed off their bases in combat gear. But for the current wars--Iraq II and Afghanistan--the rules have changed: military personnel always wear their combat gear in public; even the military bands marching in New Orleans' Mardi Gras parades dress in camouflage outfits and boots. That keeps us conscious of our being at war. It makes us remember who and what we are: a warrior state, always ready to shoot and bomb anybody and everybody, always eager to go to war, in need of wars to distract us from the troubles inside our own borders.

If we could quit fighting wars, our economic situation would be a lot better. We would have money to spend on health care and education, on homes for the homeless and food for the hungry. We don't need to ask the rest of the world to start spending more; we just need to quit throwing all our money away attacking other countries, starting wars, buying weapons. We need to quit being belligerent--and stupid.

WHERE YOUR RETIREMENT FUNDS GO

After a recent botched transaction with TIAA-CREF, which manages retirement savings for academics, I decided to complain. Looking for someone to complain to, I found Mr. Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., the president of TIAA-CREF. With him, I found his contract with TIAA-CREF, and discovered that he takes home a good bit of my money every month. So I wrote to him both about the problem I had had transferring $25,000from TIAA-CREF to my bank account and about the greater problem of his transferring $11,000,000 a year from TIAA-CREF to his bank account. The following is my letter to Mr. Ferguson.

3 April 2009

Mr. Roger W. Ferguson, Jr.
730 3rd Avenue
New York, New York 10017

Dear Mr. Ferguson,

I am an emeritus professor of English at the University of Michigan, and an emeritus professor of Humanities at Bellarmine University. I am currently teaching as an unpaid guest professor at the Universität des Saarlandes in Germany.
I am writing to you about the disastrous service I have recently received from your CREF division. Before I get to that, however, let me discuss briefly another topic.
In searching for your name and address I came across your contract with TIAA-CREF. I see that we—teachers, for the most part—are paying you $11,000,000 a year in “total compensation.” That’s a lot of money: more than any human being could possibly need, even if he were greedy and had a thousand children.
Your $1,000,000 a year salary is more than most college and university professors will earn in twenty years of dedicated work.
You will receive not less than $5,000,000 a year as a Long Term Performance Award—beginning at the end of your first year! That’s quite remarkable—and unnecessary. As it is my money that is paying you this nonsensical and offensively large this “Award” I object.
You will also receive a $5,000,000 a year Transitional Award. What is the transition you are making? From being wealthy to being obscenely, anti-socially wealthy?
I couldn’t find figures about your Retirement pay, though I am certain it will be considerably more than the retirement income of any professor who has invested in TIAA-CREF.
In a world full of poor people, homeless people, hungry people, the payment of such compensation and the acceptance of such compensation are both disgusting and immoral.
If you object to my calling you immoral for your greediness, you may explain to me why I should refrain from identifying you as such publicly. Otherwise, I will do so, to the best of my ability.
Now: to the matter about which I initially intended to write. This matter is, of course, related to the matter of your personal greed, particularly since the new TIAA-CREF sloganises itself as dedicated to “Financial Services for the Greater Good.”
On 12 March I spoke to three people—Maier, Wright, and Galvan—about transferring $25,000 of my money from CREF to my New Orleans bank. I was told the electronic transfer would take eight to ten days. (Remarkably fast electrons at TIAA-CREF; maybe you could donate a few dollars to upgrade them?)
When I telephoned TIAA-CREF on 30 March to find out why the $25,000 had not been transferred to my bank, I spoke with Gene Merchant from 5:00 p.m. to 5:28 p.m. EDT. He informed me that a check had been sent to my New Orleans address. He also noted that the order he was looking at indicated the money was supposed to be transferred to my New Orleans bank account.
He volunteered to void the check—I am currently in Germany, as I mentioned above—and have the money sent to my bank within another ten days. I said that such a slow response by TIAA-CREF to its own mistake was unacceptable.
Mr. Merchant then told me he would “escalate” the matter to the “escalation team.” Jargon. Garbage. Who got paid how much for inventing the “escalation team”?
The “escalator” assigned to me was Mr. Bob Ziegler. At 5:00 p.m. EDT on 31 March I telephoned him—he had not telephoned me, as I had been told he would—and was answered by a machine. On 1 April Mr. Ziegler telephoned me, to say that within two to three days the $25,000 transfer I had ordered on 12 March would actually be made. (More fast electrons. Maybe another contribution?)
I asked Mr. Ziegler for the address of a superior to whom I could complain. He told me I could write to Mr. Greg Ryan in Charlotte, N.C., or to Ms. Karen Green at something called strangely the “ IPS Individual Group” at “Financial Services for the Greater Good” in Denver.
I chose to write to you instead. Perhaps you can earn a few of the many dollars you are paid to teach your employees not to make mistakes, your escalators to do something better than escalate, and your electrons to work more quickly.
I don’t like incompetence—three weeks for an electronic transfer of funds--though I must note that it is much, much less offensive than greed.

Sincerely yours,

Bert G. Hornback

OYSTERS AND OSTRICHES

Oysters have been around a long time. Longer than ostriches.
For the ancient Greeks, an oyster was an OSTREON. The general word for shellfish was OSTRAKINOS, which then became the word for an earthenware pot or dish, an OSTRAKON. When the Athenians ostracized someone, they voted him out of the city, writing his name on fragments of earthenware pots which they used as ballots.
The OST- root also appears in the Greek word for bone, OSTEON, which is also the word for a rock, or the stone of a fruit. The ancient Sanskrit word behind OSTEON is ASTHI, or ASTHNAS: bone. For the Greeks, OSTEINOS says made of bone; an OSTARION is a little bone. And OSXE is the word for scrotum.
The OST- or OS- root for bone and rock and the stone of a fruit, an earthenware pot or dish, a shellfish and specifically an oyster, is a root meaning something hard. OSXE, the Greek for scrotum, is perhaps derived from the same root, but if so only secondarily: OSXE is more likely related to the SCRO- root that is used in the Latin word SCROTUM, the pouch or sack for the testicles.
According to eytmologists, an ostrich also gets its name from ancient Greek. For the Romans, AVISTRUTHIO or simply STRUTHIO was a large grey bird, which took its name from the Greek STROUTHION, and the earlier STROUTHOS. Actually, the ostrich was a MEGASTROUTHOS for the Greeks; the STROUTHOS was a sparrow. And a MEGASTROUTHOS was also called a STROUTHIOCAMELOS.
But a case—erroneous, but a case nonetheless—can be made, etymologically, for ostriches being related to oysters, not sparrows. Ostriches are large grey birds, whose bodies are shaped much like giant oysters—giant oysters with long necks and long, skinny legs. The ostrich might just as well get its name from an oyster as from a sparrow. Visually, ostriches are much more like giant oysters than giant sparrows, in shape and color. And if the Greek OSXE does derive from the OS root, making scrota related to oysters, the Greeks could just as easily have seen ostriches as related to oysters.

A Special Report from the
Speculative Etymology Section of the
Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought

SHAME ON THE PRESIDENT

Shame on President Obama. The world watches as the Obama administration hides kidnapping and torture behind the screen of "state secrets."

The whole world is aghast at the news of the CIA's seven years of torturing Binyam Mohamed, a British subject and citizen, and the Bush administration's blackmailing of the British government to keep them quiet about the torture. And now Obama wants to continue such shameful and criminal activities.

Shame on President Obama. Shame on our country.

Bert Hornback

WORDS: ABOUT WAR, GAY RIGHTS, AND ABORTION

WORDS: ABOUT WAR, GAY RIGHTS, AND ABORTION

Americans need to learn that "bi-partisan" isn't necessarily good. Nor is "compromise” --as popularly understood--good, unless by a lucky accident. And "tolerance" isn't good, unless we are talking about tolerating cold weather or a toothache, or (if we are being generous) tolerating fools.

If half of us are racists and half of us aren't, will "bi-partisanship" work as a way of insuring equal rights? Of course not. Likewise, President Obama's inauguration "compromise" on gay rights was absurd. Either gays have equal rights with everybody else, or they are discriminated against and abused as second-class citizens. Having a anti-gay rights bigot and a gay bishop both pray to presumably the same god for him and for us is ludicrously bi-partisan, and demonstrates how idiotic our idea of compromise is.

If partisans on both sides can agree on something, then that something has bi-partisan support. If we reach a compromise on an issue, that means we agree on a course that we think is the right one--which may not be down-the-middle at all! A compromise is an agreement: the word says that those who compromise "promise together"--for the future. (I don't make "promises" about the past; that makes no sense.) We can achieve a compromise on how to end our war in Iraq, by agreeing on how to withdraw U.S. troops; but we can't have a compromise that is half-way between war and no war.

The Clinton "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gays in the military was a false compromise. It denied gay rights: it kept gays second class citizens. If the "don't ask, don't tell" policy had applied to all troops, heterosexual as well as homosexual, it would have been a decent if meaningless compromise.

Abortion is currently legal for the most part in the United States. Some people argue that abortion is murder, however. Is Roe v. Wade a compromise solution? No. It rejects the argument that abortion is murder, and accepts the argument for a woman's right to abort a foetus. The question was not decided by putting a woman's right to control of her own body above or ahead of the prohibition against murder; rather, it decided that abortion is not murder.

The U. S. Supreme Court made that decision without establishing precisely what determines whether or not a foetus is a living human child. Under U.S. law, if a court can't determine that a person has committed a crime--murder, for example--the accused must be acquitted: thus, if we don't know that a human child has been murdered we can't judge abortion to be murder. If the foetus is a human child, however, killing it intentionally is murder.

When we acquit the accused murderer because we cannot be certain of his guilt, we make our decision in order to avoid punishing the innocent. "Reasonable doubt" is the cut-off point: proof of guilt must be "beyond reasonable doubt." Can the reverse argument be made in the case of abortion? If the foetus is "beyond reasonable doubt" not a human child, the abortion is legal; but if there is a reasonable possibility that it is a human child, must its right to life be protected?

Our laws have as their first purpose the protection of the innocent, and from this derives the secondary purpose of punishing the guilty. In the case of abortion, however, there are further moral complications. The first is that, prior to Roe v. Wade, it was possible for all Americans except the poor to get safe abortions without fear of prosecution; all they had to do was find a doctor who would perform the operation. The poor could get abortions in back alleys, or abort themselves, but often died as a result. The law against abortion was, on the face of it, discriminatory. The second complication in trying to regulate abortion is that our society doesn't mandate proper care for children: once children are born, they may starve to death or be homeless or grow up uncared for and uneducated for life--and no laws have been broken. If we are to protect the rights of the unborn, shouldn't we also acknowledge that, once born, children have rights too?

We need to stop the partisan shouting of the "pro life" and "pro choice" advocates, and think our way through to an honest compromise: a way forward, to a proper future which will not require some of us to "tolerate" abortion that may be murder, and will not "tolerate" child neglect in any form in our society.

JUSTICE

How can the United States talk about "justice" How can American citizens talk about "justice"? The only kind of justice that exists in the United States is that which is radically modified by "liberty," the doctrine of irresponsible self-righteousness.
Our government suspends the right of habeas corpus, does away with the presumption of innocence until proven guilty; it condones torture, practices state kidnappings and "disappearances," and blackmails our supposed allies to keep quiet about our torturing their citizens. It starts illegal wars of aggression, and supplies obscene weapons--I'm thinking of phosphorus bombs, designed to burn, maim, and kill people indiscriminately--to vicious, uncivilised Israelis.
(The phosphorus bombs that the United States gives the Israeli army to use against Palestinians are not designed for use against military targets. They don't destroy buildings or guns; they aren't aimed at combatants. They are dropped, to explode before they hit the ground; upon detonation, they spew hundreds of large burning phosphorus pellets through the air. Phosphorus burns flesh--and keeps burning flesh, and keeps burning flesh. Of anybody: children, for example, as well as women and men and maybe even a few militants.)
Now, with the closing of the United States' main Concentration Camp at Guantanamo imminent, many Americans are complaining: they want "justice," they say, thining about the bombing of the USS Cole and the destruction of the World Trade Center. But Americans don't want justice; they want revenge. And revenge is not a worthy motive for anything.
After torturing people for six years, we have no right even to use the word justice. Only if the torturers--from the president down to the lowly scum who gave the direct orders and the craven creatures who carried them out--are brought to justice for their crimes can those who have been tortured ever be accused of crimes, and probably not even then: they have already been punished--illegally, inhumanely, and unjustly.
Americans can't ask for what they call "justice," and they can't be allowed further acts of vengeance. Rather, America must be brought to justice for its crimes.

O’BAMA SELLS WASHINGTON

Did we elect Barack O’Bama governor of Illinois?

This is disgraceful, to say the very least. Today I received an e-mail from the president-elect, another from his wife, and yet another from David Phlunkey, telling me that if I send them just $5 I will have a chance to win a ticket to O’Bama’s inauguration.

The governor of Illinois is no worse than he is, and I am disgusted. No wonder his cabinet is full of sleazes.

Bert Hornback
c

UTILITARIAN BIOTECHNOLOGY AWARD

The Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought has made a significant grant to its Department of Utilitarian Biotechnology, for work on the cross-breeding of dogs and eyeglasses. One of the great wastes of human talent seems to be the misplacement of eyeglasses; this waste could be eliminated if eyeglasses could be taught to follow their humans around, the way dogs do. A team of researchers will be selected by Professor Susan di Nahm and her research associate, Doctor Norman D. Plumm. Applications may be submitted any time within the next six months to the Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought.

SAVING THESE UNITED STATES

So far the response to the financial melt-down in the United States has been a typically American one: greed. Greed feeds greed. The “bail-out” of America, as sponsored by both the Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration, is to let the future pay for it. For the next century, our children and grandchildren to the fifth or sixth generation will be paying for the greed and profligacy of our time.

George Bush financed his tax cuts for the rich with deficit spending, which is a polite word for increased debt. He paid and is paying for his bloody wars of aggression—and his absurd “Department of Homeland Security “—by increasing the national debt by three trillion dollars. And now the “bail-out” of long-failing but expensively-led corporations and greedy banks intending to make profits from the poor: we will pay for bailing them out by borrowing another few trillion dollars from the future. And it’s not the rich who will pay for all these loans: they and their wealth will be protected. It’s the poor who will be taxed.

The main problem with the supposedly United States that they aren’t united. They aren’t a culture, a society. These United States are made up of the rich—and everybody else. Our problem is not a lack of wealth, but the gross maldistribution of wealth. Our problem is greed.

The solution to the problem is relatively simple: redistribute the wealth. There is no civilised, social, moral reason for some people to have billions of dollars. So we must have a new law which says that every citizen of the United States has the right to own perhaps $100,000 a year of disposable wealth or property (excluding a single domicile) for every year of life left to him or her up to the age of seventy. All wealth in excess of that amount will become commonwealth.

If a family has but one bread-winner, and he or she has less that $50,000 in any year, the commonwealth fund will top that up so that the family will have $50,000 for the year. A citizen who is disabled or reaches the age of seventy will receive from the government $100,000 a year for the rest of his or her life.

If an individual fifty year-old citizen has more than $100,000 times twenty--$2,000,000—all money and property (excluding a single domicile) in excess of that $2,000,000 will be forfeit to the commonwealth. If a family of four—two thirty year-old parents, twins aged ten—has a combined wealth of more than $20,000,000, they will forfeit the excess.

A sixty-year old couple having a primary domicile fully paid for and worth $500,000, and another vacation home fully paid for and worth $300,000 may possess, jointly, $1,700,000. If the next year they own the same two homes, they may possess, jointly, $1,500,000. By the time they are sixty-eight, the can still have their two homes, but will be allowed only $100,000 jointly in addition. At age sixty-nine, they will have to sell the vacation home—and join the rest of the population who have but one domicile.

Rich institutions, like the Roman Catholic Church and Harvard University will likewise be required to disperse their gross wealth.

Why not? Why let Bill Gates sit on $50,000,000,000, and praise him for giving away $50,000,000? That’s but one-tenth of one percent of his wealth. That’s no more charity than my giving a dime a day to a homeless person.

Why let the Catholic Church pay no taxes on its wealth and property? The archbishop of Louisville complained at having to pay $26,000,000 for pedophile priests’s crimes; “I only have $52,000,000 in ready cash,” he said. Poor church!

Churches of all denominations are locked up most of the time; they are open to the public only six or seven hours a week. If they want tax exemptions, let them serve the public: let them be open for eight or ten hours a day, seven days a week, to provide comfort and shelter for the poor and the homeless. Let them feed the poor, every day. Otherwise, make them pay taxes. Require them to pay for their greed.

There is enough wealth in the United States to make a decent society for us all: to make a genuine commonwealth. It’s time for us to have a genuine revolution, and give ourselves the gift of freedom. In liberty, we each take care of ourselves, for ourselves; in freedom—which is friendly—we take care of each other, for the sake of us all.

I think I could pledge allegiance to such a country. And I suspect that the rest of the world would praise and admire us for being good citizens, and setting a good example for all of humankind. And then we wouldn’t have to be afraid of terrorist attacks or anything else bad.

9 January 2009

THE RATTLE OF BONES

The wise man stood beside the village well. It was dry. Women came to him to ask for help. There was no water for their cows, and no milk for their children. The goats, too, and the sheep, were dying of thirst. The wise man told the women to hold forth their hands, and he cried tears into them. “Let the animals drink my tears,” he said.
Men came to him. The fields were barren; the seed had failed, and they would all starve. “Take my seed,” he told them; “spread it in your fields.” And he spent his seed in their hands.
The mayor sent to him. He was having a wedding feast for his daughter, but the vineyards had withered and there was no fresh wine. The wise man took a sharp stone, and made a deep cut in his breast. He picked up a cup-shaped stone from beside the dry well, and filled it to the brim with his blood. “Let them drink this,” he said; “it is better than wine.”
The next day the well was spilling over. The river was full, and the cows were giving milk. New wheat and corn and grass began to grow in the fields. In the mayor’s orchards, the grapes hung heavy upon the vines.
The mayor opened the gates in front of his house, and threw gold into the streets. He invited the whole village to his daughter’s wedding feast.
When everyone had eaten and drunk his fill, the mayor and the villagers went to thank the wise man. Beside the well they found his bones, nothing more.
“This is a sign,” the women said.
“It is a warning,” said the men.
“We must take heed,” the mayor said. “Such profligacy as his is not right, or just, or good.”
The people began to store water in barrels, and to harvest and hoard the grain from the fields. The mayor closed the gates before his house, and posted guards in his orchards.
The bones rattled noisily, and got up. The well suddenly went dry again. The bones started to walk out of the village. In front of the mayor’s house they paused, and the vines in his orchards withered, the grapes shriveled and dried and fell to the ground. As the bones rattled across the river, it dried up in front of them and became a bed of sand. The crops in the fields turned brown as it passed.
The bones walked on. Soon the villagers could see them no more, and the rattle of bones was dead in their ears.