born live love die

After the latest in a series of ‘misstatements’, one of which was repeated three times, why is no one asking the obvious?

“Is John McCain dotty?”

Off? Bats? Batty? Bonkers? Buggy? Around the bend? Balmy? Crackers? Daft? Loco? Loony? Nuts? Crazy? Barmy? Cracked? Touched?

Has he gone haywire? Gone around the bend? Has he slipped a gear?  Is he all there?

Does he have early onset Alzheimers?

Perhaps it isn’t that early. According to the USA Today, 18% of the baby boomer generation is expected to get Alzheimer’s disease.

About 14 million, or roughly 18%, of the USA’s 79 million baby boomers can expect to develop Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia in their lifetime, a newly released report shows. The oldest baby boomers are turning 62 this year and are by definition entering the risk zone. Age is the single biggest risk factor for the disease: The likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s doubles every five years after age 65.

There is more in the article about the strain that the Alzheimer’s boom will put on the health care system; check it out.

But let’s get back to McCain. At 72 at the time of inauguration, he is outside the baby boomer age group, but let’s assume that he is not that far outside the age group for it to be statistically relevant. At 72, he is four times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms; this is greater than 70% likelihood.

Symptoms?

The disease can begin many years before it is eventually diagnosed. In its early stages, short-term memory loss is the most common symptom, often initially thought to be caused by aging or stress by the sufferer.  Later symptoms include confusion, anger, mood swings, language breakdown and long-term memory loss.

John McCain has exhibited a lot of short term memory loss.  He is aging and has lived a life filled with stress, to be sure.  Confusion?  It’s there.  Anger?  Boy howdy.  Mood swings?  Boy howdy squared.  Language breakdown?  Notice how slowly and carefully he speaks sometimes, trying to will the right words to come out.  Long-term memory loss?  I don’t know.

John McCain has not released his medical records.  Is it possible that there is information in them that questions McCain’s mental health? There are tests that will detect plaque build up in the brain.  Is it irresponsible for John McCain to not take such tests, given the likelihood of him getting the disease?

One thing that often happens is that family and friends go into denial about the evidence of the disease.  McCain is surrounded by people who have a vested interest in him not having the disease.  Reagan was that way too.  He probably had the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s, but they were masked by the people around him.

The right question to ask is: “Is the person answering the red telephone at 3 am compos mentis?”

I saw a documentary tonight, “The Other Side of the Mirror”.  It is about Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival.  It covered the years 1963-65.  For those keeping score at home, 1965 was the year that Dylan went ‘electric’.  The result of that transition was less than the sum of its parts.

I don’t expect a lot of wisdom from people younger than 25.  I don’t think they have lived enough to have wisdom, let alone impart it.  But there is a line from a Bob Dylan song, “My Back Pages” that I first heard when I was 16, and I have remembered it since then.  The refrain, following a lot of not very comprehensible imagery is,  “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”  I like to sing the song in 3/4 time because it has a swing to it.  The song is in 4/4 time, but by playing with it a bit, it sounds better in 3/4 time.

Bob Dylan recorded that song in 1964 when he was 23.  I don’t know if I really had anything wise to say when I was 23.  Perhaps Dylan was exercising found dialog, something writers do.  I don’t know.

In this film, Dylan starts as a frail looking young man, aged 22, and is clearly a star in the making.  By the end of the movie, he is 24, and has begun to weary of the attention.  In December of 1965, he held a press conference in San Francisco, hosted by KQED.  It is almost surreal to watch.  Here is a link about it.

The questions ran like this: “Since you are the voice of this young generation, what do you have to say to us?”, and Dylan would smirk and say, “I’m just singing my songs.”  This goes on for about an hour.  I think he probably thought it was very funny.  I do now, but the anxiety of the questioners is palpable, as they are trying to decode the enigma that was the time.

This film doesn’t have that footage.  But it does have some great footage of the time.  The filmmaker, Murray Lerner, did a Q and A session after the screening and didn’t try to correlate songs and years to events.   There was talk in the Q and A session about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as though that ended something.  The Selma to Montgomery march happened in the spring of 1965.  I wished that there had been more crowd shots from 1965.  The draft was being ramped up then; SSG Barry Sadler had the top selling song in 1966, “The Ballad of the Green Berets”.  How many young men were thinking about what was to come?  Could we see it in their faces?

Mr. Lerner tried to relate the meanings of some of the songs, but I think there is a lot of leeway in interpretation.  For example, he said that the song “Maggie’s Farm” was about worker alienation.  I wonder.  Maggie’s Farm, Alabama, was the site of the surrender of the last organized unit of Confederate soldiers in the Civil War.  Did Dylan encounter this fact somewhere and spin a song around the peculiar name?

I saw some footage recently of Bob Dylan singing a song while strumming a single chord on the guitar.  The footage is from the early 1960’s and I was struck by how similar to rap music it was.  The idea that Bob Dylan could be the godfather of rap is funny, but closer to true than not.  The lyric of his song was rhythm based, had oddly joined rhymes and was abstract enough to require translation.  Sounds like rap to me.

Too much has already been written about the Dylan decision to ‘go electric’.  I think that the only meaningful thing I can add to this discussion is to let go another fart into the wind.  At Newport, Dylan was backed by Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper and the rest of the Butterfield Blues Band, sans Butterfield.  The guitar stylings of Mike Bloomfield are the stuff of the times.  It doesn’t age well.

The movie is a pleasant remove from other concert movies.

A talking point on the right, in the spittle filled mosh pits that pass for civilized discourse over there, is that Democrats don’t have a plan for getting out of Iraq.  This is a trusty, rusty carnard where any plan that is put forward is sliced and diced, taken out of context, and just plain lied about.  But ten Democratic contenders Congress have a plan.  And they brought their A-game gravitas.

A Responsible Plan is a good plan for leaving Iraq.  The ARP 10 are staking their hopes on this plan.  They have attracted a lot of attention.

• Major General Paul Eaton (U.S. Army ret.)former Security Transition Commanding General, Iraq
• Dr. Lawrence Korbformer Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration Brigadier
• General John Johns (U.S. Army ret.)specialist in counterinsurgency and nation-building
• Capt. Larry Seaquist (U.S. Navy ret.)former commander of the U.S.S. Iowa and former Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning

Gen. Eaton is a straight shooter.  If you were going to cast someone for the part of a Maj. General, he would get the part.  He looks hard. And his words are hard.

The ARP 10 are:

• Darcy Burner candidate for U.S. House, Washington
• Donna Edwards candidate for U.S. House, Maryland
• Eric Massa candidate for U.S. House, New York
• Chellie Pingree candidate for U.S. House, Maine
• TOM PERRIELLO candidate for U.S. House, Virginia
• Jared Polis candidate for U.S. House, Colorado
• George Fearing candidate for U.S. House, Washington
• Larry Byrnes candidate for U.S. House, Florida
• STEVE HARRISON candidate for U.S. House, New York
• SAM BENNETT candidate for U.S. House, Pennsylvania

Active links to be added later.

I was on my way to a film event and noticed that the woman in the SUV next to me had a tag hanging from her rearview mirror. The tag said “Chicks Rule”. What is it, exactly, that chicks rule? Is this something to be proud of? To rule? How would a tag that said “Men Rule” be received?

Lest your response be, “Get a sense of humor”, I assure you that I do have a sense of humor. The funniest joke I heard today is about two women in Yonkers talking about the affairs of Eliot Spitzer. The punch line is “And he was paying retail!”

I think I’m going to get a tag for my mirror that says “Guys Govern”. I don’t expect it to be understood.

Shelby Steele’s meditative book about race in America, “The Content of Our Character”, was an important book which raised the bar for discussion about race in America. The principal lesson I remember taking from the book is about the difficulty in moving from the moral sphere, where points may be won, to the political sphere, where they are adjudicated. I found Mr. Steele’s book on a remainder table at Books, Inc. in San Jose. After reading it, I went back, bought many more copies and gave them to friends.

“Black in Selma” by J.L. Chestnut is a case study about morals and politics. The book recounts Mr. Chestnut’s life as one of two black lawyers licensed to practice law in Alabama and about practicing before Judge George Wallace. I remembered Steele’s maxim while reading about the first black police officer in Selma, Alabama, and how his authority was degraded by the insistence by black leaders that this man only patrol black neighborhoods.

The issue of police treatment of blacks is an important one. Mr. Chestnut’s book also provided a nuanced look into life in black neighborhoods and how the police were the first line of offense. In his book, white police officers go into black neighborhoods and coerce black women into sexual congress. When a black husband or boyfriend objects, he is beaten or humiliated. Iconic stories about bad actions of both white and black men circulated in each others respective communities. For whites, the stories are about rapes that happen in local lover’s lanes, where innocent white lovers are jumped by blacks and white women are abused. For blacks, they are as related by Mr. Chestnut. But these stories both iconic and real, as Mr. Chestnut names names.

While the police today may not enter black neighborhoods for the intention of having a party, but iconic stories of them still circulate. In a recent series of newspaper articles, those iconic stories were made manifest. The Seattle police use a charge of “obstructing a public officer”, a misdemeanor, to target people they want to take off the streets. They often beat the people arrested, who are disproportionately young black males. These arrests are a gateway arrest, and are used, among other things, to find people holding drugs, making it a felony arrest.

The use of police power to target a racial minority is one of the issues that we, the People, need to discuss. This is what Senator Obama’s speech was about yesterday. On the other hand, Mr. Steele is slipping.  Mr. Steele writes a confusing essay in the Wall Street Journal that seems intended to spread FUD: fear, uncertainty and doubt. Near the end, Mr. Steele writes:

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn’t thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to “be black” despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn’t this hatred more rhetorical than real?

By what measure is Mr. Steele justified in classifying Senator Obama as ‘insecure’? On the contrary, I think he is very secure in his blackness, in that he can traverse places where anti-white vitriol is the order of the day and not let it change his vision of America. We don’t know if the Senator was shouting “Amen” while sitting in pew or sitting in silent opposition. That anything about the Senator can be inferred in the words of the pastor is fallacious by inspection. I choose to take his words at face value:

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

Mr. Steele is capable of trenchant analysis about race. He should get back to it.

David Mamet wrote a guest op-ed in The Village Voice titled “Why I am no longer a ‘brain dead liberal’”. The point of the piece was for him to say that he was no longer liberal. He sums up his former position as

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

For Mamet, liberalism is: “everything is always wrong”?

He wanders around for a while then comes back with this gem:

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

At this point I ask of Mamet, “Who cares what you think?”

Mamet is a principal pivot man in the myopic circle jerk that American theater has become. These people think that reality begins and ends with whatever pygmy thoughts have just crossed their narcissistic brains. Mamet is a cheerleader of the “Hey, look at me!” chorus and now he wants us to pay attention to his transition from brain-dead liberal to just brain-dead.

Yo, Mamet!

Shut up.

I say that only because he should, well, shut up. He is embarrassing himself. Or he is at least embarrassing me with his trivial analysis of government, politics and people and calling it ‘liberal’.

Mamet is an example of the kind of person I refer to as a nay-sayer. These are people who more akin to the secessionist Right in that they think of the relationship between citizen and government as “Us vs. Them”, where the Us is a select group of people who somehow have privileged information about Reality and Them is everyone else who would destroy that knowledge, thereby preventing Utopia from forming. These are people who never seemed to accept the idea of “we the People”. These are people, on both sides of what passes for a partisan divide in America, would never consent to be governed, but would only rule if given the chance.

“We the People” means that we have a political process and when that process fails and someone like George Bush takes office, we the People accept it and take responsibility for his actions. Yeah, it sucks that the dumbest guy in class gets to take the shiny, well running economy and trash it, gets us stuck in a foreign war of his choosing, and then go cruising off into the sunset, leaving us with his mess, but that is the way our system works. If you don’t like it, then work to change the system.

America isn’t a schoolroom teaching values or a marketplace.  America is an idea, an idea that people can meet and govern themselves without needing a king blessed by a deity, or a chief selected by genes.  We, the People, have this responsibility and we will meet and find common ground, without resorting to words ending in -ism.  We will treat each other with respect and learn to trust in our better parts.  This is the goal and we often fall short of it.  And since we have started this experiment in a land of wealth, it isn’t clear that it is a formula that can be extended beyond our shores.  But we go on, and we try.

So, Mamet, go back to jerking people off with you turgid dialog, but leave the political analysis to those of us who are actually out here in America and really like the place.

Senator Barack Obama gave a speech today unlike anything we have heard lately. It was honest. Most politicians wouldn’t know honest if it bit them in the ass. But he was honest. Here’s the video of his speech:

The nuts:

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committ ed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

Reading this speech brought tears to my eyes. I usually get weepy when I read Lincoln’s Second Inaugural,

It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Yes, racism is still an issue in America, but maybe we can talk about it honestly, and not crouch behind familiar walls and throw ready made bombs, made by hands other than our our own.

The first three minutes of this video clip are great.

I must confess and declare my ambivalence about terrorism. On the one hand, I see it as the expression of compulsive narcissists, who would destroy to get the attention they think they deserve. On the other hand, I recognize the sweet siren call to cut to the chase and secure some form of justice in the immediate, now.

I have a friend who says that all of the politicians, regardless of party, should be shot, unless a slower and more painful form of death is readily available. This comment usually comes after a couple hours of drinking beer and we have run down all the topics of the day and are finally down to politics as something to talk about.

When I read things like this from Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, I think that a couple dozen mortar rounds would put PAID on it quite nicely.

After all, for those of us who supported the war, rebutting arguments about weapons of mass destruction has become reflexive. We point to all the United Nations Security Council resolutions, the International Atomic Energy Agency statements, the C.I.A. analyses, the Silberman-Robb report, the Senate Intelligence Committee findings — if we were wrong, we were in good and honest company.

Call it bad and dishonest company. The AEI was one of the cheerleaders for the war and she neglects to mention anything about the AEI’s role in support of the White House Iraq Group. This group, chaired by Karl Rove, led the media driven push for war in Iraq, the approval of which was timed to coincide with the 2002 mid-term elections.

But what about the mistaken assumptions that remain unexamined? Looking back, I felt secure in the knowledge that all who yearn for freedom, once free, would use it well. I was wrong. There is no freedom gene, no inner guide that understands the virtues of civil society, of secret ballots, of political parties. And it turns out that living under Saddam Hussein’s tyranny for decades conditioned Iraqis to accept unearned leadership, to embrace sect and tribe over ideas, and to tolerate unbridled corruption.

No freedom gene? You sanctimonious bitch. She should spend a fortnight, or better, a month of fortnights, in Ramadi and see if she still feels that way.

We would be better served to understand how the free world can foster appreciation of the building blocks of civil society in order to help other victims of tyranny when it is their turn.

There were a lot of us who already knew that Iraq was a fratricidal mess and appreciation for the building blocks of society would come up short when balanced against decades of tyranny.

Here are some more of the things she has said in the past:

Danielle Pletka, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, with close ties to the Pentagon’s planning group, tells Robert Dreyfuss of American Prospect Magazine that the State Department’s perception of Chalabi is wrong. “The [Defense Department] is running post-Saddam Iraq,” said Pletka, almost shouting. “The people at the State Department don’t know what they are talking about! Who the hell are they?… the simple fact is, the president is comfortable with people who are comfortable with the INC.”

Ms. Pletka was a supporter of Chalabi, the puppet the Pentagon intended to install before boogying out the door of Iraq.

In an op-ed piece defending Ahmed Chalabi, Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute writes that “throughout the 1990s, Chalabi was regularly accused of malfeasance by his enemies,” and asserts that the conviction in Jordan (see April 9, 1992) “has never been documented.”

Oh, but it was documented. Ms. Pletka is very good at the conditional re-write of history.

And where is she now? Old habits die hard. She is one of the main cheerleaders for war with Iran, shaking her ta-tas for yet another war. See this link for the story.

Link note: I found Cooperative Research History Commons and it is priceless. Check it out.