Hornback's It Says Here

A Thought for the Day

2012-01-26T03:26:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama agree about one thing. Both believe that the U.S. president is an absolute ruler. Gingrich thinks that the president can overrule the Supreme Court--which means that he can scrap the U.S. Constitution. Obama is even bolder: he has announced that the president can order a military strike any place in the world at any time.

One might think that Americans might object. But after Gingrich's announcement that he would void Supreme Court decisions that he didn't agree with, he rose to the top among the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. And when Obama "rescued" an American and a Dane from captivity in Somalia--and killed nine Somalians--nobody objected.

Of course not. Gingrich didn't threaten to turn the Congress out to pasture. And Congress certainly wouldn't object to what Obama did: after all, Congress had almost succeeded in passing a bill that would have made it legal for the U.S. military to take anybody anywhere hostage--even U.S. citizens in the United States--and hold them indefinitely, without being charged with a crime. We could all have had careers in the U.S. concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay had Senator Rand Paul not intervened.

GOD BLESS AMERICA

2011-12-21T13:44:00.000-08:00

One of my former friends in Ann Arbor, Michigan, says he "respectfully disagrees" with what I say about the US government's treatment of Bradley Manning. If it were his son--or his grandson--being held illegally for 18 months, tortured, charged with OBEYING the law in making felony offenses public information, public knowledge, I am sure he wouldn't disagree with me.

But at least he answers what I say. Most of my former friends don't answer, or they tell me to shut up.

But I can try to talk about other things. Or maybe I should propose that I will talk about the same things, using different particulars.

The US spends a billion dollars--$1,000,000,000--a day on Obama's wars. We bomb civilians, claiming that they are "Taliban." But the US vice-president says that the Taliban is not the enemy. (By the way, the US createdthe Taliban. The same way it created Ayatolla Khoumini to run Iraq--thank you, Central Intelligence.)

But we spend nothing on schools in the US, and our schools are terrible. We allow families to live in abject poverty--and even Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, works to prevent that! We don't provide medical care for the poor.

And what do the rich Americans do? The millionaire rich look for tax loopholes. The billionaires either sit on their obscene wealth, letting it grow like an anal cancer, or they give bits of it away, or the spend it on self-glory. Most billionaires are in the first category: they just greedily grow their wealth. The second group give away a few billion--or even tens of billions. But of course Warren Buffet could afford to give away fifty billion--$50,000,000,000--and still be obscenely rich. So could Bill Gates.

I teach now at the Universitat des Saarlandes in Germany. Students and a few faculty here, and some Dickens scholars from Britain and the United States, and an Irish diplomat gave $5,000 this month to buy Christmas presents for 500 poor, orphaned, or abandoned children in Moldova. A billion dollars from Mr. Buffet or Mr. Gates would have have made it possible for "Aktion Oliver" to do a lot more!

The billionaire who wants to invest in a new space craft--to replace the shuttle--will do nothing for this world. Why doesn't he give his billions to the poor--in America or elsewhere?

President Obama buys Christmas presents (for his daughters--and his dog) at a discount store. Should we applaud? HELL NO! We should demand that he quit his wars, and give $1,000,000,000 every day to the poor.

Am I being unreasonable? Of course not--except to unreasonable people:honi soit qui mal y pense.

Cordially yours in this charitable season when good Christians nod with pennies at the poor, and offer up their greed to be blessed.

Bert Hornback

ON A LIGHTER NOTE, ON THE BRIGHTER SIDE

2011-12-17T15:47:00.000-08:00

I have taught at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Michigan, University College Dublin, Bellarmine College in Kentucky, and now for the last four years at Saarland University in Germany. I taught at Michigan for twenty-eight years--and it is now fifty years since I began my teaching career at Notre Dame.

It was been a very interesting fifty years. The invasion of Cuba by the United States--and a total of 28 attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. The assassination of John Kennedy. George Wallace running for president in the United States. The assassination of Martin Luther King, then of Robert Kennedy. Vietnam. Richard Nixon. The illegal "Contra" army in Nicaragua. Support for Boris Yeltsin. Reagan's invasion of Grenada. George H. W. (C.I.A.) Bush's invasion of Iraq. Clinton bombing Iraq--just to show that he too could murder people. Then George H. Bush's invasion of Iraq, and Afghanistan. Obama's wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya. The concentration camp Guantanamo Bay. Torture. And Bradley Manning.

But despite all that, I have been blessed, personally and professionally, with the opportunity to teach. And for most of these fifty years, I have had very good, serious, bright, and thoughtful students to work with. Sometimes I am ashamed to have had such a blessed life. Even during my three years in the Marine Corps, I worked for a good captain, and then a wonderful and courageous colonel--who resigned in protest against the Vietnam war. And during those three years I worked with several hundred young men who were good and thoughtful friends.

Teaching is--to me--something sacred. I'm not a believer in "sin," but if I were I would call going to class unprepared a mortal sin. And to waste students' time talking about worthless things--mere academics--is a serious sin or crime or fault as well.

But for all these years, my students have kept me working hard to be a good teacher, every day. I think that they have been successful, most days. They are responsible for my good days; I am responsible for the bad ones. I hope they haven't been too many. I can think of eleven, these last fifty years. But there are probably more. Maybe a lot more.

When all the bad stuff in the world weighs heavily on me, I think of my students, and of the privilege I have of getting to teach them. And when I come close to despair, thinking I can't change this world, I remember that theycan.

Teaching is a good life. And I am thankful that I am a teacher. The United States defeated me, and I won't teach there any more. But I am teaching in Germany now--this is my fourth year--and I am very, very happy.

Bert Hornback

BRADLEY MANNING

2011-12-17T15:46:00.001-08:00

Bradley Manning is a very brave and honorable man: moreso than anybody in the U.S. government or elsewhere in the allegedly "free" United States. The United States is a police state, a rogue state that violates all laws. Bradley Manning stood up to the government, exposed war crimes and lies.

Knowing what he did, Bradley Manning did what he was required to do by both United States Civil Law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Barack Obama, supposedly a smart man and qualified as a lawyer, has already declared Bradley Manning guilty--which demonstrates clearly that the United States is not a country which respects law. (The right of habeas corpus in the United States--guaranteed in its Bill of Rights--has been suspended by both George H. Bush and Obama.)

When this absurd Kangaroo Court has had its day, it will be time to reconvene Nuremberg. It has been restored. And this time the Americans won't be the prosecutors and the judges. This time the Americans will be the prosecuted, and the judged. And the court can send all the convicted Americans to America's own concentration camp at Guantanamo.

All the Americans can offer in their defense is blackmail: they have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world, and that they aren't afraid to use them.

Manuel Noreiga

2011-12-11T15:17:00.001-08:00

Manuel Noreiga is being extradited from France to Panama. He was first arrested by the United States, during the presidency of George H. W. Bush. The U. S. invaded Panama to get him. At his trial, Noreiga tried to introduce evidence that he had worked for George H. W. Bush when that Bush was head of CIA; this evidence was disallowed--so Noreiga held up a large photograph of himself with Bush, and Bush with his arm around his good drug-running friend.

Maybe Panama should try extraditing George H. W. Bush, too. Nicaragua might also want the former U. S. president. And Cuba? Who was resp[onsioble for those 28 U. S. attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro?

But back to Panama. It would be a shame to let George H. W. Bush die of old age, without ever having to face justice.

SENATOR RAND PAUL, HERO

2011-12-04T02:32:00.000-08:00

People--like me--ridiculed Rand Paul when he ran for the U.S. Senate. He was a young know-nothing, we said. But now he has proved to be freedom's hero--a position ninety-nine other U. S. Senators refused.

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan asked for a voice vote that would have turned the U.S. into a full-fledged police state. It would have authorised the U.S. military to capture and incarcerate--for life--any U.S. citizen, without any judicial oversight and without the requirement of charges of the possibility of trial.

A voice vote doesn't record who votes yes and who votes no. And Levin was sure a voice vote would produce an affirmative majority.

Nobody objected but Rand Paul. And his requesting a recorded roll-call vote saved us. The prospect of being known for having voted for the end of the rule of law, for having voted to turn the U.S. into a police state, caused at least ten Senators to change their minds and vote against the measure. Among them, of course, was Senator Carl Levin.

What an extreme of dishonor. What dangerous dishonesty. Senator Levin should resign from the Senate, in shame. And Rand Paul ranks--by this one action--with the greatest of American heroes.

Bert Hornback

OOPS! IT WAS AN ACCIDENT. . .

2011-11-27T11:11:00.000-08:00

I probably should look at what the American response to the killing of 24 Pakistani troops--allies--has been. But I don't want to. I don't want to read about or hear "apologies" for a "mistake"--which is a euphemism for "So what?"

A country that exists as far outside the idea of law as the United States does is not to be trusted for anything, anywhere, at any time. Torture, vigilante murders carried out--proudly--in other countries, the concentration camp at Guantanamo, the imprisonment of Bradley Manning: these are the signatures of the United States. And all are violations of what the world has agreed are the standards for civilised conduct on this planet.

Perhaps the rest of the world should pool its resources, and build a huge rocket that could send the United States into outer space. The hole left by its absence would hold enough water to reduce world flood threats, eliminate 65% of the world's carbon emissions, and get rid of most of the world's nuclear weapons. Our planet would be a better, safer, more livable place if most of North America could be sent into exile.

SHOCKING NEWS

2011-11-14T13:14:00.000-08:00

It has just been revealed that BRADLEY MANNING is not who we thought he is. He is actually an Arab--which in the United States is officially called an Islamic Terrorist. Looks can be deceiving--and his disguise as a gay young man has misled everybody.

Because the Obama administration has now identified Manning as an Islamic Terrorist--and not an American citizen with constitutional rights--it is now clear that the Obama administration's holding him in solitary confinement since 5 July 2010, and its regular torture of Manning during these last fifteen months, is entirely justified.

Because Manning has been declared an Arab, an Islamic Terrorist, President Obama is now free to order Manning transferred to his illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, where Manning can be tortured all the time. And at Guantanamo, Manning will be a short-timer: he has been in solitary confinement for only 510 days. Most of the prisoners at Guantanamo have been held--and tortured--for more than ten years: 3,650 days minimum!

President Obama promised--that's a big word--to close Guantanamo within a year of assuming office. He hasn't done so. His excuse is that since we have held these men illegally--and tortured them illegally--for more than ten years, they might not like us.

Slavery was rarely so violent as what the United States government now practices. For most of the last sixty years of history, the United States has only tortured, executed, eliminated foreign nationals. But now? Bradley Manning is one of us.

No. I'm wrong. Mr. Obama has declared that he is an Islamic terrorist, and thus Mr. Obama can do anything to him his unconstitutional presidential heart wants to do.

And anyway Bradley Manning gay. And no real Americans are gay. He must be an Arab. A pale-skinned little Arab with blue eyes, a flat nose, and freckles.

God bless America. It needs it. It needs forgiveness, too. We all do, in America.

Bert G. Hornback

COLLEGE ATHLETICS AND HONOR

2011-11-09T12:12:00.000-08:00

Joe Paterno? He's just one of the crowd.

I grew up with publicity that called a mean, cruel, vulgar, ignorant man "a builder of men." He was the basketball coach at Western Kentucky, a sort of Penn State of the 1940s and 1950s. He was a disgusting man, and in no way a "coach"--or "a builder of men."

When I was thirteen I was taken to La Guardia airport in New York to meet the plane a country boy, a high school senior from Tennessee, was on. It was awkward when he shook hands with my father and me: He had a suitcase in one hand, and a roll of fifty-dollar bills in the other hand. My father--Western's athletic director and assistant basketball coach--was in New York with the team for the NIT tournament; a "backer" had sent Tom to the tournament, as part of the wooing process. I was given money every day to feed and entertain Tom; my father didn't want him spending Boo's money.

I knew which players at Western went to which local businessmen for their monthly salary, and where they got their free clothes and shoes. And where in Bowling Green they could eat for free. All perks.

When, in the early 1970s Western Kentucky's basketball program was being investigated by the NCAA, my father--at the end of his tenure, then, as athletic director--was called to a meeting with the college president. (The president was an old Western basketball player, my high school basketball coach, a high school principal, the dean of students at Western, and then president.) My father came home and announced proudly that when Dero had told him how worried everybody was about the NCAA investigation, he had responded simply, "My lips are sealed, Mr. President."

I had gone to Notre Dame as an undergraduate. A basketball scholarship freshman--also from Kentucky--was a friend of mine our first year. He told me he had come to Notre Dame because other schools were offering him so much money that his father was scared. (And no, it wasn't Paul Hornung; he played football, and sold hundreds of dollars worth of tickets every home-game Saturday in South Bend.)

I went from Notre Dame to Michigan. In the 1970s I met an inmate in a minimum security federal prison in Michigan. He wrote to me because a former Michigan fullback had recommended me to him. This man was being denied parole mostly because he was a black man from inner-city Cleveland. (I helped him get parole. Two years later he invited me to his wedding; he had a good job in Florida.) The former Michigan fullback had been a great star in Ann Arbor. When he graduated he held the record for the most touchdowns scored by a Wolverine. But he was too small to make it in the NFL. And in the fall after he graduated, he got frustrated with having no weekly wad of money, no free big car, no apartment. And he bought a pistol and walked into a bank, demanding money.

After 28 years at Michigan--which was for most of that time a great university at which I was proud to teach, despite its fraudulent athletics program--I left, to take care of my elderly parents and teach at a small college in Kentucky. One spring night a very expensive fifteen-passenger van belonging to the office of Student Affairs was vandalised. The tires were slashed, the windows broken, the interior destroyed. The next morning my freshman English class wanted to know if I had heard about the incident. I hadn't, but they had, and wanted to tell me about it. As they were relating the story, a not-very-bright boy who was at the college on a baseball scholarship interrupted: "Hey, nobody is supposed to know about that! Coach called a meeting this morning, and told us to keep quiet about it." Everybody knew about the vandalism--but nothing was done about it.

The moral of my story: it's not that the athletes are immoral, or criminal. It's that the coaches and the athletic directors and the university administrators are corrupt. And the Paterno scandal is just another example.

Why not do away with what is called "college athletics." With the money saved, universities could go back to being universities. True, some of the big athletic programs make money--but the money they make goes to athletics, not academics.

Bert Hornback

OCCUPY THE VATICAN

2011-11-06T11:44:00.000-08:00

In what must be a preemptive gesture, the current pope has endorsed the "Occupy X" movement. No doubt Jesus would have approved of such a non-violent protest against greed: "Give up all you have," he said, "and follow me."

But the Vatican is the richest corporation in the world. And for the Roman Catholic pope to endorse the "Occupy X" protests is an act of supreme hypocrisy. The Catholic Church is rich enough that it could buy the bankrupt United States of America.

The pope's gesture is pure hypocrisy. Maybe he wants to forestall an "Occupy the Vatican" protest in St. Peter's Square by pretending to support redistribution of wealth.

For all the other sins that Jesus mentions in the Christian gospels, he condemns hypocrisy a dozen times over. And his church--his Catholic church, with all its cathedrals and artworks and gold stuff and fancy vestments and real estate holdings and bank accounts and the banks it owns--is in its pretend Christianity the worst hypocrisy in the world.

Occupy the Vatican!

St. Benedict--this pope has chosen his name--is famous in history for the inauguration of the idea that though individual priests and monks should take vows of poverty as well as vows of chastity and obedience, the church itself could have as much wealth as it could collect. That clever discrimination is part of the "Benedictan Rule." Never mind Jesus and his teachings.

Occupy the Vatican.

Occupy the Vatican.

Bert Hornback

WHY I MAY VOTE FOR RON PAUL

2011-11-01T12:21:00.000-07:00

I voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He had stood for and signed a great Civil Rights Bill. He had launched the bid for the Great Society. And he declared "War on Poverty."

But why, we should have asked, go to "War" to get rid of poverty? We didn't ask that. And anyway, in 1964 he ran against an absolute idiot, Barry Goldwater.

(Though we didn't know it, in 1964 we already had the War in Vietnam. In 1962, Paul H. Corscadden started training CIA infiltrators into North Vietnam. Corscadden was later the "CIA delegate"--as he described himself--to the Paris Peace Talks. But then he was suddenly called away, "to assume a sensitive desk in Chile"--whence the attempted murder of Salvador Allende, ordered by Richard Nixon, and then Allende's assassination in 1973.)

I have been more careful with my vote since 1964. But the choice didn't even seem to need carefulness in 2008. How wrong I was. It's not that McCain would have been better than Obama, but that he would have been honest. And I would rather have an honest fool in office than a viciously dishonest and unprincipled man who is supposedly intelligent.

So maybe this next time I will support Ron Paul. He supports Bradley Manning, and points out Obama's dishonesty. Whistle-blowers? Bradley Manning is the most important whistle-blower since Daniel Ellsburg--and Obama has had him in prison for sixteen months: has tortured him for eight of those months: and has declared that Bradley Manning "broke the law."

So: Ron Paul for president! And any of my "liberal" friends who are upset at my support for Ron Paul can maybe think about who they are supporting--and what he stands for.

Obama's illegal wars, his political assassinations, his concentration camp at Guantanamo, Bradley Manning in prison. That's Mr. Obama to date. Quite a record for a supposedly intelligent Harvard lawyer who promised to end Bush's wars, close Guantanamo, and support whistle-blowers and a lawful, transparent democracy.

Bert Hornback

MURDER

2011-10-20T13:34:00.000-07:00

The United States has reintroduced its old "assassination" foreign policy. It now has a simpler name: it's "murder."

Does any living American remember when Americans lived by the rule of law? Does anybody in the United States object to assassination?

Americans simply murdered Osama bin Laden. Mr. Obama wouldn't have trusted the World Court to try him, and the United States didn't have legal jurisdiction to try him.

Mr. Obama won't attempt to bring to trial any of his prisoners in the illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo because (a) they have been held--for ten years--illegally; (b) the United States has no authority to try them for anything; and (c) Mr. Obama doesn't trust courts to convict them automatically.

It is appropriate that in his current multi-wars in the middle east, Mr. Obama's preferred murder weapon is the drone. Drones perform surgical killings--a lot like abortions, except that surgical killings sometimes abort the wrong victims.

An unidentifiable android in the Nevada desert programs a drone to kill somebody ten thousand miles away. Or American-fed, American-funded surrogates--a human form of drones--capture, then murder Khadafi.

It's all very simple. AND UTTERLY UNETHICAL, UNLAWFUL, ILLEGAL, CRIMINAL.

God bless America? If there is a God--particularly a Christian God--he or she will DAMN America.

PRIORITIES

2011-10-14T14:51:00.000-07:00

Another new Obama war? In Uganda?

But we can't afford long-term health care for elderly Americans.

Priorities? Obama is an idiot. A war-monger. Give me Richard Nixon, or even Lyndon Johnson. Or George the First. Their crimes were petty, compared with Obama's. Even stupid George W Bush--advised by Cheney and Rumsfeld--wasn't as bad as Obama.

How would you like to be the daughters of that man? Growing up, knowing what your father did?

ATTEMPTED MURDER

2011-10-13T13:52:00.000-07:00

Iran was planning to murder an Ambassador, the U.S. says.

The U.S. admits to more than 28 attempts on the life of Fidel Castro. It murdered President Diem in South Vietnam when he was no longer useful. Who else? It tried to murder Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Hasn't it just tried to murder President Kadhafi in Libya? Did the U.S. have any right to murder thousands of people in Iraq? What right had the U.S. to murder Osama bin Laden?

Is the U.S. president insane, claiming that Iran has violated the U.N. charter? The U.S. has violated the U.N. charter dozens of times, with its wars and assassinations.

If the U.S. didn't have 12,000 nuclear missiles and a record of being willing to use them, it would be declared a rogue state, and brought before the world court. Slobodan Milosovic is no more a war criminal than George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

I don't support assassination, by Iraq or the U.S. But I find it particularly disgusting for the U.S. to complain about Iran's allegedly uncivilised conduct. The U.S. leads the world in uncivilised conduct.

Oh. I forgot to mention torture. And Bradley Manning.

Bert G. Hornback

Medical "Research"

2011-10-12T14:43:00.000-07:00

Does anybody remember when medical research was scientific? These days, any doctor who has access to medical files can claim to be a researcher, by assembling some statistics. Basic science is third cousin twice removed from statistics.

Never mind what causes disease X; if 45% of the people who have disease X ate prunes twice a week, that is supposedly a scientific discovery. So what if 45% of the people who have disease didn'teat prunes at all? Well, according to current medical "science," both statistics rank as scientific discoveries.

Science reduced to statistics is nonsense. Most physicians aren't scientists--but a few physicians who have ambitions beyond their capacities pretend to be scientists, and the medical profession more and more pretends that statistics, not science, can guide medical practice.

Nonsense. Utter nonsense.

Bert Hornback

THE EVIL MEN DO LIVES AFTER THEM

2011-10-02T14:11:00.000-07:00

I voted for Mr. Obama. So did enough other people to get him elected. Mr. Obama defeated a stupid but honest man. The Nobel Committee in Oslo agreed with our vote, and awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now he is the world's leading criminal. He has no respect for any laws. He violates the United Nations Charter on torture. He refuses to let United Nations monitors interview Bradley Manning--who has been held without charge for 16 months (a violation of the U.S. Constitution, but Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama have both suspended the Constitutional right of Habeas Corpus)--and has already convicted him, by executive declaration: "He broke the law." He has expanded Mr. Bush's offensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to include Pakistan, Syria, and Libya. Will he next attack Mexico?

Now Mr. Obama has murdered an American citizen because he has declared that citizen guilty of terrorist activities. Supposedly, the idea of a bounty of the "head" of an alleged criminal went out in the late nineteenth century, as the United States moved toward civilisation.

Mr. Obama is a dictator. He is the law. Of course, in matters of domestic policy, he doesn't act as a dictator: he is a patsy for the rich. And in exchange, they let him play Nero in the rest of the world.

Have Americans no shame? "My country, right or wrong" has never--ever--been as bad as this. Give us Bush II and Cheney: they were better. Oh, for the good old days of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.

Has there been a worse president than Barak Obama? Ever? Has there ever been a more dangerous man in the White House? Has the United States ever been so dishonorable?

And yet there is no protest. We roused ourselves to protest against Lyndon Johnson's small war against Vietnam. We were indignant enough to force Richard Nixon out of office for minor crimes. And we impeached Bill Clinton for sexual dalliances with a White House intern. But we accept Mr. Obama's lawlessness, his violations of our Constitution and our honor.

Are we--ourselves--as un-American as he is? Have we no honor left?

Bert Hornback

Velveeta

2011-10-01T08:15:00.000-07:00

I've just read that Velveeta contains fine strands of wire. I'm shocked. All these years I've thought it was made of pure mucilage and orange food coloring. But then I didn't think American law allowed the president to order the murder of American citizens suspected of crimes. I thought that was forbidden. Stupid me.

Bert Hornback

2011-09-06T21:10:00.000-07:00

Does anybody remember when what the USA does to its enemies--Osama Bin Laden and others--was called ASSASSINATION? Or when what now we call "rendition" was known as KIDNAPPING? Or when "enhanced interrogation techniques" were called TORTURE?

How low can we stoop? Why are we the only people in the world who sing our praises?

Rogue state. And our president was going to change all that . . . .

Shame.

And I'm both angry and ashamed.

Bert Hornback

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR

2011-08-27T08:09:00.000-07:00

Martin Luther King, Jr. was indeed a hero, a great, courageous, noble man. And he more than deserves to be honored.

But the journalists keep praising America, not Dr. King. They write about "Jefferson's Temple" and the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument--and even about the FDR memorial. And they write about how wonderful it is to have Dr. King's memorial among those great men--as though he ought to feel honored to be among them.

Jefferson, they say, was the great "philosopher," the noble mind who founded our country. They don't mention his slaves, or his slave children--his own children--whom he sold on the open slave market to buy books. Or his determination that a black person could not be a poet. Washington did free his slaves--but only at his own death.

I like the idea of Dr. King being with Lincoln and FDR. They are good company. Those three were great men--like Dr. King. But why not add a memorial for Eleanor Roosevelt? She was as great an American as her husband. And she was our first black first lady.

The journalists write about looking out from Dr. King's memorial across the basin to Jefferson, and put Dr. King in a line from Jefferson to Lincoln or maybe Washington. I prefer to see it as Dr. King alongside FDR and Lincoln--and Jefferson off on the "other side." Segregated, as it were. Isolated. We have come a long way since Jefferson, and he is best left behind.

Let's celebrate Dr. King for himself and what he did for all of us.

Criminal Behavior Should Be Punished

2011-08-25T09:26:00.000-07:00

In a nation of laws, criminal behavior must in some way be punished. Three former employees in the Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, school system, have been charged with embezzling funds from the school system, and have pleaded guilty to felony fraud. A fourth former employee, who knew of the crime but did not report it, has pleaded guilty to misprision of a felony, which is itself a felony crime. In some jurisdictions this crime is called being an accessory after the fact.

The United States government and the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office cooperated in this case, prosecuted by the United States Attorney's Office.

Good for us--and good for our government.

But elsewhere, in the world beyond Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, our government has been holding a man who refused to be an accessory after the fact to torture and other felony crimes. His name is Bradley Manning. He has been imprisoned--illegally--for more than a year. Most of that time he has been kept in solitary confinement, and tortured. He has not been charged with a crime, because if the United States government charges Bradley Manning with releasing documents about its own felony crimes, he will claim in his defense that he was doing what United States law requires him to do when he knows that felony crimes have been committed.

How can we do this? We aren't doing it; the officer in charge of this country, who has sworn to uphold this country's laws, is doing it: and we are letting him do it.

Had Bradley Manning not released the documents which he discovered, related to secret felony offenses, he would have become himself a felon.

Barack Obama knows this. He is a Harvard lawyer--and Harvard lawyers know that misprision of a felony is a serious crime. But as officer in charge of the United States government, Obama wants to hide those felony crimes our nation has committed: to cover them up. And that makes Obama a felon, too.

We have lost our constitutionally guaranteed Right of Habeas Corpus; both Obama and his predecessor claim to have "suspended" it. No president, of course, can "suspend" the constitution. Only a dictator can do that.

And for more than a year, now, Obama has held Bradley Manning in prison, illegally. Punitively: though Bradley Manning has not been charged with a crime, Obama has proclaimed publicly that he is guilty: "He broke the law."

Obama has refused to let the United Nations Human Rights lawyers interview Bradley Manning in private.

Misprision of a felony is itself a felony crime under United States civil law, and under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

But Obama doesn't care. He is a rogue president. The prima facia evidence of his public conduct indicts him as a criminal for violating the oath he took upon assuming his office. Obama swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States. He has violated that oath, and continues in his arrogance to violate it every day.

Remarkably, so many of my supposed friends agree with him: friends whom I never would have expected to say "My country, right or wrong: but my country." I am ashamed: but not just of them. I am ashamed of me, too. But I am proud of Bradley Manning, and proud of those who support him.

Maybe I will manage to get brave enough to support him more actively myself.

If I don't, I will be morally guilty in the same way that Obama is guilty: of imprisoning, torturing, persecuting a national hero. And I don't want to be what Obama is.

Bert G. Hornback

hyper

2011-08-11T20:11:00.000-07:00

I'm seventy-five. I was around during World War II--when the USA pretended that the Nazis were good guys and the Japanese were sub-human evil beings, when black people in the USA were in effect still slaves, and when the USA used its two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

My head hurts tonight in a strange way. Maybe I'm old enough to die and get out of here. Not that I don't love humanity, and life itself. But I'm worn out with the USA, and tired from having spent most of my time and energy arguing against what I see as evil.\

But if I am going to die soon, I want to get this said before I go.

For the last few years I have lived in Germany. I teach there: a civilised place, an intelligent and thoughtful and moral people. Maybe the scourge in their past helps them--us, I should like to say--to be moral.

The USA has never accepted any of its shames: its many vicious, murderous shames. Native American genocide. African and African-American slavery (both: the children of African slaves--often, like Thomas Jefferson's children--were African-American, or Afro-European slaves). Nuclear bombs in Japan. And all the USA's manufactured wars of aggression, in Korea, in the 1958 invasion of Lebanon, against Cuba, in Vietnam with lots of napalm, in Grenada, in Iraq with Colin Powell burying live Iraqi kids in the sand with bulldozer-tanks, in Iraq again, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan with murderous drones, in Syria.

And now: sometimes I am outraged by us, or disgusted; sometimes I am just angry, or embarrassed, or perversely amused. But this time I am outrageously pleased.

The good-old-broke USA has spent billions--maybe trillions--of junk dollars designing and testing a 'hypersonic' plane. Not 'supersonic'--beyond the speed of sound--but hyperbolicly 'hypersonic.'

'Superfast' means something like 'most fast,' or 'fastest.' But 'hyperfast' means ' 'over-fast,' or 'too fast.' And wow! This thing was 'hypersonic.'

It was. And on Thursday it ran away from its trackers.

The plane that could travel at 13,000 miles per hour--21,000 kilometers per hour--would have let the USA military drop bombs on its enemies, anywhere in the world, in less than an hour.

On Thursday morning the Pentagon's best team of idiots launched one of these things, testing it.

They only had two of them. The first aborted itself after nine minutes, and disappeared into the Pacific Ocean. Two hundred thousand homes for poor people sank with it.

The second launch--this Thursday's--lasted thirty-six minutes. And then the thing escaped from the tracking radar: ran away. Where to? Did it go too fast for the radar to follow it? Did it burn up--at more than 2,000 degrees centigrade--in the outer atmosphere? Did it just run off somewhere on its own, maybe to a more civilised planet? Or did it land somewhere'' in Siberia? Antarctica? In an ocean?

It could have landed, of course, in someplace like Washington. An appropriate landing place. As the little girl used to say in the "Katzenjammer Kids" comic strip, "they brought it on themselves."

So: goodnight. If I am here tomorrow, I'll look to see if the USA's 'hypersonic' extravagance cause a sunami somewhere, or just blew up, or maybe found its way home to Washington, or maybe found its way off into outer space. And if I'm not here tomorrow, maybe I'll meet it out there somewhere.

Bert Hornback

Cynthia Tucker on Obama

2011-08-04T22:07:00.000-07:00

Three things.

First, Cynthia Tucker's recent syndicated response to disaster--to "the sky is falling"--is absurd. If the sky is falling--and it is--its doing so doesn't "depend on where you're standing." Six years ago New Orleans was flooded--and no matter where you were standing, yes, New Orleans was flooded. Even people on St. Charles Avenue knew that. Even Ray Nagin hiding in his penthouse knew that. We have lots more examples--but I read Tucker's nonsense in the New Orleans Timers Picayune.

Second, "Obama's first campaign centered around hope." That's nonsense, too. How is it possible for a campaign to "center around" hope? A center is a center, even in these impossible times in this desperately possible place. Tucker is talking nonsense.

Third, Tucker wants Obama to "reignite that spark" of what was, very briefly, hope. But Obama himself snuffed out any "spark" of hope he had given us with the first three of his broken promises: (1) he didn't end our wars of aggression, but multiplied them; (2) he failed to close the torture camp at Guantanamo Bay; and (3) he failed to restore our constitutional right of habeas corpus--and thus has been able to torture Private Bradley Manning in naked solitary confinement at Quantico for twelve months. (Manning's continuing imprisonment--without being charged with a crime, let alone brought to trial--was justified by Obama, of course, by his dictatorial proclamation, "Manning broke the law.")

The only hope I can see that Obama might be expected to ignite would come from his apologising for having been such a terrible, irresponsible, and untrustworthy president thus far, and resigning.

Obama has taught us how utterly hollow hope can be. As a former law professor he is intelligent enough to understand what a terrible lesson he has taught us.

"Can Obama inspire new hope in voters?" Of course he can't. Cynthia Tucker's essay is nonsense. But it does invite us to say the obvious: Obama should resign.

Bert G. Hornback

Europe

2011-07-22T04:42:00.000-07:00

EUROPE

Is Europe a success? Of course. Europe is not the euro, or finance. Europe is one of the great cultural experiments or adventures or undertakings in all of what we humans call time.

Americans have long—and loudly—celebrated the alleged “cultural experiment” that brought the United States into existence. But that wasn’t a cultural experiment, except that it was built on annihilating Native Americans, destroying their advanced civilisation, and importing Africans as slaves.

In 1952, the high school debate topic was the success or failure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. My debating partner was a girl named Evalyn Hosterman. Instead of defending NATO—it was, after all, nothing more than a military alliance—we argued that our human future on this planet should be a United Nations future. There is nothing in my life that I am more proud of than our seventeen year-old boldness and idealism.

The United Nations has had very little success, of course, in promoting civilisation, largely because of America’s absolute disagreement with the ideals of the United Nations. I suspect that the whole world knew, in 1947, that the United States would control, direct, and limit the United States. And by 1950, an alternative was being proposed—remarkably, from Britain—which in time would become the European Union.

The European Coal and Steel Union became the European Economic Community, which became the European Community,, and then the European Union. As late as 2005, the liberal National Public Radio in the United States still occasionally referred to the European Union as the “Common Market.” Of course: officially, the United States only understands two things: war, and what is called “economics.”

America thinks the idea of Europe is a failure. But then the United States didn’t understand what the European Economic Community was: couldn’t, because in Amereica, “economics” has to do with money, and the ideal of getting rich. The European Economic Community was two things that the United States couldn’t understand: a community, instead of what the Americans call a competition, and a real economy.

Economics is by definition social, not competitive: since the ancient Greeks created the word, it has to do with how we live together. It is a culture word. And the United States is is neither an economy or a culture. It is a me-first, screw-your-neighbor, win-win-win mock-society.

To be sure, the European Union has its faults: it is by no means perfect. But it is maybe the closest we humans have come to perfection thus far in our history.

Part of my pleasure with being a European is in collecting examples of our successes. Let me give you three small ones.

I teach at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken, Germany. Last winter term we had an “Irish Semester” in the English department. In December three students in English and a doctoral student in physics decided to collect Christmas presents for poor children in Dublin. They contacted the St. Vincent de Paul Society in Dublin, who agreed to deliver the presents, and DHL, which volunteered to deliver the presents to Dublin. In six days the students collected, boxed, and wrapped 131 ten-to-twenty euro presents and sent them off. Michael Tighe, our St. Vincent de Paul contact, wrote: “You wonderful kindness made me feel like a real European. Gifts like these are the European Union.”

In June of 2011, Klaus Schappert, the physicist—who is also the founding president of the German Charles Dickens Gesellschaft—decided that this year he wanted to collect 2,000 Christmas presents for orphaned or poor children in Romania. The project is called Action Oliver, after Dickens’s novel. And the project’s chief patron is the current head of the Dickens family, Mark Charles Dickens. I mentioned his project to the Vice-President for Europe at the university, Professor Patricia Oster-Stierle; her response was that of course the whole university should be involved in Action Oliver, and she would strongly recommend it to her colleagues in other German universities. “We are all Europeans!” you know.

And then, in July, I flew back to the United States for a Dickens symposium. I looked at the dinner menu card on my Air France flight. Everyone knows how intensely proud France and the French are of their cuisine. But our menu on Air France 322 from Paris to Boston was an Italian menu. And it was accompanied by a wonderful explanatory note: our meal was “selected by Air France to celebrate its partnering with Alitalia.” (“Partnering” is a generous word: Air France saved Alitalia.)

Our menu included a salad with mozarella cheese, lasagne, a generous portion of ripe Bel Paese, two lovely amaretti biscuits, and a Sicilian lemon tart for dessert. Only the bread and the wine were French.

Europe works. It is a success: a cultural success. We Germans share borders with nine countries: Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, France, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Austria, and Poland. We are very much in Europe. My university is not a German university, but—since its founding in the early 1950s—a European university: we are both the Universität des Saarlandes and the Université des Saarlandes. And given the history of the region, that duality is appropriate.

We have a French-German high school in Saarbrücken, and a popular park that is partly in Germany, and partly in France. And both Deutsch Bahn and SNCF—the German and French national railways—operate the high-speed trains that run from Frankfurt to Saarbrücken to Paris: sometimes you ride the French TGV, sometimes the German ICE.
There is a hill just outside Saarbrücken, overlooking the Saar river and the peaceful, green German and French countryside. It is a park, dedicated to the 12,000 young Frenchmen and the 10,000 young Germans who died there one Thursday afternoon in the 1880s. There is an obelisk memorialising the young Frenchmen who were killed that day, and about twenty yards away a column memorialising the your Germans who were killed. And there is a third monument: a not very large stone cube, surrounded by some light blue gravel. The brass plaque on the top is engraved, simply, “Never Again.”

This is the European Union. This is Europe. And in December, when Klaus Schappert’s Action Oliver sends 2,000 Christmas boxes to children in Romania who have never in their lives received a present, he will have made Europe again a bit larger, a bit more inclusive. And we won’t forget those Irish children, either. They aren’t only Irish; they are Europeans, as far as we are concerned. And that means something: there is an important principle involved.

Europe is not money-based, or power-based. It is based in the ideals of culture and real economics. Starting with little things like Christmas presents for poor children in Dublin and in Rumania, and an Italian dinner on Air France, maybe we will change—

THESE PIPES AREN'T CALLING ME

2011-07-17T01:28:00.000-07:00

Of course the pipes that were calling in "Danny Boy" were uilleann pipes, not the pipe organs most of us know. And those uilleann pipes--elbow-powered relatives of the Scottish bag-pipes--were melodic, and they didn't pretend to be orchestras.

The pipe-organ is a completely different thing. Its ambition in modern times--since the late seventeenth century--is a curiously un-musical one. The "Age of Enlightenment" celebrated its white male self as enlightened by reason--though we might say, today, that its founders were but reasonably enlightened.

Among other things, they thought that only European males were enlightened or susceptible to enlightenment. Women had no rights; the African slave trade was in its heyday; Native Americans--despite their marvellous civilisation--were slaughtered as "savages." I'm not sure that Spinoza, Locke, Diderot, and Jefferson considered the Chinese as enlightened or enlightenible. And they seem to have excluded their unbleached brothers in India, with whom they shared both genes and language, from the white male state of, if not yet perfection, at least perfectibility.

The pipe organ rose to prominence in the Age of Enlightenment. It was the most complete "thing" man had ever made. One enlightened white male, with ten fingers and two feet--and a slave to pump the bellows--could replace a whole orchestra.

The ancient Greek word "orchestra" signified the place in the theatre where the chorus danced. In modern use, it is the place where musicians and singers perform in a theatre, or a collective term for the musicians themselves. The London Symphony Orchestra, for example, is made up of a large group of musicians, playing together.

But one glorious organist could play a symphony all by himself. Of course his violins didn't sound like violins, nor did his various horns sound like real horns. His flutes and woodwinds squeaked and squawked. But it made a lot of noise--and one man (with the help of his bellows-slave) could do it all. And when he really wanted to make noise he could unleash an outrageous throbbing and window-rattling bass rat-tat-tat that didn't even pretend to be musical.

What an achievement! It symbolised perfectly the idea of the Age of Enlightenment. It was a celebration of self, of ego, of power, of independence. Or almost so; there was still that bellows-slave who made the great teetotum work.

People flocked to the great cathedrals to hear the organ. Ten fingers, two feet, and one machine. Never mind that the man's "instruments" didn't sound as much like real musical instruments as those of the later one-man-band on the street-corner would sound, but they made more noise. They filled great cathedrals with noise.

The relation of the Age of Enlightenment to the pipe organ is one of arrogance and power. Jonathan Swift's satirical representation of the "enlightened" musicians of Laputa ("whore's land) in book three of Gulliver's Travels was an early (1735) mockery of "enlightenment" in England; he could have had much more fun with competing universal pipe organs for the fabulous Laputans to play.

So. No arrogant mock-musical honkings for me, thank you, neither live nor recorded. No arrogant organists drowning out beautiful children's voices singing Christmas carols. No organists playing Bach. No whipped-cream Wurlitzers. I would rather hear farts, screams, automobile engines, and jack-hammers than pipe organs.

And as for the Age of Enlightenment. . .

2011-07-15T13:45:00.000-07:00

The United States has raised its debt ceiling to $13,000,000,000,000. That's 13 TRILLION dollars.

The US spends a modest $1,000,000,000--one billion dollars--a day on its current wars. So every three years its war expenses are $1,800,000,000,000--1.8 trillion. How much is the total military budget a year?

And what does the US spend, annually, on health care, education, housing for the poor, environmental repair, foreign aid?

To put it another way? How much money does the US spend on destruction, and how much does it spend on construction?

And how much does the US spend on a worse-than useless counterproductive government? Is there anybody--ANYBODY--in Washington who earns his pay? And of course, they don't need pay at all: they are generously reimbursed by the rich obscenities who own them.

Let's do away with government. Pay off our debt with what we save. Squeeze the "defense industry" out of existence. Individually remove all our money from banks and other financial institutions.

And then, when everything has come to a standstill something like what happened to passenger railroad service in America: then lets abolish the dollar, and start over.

No more rich people. No more hoarders and grossers and grabbers and greeders.

We can declare ourselves a Free Nation: a nation dedicated to Commonwealth, to the "common good." We can declare for the idea of Society, instead of the stupidity of Capitalism.

We can set as our ideal that strongest and safest of virtues, Peace, and refuse the destructive vice called War--or, in the official US euphemism since 1945, Defense. (That's when Roosevelt's "War Department" was re-named the "Defense Deparment." It is the US "Defense Department" that is currently engaged in four, maybe five Offensive Wars, called on the one hand "necessary" and on the other "Wars of Choice." It is warrior Obama's departing Secretary of Defense who called Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and maybe Syria "Wars of Choice.")

The prison that provided the court for the World War II War Crimes trials has been restored. The US put Nazi Germany on trial there. It is now time for the world to put the US on trial there: it is ready for us.

If we don't halt the way we live now, in the United States--if we don't change our whole way of life--we may have to submit to such judgement.

Ah, but no. The United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons with which it daily threatens the whole world. We have used them in the past. We have threatened to use them again, for 66 years now.

But there might be a window of hope yet. Maybe the United States could be persuaded to save itself from bankruptcy by selling all its nuclear weapons to a responsible nation like Germany--for lots of money. Or maybe the Americans could sell them to those utterly trustworthy Penguins on the South Pole.

Penguins are smart: they don't have nuclear weapons, wars. capitalism, or any of those other bad things. The sane world would help them buy America's weapons of destruction--on condition that in the future Americans only destroy each other.

Remember: The family that prays together stays together. Jesus loved sinners--and hated war. God is on America's side--or at least the American God($$$$)is: that's what American coins and dollar bills all say: "In God We Trust."

Is God a nuclear weapon?

Enough. Or too much.

FOR ALL MY OLD FRIENDS

2011-07-12T15:01:00.000-07:00

Dear old friends,

We have fallen out, because I am critical of the United States. I'm sorry: but we can't be friends if I have to lie, or keep my mouth shut when my country--it is still my country as much as it is yours--is acting like Nazi Germany.

That's not an exaggeration. And you know it isn't. This country has been fighting wars of aggression--or as the outgoing Secretary of Defense and Obama Toady Medal winner calls them, "wars of choice"--since 1949. Constantly.

We bomb civilians. Remember when Reagan bombed Tripoli because some US soldiers had been murdered in a bar in Germany? But the perpetrators weren't Libyans. Remember Reagan's stupid, lying invasion of Greneda? And when the truth came out, remember how the US press forgot to mention it?

Remember the train full of Bosnian civilians that Clinton bombed--because it happened to be crossing a bridge the we wanted to destroy?

Remember Vietnam--and Johnson's lies about the Gulf of Tonkin? Remember Bush I's lies about the first War Against Iraq? Remember Bush II and his war against Iraq?

And Afghanistan?

Remember Bush's torture camp at Guantanamo Bay? Remember Obama's torture camp at Guantanamo Bay?

You don't have to remember the torture of Bradley manning, or his illegal imprisonment. It's still happening.

And you want me to be quiet? To keep still? To shut up?

I live in Germany now, among honorable people who are ashamed of their ancestors who kept quiet during the Nazi years. I also know many honorable people whose ancestors did not keep quiet during the Nazi years.

Why are so many of you keeping quiet? Why do you acquiesce in the face of the outrages our government commits? What is wrong with you? And it is a wrong, and you know it.

Bert

LOYAL OPPOSITION

2011-07-11T02:11:00.000-07:00

I oppose Barack Obama. My list of reasons is short, and specific: he governs in defiance of the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, as well as international law.

He continues to run an illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay.

He has not erased George W. Bush's suspension of the right of habeas corpus.

And because we have no right of habeas corpus, he can continue to hold Private Bradley Manning in high security custody. He held Manning in solitary confinement and tortured him for a year; it will soon be two years since Manning's arrest. Obama has already declared that Manning is guilty--"He broke the law," Obama said--though he has not been charged with a crime.

Manning can't be charged with a crime, because had he not done what he allegedly did, he would have committed a very serious crime. Knowing what he knew, to keep that knowledge secret--to continue to cover up deeply criminal acts--would have made him an accessory to those capital crimes.

The one person whose order could stop the violence against Bradley Manning is Obama: he could do that with two words, "Release him." He could also close the illegal torture camp at Guantanamo with two words: "Close it." He could restore the right of habeas corpus--so that what he has done to Manning cannot be done again. He could stop his wars, too--in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Sudan. And he could stop Israel's imprisonment of what should be Palestine.

But no. Obama has signed himself onto a list of history's ruthless tyrants. To be sure, George Bush was mean, and a liar. Bill Clinton was bright, but venal. And George W. Bush was stupid. But Barack Obama is worse than any of them. Obama is mentally agile, and he knows a lot; but he is cowardly, dishonest, and vicious, and his actions as president are--according to our Constitution--criminal.

He should be impeached, and brought to trial for his crimes.

2011-07-07T14:35:00.000-07:00

Dreamland, USA. 8 July 2011. President Obama began his remarks today by saying ghat he didn't want to upstage the celebration of Independence Day in America, so he had waited until the pollution from the fireworks had cleared to make what he modestly called his historic and heroic announcement. He was accompanied to the podium by Vice-President Biden, Chief Justice Roberts representing the judiciary, and Senator McConnell representing the legislature.

It has been reported by reliable sources inside Vice-President Biden's grin that Chief Justice Roberts' appearance was bought with a promise that new legislation criminalising stupidity on the Supreme Court would be grandfathered, and that Senator McConnell was promised a free Get-Out-Of-Hell card.

Mr. Obama announced that Private Bradley Manning would be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and that a small, life-size statue of Manning standing naked in front of his cell at Quantico would be erected (sic.) on the white house lawn.

Mr. Obama called Manning "one of the nation's greatest leaders," and announced his appointment as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In making this appointment, Mr. Obama commented that Manning would "for the first time in the agency's history, bring actual intelligence to the job."

Mr. Obama also said that, in exchange for Manning's acceptance of this important post, he had promised that within ninety days, the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay would be closed, all four of the nation's current wars against the Arab world would cease, the illegal U. S. embargo against Cuba would end, and Hugo Chavez would be invited to Washington for reconciliation talks and provided with free medical care.

In closing, Mr. Obama said that he had directed the Attorney General to file criminal charges against all those involved in torturing prisoners, including President George W. Bush and himself.

I Am Bradley Manning

2011-07-03T15:28:00.000-07:00

Why don't I hear from anybody about Bradley Manning? Why aren't we ALL writing about Bradley Manning?

He is a 23 year-old soldier. He spilled the beans concerning who all knew about--and ignored--U.S. torture in Guantanamo, and all sorts of other nasty stuff. He spent a year in punitive solitary confinement in the Marine Corps brig at Quantico--half of the time, he was confined naked: as torture. Now he is awaiting charges--finally. But what can they charge him with? Both U.S. civil law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice make hiding a crime a serious offense: in civil jurisdiction it's called being an "accessory before the fact"; under military law, it's called "misprision of a felony." So had Manning NOT made public what he knew, he would have been committing a serious crime.

Mr. Obama said--it's the lawyer in him speaking, the "you are not guilty until proven so" understanding at the base of all U.S. law--that "Bradley Manning has broken the law." Damn you, Mr. Dictator! You can't say that.

But we all sit quiet. Why? Are we stupid? Cowards? Closet vigilantes?

I have lived for seventy-five years, through World War II, and our Korean War; I even participated in our trying to start a war in 1958 by invading Lebanon. I have lived through Lyndon Johnson's lies and the Vietnam War, and the Nixon-Kissinger murders toward the end of that war; through George Bush's lies and his attack on Iraq; through Clinton's three belligerences--in Iraq, Somalia, and Kosovo--and though George W. Bush's stupid Second Iraq War and his war in Afghanistan, and his concentration camp at Guantanamo. And now Obama. He is as bad as Johnson, or Nixon and Kissinger, or the first Bush; worse than Clinton, and even worse than George W. Bush.

Obama is a liar, a coward, and a violent man. I don't doubt that he is an intelligent man; but he is spineless, irresponsible, and completely unprincipled. I find it hard to imagine a worse president--even though I was quite literally afraid of a President McCain.

Court-Martial Bradley Manning? No, let's have Bradley Manning for President.

Bradley Manning for President! I mean it.

Bert Hornback

GOD BLESS THE GREEDY!

2011-07-02T14:47:00.000-07:00

The absurdity of rich people's greed describes the United States. We are a liberty-first country, not a society at all. We are united, not socially, but by our greed. Greed is the one great American virtue. And if it sounds odd to hear Greed called a virtue, then you--like me--are unAmerican.

Many of my oldest friends no longer speak to me because I oppose Greed, and they know that they are greedy. I have never called them greedy, but they know they are. Not like the big-timers, but greedy. And as long as there in anybody else who has more money than they do, they will remain greedy.

Will any of them object to the executives who last year received from $5,000,000 to 54,000,000 in "compensation? How many unemployed people could $54,000,000 provide jobs for? Only 2,000. There are a lot more than 2,000 unemployed people in this country. But if you add up the "compensation" of the 2,000 highest-paid executives-- you get salaries for 200,000 jobless people.

Now, if we tax the wealthof all the greedy Americans who have more than $10,000,000 in real estate, stocks, hide-away bank accounts--tax them at, say, 90%--then we will have changed things enough that maybe America can be called a society.

Oh. Another tax: let's impost a 50% socialtax on the Defense Department's budget. And divide that money up among the nation's poor.

I'm serious. If I were the head of a family that had made such a mess as has been made of what could have been--maybe once was--the American family, I would expect one of my daughters or sons to take over, and implement just such a plan to save us.

Greed is just like cancer: stupid. Cancer keeps eating its host until it kills the host it fed on. And then the cancer dies. Greed suffers from the same damnable stupidity--and it and its practitioners are eating--greeding--this country to death.
The military is what it is because military spending satisfies a lot of our greediest Greeds. Military contractors--ask Dick Cheney--are leaders in the Greed business.

I hope that some day the greedy have to eat all the ugly, soiled, dirty, and worthless money they have hoarded. The rest of us may be dead by then--but we will have died as decent humans. The greedy aren't decent, and they disgrace humanity.
Well, let them try to live on dollar-bill salad.

Bert Hornback

2011-06-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

The field is, as they say, wide open. The Democrats are giving the Republicans the presidency--but the Republicans can't find anybody to take it.

President Obama, the incumbent, is of course running backwards, away from the finish line.

The Republicans can't find a respectable candidate to run against the man who can't face that his disastrously erroneous, counter-productive, broken-promises lying term is coming to an end.

Is it possible that Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich. Ron Paul, or Michelle Bachmann could be the next president of the United States? Or course it is--because Barack Obama plans to run for re-election.

His platform will be that he is the president of broken promises.

He promised to close the torture-camp at Guantanamo Bay--and didn't.

He promised to end our illegal and immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--and instead expanded them to include Pakistan--and any other country that might harbor a Taliban (our creation--does anybody remember that?) leader--and now Libya and probably Syria: and of course Iran.

He promised to stop torturing people, and to protect whistle-blowers--and has been torturing Bradley Manning for more than a year for obeying the law.

He was going to provide a real health care bill--but didn't.

He has done nothing good. And his young daughters will grow up to know that their father was a fraud. And black Americans will be ashamed to have him as their representative. And all of us who trusted him will be tempted to cry, "Never again!"

Does the Unites States hate Arabs? and Islam? Or course. Why? Is it just because of the Arab countries' oil? Or is because, since Americans are forbidden by law to hate black people, and have learned that they can't openly hate Jews, they are busy hating Arabs and Muslims--and ignorantly assuming that Arab and Muslim are interchangeable terms? And of course American Jews hate their fellow-Semite Arab brothers.

Along comes America's first black president, who is also sort of a Muslim and an Arab, but a Christian too. And he is very intelligent, but also utterly immoral.

In 2012 Barack Obama is a candidate to be defeated. But which one of the utterly unqualified, incompetent Republicans will be the one to defeat him?

Or will the Democrats get smart, refuse to endorse Obama, and maybe choose Governor Cuomo as their presidential nominee?

Bert Hornback

OBAMA OUTDOES JOHNSON AND BOTH BUSHES

2011-06-16T15:00:00.000-07:00

What an amazing arrogance. What obscenity. What shame for all of us who hold United States citizenship.

Our president has announced his intention to murder the new head of Al Qaida. No suggestion of using civilised procedures, like finding him guilty of anything: just a mad, uncivilised determination to murder him.

Sleep well, Mr. Obama. If the world survives you long enough, your daughters will grow up to know that their father was (a) a a gross hypocrite, (b) a lawless hate-monger and murderer, and (c) a man who betrayed millions and millions of good people all over the world who trusted him to be an honorable, thoughtful, just man.

To these charges I put my name.

Bert G. Hornback

"THE OLD FOOL SAID TO PUSH ON"

2011-06-11T02:06:00.000-07:00

Robert D. Gates, retiring as the U.S. Secretary of Defense, has complained that the European member-states of NATO are not supporting the U.S. the way they should, financially. Their governments aren't spending enough on "defense"--which used to be called "war."

Gates thinks that the Europeans should all follow the U.S. into bankruptcy. When the U.S. only had two major wars going--in Iraq and Afghanistan--it was spending $1,000,000,000 a day on its wars. That was all money that the U.S. didn't have, of course. Now Mr. Obama has expanded on what Mr. Bush--remember his "mission accomplished" claim?--started but didn't end. We are now at war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya. And maybe several more countries: Mr. Obama has already proclaimed that he will send troops--or other, non-human drones--anywhere in the world to murder any future would-be Osama bin Laden.

And how will Mr. Obama pay for these wars? He won't. The U.S. will just keep spending money it doesn't have. Murder is expensive: how much did Obama's office say he spent before the U.S. actually caught Osama bin Laden and murdered him? Was it $13,000,000,000?

Osama bin Laden's death was indeed murder: U.S. soldiers illegally operating in another country, shot at close range an unarmed man, and killed him. Who ordered his murder? Mr. Obama. Never mind law.

Mr. Obama--a lawyer--has no respect for law. He held Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for 365 days, torturing him. His justification for this was simple: though Manning had not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of a crime, Mr. Obama justified his treatment by declaring, "he broke the law."

There is no law, it seems--just as there is no money.

And with the U.S. as a part of it, NATO is a farce. And Robert Gates is a fool.

The U.S. should close down its absurd and disgracefully un-American Defense Department, and start spending what little money it has on its poor and its homeless--and on education and health care and paying its debts. Then someday our great, great grandchildren may have a country they can be proud of. And with the U.S. no longer trying to lead the world, their world should be a much safer world--and better, too, and cleaner and healthier and happier.

I suppose Mr. Gates's comments were welcomed by his NATO colleagues with roars of laughter. Or maybe they weren't listening. Maybe they weren't even there.

Does anybody remember the night the Smothers Brothers had Pete Seeger singing "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, and the Old Fool Said to Push On"? That was back in 1967. CBS in New York tried to cut the song--and did, but the response to their censorship was so strong that they relented, and aired the show. Seeger sang his song for Lyndon Johnson and his war in Vietnam: "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, and the Old Fool Said to Push On."

The CBS station in Detroit, Michigan refused to air the song--and then, to prove that they were correct in censoring it, played the whole song the next night--with the words running across the bottom of the screen so the audience could read as well as hear them--as a feature on the six o'clock news. Of course, the six o'clock news had a much larger audience that the Smothers Brothers did: even conservatives watch the news.

The U.S. is 'way more than "waist deep" now.

ORLANDO!!!!

2011-06-07T06:48:00.000-07:00

Orlando is the fifth largest city in Florida, with a population of 240,000 people. It has more than 750 Christian churches. And Orlando actually has a law that make it a crime for anyone to feed the poor in the city.

Three people have recently been arrested for feeding Orlando's poor, in a public park.

Somebody who has long been associated with Christianity and Christian churches once told Christians to feed the poor. More than once: over and over again. And he promised that those who refused to feed the poor would go to Hell.

Has anybody ever mentioned that in any of Orlando's 750 Christian churches?

Isn't there a higher law that trumps Orlando's shameful, disgusting law that makes feeding the poor a criminal act?

Let's all go to Orlando and feed its poor. Isn't that what Jesus would have told us to do?

Bert Hornback

SAVING CHILDREN EVERYWHERE

2011-05-30T03:32:00.000-07:00

UNICEF provides nearly a billion US dollars' worth of vaccines each year for more than half of the world's children. Worth supporting? Certainly.

And that's why two of its pharmaceutical suppliers, NOVARTIS AG in Switzerland and MERCK & CO in the United States refuse to allow UNICEF to release the prices they pay to these two giant money-makers.

They don't want competition. They want as much profit as they can get their greedy hands on. Health care? Saving children? Those are foreign words in the offices of JOSEPH JIMINEZ and JURGEN BROKATSKY-GEIGER at NOVARTIS and KENNETH C. FRAZIER and RICHARD T. CLARK at MERCK & CO.

Why not write to them to tell them what you think about them and their companies.

JOSEPH JIMINEZ, Chief Executive Officer
Novartis International AG
CH 4002 Basel
Switzerland

JUERGEN BROTAKOWSKY-GEIGER, Head of Human Resources
Novartis International AG
CH 4002 Basel
Switzerland

KENNETH C. FRAZIER, President and Chief Executive Officer
Merck & Co.
One Merck Drive
P. O. Box 100
Whitehouse Station, New Jersey 08889-0100
USA

RICHARD T. CLARK, Chairman of the Board
Merck & Co.
One Merck Drive
P. O. Box 100
Whitehouse Station, New Jersey 08889-0100
USA

To read more about their shame and about UNICEF's work, go to

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/05/29/ap/health/main20067144.shtml

Thank you for joining this decent act of protest on behalf of the world's children. And in the meantime, make certain that your doctors don't try to prescribe medicines from NOVARTIS or MERCK for you or anyone else.

Bert Hornback

What's In A Name?

2011-05-27T01:32:00.000-07:00

For the last fifty years I have named things: given them personal names to replace their corporate names. It started with cars. My first Volkswagen, in 1961, was named "Dilsey." She is one of William Faulkner's characters, of whom Faulkner says, generalising, "They will endure."

Then I named refrigerators, stoves, vacuum cleaners, furnaces, typewriters. I named them as you would pet dogs and cats and gerbils, and then they were significantly--by that signifying name--my property, and I was responsible for them.

(I had a television set once, briefly. I wasn't hooked up to get any stations, and it went to its grave nameless the afternoon that I buried it in the back yard.)

Two years ago I named my current car "Fitz." He's a little Honda Fit--or Jazz, as he would be identified, corporately, in Europe. But I've now changed his name.

On a small label, I copied the name of a young American soldier who has been killed so we can have cheap oil. And I glued it onto the car. Every time I buy a tank of gas now I add the name of another young soldier or marine who died so we can have cheap oil. I put the names on the back fender, around the gas cap.

But I can't keep up. Since 2003, two American soldiers have been killed a day, on average, in Iraq and Afghanistan. I can't keep up, let alone catch up. 6,036 young Americans have died fighting for cheap oil as of 26 May, 2011. How many more from other countries? And how many tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghanistan civilians--who (to us) don't even have names?

Maybe I should start calling my little car by its names. Maybe I should make myself think of it by its many names. And maybe if a number of us could find some way to remind ourselves of what we are doing when we buy our gasoline, we would learn, together, in a moment of outraged awareness and sympathy, to say somehow an effective, absolute NO to our war for cheap oil.

I AM BRADLEY MANNING--REALLY!

2011-05-20T17:02:00.000-07:00

We are all Bradley Manning: sure. If the government can ignore his constitutional rights by imprisoning him for a full year without charging him with a crime, and can torture him every day for a year in violation of international law, none of us is safe.

So why don't we all change our names--to Bradley Manning. We can do so, legally, in our local communities and with our employers. And of course, we will all have to apply for new Social Security cards, because of our new names. And we will have to notify the Internal Revenue Service.

And we will need new passports, and new driving licenses. And new voter registrations.

And new names on our bank accounts and credit cards.

And then, when this sleazy, law-dodging, two-faced government tries to charge Bradley Manning with disclosing their crimes, they will have thousands of us, all claiming to be Bradley Manning, to arraign.

And we will all insist on being arraigned. And we will all plead not guilty. And we will all demand trial by jury. And we will accept the government's dismissing of all charges ONLY if the dismissal applies to ALL Bradley Mannings.

And all of us will reserve the right to file charges against the United States government and Barack Obama for felony crimes against the United States Constitution.

And then? If we want to, we can reclaim our old names easily enough. But many of us, surely, will want to retain our new names, and in honor of our hero continue to be known as Bradley Manning.

Bert Hornback, a.k.a. Bradley Manning

I AM BRADLEY MANNING

2011-05-19T08:10:00.000-07:00

"I Am Bradley Manning." You can say that, too. Just click http://iam.bradleymanning.org.

Until President Obama apologises, publicly, for having said "Bradeley Manning broke the law," we all all--like it or not--Bradley Manning.

With no "Habeas Corpus"--thanks to the Bush Obama denial of our constitutional right to such protection--and Obama determining guilt before and instead of trial, ALL AMERICANS are in danger. And our government is the source of that danger.

As things stand right now, Obama--who has declared that "Bradley Manning broke the law"--can declare any of us guilty of anything. And since he has suspended the U. S. constitution and imprisoned Bradley Manning for ONE FULL YEAR without charging him with a crime, he can do that to any of us. And he can keep us there indefinitely.

For one full year Bradley Manning has been illegally confined--and until two weeks ago, tortured every day by President Obama. The United States has illegally confined two hundred prisoners at Guantanamo Bay--most of them for ten years now, and most of them presumably tortured: including one prisoner arrested (for throwing a rock at a U. S. Marine) when he was fourteen years old, who is now twenty-four years old.

I don't understand how we can be so quiet about this. Is it that we don't care--or that we are cowards?

I AM BRADLEY MANNING. SO ARE YOU. INDEED: EVERYBODY IN THE UNITED STATES IS BRADLEY MANNING--EXCEPT FOR THE MAN WHO HAS IMPRISONED HIM: THE MAN WHO HAS DECLARED THAT "BRADLEY MANNING BROKE THE LAW."

Our president's daughters are Bradley Manning. And so is his wife. We are all Bradley Manning. We should all acknowledge--and claim--our identity, publicly. We should answer to no name except "Bradley Manning."

Does your driving license identify you as "Bradley Manning? Your passport? Will you vote, next time, as "Bradley Manning"? Is the name on your mailbox "Bradley Manning"? Do you sign your checks, your letters, "Bradley Manning"? You should.

Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning

priorities

2011-05-15T13:53:00.000-07:00

A nation that spends three trillion dollars trying to kill one man, but has no money to pay school librarians, is an idiocracy.

How utterly stupid can the United States be? A president who is supposedly intelligent continues for more than two years to spend a billion dollars a day on his wars--just like his stupid predecessor did. But just like Bush's United States, Obama's America can't pay for health care for its citizens, or police its streets, or feed and house its poor. And now, in California, it can't afford librarians in its schools.

But the president has at least one, maybe two new wars against Muslims. Remember how he wanted to stop our wars?

Why is the United States at war against Muslims?

Well, we can no longer lynch Black people legally in the United States.

And we have already murdered most of the Native Americans: there aren't enough of them left to make a war any fun.

And we can't openly hate the Chinese because China owns most of America's debt.

We could maybe hate people from India--but they don't hate back very well.

So we hate Muslims. They aren't as easy to spot as Blacks, or Orientals, or people from India. But they can be identified--by their names, and their beards, and the way they dress.

We now have five wars going on against Muslims: in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Yemen, in Syria. What about Libya? Or Palestine--a proxy war, being fought by our allies (or our masters) the Israelis? Seven wars? And more?

Of course, us white, peace-loving, Onward-Christian-Soldiers crusaders have been busy trying to murder all the Muslims, ever since the twelfth century in the era named after (blessed are the peacemakers) the World's Greatest Warrior, Jesus Christ.

But let's be serious. It will better if schools don't have librarians: better still if the schools don't have books. Children need to be protected from both information and knowledge.

With Liberty and Justice For All

2011-05-06T14:27:00.000-07:00

I don't know where to start: there are so many shames to deplore and complain about. I will take the one which has at least a small element of good in its most recent news.

A small element. Bradley Manning is no longer being held in solitary confinement in Quantico, and no longer being tortured. A year of such was enough? Bush Obama has done away with the Constitutional right of "habeas corpus," so he could keep Mr. Manning for a year without bringing any charges against him. That, of course, is what Bush Obama is doing at Guantanamo Bay, and has been doing there for more than nine years: since he was just plain Bush.

But nobody cares. Most of my former friends condone such. I can't understand them. Or maybe I just pretended, for many years, that they were decent, thoughtful, honorable people, because I wanted us to be friends. No more. I can't do that any more.

Bradley Manning is now being held at Fort Leavenworth. He is actually allowed to wear clothes now. (Are all the U.S. Marines at Quantico sexual perverts? Not gay, but perverted?)

But Obama has announced that "Manning broke the law." Well, I guess I am glad lawyer Obama said that: because as he must know--being lawyer Obama--he has now fatally prejudiced any attempt to bring Mr. Manning to trial on any charges.

Lawyer Obama knows, of course, that Mr. Manning upheld the law. Both U.S. civil law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice make "misprision of a felony"--the hiding of a known felony offense--itself a felony offense.

The war crimes that Mr. Manning exposed, through Wikileaks, were felony offenses. He had a duty--a legal duty--to expose them.

The real criminals in this serious case are (a) George W. Bush; (b) his underlings who actually committed the war crimes--torture, illegal imprisonment; and (c) Obama who has continued the torture and illegal imprisonment at Guantanamo and the year's worth of illegal detention and torture of Mr. Manning.

The chambers at Nuremberg have been completely refurbished. It's time they be used again. This time, the prosecutors can't be Americans--because Americans must be the ones on trial.

And to those of you who might read this--who once were my friends--I hope you can find your way toward honor again. You are welcome to despise me, but please don't be either determinedly stupid or mean.

POT-AND-KETTLE DIPLOMACY

2011-04-20T13:46:00.000-07:00

U. S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton says that the U. S. must stop the arbitrary detention of prisoners not charged with crimes, and must stop torturing prisoners.

That's surprising and most welcome good news.

It would mean her boss, President Obama, would have to close his (yes, his) concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, and release all those detainees who have been incarcerated in cages there these last ten years--though none of them has been charged with a crime.

It would also mean that the U.S. would have to stop the daily, round-the-clock torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning at Quantico, and either bring charges against him or release him--and give him the honors and medals he deserved for his brave and heroic actions..

Ah, but damn it, she said that Syria had to stop arbitrary detention and torture. Not the U.S. The U.S. is above the law--because it has thousands of nuclear weapons. And it is above the law because it is so far in debt that if it collapses, the whole world is in a mess. Both the U.S. missiles and the U.S. debt are threats.

So the U.S. continues to be a rogue state, and hypocrisy continues to be its national pastime.

Bert Hornback

What are we doing? What we are doing.

2011-04-11T13:53:00.000-07:00

Three workers in Nebraska have experienced an "unplanned radiation exposure." I assume this means that sometimes workers experience "PLANNED radiation exposure."

No doubt members of the military cause "unplanned civilian casualties" with their guns and bombs. And "planned casualties"? I am sure our troops experience "unplanned casualties" of their own--and I wonder, given our generals' vulgar attitude toward suffering and death, if our troops don't experience "planned casualties" as well.

Every time we kill human beings in our wars--in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Libya--those human beings, once dead, as declared to be enemies. That, of course, makes sense: we are the good guys, and perversely, in our absurd moral system,good guys kill bad guys.

I know that many Americans--many of my friends and former friends--will object to what I have said: not because they deny it or disagree with it, but because they don't want it said.

DEAR MR. OBAMA

2011-03-13T13:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a letter for the U.S. President, for whom I quite happily and enthusiastically voted three years ago. I was betrayed, of course. Mr. Obama is a liar. He ran dishonestly. I am disgusted. If you think I am unfair to him, tell me how I am such.

Bert Hornback

Mr. Obama,

You have betrayed all the Americans who voted for you.

You promised to close the U. S. concentration camp at Guantanamo. Instead--in violation of everything that this country has ever stood for, and what you promised us--you say that some of the men illegally incarcerated there for ten years will be kept there for the rest of their lives. Why? Because though we can't charge them with any crime, we have tortured them for so long that they no doubt hate us.

You promised to end the George Bush torture regeime. Instead, you allow it to continue--and you add to it the outrageous World War II style torture of Bradley Manning at Quantico. That young man is a hero, a noble human being: and you are evil in trying to drive him crazy so you can keep him locked up for the rest of his life. You know that you can't try him in court: his defense will be that he obeyed both U. S. law and U. S. Military law in exposing your administration's felony offenses.

If I could, I would change places with Bradley Manning. And I would shout every day until I was hoarse about you and your agents' crimes. I would demand to be brought to trial--and you would have to murder me, Mr. Obama, to shut me up.

Do you ever think what your daughters will think of their father when they grow up? He was a liar, a coward, a criminal, a torturer, a murderer. Is that what you want them to think of their father? Are you the man Michelle Obama married? Are you the man so many millions of people voted for?

Unless you change. Mr. President--unless you recover what was once, I believe, your decency--when you die, your epitaph will read,

Here lies Barack Obama,
Who betrayed Millions of Decent People
All over the World
With Lies and Bombs and Torture
And brought Horrendous Disgrace upon his Nation.
The Civilised World
despises him.

Both Lyndon Johnson--who lied about the Gulf of Tonkin--and Richard Nixon--who was a criminal, who was responsible for Kent State and the bombing of Cambodia--will be remembered as better presidents and as better human beings than you.

How can yopu pretend to be decent? How can a man responsible for torture sit down to watch a basketball game with "friends? How can a man who kills as many people as you do, every day, spend a recreational evening?

I live in Germany at the present time. When you were elected president, Germans were elated. Everywhere. People I didn't know stopped me, shook my hand, hugged me.
Now, however, my friends say, "What happened?" "America is an awful place." "I am sorry for you--and sorry for all of us."

And when, these last few days, your bombers rumble overhead at night here, people who honored the United States for its role in ending World War II spit on the idea of the United States today.

The restoration of the trial chambers at Nuremberg has recently been completed. They are ready and available for war crimes trials. Soon George Bush, his cronies, and Barak Obama may well stand in the dock there together.

Is that what you planned for yourself?

Are you a coward, or simply a dishonest man? Or are you the aggressive criminal--violating our country's laws and traditions, violating our United Nations obligations, insulting humanity--that your actions make you out to be?

Sincerely yours,

Bert Hornback

P.S. I post this as "It Says Here" because the Obama Administration--in the best Fascist fashion--wants to "communicate" with us, but will not allow us to answer, to talk back.

BANKRUPTCY

2011-02-18T08:01:00.000-08:00

The biggest bankrupt in the world's long history is, naturally, the United States of America. But because the United States has thousands of nuclear weapons and a proven readiness to use them, it is allowed to continue borrowing money from the rest of the world.

The United States uses its nuclear weapons to blackmail the rest of the world into continuing to lend it money.

Mr. Obama pretends to want to curb spending to avoid an American implosion. A dollar saved here, two dollars there. If he would (1) END HIS WARS, and (2) disband his military forces and (3)cancel all military spending programs and (4) dissolve the so-called Defense Department, he could not only balance his budget, but even wipe out most of America's debt within ten years.

He could do that, and at the same time provide real jobs for all those in the military, all those civilians who run the military, and all those who would become unemployed by our shutting down the defense industry.

The new jobs those million-plus people would have would be honest, productive jobs: jobs that build homes and schools, grow food and restore land, and learn useful skills and trades. Their labor, in time, would give us clean water and clean air again--as well as clean consciences. Many of those men and women would become teachers, and our disastrous public schools would start educating our children.

We could begin to remake our failed society--and as we did so we would re-learn the civilised, social virtue called freedom, and abandon our stupid, selfish insistence on liberty.

"Liberty" is a word which looks out for self. It has never pretended to be wise. It is a do-your-own-thing word, a word for pursuing individual desires. It's the same word as "libido."

"Freedom" is a very different word. Its close relatives, linguistically, are "free" and "friend." If we are free, we are free together.

If we are truly free, we won't have homeless people, or hungry people. We won't have a dysfunctional school system. If we are free, we will have universal health care.

Pursuing liberty, we pursue profit, and individual wealth. Pursuing freedom, we pursue that other, social ideal called "commonwealth."

"Wealth" is a good word: literally. Its root is in the word "well." It has been in use for more than a thousand years in Germanic and English languages. It means both happy and good--and both "happy" and "good" are social words, too: their roots are in words for gathering.

Maybe Mr. Obama should get a good dictionary. Maybe we should all get good dictionaries, and find out what our founding fathers--humanly and nationally--once proposed to us as a way of life.

And while we are rediscovering what is good, we may also discover something else that we all should know: something that every history lesson teaches us, as soon as our todays turn to yesterdays. Good is good. But war? It isn't only bad; it is worse. War is an early form of the word "worse."

Let's change our world. Let's ask Mr. Obama to start changing it right now, by ending his wars--and making things worse. Then we can start being good instead of greedy, social instead of selfish, and free.

And then--maybe even soon--we won't be bankrupt any more, wither monetarily or morally.

MULTI-CULTURALISM

2011-02-12T04:54:00.000-08:00

Mr. Sarkozy says multi-culturalism is a failure. French Muslims praying in the street is proof. Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu est MON dieu! So the Christian dictator of France has spoken.

There is no room in Mr. Sarkozy's world, I suppose, for a united Ireland. Or a united Cyprus. Or civilised existence within and among the Balkan states. Can black people and white people live together? What if Jews took to praying on Mr. Sarkozy's streets? Should China and India throw out their Christians?

Mr. Sarkozy probably wants Germany and France to go back to fighting. Maybe he wants to have another Thursday afternoon war on the hillside at Spicheren, and kill 10,000 German boys and 12,000 French kids in six bloody hours.

At Spicheren, overlooking the river Saar, there are two late nineteenth-century monuments: one to the 10,000 Germans who died that day in that place, the other--forty meters away--to the 12,000 French soldiers killed there. In between these two is a third monument: a modern one, erected by the European Union. Its plaque says, simply, "Never Again."

Europe should budget generously for the building of a wall around Mr. Sarkozy's version of France. All of Europe's unemployed--including those in Mr. Sarkozy's France--can be put to work on the job. That will solve two problems: our European unemployment problem--which is economic--and our problem with Mr. Sarkozy's France--which is moral.

EGYPT

2011-02-12T04:27:00.000-08:00

Our dear ally in the struggle to prevent democracy in the Middle East has fallen. Repression, U.S. style detention, torture: these have been the trademarks of Hosni Mubarak's long dictatorship. But he has been America's ally: as in earlier days were Generalissimo Franco in Spain, President Salazar in Portugal, President Batista in Cuba, the Shah of Iran, President Marcos in the Philippines. With Mubarak gone, maybe the only American-supported dictatorship left is that in Saudi Arabia: which has never even pretended to be "democratic."

The Obama government's response to the crisis in Egypt proves once again the absolute bankruptcy of United States foreign policy. Through its constant abuse of the word "democracy" the United States has made of it an obscene joke: even at home. Disregard for "democracy" at home gave the United States the presidency of George W. Bush. Mr. Obama was actually elected, democratically. But his use of the word is so badly tainted, so corrupt, that in terms of foreign policy we really are no better off: the United States is still trying to impose its will on other countries--by force.

Mr. Obama's outgoing press secretary, Robert Gibbs, says "Iran's government fears the will of the people." Mr. Gibbs never said that about Hosni Babarak's government.
And no American president or press secretary has ever said such about any of the dictatorships that the United States has supported. Democracy? The United States is no friend to democracy anywhere: even at home. The United States is run for and by the rich.

BLESSED ARE THE. . . .

2011-02-03T10:50:00.000-08:00

President Obama has attended the Christian prayer breakfast. And he says that his faith is part of his strength, or something like that.

No doubt he prays "Blessed are the Peacemakers" every morning as he spends another billion dollars bombing people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Is there a special prayer for people who run concentration camps? Is there a special prayer he says to absolve himself of guilt for the imprisonment and torture of Bradley Manning?

Does he have a biblical reference to justify his acceptance of American greed as a way of life?

There is so much about our way of life that is absolutely opposed to what Jesus taught. And Jesus condemned hypocrites twenty times for every time he mentioned any other sin. But Christianity in the United States is utterly hypocritical.

I wonder if any of the Christians at the prayer breakfast thought about giving the food that was served to the hungry and the poor? Or as the left, maybe giving their coats to some poor people who don't have coats? Or . . . .

Bert Hornback

FACING UP TO NICENESS

2011-02-01T13:48:00.000-08:00

I have been noticing, of late, all the snarling, glowering, tough-guy faces on cars--especually on American cars. On some of the big European cars,too. Waiting at traffic lights, they seem to say CHALLENGE and AGGRESSION.

Wouldn't the world be better off--maybe just a little, but better, still--if our cars didn't seem to want to be violent?

I suspect that a man who drove a car with big pink and white rabbit's ears might might find it harder to be a competitive driver. A car whose grill smiled might not try to squeeze other drivers changing lanes. A driver whose car looked like it was wearing big round classes might feel meek or shy even. A golden retriever? A happy young collie? Maybe a goose?

Why not?

The State of the Onion

2011-01-22T11:26:00.000-08:00

President Obama is about to give his second "State of the Union" address. Suppose he tells us the truth. These truths:

1. We are impossibly far in debt, and can't even pay the interest on that debt. And yet we keep spending a billion dollars a day, not on our people's health and education, not on feeding our hungry and housing our homeless, not on our crumbling infrastructure, not on renewable energy, but on three wars.

2. Our wars are all three illegal and immoral wars, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan.

3. We are still running an illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay.

4. We are still torturing prisoners, including Bradley Manning, a U. S. citizen held illegally in solitary confinement for seven months, tortured--sleep deprivation, manacles, nakedness--and as yet uncharged with any offense.

5. We are still running an illegal kidnapping--"rendition"--program all over the world.

6. We no longer have our constitutionally guaranteed right of Habeas Corpus.

7. We are a terribly violent society, in which guns and gunfire murders are rife throughout the land.

8. Our prisons are overflowing, but millions of criminals--white collar thieves for the most part--are still free.

9. We are obsessed with greed, and while millions and millions of us exist in grinding, inhuman poverty, millions of filthy-rich anti-social anti-citizens sit on millions and millions, billions and tens of billions of dollars.

10. We are a rogue state, a failed society, and a danger to the whole world.

Mr. Obama could recite this "Bill of Wrongs" to begin his State of the Union speech, and then tell us how he would like to address these problems.

If he does, I will support him: with all my patriotic, America-loving heart.

Oh, say can you see. . .

2011-01-11T14:45:00.000-08:00

Back in the 1970s, when U.S. foreign policy was the inanely unsophisticated mix of bullying and trying to bankrupt the Soviet Union with the arms race--the legacy of John Foster Dulles--Europeans figured that the Soviet Union would only bluff, but never call a bluff, and that if it went bankrupt, it would give in. But they figured that the United States was too macho adolescent ever to back down, and that if it found itself on the edge of bankruptcy, it would blow the world up.

The Soviet Union--thanks to the leadership of Michail Gorbechev--accepted their loss of the arms race. Mr. Gorbachev was willing to dissolve the Soviet Union. But he didn't want to abandon communism. America had never understood communism, popularly: it was supposed to be the opposite of democracy. Communism, of course, was the opposite of capitalism, and totalitarianism the opposite of democracy. And by the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was a capitalist state more than it was a democracy. And capitalism was afraif of communism.

Today, capitalism sees socialism as its main adversary. Greed versus social or communal existence. Me versus us. And as capitalism fails, it becomes more and more dangerous to the whole world.

Europe is a socialist union. Even with all the current difficulties, everybody is agreed that the solution to the problems the Union faces must be achieved socially.
In America, chaos is rampant. Crimes against society range from simple everyday rich folks' greed to Madoff-style greed and BP irresponsibility and cover-ups, from multi-billion dollar bank theft to everyday cheating. "Liars in public places" are a dime a dozen.

At present it seems that the explosion of the aggressive Bush Warrior years may be giving way to more self-destructive behavior, nationally. The Obama presidency is only symbolic: and shamefully, disgracefully so.

The nuclear fear years were years of fearing that the United States would blow up everything: universal explosion. What we are facing now is American implosion. The rest of the world will be much better off, of course, if the United States implodes.

And maybe the United States will be better off if it implodes, too. And disappears.

Maybe a few benign, civilised Native Americans will survive the impolsion, and build--rebuild--a decent civilisation upon this blighted continent.

Seventy-five

2011-01-06T14:33:00.000-08:00

I'm seventy-five. The last time I checked I was seventeen, going off to college. Then nineteen, going to work at a Children's Home and meeting a wonderful kid named Larry Lawson. Then twenty-one, graduating: and becoming somehow a Marine lieutenant. Twenty-four, starting graduate school, and teaching freshmen--and wanting to be older than I was, wanting to be thirty. A year in Ireland. Off to Ann Arbor to teach at twenty-eight. How much life, how much energy, how much hope for the future--and no limits to anything.

Twenty-eight years there, in Ann Arbor. Wonderful years, in many ways. Hearing from old students now, I remember how lovely those years were. Teaching, doing plays, protesting against the war--that war--poetry readings, writing books, wonderful ten-week hard-work summer study trips. Our softball team. Honors basketball. Students, friends. Sunday dinners. Bremen Scholars, every Monday night for ten years! But bad things, too: the selling of the university to greedy men, the betrayal of education, junk.

Leaving Michigan. Resigning, in protest. After twenty-eight years. Half my life. I'm suddenly fifty-six years old!

Taking care of my parents. Teaching in Louisville. An old childhood friend, Morty: we were five! Doing Greek--Homer, Sophocles, Euripides--with Ben every night. "A city where the main intellectual occasion of the year is a horse-race."

Years and years of letters, daily, with Don Hall. Wendell Berry just down the road while I am in Louisville. To Stockholm in 1995 for Seamus's Nobelling.

Amsterdam, after Mom's death. For five years. New Orleans. Then by a wonderful accident, to Saarbruecken. Living with the Schapperts in Sulzbach, teaching at the Universitaet des Saarlandes. Wonderful, wonderful. A Dickens Seminar, an Irish Semester. Waiting for Godot, Sebastian and Aoife and others.

But how did I get to be seventy-five? I have old students who write to tell me they have retired. Students who turn their children over to me for questions. A friend who asks me to write to his grandson!

My legs get tired climbing all the hills and steps here in the Saarland. It's beautiful--but I have trouble climbing. This March I will take thirteen students to Ireland for two weeks. I don't think I will drive; they are twenty-four to twenty-seven; I will turn the driving over to them, even though we'll be driving on the wrong side of the road. And though I will ask them to climb Ben Bulben, I don't think I will try. I've done it twenty-six times, the last when I was sixty-seven.

Not seventeen, off to Notre Dame for freshman year. Never having said the word "tragedy" out loud--never having had occasion to say it out loud. And now, thinking--at seventy-five--that someday I will have to say the words "death" and "good-bye" out loud.

That will be okay. I am confident--perversely so, perhaps--that things will get better in this crazy world, that the greedy and the violent and the cowardly and the
selfish among us won't always prevail, and that maybe the wonderful people I have known--all the lovely people who have been my students--will create a better world for their children and their children's children.

And maybe I won't be so angry, as I often am, at my generation: for our stupid selfishness, for our craven cowardice, for our irresponsibility to the good.

6 January 2011

2010-12-28T11:20:00.000-08:00

ON THE CUTTING EDGE.

You might say, “My work is on the cutting edge.” Or maybe you would boast, “I like to be on the cutting edge," or "I live on the cutting edge.”

Sorry about the first: your work’s being shredded? And the second? OUCH!
That must hurt! I hope you aren’t sitting on that cutting edge.

My point is a simple one. The people who created the idiom, “the cutting edge,” may have had something in mind, a metaphor perhaps about getting things done? It’s easier to cut the cheese with the cutting edge instead of the flat edge.” But the people who use the idiom to describe their work or thinking or research are not to be trusted: they don’t make sense. And those who “live on the cutting edge” must be (a) in great pain, and (b) utter idiots.

SOMETHING GOOD

2010-12-28T10:53:00.000-08:00

For a change, something to be happy to report.

Four students at the Universität des Saarlandes where I teach—two undergraduates, two doctoral students—decided in early December to collect Christmas presents for poor children in Ireland.

Our English department is in the midst of an “Irish Semester,” and we have received generous support from the European Government, Irish embassy in Berlin, Volkswagen Ireland, the Irish Tourist Board, and Guinness. They decided that we should give something back.

The Saint Vincent de Paul Society in Ireland agreed to accept and distribute presents for us. DHL volunteered free shipping and delivery to Ireland for our packages. And Wordsworth Publishers in England gave them 48 free books, ranging from “Gulliver’s Travels” to “The Little Prince,” from Jane Austen to John Steinbeck, from a big book of Irish fairy tales to the collected tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

Starting the 10th of December, they asked students and staff to leave presents in our departmental library: €10 to €15 presents, of a size to fit in a shoebox, for girls or boys, age groups up to three, 4 to 8, 8 to 12, and teenagers. Five days later, DHL picked up 141 boxes. And the boxes arrived at St. Vincent De Paul in Dublin on Tuesday, 21 December, in time to be delivered for Christmas.

Michael Tighe, their contact at St. Vincent de Paul, wrote to thank them:

I think this is a great story of European brotherhood and goodwill. A lot of
people here feel quite conflicted about Ireland having to ask for support from
the IMF and the EU so something like this, in my opinion, adds a lovely sense
of European community and society instead of it all being about European
economy. Maybe I’m just a romantic, but you have really brightened my sense of
being not just Irish but a European too.

Eva Michely, Heike Missler, Klaus Schappert, and Sebastian Zimmer are already planning for next year. Maybe 141 boxes will turn into 500 then.

Bert Hornback

THE COMMUNITY OF THE DYI NG

2010-12-28T10:50:00.000-08:00

Thinking, lately, about death. If there is no afterlife, then once I am dead that’s it. What follows is nothing. Why should I want to be remembered as a good man? I won’t be around to appreciate that. And if I have been an evil man, that won’t matter to me either. Since everything that exists in time will be, for me, non-existent, once I am dead, everything is utterly and absolutely meaningless.

I might accumulate happiness and pleasures and good memories and friends, but in the end they are like the material things—property, money, titles—that I must leave behind when I die.

The belief in death makes everything meaningless—unless I also believe in community. And community proposes, or perhaps more simply is a kind of afterlife: but an afterlife about us, not me. And if I can believe in community, then I don’t need the kind of personal afterlife that religions help us to fabricate.

To believe in community means that I have to be good enough to want to make better and happier the lives of those who follow me.

Of course, I will first have to believe in the good. Unless I believe in the good—absolutely—as the highest value—everything moral is absurd.

This is not a new thought, and it doesn’t belong to me. Our languages have been teaching this for several millennia. Community, good, and moral are all together words: words that teach togetherness. Thus my afterlife is our afterlife.

If there is what is usually called an afterlife—a continuance of personal existence beyond death—that will be a happy bonus. But more important and more urgent is the life that goes on in this world after my death and beyond my personal existence. I have to be good in this life—good enough to make better the lives of those who follow me.

If I believe in the good, I have no choice but to try to live in this way. A life dedicated to the good has no room for our usual greed.

Bert Hornback

HONOR BRADLEY MANNING

2010-11-29T11:33:00.000-08:00

Brave people are often abused.

Honor is something that recent (and present) American governments have not been known for. Indeed, our governments since John Kennedy's "Bay of Pigs" invasion have regularly been criminal in their disregard of our Constitution and United States law. Our current and on-going violations of international law make us a rogue state.

WikiLeaks is providing a valuable service to the world--and to us, as Americans. We should be glad to have the crimes and dishonesties of our government published. Only by knowing them can we correct them.

Are there any Americans who are proud of what the WikiLeaks documents expose? Shouldn't we all thank WikiLeaks, and then demand that those responsible for illegal. immoral, and unethical policies and actions be charged and prosecuted.

If we don't do that, we are as guilty as our governmental thugs are.

If our government thinks that Private Bradley Manning is ultimately responsible for these damning documents being released, then congress should award him the Congressional Medal of Honor, and we should all celebrate his heroism. Right now, however, our government has Bradley Manning in prison, in solitary confinement, at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. He has been so held for nearly seven months.

Bradley Manning has not yet been charged with a crime. He has committed no crime. In fact, under both United States civil law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice had he not made public the evidence of the serious felony crimes which he discovered, he would be guilty of misprision of multiple felonies, of being an accessory after the fact to the commission of those felonies.

Bradley Manning has committed no crime. And our government can't charge him with having committed a crime, because his defense will be that he was doing what our law requires him to do. So, since George W. Bush suspended our Constitutional right of Habeas Corpus by executive order, and Barack Obama has not undone that illegal order, Bradley Manning might just spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement at Quantico. He is now twenty-two years old.

But maybe, someday, he will be released. Maybe someday we will have an honest, honorable, law-abiding president again. But someday is a long, long time for a young man to wait for justice. Must we make him wait? Must we cooperate in violating his rights? Must we support governmental oppression? Must we be toads and toadies? Cowards?

THOSE THINGS MONEY CAN (?) BUY

2010-11-28T03:00:00.000-08:00

Sure, everybody knew it. Except for the owners of the Miami Hee-Heat and the three Hee-Heaters named James, Bosh, and Wade.

In Saturday night's loss to Dallas, James Bosh Wade played 115 of the team's total of 240 minutes (48 minutes x five players on the floor). Among them, the others played 115 minutes.

Here are the statistics:

Hee-Heat; Rest of the team
Shots/Shots made 56/22; 19/9
Threes/Threes Made 6/0; 8/5
Rebounds 25; 18
Assists 11; 6
Steals 3; 5
Turnovers 13; 1
Blocks 2; 3
Points scored 67; 28

For most of the game, the Hee-Heat seem to have tried to play by themselves.

Dallas, on the other hand, played as a team. They took 87 shots--and five different players took more than shots each--and made 40 of them. 6 players scored morer than 10 points each, Five players took a total of 17 threes, and made five of them.They had 46 rebounds, 25 assists, and made 8 steals. And six players committed a total of only 11 turn-overs--whereas James Bosh Wade among them gave the ball away 13 times.

This wasn't simply a bad night for the Hee-Heat. It was their usual night. Maybe if they were in a three-on-three league they would be pretty good. But maybe not. Maybe they would be better as three entries in a one-on-one league.

WAR MEMORIALS

2010-11-21T07:40:00.001-08:00

Most countries, I suspect, have war memorials. And the majority of those memorials heroize the dead warriors. The British Cenotaph in London, a memorial to the British soldiers and sailors killed in the 1914-1918 war, is emblazoned with the words “The Glorious Dead.” The Marine Memorial in Washington, D.C. remembers those who died in World War II in the image of four Marines struggling to raise a United States flag on Iwo Jima, a small island in the Pacific Ocean.

Trafalgar Square in London has a column at its center, topped with a statue of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, the victor of the battle of Trafalgar in 1813. At Hyde Park Corner the Duke of Wellington, the British general who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, has a great marble arch dedicated to his memory.

And Hyde Park Corner also has, from a century later, a white marble memorial topped with a large bronze statue of the biblical boy David. It is dedicated to the Machine Gunners Corps of the British Army: “To the Glorious Heroes . . . who fell in the Great War .” And just below that dedication, a perversely celebrative verse from the biblical Book of Samuel: “For Saul has slain his thousands, but David his tens of thousands.”

Nearby, there is an equally perverse statue, allegedly of Achilles. It is heroic in size, more than five meters tall. It represents the Duke of Wellington as Achilles. The Duke was forty-six years old at Waterloo, and lived to be eighty. Achilles, of course, was killed at Troy, at about twenty. The statue represents Wellington-Achilles as a beautiful, muscular young man, with not a blemish on his naked body. For decency’s sake, his genitals are covered by a fig leaf, but his sword is left naked.

There is a war memorial outside Spicheren, on the French-German border near Saarbrücken. In 1870 the French and Prussian armies fought there on a Saturday in early August of 1870. It was a horrible day for both sides. Late in the afternoon, the French retreated to Metz. By then 12,000 young Frenchmen had been killed, and 10,000 young Germans. Today there is a memorial to those 12,000 French soldiers atop the hill, and about twenty yards away another plinth, memoralising the 10,000 Germans who died that day. In between, there is a small circle of light blue gravel surrounding a rectangular stone, three feet high and about two feet square. A small brass plaque in the middle of the top is inscribed “NEVER AGAIN.” It is a European Union marker.

Washington, D.C. is full of monuments. The beautiful and worthy Lincoln Memorial; the monument to George Washington, a slave-owner; the Jefferson Memorial, dedicated to the author of the Declaration of Independence, who later sold his own children by a slave woman. John F. Kennedy. Franklin d. Roosevelt. Others. But not many war memorials, surprisingly. But maybe the United States has already had too many wars for them all to get memorials. The War of 1812, the Civil War, all the nineteenth century Indian Wars, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, the invasion of Lebanon in 1958, the invasion of Cuba in 1961, Vietnam, the proxy was against Nicaragua, Greneda, Iraq I, Iraq II, Afghanistan.

But there is a Vietnam War Memorial: a black marble wall, with the names of the thousands of American men who died in that shameful war. It isn’t a heroic monument, it doesn’t celebrate anything. It simply remembers.

I have been thinking lately that we should have, in Washington, two Iraq War Memorials, and an Afghanistan War Memorial—even before the Afghanistan War is over, and even though it may already be the Afghanistan-Pakistan War.

For the first Iraq war I would suggest several bull-dozers filling in a sandy trench, burying alive a large number of young Iraqi soldiers, with General Colin Powell supervising the operation.

For Iraq II, I would recommend a big hole in the ground, filled with oil, with the heads of Bush and Cheney sticking up out of it, and the smell of lies and death everywhere around.

And for Afghanistan? Just a very large and deep hole. Or maybe such a hole filled with worthless dollar bills.

TYPICALLY STUPID ABSURDITY--AND BEYOND

2010-11-21T06:09:00.000-08:00

TYPICALLY STUPID ABSURDITY—AND BEYOND

With our help, the terrorists have defeated us. They helped us create the Transportation Security Administration. “Get Scared, America!” is its motto.

Every two minutes in our airports, a serious voice warns us: be above suspicion, personally--and always be suspicious of everybody else. We must keep our luggage with us—or it will be confiscated and destroyed. And if we see any unattended baggage, or suspicious-looking persons, we must report them immediately. Everybody is a potential enemy—particularly anybody who isn’t a regular northern European looking American. “Be Vigilant, America!”

First we had metal detectors. Then shoes off. Then no liquids: but that was a bit extreme, too soon, so we modified the restriction. No more than three two-ounce bottles of liquid. (Who decided that it would take more than six ounces of a liquid explosive to do something awful?) Pat-downs. Now full body radiation scans. And sexual groping by specially trained gropers. And a cancer survivor required to take off her prosthetic breast for checking. “Be Terrified, America!

Be so terrified that you will submit to anything.

It was Franklin D. Roosevelt, wasn’t it, who said “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Let me suggest some ways we might really begin to protect ourselves and these United States.

1. Quit making enemies. Quit bombing Afghans and Pakistanis and then calling the people we kill “Muslim terrorists.”

2. Quit referring to Islam as “the enemy.”

3. Instead of more bombs, start rebuilding the countries that we have destroyed, house by house, village by village, city by city. And rebuild the infrastructure that our bombs have destroyed.

4. And start rebuilding the failed nation called the United States.

Build schools. Hire teachers, and more teachers, and more teachers.

Build decent housing for the poor.

Provide medical care for everybody except the rich.

Tax the rich. Tax all wealth that exceeds five million dollars at the
at the rate of 100%, and use the money to pay off the national debt.

Disband the military. Depend on moral strength instead of armed force.

Use the money we spend on the military—two billion dollars a day?—to
do good things, both at home and abroad. Teach our soldiers to build
things and help people, rather than to destroy things and murder people.

Lead the world in getting rid of nuclear weapons.

Quit honoring guns. Take them out of American life.

Quit pretending that God blesses America and nobody else. Only
a perverse God would bless us and the way we live.

Learn to honor peace.

Learn to make friends, and be friends.

A FEW SIMPLE THOUGHTS

2010-11-15T14:18:00.000-08:00

1. Everybody knows that George W. Bush's book is plagiarism. One hundred percent plagiarism. No matter how bad and how badly written it is, we know he can't have written it. He can barely write his name.

2. Terrorists 300,000,003, US 0. That's something like the score.

What do terrorists do? They make people afraid, and thus disrupt lives. With the help of an idiotic government, today's terrorists have paralyzed the United States. Now the idiots at the Transportation Security Agent are adding more terror to our daily lives. In order to get into the "secure" area of an American airport, you have to submit a nude photo op or to being sexually molested by some goon. And once you are in the "secure" area, you get loud announcements every three minutes warning you that the scare monitor is at orange--has it ever been anything other than orange?--and if you see anybody suspicious looking you should notify the nearest law enforcement officer.

Our government has been given prize after prize by Terrorism International, for helping their cause. It is rumored that Terrorism International pays for the scanning devices, and trains the sexual molesters for free.

3. In case anybody hasn't noticed, we could use all the money spent on the anti-terrorism nonsense to feed the poor, house them, give them decent medical care, and give all American children decent schools.

4. Or we could just tax the rich, and pay off the national debt. Nobody needs more than a million dollars. Do you hear your good friends quivering? Say it again: Nobody needs more than a million dollars. And if you have two one million dollar houses, one of them should be taken away from you, and you should have to borrow money to live on in the other one.

5. This year for Christmas, let's feed the turkey, and eat the greedy.

Bert Hornback

AFTERMATH

2010-11-05T12:10:00.000-07:00

In the aftermath of the election, and the prospect of getting nothing done in Congress, Mr. Obama has two choices: either he can accept defeat, and be a lame duck for the last two years of his one-term presidency, or he can fulfill several of the promises he made when he was campaigning and still accomplish something significant--and maybe get re-elected.

By executive order, Mr. Obama can

(1)Restore our constitutional right of habeas corpus;

(2)Close the illegal concentration camp in Guantanamo;

(3)Stop CIA kidnappings--"renditions"--all over the world;

(4)Close all the the illegal CIA prisons and torture camps;

(5)End the US invasion of Pakistan, and US attacks inside Pakistan;

(6)Quit blocking court decisions overturning the unconstitutional
"Don't Ask-Don't Tell" law.

He can do all of that in one busy day. And he can maybe save our country and his presidency.

Bert Hornback

NO PERETZ HALL AFTER ALL

2010-10-27T00:04:00.000-07:00

Concerning Martin Peretz: I have received a letter from the office of the president of Harvard University, assuring me that "the University is not naming a building after him." In a statement issued by the University, the president says that the university is "dedicated to the proposition that all people, regardless to color or creed, deserve equal opportunities, equal respect, and equal protection under the law." He continues, "The recent assertions by Dr. Peretz are therefore distressing to many members of our cummunity, and understandably so."

So no Martin Peretz Hall of Anti-Social Studies after all.

Bert Hornback

GOD BLESS AMERICA--SOMEDAY

2010-10-21T00:12:00.000-07:00

The President of the United States says that the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law is discriminatory, and unconstitutional. So he pressures the judiciary to keep that discriminatory and unconstitutional law in force.

He says that the district court judge who ruled that the law is discriminatory and unconstitutional was "moving too fast." Does the President not know that "moving too fast" is what racist America said to people like him for more than a century?

But the President doesn't move fast. He has had nearly two years now to say "Close the Concentration Camp at Guantanamo," but he hasn't said it. He has had nearly two years to restore the consitutionally guaranteed right of "Habeas Corpus"--but he hasn't done that, either.

And thanks to the President's disregard for law or justice, he now has Bradley Manning beginning his seventh month in solitary confinement at the Quantico Marine Corps base. Manning hasn't been charged with a crime--and he hasn't committed one. In fact, he is in prison--in solitary confinement--because he obeyed the law.

A person who knowingly conceals information about a felony is by definition an "accessory after the fact" of the offense. "Misprision of a felony" is the other legal name for this crime. It is both a federal offense and an offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Had Manning kept secret the criminal activity which he uncovered about our military, he would have become himself guilty. He did the right thing, and released the information.

Another young man in the U. S. military risked his life trying to expose the murderers in his unit in Afghanistan. When his father told military authorities about it, they told him to get lost. Now that the murders are public knowledge, the military has charged the whistle-blower with murder. And the men who murdered innocent civilians at random, for sport, and saved their victims' fingers--and one skull--as souvenirs of their crimes: they are "under investigation."

What has happened to us--to the United States? Mr. Obama was supposed to be a good man, and an intelligent man: that's why I voted for him. I can't find either the goodness or the intelligence. And I can't find any leadership or courage or honor.

My friends tell me, "Give him time, give him time." They tell me we can't go too fast in trying to undo wrongs. If the house is on fire, I shouldn't hurry to put it out. If I see a drowning man, I shouldn't rescue him too fast. If. . . .

JUSTICE FOR ALL

2010-10-19T14:10:00.000-07:00

One young man about to start his seventh month in solitary confinement for obeying the law. . . .

Another charged with murder for blowing the whistle on U.S. Army murderous "game hunters" in Afghanistan, while the "game hunters" remain unindited. . . .

Bradley Manning is suspected of having leaked classified information about
U.S. war crimes. Had Manning--a twenty-one year old soldier--NOT leaked those documents he would have been committing a crime. He would have been an accessory after the fact, guilty of misprision of a felony: very serious crimes under American civil and military law.

So he is in jail: in solitary confinement at the Quantico Marine Corps base in Virginia. Starting his seventh month in solitary.

Manning hasn't been charged with any crime. Why not? Because if the military or Mr. Obama's government charges him with a crime, his defense will be that he was obeying the law by doing so, and that all those who have tried to keep what he uncovered secret are the guilty parties.

(Of course Manning has only been held in solitary confinement, not charged with any crime, for six months, going on seven. Mr. Obama's prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Concentration Camp have been held--some of them--for nine years now, not charged with any crime. That's justice, American style.)

And the young man who told his father about the kill-for-sport Army "game hunters" in Afghanistan: that young man is charged with murdering an Afghan civilian. But the Sergeant and the others who organised the murder games have not been charged with anything. Only the heroic young man who "ratted" on them. And when that young man's father tried to tell the U.S. Army what was going on, he was told to get lost.

The U.S. has given more than 200,000 young men an opportunity to become murderers. Six month tours, then more six month tours. Learn to kill. Murder is your job, boys. And now go home and be civilised. That's the American way.

In World War II, the men who fought had at least a sense--a legitimate sense--that they were fighting aggression and--in the Nazis' case--evil. When the war was over, they came home to something that could be called civilisation, having served in what could be seen as a good cause.

Since then--Korea, Vietnam, our proxy wars in Nicaragua, Angola, Bush the first's oil war, Bush the second's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now Obama's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan--our cause has been greed, our principle arrogance, our creed simple murder.

In 1945 American troops came home to a mostly civilised country. Our government created the Marshall Plan, to rebuild Europe: and the Marshall plan may well be the greatest, most wonderful social undertaking in human history.

Troops who come home now from our wars have learned to be racist bigots, or to enjoy killing, or both. And they come home to a selfish country, dedicated to greed and hatred and violence. There are many more guns in the United States than in the middle east. Our returning warriors, used to killing, will really be coming "home."

It's frightening. And what is more frightening is that so many people who should care about all this--good, decent people--have stuck their heads in the sand. They don't want to hear the bad news. They think they can hide. Maybe they think things won't explode in the United States before they have a chance to die.

But what about their children?

Bradley Manning is a hero. So is the young man who was frightened by the crazy murderers he lived with.

I'm not sure that, come election day this year, we have a chance to vote for a change in America, for a change to a better, more civilised way of life. But maybe if we vote down the extremists on the right this year, we can at least keep things from getting worse. And maybe someday we will re-learn honor and decency, and will find candidates for high office worthy of our support.

I had thought that Mr. Obama was a bright and good man. He isn't. Next round, I will vote for Bradley Manning for president. And for that other young man for vice-president. Even if they aren't on the ballot.

THUG AMERICA

2010-10-08T09:41:00.000-07:00

YASIR AFIFI is a twenty year old student, and an citizen of the United States. His father happens to be Egyptian. He found a tracking device on his car. The FBI admitted that it "belonged" to them. They wanted it back. And the FBI thug who was speaking to him allegedly said, "We're going to make this much more difficult for you if you don't cooperate."

A perverse United States judge says secret electronic surveillance of United States citizens is legal. But no judge can make what the FBI thug said other than criminal.

"We're going to make this much more difficult for you IF you don't cooperate": that statement is an overt threat of violence. It is attempted extortion.

An FBI thug ought to go to jail. His superiors who ordered the spying should be charged too, but the perverse judge has at least temporarily made that impossible.
Spying on citizens is legal, he says. But he hasn't made extortion or attempted extortion legal.

Is the United States a "police state"? Have we taken over from the old Soviet Union?

Since when is it a crime in the United States for a citizen to be an Arab, or a Muslim? Racial discrimination has been illegal since 1964: which means that cops can't harass or arrest black people because they are black or white people because they are white, or Jews because they are Jews, or Muslims because they are Muslims. Or Arabs or Arab-Americans because they are Arabs or Arab-Americans.

The United States has become a Discrimi-Nation again. It is sad, shameful, oppressive, threatening, frightening. And we are all scared to say anything. It seems that even our president is afraid to say anything: even though all United States citizens are his people: black people (African, African-American, etc.), white people (Indo-Europeans--both Caucasian and those from northern India--, Arabs, Berbers), yellow people(Chinese, Japanese, South-East Asian, Mongol, Eskimo), red people (native North and South Americans), Christians, Jews, Moslems, Hindua, atheists of any color or race or tribe or origin.

Even women, left-handed people, albinos, the physically handicapped, old people, young people, mentally handicapped people, homosexuals, long-haired people, and people who don't belong to the NRA: all of us citizens are fully-entitled and should be fully-protected under law and by our president. By our congress, too, and by our courts. Even by law enforcement agencies, and rogue organisations like the FBI, CIA, and NSA.

What went wrong? How did we become a police state without a dictator? How did the rule of law disappear? George I. Q. 0. Bush suspended (illegally) the constitutionally guaranteed right of habeas corpus, and president Obama has not undone that arrogance of power. And it has long been true that, at lower levels, the United States is a police state.

Are you afraid of policemen and sheriffs? Yes: because SOME of them are bad, evil. Do you contribute to your local law enforcement officers' "benevolent fund"? The officer who calls says that if you donate money, you will get a decal for your car that will identify you as a "friend"--and you know what that means. Do you report that criminally extortionist call to your local district attorney? Of course not.

We have known for years that the CIA and NSA commit murder all around the world--"to preserve American liberty." And none of us ever object. None of us ever say that the United States should not murder.

Right now we have a twenty-one year soldier in solitary confinement for exposing military crimes. He has been in solitary confinement for nearly five months, while our corrupt system of justice tries to find out what crime they can charge him with. Awkwardly, both United States civil law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice make concealing knowledge of felony offenses itself a felony. Thus Bradley Manning is not a criminal; he exposed criminal acts.

We run a concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. We have been holding men prisoner there, some of them for nine years, but none of them have been charged with a crime. Guantanamo is the crime. We are the criminals. But none of us says anything.

And most likely we will say nothing about what happened to twenty year old United States citizen Yasir Afifi. We will just hope that it doesn't happen to us: which means that we--all of us, me included--are moral cowards.

Morality has nothing to do with sin, or sex. "Moral" is a word for how we live together. And when we don't live together, when each of us hides and avoids social responsibility--our responsibility to each other--then we are immoral.

Unless we defend Yasir Afifi--and Bradley Manning, and the people in our illegal camp at Guantanamo Bay, and the people somewhere in this world that the CIA or the NSA will murder tonight or tomorrow--: unless we defend them, we are immoral.

Bert Hornback

HYPOCRITUS

2010-10-02T02:42:00.000-07:00

The U.S. government didn't manage to stop its hideous, perverse, illegal, and unethical syphilis experiments on black prisoners at Tuskegee until 1972: thirty years on--and well-hidden. Now we have news of further U.S. government sponsored syphilis "research"--again hideous, perverse, illegal and unethical--involving intentionally infecting otherwise uninfected Guatamalan men with syphilis. Why Guatamalan? Not just because they were poor? Not just because they were not "white"? (Well, we might say, at least they weren't U.S. citizens this time.)

Of, course, since the beginning of the Tuskegee experiments, the U.S. government had been spewing propaganda about medical experiments the Japanese were supposedly carrying out on prisoners. According to U.S. propaganda, this proved that the Japanese were "evil," even "sub-human," and deserved to be "exterminated." U.S. propaganda wasn't so hard on the Nazis: after all, they were only doing bad things to Jews.

Now? Well, the U.S. has its government kidnappers and murder squads all over the world, its secret "rendition" prisons and torture camps, and its illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. And the U.S. president won't do anything to stop them. U.S. military courts absolved almost everybody in the torture crimes scandal in Iraq. The U.S. Army almost managed to keep anyone from knowing about the "kill-for-sport" soldiers in the Army's Stryker unit--but one brave young man and his father finally made these continuing war crimes public knowledge. And the U.S. government has had Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for more than four months now, at Quantico; he is the young U.S. Army soldier who heroically and honorably leaked videos of U.S. military's murders of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, published as "Wikilinks."

Is there anything that connects all these things? Of course there is. And there are surely more links in this chain of violence, war crimes, and constant dishonor.

The Nuremburg War Crimes trials which the U.S. ran did not punish individual Nazi soldiers. It punished leaders. Of course: and in those days U.S. President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk, "The Buck Stops Here." It's time to conduct similar trials for the U.S. leaders responsible for these recent and continuing crimes. And if the U.S. court system is compromised--contaminated--and we don't have a working democracy any more, then the World Court should do it.

Or do 10,000 nuclear weapons and a lack of any sense of honor put us above anything like law or justice?

KIDNAP, KIDNAP

2010-09-27T02:14:00.000-07:00

I don't like revenge. But sometimes, when bullies won't listen, won't learn, "turn about is fair play" seems almost morally legitimate.

The US has just convicted a Palestinian citizen, Aafia Siddiqui, of "trying to murder US military personnel." She was sentenced to 86 years in prison.

Dr. Siddiqui's husband and uncle have been held, illegally, in the US concentration camp at Guantanamo since 1991. Dr. Saddiqui had been captured by US soldiers, in 2006, in Afghanistan, and was being "interrogated." She escaped. Two years later she was kidnapped, brought to the US, and left to rot in prison for two years. Now she has been tried, and convicted.

Now an American citizen has been kidnapped, and the kidnappers are demanding an exchange. They will free this unnamed hostage in exchange for the freedom of Dr. Siddiqui.

A hostage exchange. Kidnap for kidnap.

Or is it against some higher special privilege for power law that says only the US can kidnap people?

Not to mention run a concentration camp in Cuba, and hold kidnapees in secret prisons all over the world.

I don't know about you, but I assume that, like me, you prefer the rule of law to our government's arrogant lawlessness.

Bert Hornback

HYPOCRISY????

2010-09-24T14:41:00.000-07:00

Oh, come now! The good ole liberty-loving USA couldn't possibly be hypocritical. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson the slave-owning, daughter-selling "all men are created equal" founding father, the Christian hate-mongers and warriors, the democracy-loving congressmen who love lobbyists, the champions of college and professional athletics, the rich liberals, the millions and millions of income tax cheats and liars: they can't be hypocrites!

I would defend every last soul--if there is such--among them. Just because we execute a woman in Virginia is no reason we can't cry "shame!" at Iran for planning to execute a woman. Is a "lethal injection" any less humane than stoning? Does a human cringe more, cry more, curse more, hurt more being injected with a deadly poison or potion than by being hit with stones? Isn't death death? Isn't murder murder? Those Iranians! Who do they think they are, criticising us? Everything we do is right, and just, and proper. (Excuse me: can I add, just for my liberal heart's sake, "Screw the poor!")

How about the Pakistani woman sentenced to 86 years in prison--for allegedly shooting at US soldiers in Pakistan. Wait. We don't have soldiers in Pakistan, legally. Wait twice. Let's remember that the US has had her uncle and husband in its illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cubs for nine years--on "suspicion" of crimes that the US obviously can't prove or they would have brought them to trial. Wait a third time. This woman was kidnapped in Pakistan by the US.
And now she has been tried in a US kangaroo court, and convicted--of shooting at US soldiers operating illegally in Pakistan, which happens to be her country. Good for us! We are always right, no matter what we do. (We have nuclear bombs: and everybody had better remember that!)

We USers are a moral people. We believe strongly that we are right. We hate everybody who doesn't agree with us. We are confident that Jesus Christ approves of greed, and actually wrote in his famous gospels that greed and other kinds of violence are Christian virtues. We know that God blesses our abuse of other peoples.

I thank you for letting me say this. I know what I've said is true. All my rich and war-loving friends have been telling me so for years. And they aren't hypocrites.

With liberty and justice for all,

Bert Hornback

Harvard Bigotry

2010-09-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

I have just sent the following letter to the president of Harvard University, regarding the university's plans to name a building after an ignorantly offensive professor who says that "Muslim life is cheap."

May I urge you to send similar letters.

Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, President
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Dear President Faust,

I am disgusted by Martin Peretz’ ignorant and obscene remark, and both shocked and ashamed that Harvard University will still name a building after him.

Does Harvard think it is above criticism? My colleagues and students here certainly don’t think so.

I taught for twenty-eight years at the University of Michigan. Public bigotry was not honored there. And here, where people are sensitive to bigotry and prejudice, the remark is seen as utterly offensive.

Surely Harvard’s honor is not so cheap as honoring Martin Peretz will make it.
Sincerely yours,

Bert G. Hornback
Professor of English, Universitaet des Saarlandes
Emeritus Professor of English, University of Michigan

2010-09-12T17:23:00.000-07:00

I don't quite know where to start. I don't like to use--let alone depend on--statistics. I would prefer to argue principle. But nobody seems to pay any attention to principle.

If Christians were attentive to principle, they would have to quit hating Muslims, call off all their wars--and give up all their wealth to follow Jesus. If Christians were attentive to principle, they would despise--as Jesus did--all hypocrisy. (Sorry, Benedict: you are the number one hypocrite.)

But Christianity is a minority religion, and the United States is largely a godless place unless you let the hypocrites count as godly.

Even as a secular nation, the United States pretends to principle. We talk about democracy even as we subvert it. We talk about equal opportunity but do nothing to establish it. Our president talks about our consitiution while he violates it. We talk of justice and honor while we kidnap and torture and run a World War II style concentration camp.

So let's not try to talk principle. Let me cite a few statistics, and invite you to focus your attention on them.

You and I own slightly more than 61% of General Motors. For some alleged reason it was "saved" by our generous government, and still exists. It has a new CEO, Daniel Akerson. And somehow, President Obama's overseer has agreed that Daniel Akerson deserved a $9,000,000 pay package for this year!

How does Daniel Akerson deserve such? Deserve? There are hungry Americans, homeless Americans, jobless Americans who can't get work because Daniel Akerson needs $9,000,000.

We approved that? Are we crazy? Or is our greed so blind and stupid that we will protect Daniel Akerson's greed because someday we might get a chance at a similar-sized theft?

TIAA-CREF is a retirement fund organisation created for teachers. For some years Clifton Wharton. Jr., was its president. Dr. Wharton came from the academic world. Dr. Wharton was and is a great man, and not a greedy man; he didn't need a huge salary in 1987 when he accepted the presidency of the organisation founded to help university teachers prepare for retirement. But in 2009, when Roger Ferguson took over that job, he "needed"--and was given--$11,000,000 a year, plus benefits and expenses.

Should TIAA-CREF be spending teachers' money so extravagantly? If university professors are now making enough to afford people like Roger Ferguson, then university professors are paid too much, too.

But $9,000,000 a year isn't much in the United States, nor is $11,000,000 plus benefits and expenses. Daniel Akerson's annual $9,000,000 is four and a half minutes--minutes--worth of the United States military budget.

The United States spent $1,039,531,000,000 on what was euphemistically called "defense" this past year. That's $2,000,000 a minute.

And what is our defense? War in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, bombings in Palistan, kidnappings and assassination attempts everywhere, United States troops occupying parts of Cuba, Japan, Germany, Britain, Italy, Greece. Dangerous, murderous, and not very bright CIA operatives--I have known five of them--all over the world. (I wonder if the assistant economics attaché at the United States Embassy in London is still the cover for the chief CIA man in Europe?)

The best defense the United States could mount would be decency in the world at large, and a decent society at home.

Since the days of the Marshall Plan--which was one of the greatest undertakings of any government in the history of this world--the United States has gone from failure to failure, disaster to disaster, lie to lie, greed to more greed.

Can we still save us? Yes: but we need to get busy now, before there's nothing left to save, nothing left worth saving.

GO TO JAIL FOR TELLING THE TRUTH

2010-08-29T13:53:00.001-07:00

Go to jail for telling the truth.

The Bush government violated everything this country supposedly stood for. We all knew much of what they were doing, but we didn't have hard evidence. Like most criminals, the Bush government tried to keep their worst criminal acts secret. And they tried to keep the criminal acts of others secret. But the truth kept leaking out. Their crimes were so gross that they couldn't stay secret. Some of them--like attacking Iraq and the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay--weren't secret at all; they were arrogant acts of illegal, unconstitutional, immoral violence. They tried to keep their world-wide kidnapping and torture program secret, but we found out. about it.

Now, thanks to a young man named Bradley Manning, we know a lot more. Thanks to Bradley Manning's patriotism and his heroism, we have a great deal of evidence. It is in the public domain.

Knowing what he knew--having the evidence that he possed--Private First Class Bradley Manning had two choices. He could keep his mouth shut, and join all the others involved in the cover-up. Had he done so, he would have committed a crime underArticke 78 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In both civilian and military jurisdictions, this crime is called "accessory after the fact." His other choice was to make known what he had discovered.

Remarkably, Bradley Manning is now being held in prison, in solitary confinement, for obeying the law. By whom? Not by the Bush administration, but by the Obama administration.

Why is President Obama holding Bradley Manning? Because he told the truth? Because he made public the evidence for some of our crimes of violence? Of murder, of torture?

Now you and I have two choices. We can demand Bradley Manning's release from prison. Or we can keep quiet, and ourselves become guilty of being accessories after the fact. We can join the conspirators, and by our cowardice become criminals.

At present you and I can't be charged with crimes for supporting Bradley Manning and demanding his release. But if we keep quiet we might as well be living under such a threat--and maybe soon we will be. "Keep quiet," the tyrant says.

Unless President Obama wants to be the same kind of criminal join George Bush and his cronies were and are, he must release Bradley Manning immediately. The rule of law demands it. And without the rule of law, we are indeed what many in the world accuse us of being: a rogue state.

Bert Hornback

Logic, Law, Justice, and Freedom

2010-08-13T19:26:00.000-07:00

It's tiresome, dealing with ignorance. George W. Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Phylis Schlafly's absurdly stupid husband. The California woman protesting against gay marriage, and except on a few miraculous good days Thomas L. Freidman of the New York Times. They all have right to be heard. But the rest of us have a responsibility to respond.

We have had good presidents. FDR. Harry Truman--despite the gravest error of modern times, the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki. I would not agree that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima was justified; I would argue forever that the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki was criminal. So was the fire-bombing of Dresden, carried out by the United States and Britain.

Since World War II, we have had Truman's war in Korea, stupid in hindsight. And ten other wars, stupid and immoral and criminal in foresight. Johnson's lies to get us into Vietnam: the admitted fabrication of that attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. (The CIA was operating in Vietnam as early as 1962, according to CIA operative Paul Corscadden.) President Kissinger and his stooge Richard Nixon, bombing Cambodia.)

Stupid Gerald Ford, and poor Jimmy Carter: both feebly tried to have war; Ford with Nortnh Korea and Carter with Iran. Carter's attempt was much more perverse: a bunch of young Iranis had captured 50 CIA agents in the U.S. Embassy in Terehan; we couldn't release their names--or confirm their number--because they all had multiple identities and passports. The world was lucky: Carter's attempt to start WW III failed when his attack forces' helicopters went down in the desert. At time, our European friends were trying to reach a diplomatic solution to the situation in Teheran; but Carter was running for reelection, and needed to prove that he was macho. To hell with diplomacy.

Reagan didn't get to have war. But he reminisced about his combat flights in World War II--though of course those took place only in movies. He did manage to bomb Lybia, and to invade Grenada.

George I wanted a war, and he got one. He was quite a guy: remember when he said that the reason he had been so outrageously vulgar in the vice-presidential debate with Geraldine Ferraro was that he "just wanted to kick a little ass"? In August of 1990 George I decidedto go to war, though he insisted that was looking for peace. In January of 1991 he went to war, as planned.

Bill Clinton began his presidency beybombing Basra, in Iraq. Why? To prove that he was as ruthless a murderer as any other American. An Iraqi had been accused of plotting to murder George I. According to American law, an accusation is the same thing as a conviction, so Clinton prempted any court, and trial, and bombed Basra. Oddly, the man was never brought to trial. Count a few deaths for murderer Bill.

And then we got George II. And now we have Barak Obama.

Is Mr. Obama a good president? Well, he told us that he would restore "habeas corpus," but he hasn't. He promised to close the U. S. concentration camp at Guantanamo, but he hasn't. He promised an end to U.S. torture, but he hasn't ended it. And he told us he would end our illegal war in--our invasion of--Iraq, and our illegal war in Afghanistan.

He is a very bright man, but he has failed at everything. And in addition to no "habeas corous," the continued operation of the concentration camp in Cuba, torture, and our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are now invading and attacking Pakistan.

So . . . what about all those good things? I had intended to talk about them. But--sorry--I am too depressed to talk about justice and law and society and community and goodness and freedom and all those other un-American ideas: ideas that have been a part of human history for at least the past 8,000 years.

Maybe I will try again. Right now I am too depreseed--as I always am, when I think about our country. Funny: the only times I can feel good about us are when I read about Sarah Palin or Mitch McConnell.

PAY OBAMA!

2010-08-11T20:17:00.000-07:00

I've been running into this since Barak O'Bama began his campaign for the presidency. If you want to communicate with him, you have to pay. Paying him, of course, won't get you an answer. All it will get you is (a) further requests for money, and (b) e-mails telling you what to think and how to give more money.

I grew up thinking that George Orwell's "Big Brother" government was what either the Republicans or the Communists would give us. But I was wrong. It's Obama-style Democracy.

I certainly don't want the Republicans in office. Mitch McConnell is maybe the most offensive man in America. Sarah Palin is an idiot, and just what John McCain deserved. She is his "legacy." But I don't want Obama, either. And even less do I want his handlers.

Obama has done nohing of what he promised. We still run a concentration camp in Cuba. "Habeas Coupus" is still suspended. We are still operating our "rendition" schemes, and are still engaged in torture. We are still in Iraq, still in Afghanistan, and now we are at war in Pakistan.

And one can't tell the president or any of his handlers this--or anything!--unless one pays the Democratic Party.

I am utterly disgusted. Would that we had Richard Nixon and his gang running things! Forty years ago I would have been insulted at the idea that I might ever say such. But I have said it.

We have stooped so low! And we have been betrayed--by a man intelligent enough not to have wanted to betray us.

Shame on you, Barak Obama.

Shame on you.

LIES THAT LEAD TO WAR

2010-07-24T08:55:00.000-07:00

When I was a schoolboy, the argument was over whether Franklin Roosevelt knew in advance that Pearl Harbor was to be attacked, but let that attack happen so that he could get the United States into World War II. Then--as quick as quick--we were at war in Korea, over aggression from the North. To make this war legal Harry Truman called it a "Police Action."

We invaded Lebanon in 1958, without invitation, because Admiral Holloway wanted a "show of force" in the Mediterranean, and Dwight Eisenhower let him have his way. After three months we came home. Our accomplishments: ruining Beirut's streets, almost burning down the port (my fault), killing one of our own soldiers, and getting in the way of a democratic election.

Then Lyndon Johnson lied his way into the Vietnam War--undeclared by Congress, but allowed thanks to the fabricated story about attacks on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. Lies. A war justified by deliberate lies. A hideous ten-year war followed. But it was actually longer, because the CIA started it in 1962--not in 1964.

Gerald Ford sent U.S. Navy gunboats into North Korea, but failed to start a war. Jimmy Carter asked our European allies to try to resolve our problem at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and while they were doing so he tried to invade Tehran. Thanks
to U.S. technology, his invasion failed in the desert, and Carter didn't start a war.

Ronald Reagan had a hard time finding a war to fight, and finally settled on invading Grenada. The pretext? Cuban soldiers. But the Cuban "soldiers" had been invited there by the Grenedan government, to build new runways for the airport--so it could land 747's loaded with U.S. tourists! On the second day after the U.S. invasion, the Grenedan president was produced aboard a U.S. Navy ship, holding a typewritten letter (unsigned) requesting (after the fact) U.S. intervention. We admitted this. Awkwardly, we had invaded a member-state of the Commonwealth of Nations, whose head was and is the Queen of England--and she had not been consulted about this invasion of her territory.

George Bush invaded Iraq for oil. Pure, simple, overt aggression. Like Hitler taking Poland. For several months after his decision to invade was made, Bush pretended not to have decided to to go to war. Lies. Documented lies. Several thousand Iraqi soldiers were buried alive by Colin Powell in this exercise in American freedom and justice.

Then Bill Clinton. First thing, in February of 1963, he ordered a bombing raid on the Iraqi city of Basra. Why? Because an Iraqi civilian in puppet Kuwait had been accused of plotting to assassinate George Bush. The Iraqi was never tried, let alone convicted. But that didn't bother Clinton: he was proving that he was an American president, by going to war and killing people.

And then George Bush II. All the stupid lies to get us into war. Nine years' worth now.

And after having said that this war was wrong, and that he would end it; after saying that he would close the U.S. concentration camps around the world, and stop the U.S. torture of abductees--after a year and a half, Obama has done nothing except expand the Bush wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan.

Now, it seems we are lying our way toward a war with North Korea. The evidence of a North Korean attack on a South Korean ship is very, very suspicious. It seems to have been manufactured by the South Korean government, perhaps in collusion with the U.S. government.

Lies. Lies. Lies. Lies.

What is this country? Criminal is not a big enough word for us. But it's maybe the biggest we have available. And since the U.S. claims to be a democracy, we are all--every last one of us--criminals. We know full well that we are being told lies. But we don't care. We are a dying society--a non-society, dying of our own stupid greed and arrogance. But we are still trying to rule the world.

REFUDIATION

2010-07-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

REFUDIATION is a perfectly good word. Sarah Palin has no need to indulge in palinody for having used it.

To REFUDIATE is to be asinine, or act like an ass, again.

Sarah Palin’s whole career is REFUDIATION. FUD (or FUDD) is an old Northern word for “ass,” or “backside.” Funny: PALIN is itself an old Greek word for “back,” or “backward.”

And Sarah Palin—going back, perhaps, to her roots, being both a Palin and an ignorant, loud, hee-hawing ass, has been REFUDIATING throughout her public career.

Everybody who laughed at poor, ignorant Sarah should be ASSHAMED for mocking her REFUDIATION.

America needs more ignorance.

It also needs more stupidity and dumbness. Both those words have to do with not saying anything, with keeping your mouth shut.

Bert

DEALING WITH LIARS

2010-07-17T14:55:00.000-07:00

Given that, in the case of Shahram Amiri, we are dealing with the world's premier liars and the world's dumbest bunch of thugs since comic books were born, shouldn't news agencies like the New York Times be a little bit more circumspect?

The world's premier liars and the world's dumbest bunch of thugs are one and the same, of course: the CIA. If I were in charge of guessing through this fiasco, I would have no problem choosing my route.

The first premise is that the CIA made a mess. The second is that they are lying, trying to get out of it. Shahram Amiri either wasn't a nuclear scientist, or he was a plant posted by the Iranian government. He was either kidnapped, or bribed to defect. He was allowed to return to Iran either because he had already set up the disclosure of his "exploitation," should he disappear, or because the CIA was hoping to hide its stupidity, or because they were even stupider than they usually are and just let him go home since he wasn't a nuclear scientist anyway.

The CIA has housed incompetent people since I first met them in 1957. They are Keystone Cops with huge budgets, huge egos, and the intelligence of earthworms.

Earthworms take things in: blind observation. It runs through them, and comes out the other end as intelligence. Ask Philip Agee if I'm right. Or Mark Sullivan. Or the widow--or the children--of Paul Corscadden.

Bert Hornback

PAYING FOR CLEAN ENERGY--AND NEW ORLEANS

2010-06-15T12:34:00.000-07:00

It used to be that rich people gave fat sums of money to presidents and politicians to buy the kind of government they wanted. Barack Obama has changed all that. Now he asks little, otherwise insignificant people like me to give him money to buy the kind of government we want. And he obviously has a whole staff of people hired to do this.

For example: This morning I received an e-mail from Mitch Stewart, seemingly the chief confidence man. Today’s subject is “Getting to a Clean Energy Future.” I opened it because of the topic. As a New Orleanian, I am very seriously concerned about our energy future; but more of that later.

Mr. Stewart’s plan this morning was that I add my name to a letter asking the U. S. Senate to vote for Clean Energy legislation. So I did, electronically. But in order to complete this transaction, I was required to choose an amount—between $5.00 and $34,495.00—and submit my credit card information.

I had no intention of paying even $5.00 to try to influence a vote in the Senate. My taxes already pay Senators outrageously and give them health care nobody else in America has and a pension that pays their salaries for life.

But I couldn’t vote unless I paid. I tried giving them a wrong credit card number—but somehow they already had my credit card information, and rejected my wrong number! Hmmmn. What is the president’s chief con man doing with my credit card information?

The Obama “open government” wheeze is just that: another con game. Through Mitch Stewart and others on his team, Mr. Obama gets to talk to me by e-mail any time he wants to. But there is never—never—an opportunity for me to reply.

He tells me he wants me to support his health care plan. I want to say, yes, I will—but first I want him to agree to a much bigger health care plan, by closing his concentration camp at Guantanamo and ending his two brutal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I am not allowed to say that.

He asks me regularly to support something or another, but he never mentions Guantanamo or his wars. And I am supposed to support him? Nonsense.

Mr. Obama is full of words about the BP oil spill catastrophe. Words. George Bush only flew over New Orleans once after Katrina; Obama has flown over four times, and twice he has landed. Of course, those four fly-overs cost us a total of nearly $20,000,000.00 –which could much more usefully been spent on relief for the shrimp fishermen and their families whose livelihood has been wiped out by this disaster. Obama’s fly-overs are a very expensive, insensitive, useless publicity stunt.

Mr. Obama is intelligent. Why didn’t he start building a barricade in front of wetlands and wildlife refuges—and even beaches—on the first day? The country is full of big earth-moving rigs, used by construction companies to build highways, used by Colin Powell’s army to bury thousands of Iraqi soldiers—to bury them alive in the sand. And why haven’t we been siphoning spilled oil out of the Gulf for six weeks now? He should have ordered that on the second day after the disaster struck.

Since Mr. Obama assumed office, he has mocked himself, his promises, and his promise. We expected a great deal of him, because he promised a great deal. All the world saw a promising future in him. And he has betrayed us.

The constant solicitation scheme is offensive. So are the chatty one-way communications he sends out as electronic versions of the infamous “rallies” of earlier times. We can’t talk back. We can’t ask him about the promises he has broken, about his new war hatching in Pakistan.

We can sign our names to letters of support for him. And we can pay him to let us do this. That’s all.

And that’s democracy.

Bert Hornback

MALIGNING THE KANGAROO

2010-05-12T02:07:00.000-07:00

There is no reason for us to insult the kangaroo by talking about the way justice is administered in the United States. It was in the United States some one hundred and fifty or sixty years ago that the "kangaroo court" came into the English language, and it referred to sham legal proceedings. Such travesties of justice were also called "mustang courts." There's no reason to insult horses, either. Let's just call them American courts.
The United States has a rather full history of sham legal proceedings--as do many other countries. But that doesn't make ours the less shameful or despicable. Indeed: since vanity (or is it insecurity?) makes Americans boast constantly about the glories of our form of government, our sham justice is all the more hideous and disgusting. American injustice has become a model of perversion.
The CIA has for many years now operated outside the law, murdering and kidnapping and torturing. Presidents since Eisenhower have all condoned such: have known what the CIA was doing, and have sanctioned it.
Our government acknowledges that since 2001 the CIA has run secret torture camps all over the world. Men are kidnapped and taken to these illegal torture camps. Many of them die there: are murdered there.
In 2004 Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was captured, and held for two years in one of these secret torture camps. Then he was transferred to the US-run concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. He has been in the Guantanamo torture facility for six years.
Now the US government has decided to bring Mr. Ghailani to trial. It would be worse than naive to expect that his trial will be anything but a sham.
Lewis A. Kaplan, judge of a Federal District Court in Manhattan, was asked by Mr. Ghailani's lawyers to dismiss the charges against him because of his illegal torture--and because he has been held captive for eight years in concentration camps, not charged with any crime.
Judge Kaplan ruled that the US government's illegal treatment of Mr. Ghailani has no relation to the charges brought against him.
I know I shouldn't complain. I should accept this the same way I should accept everything else that's wrong with the United States, from our wars to our racism and our violence and our poverty and our ignorance--and our hypocrisy.
I should be ashamed of myself for complaining, not ashamed of my country.

US INTERVENES TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING

2010-04-19T00:36:00.000-07:00

A hundred million Americans have pledged to use the automatic ice-makers on their refrigerators to make a billion ice cubes to send to the North Pole to restore the ice cap.

For summer vacations, Americans are being urged to drive their cars downhill only, to save gasoline and reduce emissions.

The Surgeon General has urged flatulent Americans to reduce their emissions to once a day.

Republicans have agreed to filibuster only in sign language, and if the Hot Air bill passes, politicians will be silenced indefinitely.

The Office of Air Pollution Control has banned all radio talk shows, and both CNN and Fox News.

Smokers will be forbidden to exhale.

The American Medical Association has recommended that human body temperatures be reduced to 90.0 F. by 2012.

Happy Days are Here Again!

2010-04-17T09:06:00.000-07:00

"Happy Days are Here Again!" That used to be the U.S. Democratic Party's song. The last time I remember hearing it was in 1968, when at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, a brass band tried to drown out boos from delegates as the Party machinery forced the presidential nomination of Lyndon Johnson's pathetic, spineless tool Hubert Humphrey. That summer an assassin's bullet and the leaders of the Democratic Party gave the world Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and six more years of the vicious, deadly U.S. war against Vietnam.

These days things are at least as bad as they were in 1968, in the U.S. Two illegal and immoral wars going, and a third now underway (by drone) in Pakistan. A concentration camp at Guantanamo, still, and everybody trying to forget about U.S. war crimes and torture. No right of Habeas Corpus, still--suspended by George Bush's presidental proclamation, and still suspended by Barack Obama. Will it ever be restored? Or does the U.S. find it more convenient to be able to "disappear" people?

But I am told I should be happy, even if my country is a rogue state.

I should be happy, even though New Orleans is still--five years after Katrina--trying to house its homeless. Even though poverty in the United States is unrelieved. Even though our schools are for the most part a disaster. Even though our expensive new health care bill will leave millions of Americans without access to medical care. And the rich are still rich, and getting richer. And the rich are still rich, and getting richer. And the rich are still rich, and getting richer.

Should I say that again? And the rich are still rich, and getting richer.

But never mind them. If the rest of us were decent, we could give the rich away--to Antarctica--and take care of our problems without them. We could, if we had proper, decent leadership. But without having taken care of our poor, our homeless, our ill-educated, our uninsured, even without quitting the wars that bankrupt us both economically and morally, even without closing our concentration camp at Guantanamo, President Obama is talking about wanting to send men to Mars! For that, he should win the Marie Antoinette Prize--or be sent to mad King Ludwig's Neuschwanstein to live out his idiocy.

That's a joke, of course. Not a very good one, not enough of one to get me a place in the chorus of Americans singing "Happy Days are Here Again." But even if I sang "Happy Days are Here Again," I couldn't make myself deaf to the chorus of our wrongs and the sad, shameful state we are in.

2010-04-15T14:44:00.000-07:00

I had a colleague at the University of Michigan who telephoned me one evening after the executive committee of the English Department had determined salary raises for the next year for the faculty. Though I was the most published member of my department, taught four classes instead of two, was the only member of the department to have received two university teaching awards, had also received two awards for outstanding service to students as an academic adviser, etc., as usual I was to receive the minimum salary raise. My friend told me, "Bert, if you would just learn to keep your mouth shut about things, we could pay you more." Thanks, E.J.

Now I am told I should quit complaining about things going wrong, not at the University, but in the United States and in the world. I'm not going to do it. To accept this world as it is is immoral. To accept President Obama's governance of the United States would be, to my mind, to join in the perpetration of war crimes. And I won't keep quiet--even if many of my American friends object to what I say.

The United States is running a concentration camp in Cuba. If we didn't have so many nuclear weapons and a nasty record of having used them, the rest of the world would object. The United States has suspended the constitutional guarantee of Habeas Corpus--which is of course unconstitutional. We are currently engaged in two illegal and immoral wars, and are regularly now bombing people in yet another country.

Why should I shut up about this? Why should I not complain? Why should I not be angry--at what my country is doing?

Those who say I should shut up want to pretend that everything is rosy: and they want to pretend such because everything is indeed rosy for them. They are wealthy, they live in safe communities, their kids are either finished school or in good schools, they don't even know anybody who is in the military, and they never even think about Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Pakistanis, poor Americans, people without health insurance, kids in bad schools, street crime, poverty.

I don't do all I should to try to stop our national crimes. I don't do all I should
to try to remedy the evils that infest our society, or to relieve the poor. But I do more than those who tell me to shut up--and I challenge them to show me otherwise.

News from the Academics

2010-04-05T02:33:00.000-07:00

An exciting new "critical" approach to literature has been announced. Well, not an approach to literature, really. It's part of the game of tag that the academic folks play with books. This one is called "Do you know that I know what you know."

Do you know that I know what you know?
I know that you know what I know is useless.
Do I know that you know what I know is useless?
You know that I know that you know what I know is useless.
But I am the professor, and I am writing a book about what I know.

It needs a better name than "Do you know that I know what you know," of course. How about Semiarsics? Typslomusics? Opisthics?

The Catholic Church . . .

2010-03-21T14:21:00.000-07:00

Authortity always asks for acceptance of its errors. The Catholic Church never, ever, invokes "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." But caught--quite literally--with its all-male pants down--it suddenly remembers.

The woman caught in adultery is no great sinner. Consenting adults? There is nothing abusive about that, though there is perhaps a breach of trust, of faith.

But the clerical sex crimes are another matter. These are rapes: statutory rapes for the most part, the victims under the age of consent. For the victims beyond that age, it's a matter of "moral" authority used to commit crimes. And the Catholic Church lives on the "moral" authority of its clergy.

To look more largely at what the Catholic clergy's sex sacandal means is to ask, why does the Catholic Church exist? What does it have to do with Jesus of Nazareth? Anything?

He taught against greed, against the rich. What is the richest--and the greediest--organisation on the face of the earth? The Catholic Church. It not only has the biggest bank accounts, the greatest stock holdings, the most real estate; it glories in its wealth. Its churches proclaim wealth. Its Pope wears a triple gold crown, and parades around dressed in gold-embroidered vestments. Everything about it mocks Jesus of Nazareth.

So why does it exist?

The historical Jesus was a very good and noble man. He taught the same simple but profound goodness that Socrates taught. Because many people listened to him, and accepted with enthusiasm what he taught, he was deemed dangerous by the powerful people of his time, and brutally murdered.

Since then, the powerful people have been more shrewd. They have taken him over, pretended to admire and love him, have made a god of him--and have ignored everything that he said.

If the people who call themselves "Christians" thought--for one short moment--of what their Christianity amounts to, they would rise up and with one great decent voice begin to change the world. The wealth of the Catholic Church would be used to feed millions and millions of people, gaudy churches and cathedrals would house millions of homeless people, and freed from the Church's hypocrisy we might even begin to take care of each other.

Christians could indeed change the world. The first step toward than end would be the abolition of the Catholic Church. It has a long, long history of abuse: and the thousands of cases of sexual abuse of boys that have been exposed in recent years are just the perverse tip of nearly two thousand years of moral perversity--and the perversion of the teachings of one of the truly great men in human history.

The Catholic Church has responded to the crimes of sexual abuse by condemning the sin, but not the sinner. How clever! The pope apologises for the sins, but doesn't mention the sinners. One might think, from what the pope has said, that what has been exposed is a massive, world-wide ring of young masturbators, not a world-wide ring of vicious hypocritical child-molesters disguised as Catholic priests.

WIN-WIN SITUATIONS

2010-01-23T09:04:00.000-08:00

The United States has found another another win-win situation. We will sell more arms to India and also more arms to Pakistan. The more arms they have, the bigger war they can have some day--without having to use their nuclear weapons. And the more money U.S. arms manufacturers will make.

A few years ago the good people who make their money selling weapons all over the world happily sold arms to Ronald Reagan so he could give them to the Taliban--so they could fight the U.S.S.R. Did the arms manufacturers already know that the Taliban would use them to fight the U.S.--and that George Bush and Barack Obama would then buy more arms from the weapons manufacturers so the U.S. could fight the Taliban?

The coffin manufacturers must be next in line for getting really rich. The way things are going, it will soon be time to bury the whole of the U.S.

MONEY TALKS

2010-01-23T08:37:00.000-08:00

This year, in the United States, the football bowl games all had new names. The AT&T Cotton Bowl, the FedEx Orange Bowl, the Allstate Sugar Bowl, the CitiBank Rose Bowl.

Now that Congress is part of the economy, and senators and representatives can be purchased legally, their owners will start identifying themselves. We will have the MetLife Senator from Massachusetts, the Exxon Senator from Illinois, the DuPont Senator from Delaware, the Pfizer Senator from Florida. Or maybe we will just do away with the state designations, and identify Senators by their corporate owners.

I wonder who will own--or already owns--the Supreme Court Justices? They will no doubt have the biggest price tags.

What a wonderful thing democracy is! The best thing about it, as the United States demonstrates with such remarkable regularity, is that democracy is so easily corrupted.

Bert Hornback

TEACHING OBSCENITY

2010-01-18T07:32:00.000-08:00

American universities teach lots of different things: math, medicine, law, the humanities, the natural sciences, the social sciences. But they teach most effectively the anti-social science that their recent presidents practice, which is GREED.

American university presidents teach by example. They are paid hugely obscene salaries, and in demanding and accepting such teach their students GREED. No matter what students are taught in their other classes, they are all taught GREED by their presidents.

Michigan is a state in desperate economic trouble. Unemployment, poverty, homelessness are everywhere, not just in Detroit. There are even unemployed, poor, and homeless people in Ann Arbor, where the University of Michigan is situated. The president of the University of Michigan has an annual salary of $600,000, plus a $100,000 a year bonus, plus an expense account, plus a huge mansion and servants to take care of her and her husband. In addition to being the university president, of course, she is the university´s senior professor of GREED, and one of the nation´s best.

(If Michigan´s president is not such an effective professor of GREED, then why is she being paid so extravagantly?)

HAITI

2010-01-18T07:16:00.000-08:00

Of course we need to help the people of Haiti. But we don´t need three presidents urging us to donate a few dollars each to the cause.

Mr. Obama can suspend his wars for a week, and send $7,000,000,000 to Haiti. That´s $20 for every American. And then he can suspend his wars for another week, and send $7,000,000,000 more.

By then maybe we will have realised that we do much more good by helping others than we do by bombing them.

I would rather be afraid of possible terrorists than guilty of mass murder. And I think there is much better likelihood that the United States can be safe from attack if it helps others--the poor, the needy--than if it murders them.

America´s wars kill other people, and they endanger Americans.

PRESIDENT OBAMA

2009-11-25T12:48:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-11-21T04:52:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-15T13:57:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-15T02:18:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-02T14:20:00.001-08:00

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

2009-10-23T01:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-18T08:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-16T08:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-15T23:32:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-04T14:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-23T18:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-24T03:27:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-24T03:19:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-20T07:43:00.000-07:00

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.